The normalisation of hate: a precautionary lecture
15 January 2026
In his recent Substack post, Joshua Rozenberg has drawn attention to a recent speech delivered by Jonathan Hall KC to the think tank Policy Exchange called The Lessons of Bondi Beach: Terrorism, Hatred and the Law.
“It sometimes seems to me that it is not so much extremism as normalisation that we have to fear”, Hall observed.
It is indeed an important and nuanced reflection on the subject that is worth summarising again on the UKHRB for readers who are not subscribed to Rozenberg’s Substack or who have missed it for any other reason.
Jonathan Hall KC’s lecture articulates a compelling case that contemporary anti‑Jewish agitation cannot be treated as routine protest but must be recognised as a vector of risk for real-world violence and ultimately terrorism. His core insight is that what threatens liberal democracy is less spectacular “extremism” than the slow “normalisation” of sectarian calls to violence, particularly against Jews. For our lawyer readers, the speech matters because it shows how existing doctrines on precaution, public order and incitement must be read through the lens of this normalisation if law is to discharge its protective function without abandoning its commitment to free expression.
Normalisation as the central insight
Hall’s most important conceptual move is to shift attention from isolated extremist incidents to the cumulative effect of repeated, tolerated hate speech in public space. His remark that “it is not so much extremism as normalisation that we have to fear” reorients the legal gaze towards the background conditions in which violence becomes thinkable.
For lawyers trained to look for overt thresholds—direct incitement, a real and immediate risk, imminent disorder—Hall’s emphasis is salutary. He shows that when chants such as “Death to the IDF”, “Globalise the intifada” and genocidal slogans about cleansing the world of “Zionists” are publicly repeated without legal or social pushback, the law itself risks being complicit in constructing a “psychological extremism in which conspiracies make sense and violence seems the only solution”. By identifying normalisation as the true danger, Hall gives doctrinal debates about proportionality and necessary interference under articles 10 and 11 a concrete, empirically grounded object on which to focus.
From chant to violence: the evidential chain
Hall’s argument is powerful because it is not merely theoretical: he constructs a detailed evidential chain linking antisemitic slogans, the social milieu they create, and acts of lethal violence. At the heart of the lecture is the juxtaposition between apparently “political” speech on marches and the murders at Bondi Beach and Heaton Park, killings carried out by individuals influenced by Islamic State propaganda.
He draws a chilling parallel with Abu Hamza’s sermons outside Finsbury Park Mosque, where explicit calls to go “after the blood of Jews” were, for too long, treated as a grotesque but tolerable outgrowth of free speech rather than a “genuine call to deadly action”. Hall reminds lawyers that this misreading was not costless: it was part of the ecosystem that enabled later jihadist violence. The same is true, he argues, of Al‑Muhajiroun’s “soldiers burn in hell” Remembrance Day rhetoric, which helped create a moral universe in which the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby became imitable.
This historical material underpins his claim that current anti‑Jewish chants and iconography—red triangles signalling physical targeting, “Death to the IDF”, and the repeated deployment of medieval battle‑cries in Arabic against Jews—ought to be read, not as hyperbolic metaphor, but as participation in a propaganda tradition that terrorists themselves know to be operative. He notes that jihadist and extreme right‑wing groups invest heavily in “beacons, aggregators and content stores” because “they believe propaganda works and it does”, and he insists that street chanting and placards are simply another mode of this propaganda environment.
The precautionary principle and its recalibration
A central virtue of the speech is that it is not a counsel of panic but a sober recalibration of the precautionary principle for the post‑Bondi moment. Hall frankly acknowledges that in November 2023 he opposed extending terrorism law to deal with Gaza‑related protest, arguing that existing terrorism statutes were sufficient and that the marches, while often “rabid” and “inconvenient”, should be treated as legitimate political expression drawing attention to real suffering.
That earlier stance was rooted in a Supreme Court articulation of the precautionary principle as a basis for “deciding to act, rather than waiting until directly harmful activities have taken place”, but Hall then reserved terrorism law for truly exceptional threats and urged reliance on ordinary criminal law and robust protest policing. The lecture is strikingly honest in explaining why his assessment has shifted: the “dial moved” when the red triangle and overt Hamas iconography began to appear, when demonstrations were deliberately routed “near places of Jewish life”, and when protests at Liverpool Street Station followed within hours of the Heaton Park synagogue murders, normalising those deaths as just further casualties in a broader conflict.
For lawyers, this is an important step. Hall shows that precaution is not a one‑time calibration but a provisional stance “capable of responding to evidence”; where the evidence is mounting that certain protests have become vehicles for sectarian calls to violence, the precautionary principle requires the state to treat those calls as a national security risk rather than as protected protest speech. Crucially, he insists that this shift does not require wholesale expansion of terrorism law; instead, it demands consistent use of existing offences—stirring up racial hatred, public order offences, and narrowly drawn propaganda offences—before the situation deteriorates to the point where exceptional measures become unavoidable.
