You’ve probably noticed Benjy at pro-Palestine rallies for years. It’s kinda hard to miss him really. With his shiny blonde hair and his piercing blue eyes, he’s always carrying the banner up front, never loosening his clutch on the megaphone. His enthusiasm seemed kinda cute back in ‘09. Besides, you thought if white folk only wanna listen to somebody who looks like them, then it wouldn’t do much harm to let Benjy overshadow actual Palestinians in being the ‘face’ of your local solidarity action. 

By now we know Benjy leads a double life. In the day he is an ordinary rich white boy who lives in a loft conversion warehouse on the East end of London. But whenever he hears of injustice and US imperialism, he plays the first ten notes of the Internationale on his grand piano and hey presto, he turns into: KEFFIYEH BOY! 

During Occupy protests he was wandering about with his keffiyeh and his anonymous mask telling his white friends “you really think it’s a coincidence that all the world’s biggest banks are run by the Jews?” You pulled him aside and told him that you and your homies have been working to separate anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism for years, that anti-colonial movements are stronger without weird conspiracies and KKK style holocaust denial theories. 

A year later he had already gathered other white boys who were eagerly retweeting his rants about how the Arab Spring was just a CIA ploy to weaken stable governments in the Middle East. It seems he lost contact with reality. You would occasionally notice him at small rallies, saying misogynist shit like: “Sweden has the highest rape rate in Europe, so what if Julian Assange had a pop or two?”

These days he and his little tribe spend most of their time campaigning for Corbyn. Oh you know, like chanting “no more war” to drown out questions about his support for the Assad regime, things like that. Someone bumped into him at the bus stop the other day. He was arguing that Trump is *actually* the pacifist candidate. When asked to clarify, he just got mad and yelled: