People chanting “jihad” on the streets of London are inciting terrorist violence and should be tackled with the full force of the law, Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, has said.
Jenrick’s comments appear to be at odds with the position of the Metropolitan police, which suggested this weekend that officers did not consider it to be against the law.
The Met said it had reviewed a video in which a man can be seen chanting “jihad, jihad” at a demonstration organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir in London on Saturday, and it had not identified any specific offences in the clip.
The Hizb ut-Tahrir rally was separate from a much larger pro-Palestine rally of about 100,000 people in London.
Jenrick said it was an operational matter for the police, but the government’s position was that chanting “jihad” was “completely reprehensible” and “inciting terrorist violence”.
Speaking to Sky’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips, Jenrick said: “I never want to see scenes like that. It is inciting terrorist violence and it needs to be tackled with the full force of the law.
“Ultimately, it’s an operational matter for the police and the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] whether to press charges. Arrests have been made … there have been arrests since the beginning of this situation. And we want to make sure that the police do everything that they can to protect British Jews.”
Jenrick said there was also a broader question, beyond legality, to the question of values. “There should be a consensus in this country that chanting things like jihad is completely reprehensible and wrong and we don’t ever want to see that in our country,” he said.
In a statement on Saturday, the Met police said it and lawyers from the CPS had come to the same conclusion about the clip of the man chanting jihad.
But it added: “Recognising the way language like this will be interpreted by the public and the divisive impact it will have, officers identified the man involved and spoke to him to discourage any repeat of similar chanting.”
The Met also said it had not identified any placards or banners as unlawful. However, it said another incident recorded at the rally may have constituted a hate crime offence, which it was investigating. In the video, two young men are shown chanting in Arabic, saying words that appear to include Hamas and “Yahud”, which means Jews.
In a tweet, the Met said: “We have specialist officers with language skills and subject expertise assisting with this operation. The actions in the video amount to a hate crime offence. Officers are actively working to identify those in the video.”
