Would You Like Fries With That?

Orienting myself in another new city usually starts with heading into the ‘old town’ and just following my nose. In this case, it led me right to another parade, or in this case probably more accurately a protest. The Danish people have, like many in the world, been protesting the genocide in Palestine. In this instance, the protest was specifically aimed at Maersk (a shipping company) who as a commercial transporter are delivering weapons and arms to Isreal.

I stopped a young man who was noting down police ID badges to get his take on free speech and political action, expecting Denmark to be on the whole quite civilised about these sorts of things. He informed me that was not the case, and the reason he was writing down badge numbers was due to an incident earlier in the month when protesters targeted Terma (an arms manufacturing company) and were subject to police violence.

He did point out that there were two distinct groups present, people who were dressed mostly in black and covering their faces, he said, likely because they were intending to do something illegal like storm the offices of Maersk, which apparently, they’d done last year, and a second group of folk dressed more typically (do protesters have a typical look?). He invited me to join the peaceful protest if I wanted, so I told him it’s actually illegal to say the phrases being uttered here back home in Australia. To which is surmised, ‘that’s fucked up man.’ Yes, yes it is. At this point the dog unit had arrived, and he was off to get the K9 officers’ credentials.

I sat on a wall for a bit a watched the stand-off between the police in their riot gear and the protestors in their ninja get-ups. After being in Berlin so recently it still boggles my mind that Isreal, with its citizens carrying the trauma of the holocaust could ever think to commit a genocide themselves. And then it makes my blood boil that there hasn’t been a collective international effort to intervene.

After some time yelling at the police, and for reasons unknown to me, the protesters simply turned around and marched away from the Maersk offices. Ok then. Time to find the Little Mermaid.