Why antisemitic speech cannot be treated as “just protest”
The lecture is particularly forceful in rejecting the idea that explicitly anti‑Jewish slogans and imagery can be assimilated to the noise of ordinary political protest. Hall’s starting point is the ordinary distinction—embedded in both law and political discourse—between states and peoples: British criticism of Putin does not licence hatred of Russians, condemnation of the Iranian regime does not license demonisation of Iranians, and so on. He notes that, in terrorism studies and legal practice alike, there is careful insistence on distinguishing “Islamist extremists” from Muslims as such, precisely to avoid collective stigmatisation.
Against that background, he asks why Jews should be the exception. He catalogues examples from pro‑Palestine marches: a placard proclaiming that “Western Zionist puppet masters instruct their evil scum puppets in Tel Aviv to do their dirty work”; repeated chants invoking historic massacres of Jews; and slogans that, by their plain meaning, call for “cleansing” Zionists from the world. The “scorecard in avoiding hatred is not good”, he observes, and it is telling that such messages are “repeated without check by other marchers”, suggesting not merely fringe presence but a degree of social acceptance.
Hall’s insistence that “doing nothing is not an option, especially where hate becomes normalised” is doctrinally significant. It challenges a complacent reading of article 10 that treats non‑imminent speech as essentially harmless, and instead aligns with article 17 ECHR’s reminder that no right may be invoked in order to destroy the rights and freedoms of others. When marches move beyond denunciation of Israeli government policy and into racialised hatred of Jews as a people, the balance under articles 10 and 11 must, in his view, shift decisively towards protection of the targeted minority and the prevention of a “plausible” trajectory towards “terrorist violence, even genocidal violence as in Rwanda and Myanmar”.
Learning from terrorists: antisemitism as a driver, not a by‑product
Hall’s speech is also noteworthy for his stark suggestion that legal systems should “learn from the terrorists themselves” when assessing the gravity of antisemitic speech. He cites Islamic State statements celebrating attacks on Jews and explicitly framing antisemitic hate speech as central to their “cosmic war narratives”, used to “recruit, radicalise and inspire violence”. Analysts such as Seb Gorka, he notes, have shown how Jew‑hatred functions as a grievance engine in jihadist propaganda, and Islamic State’s own communiqués after Bondi explicitly boasted of an “invisible war” against Jews worldwide.
If terrorists treat antisemitic incitement as a strategic asset, Hall argues, democratic states cannot plausibly treat the same rhetoric as a negligible side‑effect of protest. The symmetry matters: “Islamic State must be rubbing their hands when they hear ‘Death to the IDF’, ‘Globalise the intifada’, and see the red triangles of death” on Western streets, because these public performances confer legitimacy, visibility and psychological reinforcement on the very narratives that IS is pushing online. This is why he insists that terrorism and hate are “distinct but often symbiotic”: hatred alone may fall short of terrorism’s definitional requirements, but it is precisely the material that terrorist actors “harness… for their grander purpose”.
For legal doctrine, Hall’s insight supports a more purposive reading of offences relating to stirring up racial hatred, dissemination of extremist material and encouragement of terrorism. When the same phrases and symbols are deliberately used in both terrorist propaganda and domestic marches, it becomes artificial to treat them as benign in one context and dangerous in the other; Hall’s lecture therefore invites courts and prosecutors to take context seriously, including the global propaganda economy within which street protest now operates.
Taking antisemitic hate speech more seriously in law
Finally, Hall’s lecture is commendable for the care with which it aligns a tougher stance on antisemitic speech with enduring commitments to legality and non‑discrimination. He rejects calls to use terrorism law as the default instrument against protest‑related hate, recalling the late Conor Gearty’s warning that terrorism statutes are exceptional and risk “perverting” ordinary criminal and administrative law if over‑deployed. Instead, he articulates two principles: terrorism legislation should be used “as little as possible and only where ordinary law is insufficient”; and the need for it can be “kept at bay if ordinary laws are properly enforced”.
On this view, the legally appropriate response to antisemitic protest speech is, first, rigorous enforcement of existing hate‑speech, public order and incitement offences; second, a more discriminating approach to march authorisation that rejects “serious disorder” as the only basis for restriction and admits the cumulative risk posed by normalised sectarian calls to violence; and third, a principled refusal to allow “rights to be asserted in order to subvert other rights”. Hall explicitly recognises that this will mean curbing some individuals’ ability to carry placards such as “Clean the world of Zionists” but argues persuasively that “this is hardly an illegitimate restriction”, especially with safeguards such as the requirement of Attorney General consent for certain prosecutions.
The prize, he suggests, is a democratic order in which Jews do not become a “suspect community” behind ever higher walls and volunteer‑guarded synagogues, and in which “democracy does not harbour the seeds of its own destruction”. In an era when the line between protest and propaganda is increasingly porous, Hall’s lecture offers legal practitioners a principled, evidence‑rich framework for treating antisemitic hate speech not as a regrettable fringe phenomenon but as a serious, specific driver of violence that demands a correspondingly serious legal response.
