spiked95%
The dark truth about the pro-Palestine marches 74%
By Limor Simhony Philpott92%
7/15/2026, 9:55:08 AM
Topics: Politics
Keywords: Gaza, Israel And Palestine
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 50.8% saturation with 389 hits. Analysis detected 2,090 faulty-reasoning hits from 766 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 67.4% and a BS Rank of 74% (4,199 of 15,883 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 73.60% of the article peer group.
Britain’s pro-Gaza marches have been sold to the public as a grassroots movement – a spontaneous outpouring of conscience by ordinary people appalled by war.
A new report from the think tank NGO Monitor tells a very different story.
It turns out that Britain’s largest protest movement is not nearly as spontaneous or grassroots as it looks.
Instead, a small number of well-organised groups, motivated by a common loathing of Israel, have spent years building the infrastructure that now drives much of Britain’s pro-Palestine activism.
As soon as Hamas launched its attack on 7 October 2023, the activists were ready to hit the streets.
The report maps 40 organisations at the centre of the protests.
Eleven are linked, or have leaders who are linked, to extremist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.
Ten of the organisations are charities, eight are companies, nine are hybrids and 13 – nearly a third – have no formal legal structure at all.
Nineteen receive UK government money, via the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office or Gift Aid, while at least 11 take money from other governments, too.
None of this is illegal.
But it does mean that large, continuous flows of money – foreign and domestic, public and private – are moving into organisations that face none of the disclosure duties we would impose on a political party taking a fraction of these sums.
Of the 40 organisations, NGO Monitor has identified six as the protests’ principal organisers.
Five of these have little or partial financial transparency and just as many have reported links to extremist or terror groups.
One of the least transparent organisations is the Muslim Association of Britain, which has been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood – a hardline Islamist movement banned in most Middle Eastern nations.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) is the group most associated with the marches.
Despite what many people think, the PSC is not a charity.
It is a registered company and therefore doesn’t have to say where its money comes from.
In 2025, the PSC reported an income of £3.8million, which it insists came ‘almost entirely’ from members and donors.
Perhaps it did.
But the public has no way of checking, and the PSC has ensured we can’t.
A handful of organisations do carry full charitable status.
Some of these, like the Islamic Human Rights Commission, have received roughly £458,500 in Gift Aid (a form of public subsidy) since 2020 – despite its well-known links to the Iranian regime.
Lord Walney, the UK government’s former independent adviser on political violence, warns that this opaque system is ripe for foreign manipulation, including by proscribed terror groups.
The groups behind the marches have flexed their muscle in recent years.
They lobby parliament, mobilise hundreds of thousands of people and dominate Britain’s streets.
Yet they are regulated as though they were a collection of harmless charities and campaign groups, rather than some of the most powerful activist networks in the country.
Britain has built an elaborate regulatory system for politics, but forgotten that politics no longer happens only in parliament.
Whatever your view of Gaza, that should give you pause.
Not because people should not protest – of course they should.
It is because this is not just another pressure group.
The pro-Palestine movement has repeatedly shut down city centres and has gone hand in hand with a surge in anti-Semitism, primarily among youths.
Jewish communities have been openly targeted by protesters since 7 October 2023.
MPs, too, have spoken about threats linked to Gaza demonstrations.
One stood down citing death threats, another’s home was targeted and parliamentary procedure itself was altered amid genuine fears for members’ safety.
We rightly worry about foreign money reaching Westminster through the back door.
Parties are banned from taking foreign donations for this reason.
Yet organisations that can put more people on the streets in an afternoon than most parties manage at a General Election can take money from foreign governments and foreign foundations with none of that scrutiny.
If foreign influence is a risk when it comes to political parties, why would it not be a risk here?
This is not an argument for banning marches.
It is an argument that a powerful movement capable of intimidating communities and bullying politicians into silence has no business hiding behind a transparency standard weaker than a parish council’s.
If it really is the grassroots, good-faith movement its defenders insist it is, it has nothing to fear from proving it.
Limor Simhony Philpott is a writer, policy adviser and researcher.
Analysis
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