‘What are your reasons for opposing mass slaughter?’ is not a serious question

Last week, a video circulated online of Suella Braverman, the UK’s twice-sacked former home secretary, walking around an encampment of protesters at Cambridge who were demanding the university cut its financial ties with Israel. Braverman, in the company of Patrick Christys of the right-wing broadcaster GB News, was attempting to engage the protesters in a discussion about their aims.

“Hi, I’m Suella,” she says, approaching one group. “I’m keen to find out your views, and what you’re protesting about.”

The protesters stand in silence, their faces concealed by keffiyehs, their arms crossed impassively across their chests. The pair walk on, affecting an air of bafflement about this refusal to engage them in conversation. “These are supposed to be some of the brightest minds in the land,” says Braverman, “taught in the art of articulating their views, and expressing arguments in a coherent way. And I’m interested in hearing their arguments, engaging and listening.”

It goes on like this for what feels an uncomfortably long time, with Braverman and Christys approaching successive clusters of protesters, and continually being met with blankness and silence. She tells one group she’s keen to hear their message to Israel. Nothing. She asks whether the hostages should be released now. Nothing. To an elderly man sitting on a wall, holding a sign saying “Openly Jewish against visible genocide”, she introduces herself with strained courteousness, and asks what his message is to Israel. He simply holds up the sign so that she can better read the words printed on it. He does not speak.

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I find this clip fascinating, because of how it represents not just a conflict of political ideas, but of understandings of what it means to engage in discussion about those ideas

Looking around and adopting a tone of polite desperation, Christys says, “Guys, anyone willing to just explain a couple of bits and bobs? What you guys are doing here? Why it’s so important to you? What the demands are? Anything?”

No one, it turns out, is willing to do so. Braverman and Christys leave the encampment entirely bereft of the bits and bobs they wanted explained to them.

I find this clip fascinating, because of how it represents not just a conflict of political ideas, but of understandings of what it means to engage in discussion about those ideas. It’s a piece of theatre – or rather two pieces of theatre being performed against each other, and illustrating a clash of incompatible discourses.

The protesters believe that there is a genocide under way in Gaza, and that it should stop immediately. Braverman and Christys already know that this is what the protest is about, as do the viewers of GB News. Essentially, Braverman and Christys are acting: they are pretending to be people who, for some reason, don’t understand what the protesters are protesting about. They are pretending that there is something that needs to be explained, and that they want to engage the protesters in conversation to better understand it.

In the light of a ruling by the UK’s high court earlier this week that as home secretary, in making it easier for the police to criminalise peaceful protests, she had acted unlawfully, Braverman’s performance as someone interested in serious democratic engagement with protesters is even less convincing. She is not, as she puts it, keen to find out their views, and what they’re protesting about; she is in fact keen to have them arrested, and to gut their democratic right to protest in the first place.

Cambridge is not the only venue where this particular genre of political theatre has been performed. Earlier this month Peter Baker, the White House correspondent for The New York Times, commented on the refusal of Columbia University protesters to speak to reporters. Such protests, he said, were “not actually about explaining your cause or trying to engage journalists who are there to listen”. Reading this, I was struck by the oddity of the claim. It’s entirely plausible that a person might disagree with the protesters’ cause, and certainly with their decision not to discuss it with the media, but the idea that anyone even minimally aware of current affairs – let alone a White House correspondent for The New York Times – would need that cause explained to them is deeply bizarre.

Here in Ireland this week, former justice minister Alan Shatter, a consistent critic of Ireland’s response to Israel’s assault on Gaza, mounted his own small-scale version of the piece – attempting, with Newstalk’s Henry McKean, to engage UCD student protesters in discussion about their views. (Among other demands, the protesters are pressuring the university to completely divest from academic ties with Israeli institutions.)

To ask a man what his message is while he is holding a sign clearly stating that message: this is so wilfully obtuse that it is simply not worthy of an answer

As with the British and American performers who preceded him in the role, he was met with silence from the students he attempted to engage. Shatter had by this point already described protesters at Trinity College as “Hamas supporters”, so it’s not surprising that the UCD students didn’t take him up on his offer of a polite chat.

The silence of the protesters is a more serious form of political theatre: a tactic to expose the absurdity of the notion that there is anything to be discussed or debated. Suella Braverman’s exchange, in that Cambridge clip, with the elderly man sitting on the wall is in this sense the most powerful illustration of this absurdity. To ask a man what his message is while he is holding a sign clearly stating that message: this is so wilfully obtuse that it is simply not worthy of an answer. It’s as bizarre, and as insulting, as approaching a person at a funeral and asking them why they’re sad. “What are your reasons for opposing mass slaughter?” is not a serious question. The most appropriate response is contemptuous silence.