The Man with the Flag and the Journalists Who Forgot Their Trade

Outside Birkbeck, reporters mistook provocation for journalism, offering a platform to ignorance draped in an Israeli flag. I stepped in; facts broke his certainty, silence swallowed theirs.

On Tuesday, 7 October 2025, outside Birkbeck, University of London, the atmosphere felt less like a march than a cross-examination of public conscience. The prime minister had already declared the day’s student demonstrations “un-British,” urging undergraduates to stay away¹, university leaders issued cautions of their own. In the shadow of a recent, deadly attack outside a Manchester synagogue, police ringed campuses, and the news desks sent their people out with live rigs and empty notebooks. The protests went ahead anyway². That much, at least, is indisputable.

A cluster of reporters converged on a man who would not give his name. He had unfurled an Israeli flag and began offering a string of assertions, Palestine and Hamas are “inseparable”; keffiyehs are “a terrorist symbol”; a genocide in Gaza is merely “debatable.” Presented with requests for particulars, who are you, what evidence, what chants here today, he declined to identify himself and defaulted to vagaries about “these peo…