Arrested for Saying that Israel is Doing What the Nazis Did - It is NOT the Job of the Police to Control Free Speech

The Irony of the Institutionally Racist Metropolitan Police Telling Anti-Zionist Jews What They Can and Cannot Say is Like Harold Shipman Lecturing on Medical Ethics

Last Friday four Jewish people – Haim Bresheeth, an anti-Zionist Israeli, Jackie Walker, who was expelled as a result of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ in Corbyn’s Labour Party, Stephen Kapos – a child survivor of the Hungarian holocaust and myself addressed about 100 people demonstrating outside the residence of Israel Ambassador, Tzipi Hotoveli.

Hotoveli Opens Book with Blank Pages

Hotoveli is a notorious racist who described the Nakba as an ‘Arab lie’ despite it being copiously documented. The fact that Israel not only won’t open its archives on the Nakba but is busying trying to hide those documents that have been revealed, demonstrates that it has something to hide.

Hotoveli once presented a book with no pages to the Knesset opening it to declare that this was the sum total of Palestinian history.’You are thieves of history’ which was rich coming from a thieving Zionist colonist. The fact that this racist nutcase was welcomed to the Labour Party conference says everything about the moral vacuum at the heart of Starmer’s so-called Labour Party.

I was the last of the 4 speakers. I made it clear that the genocide and ethnic cleansing, the bombing of hospitals, universities, schools, tent encampments as well as the starvation blockade reminded me of nothing so much as the behaviour of Nazi Germany. I could have added that it bore a distinct resemblance to the behaviour of the British Empire in India, Kenya and many other of our colonies but since Israel claims to inherit the memory of the Jewish holocaust dead it was appropriate to confine my remarks to the holocaust.

I also repeated the phrase that I had used at the Palestine Expo five years ago, which the Jewish Chronicle had highlighted, namely that Today most people with a streak of moral fibre would agree that I was prescient. Not so the Police. They were on the look out for any speech that their political masters considered ‘anti-Semitic’ using the bogus IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which gives as an illustration of ‘anti-Semitism’ ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’.

In its opening sentence the ‘definition’ describes itself as a ‘non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism’ but in practice the Police and other State bodies, including universities, have adopted it as if it were a legal  code. This is not the place to dissect the IHRA, whose only purpose is to defend a racist genocidal state, as its critics are numerous. Academically and intellectually it is indefensible and even Zionists like Professor Geoffrey Alderman and David Feldman have criticised it as flawed,  faulty and bewilderingly imprecise.

I was arrested under Section 5 of the Public Order Act

The fact is that the IHRA’s basic message is that all except anodyne criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic and that is enough for Sir Mark Rowley’s none too bright thought police.  As Sir Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal judge wrote in Defining Anti-Semitism (LRB, May 2017)

Endeavours to conflate the two [Zionism and anti-Semitism] by characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic are not new.

Sedley also wrote that the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite’. However the Metropolitan Police are better known for their corruption and thuggery than any intellectual achievements.

The irony is that I was arrested on the 88^th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street when the Met did their best to batter their way through the Jewish East End of London in order that Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists and National Socialists (they changed their name to add the last 3 words in 1936) could march and intimidate working class Jews.

When anti-Semitism was a real force to be reckoned with in society, no group was more sympathetic to the fascists than the Metropolitan Police who had many BUF sympathisers in them. Now that anti-Semitism has been redefined as support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism, which is the adopted policy of the British government, the Met is now against it!

As Jews have moved to the right and become both more prosperous and an alibi for British support for Israel, the Met has combined philo Semitism with Islamaphobia and anti-Black racism. Their racism hasn’t gone away it has simply been transferred to others.

At the end of my speech I was informed by others that the Met, who were surrounding the demonstration, were pointing at me and sure enough, as the demonstration dispersed I was asked to accompany plod. Now for the sake of fairness I should add that the Police were perfectly polite and I accept that they were doing what the Mark Rowley’s and Keir Starmers of this world were instructing them to do which was to clamp down on pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist speech.

I was arrested and taken to Holborn Police station where I was held for 7 hours before being released early in the morning. I was interviewed for nearly an hour by two cops who clearly didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. I decided to dispense with a solicitor since there was nothing they could have done and since I don’t agree with blanket ‘no comment’ interviews, which tend to suggest that you have something to hide, I was happy to take them on.

I was bailed with two conditions:

Not to come to Camden and not to attend pro-Palestinian protests in London. As far as I am concerned the latter is unlawful and I will be seeking to have this removed at the first opportunity. Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights is quite clear. Even the most stupid politician and policeman should be able to get their heads around it:

During my interview I referenced the 1999 case of Redmond-Bate v DPP where the said LJ Sedley ruled that ‘“Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.” It’s something that the Zionists and their claque of supporters don’t want to understand. Nor did the police who interview me understand what I was getting at. Policemen rarely do understand such concepts.

“Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. What Speakers’ Corner (where the law applies as fully as anywhere else) demonstrates is the tolerance which is both extended by the law to opinion of every kind and expected by the law in the conduct of those who disagree, even strongly, with what they hear. From the condemnation of Socrates to the persecution of modern writers and journalists, our world has seen too many examples of state control of unofficial ideas. A central purpose of the European Convention on Human Rights has been to set close limits to any such assumed power. We in this country continue to owe a debt to the jury which in 1670 refused to convict the Quakers William Penn and William Mead for preaching ideas which offended against state orthodoxy.”

Comparing Israel and its genocidal racism to Nazi Germany is something many Israelis have done. Ze’ev Sternhell, a former professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a child survivor of the holocaust, wrote an article In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism. One suspects that the idiots who arrested me would have arrested Sternhell too.

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem p.7

Hannah Arendt, who was a refugee from Nazi Germany and the greatest political scientist of the last century noted in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem that the attacks at the Eichmann trial on the Nuremberg Laws for banning marriage between Jews and non-Jews was somewhat ironic since Israel also banned them!

The fact is that the very racial supremacism that the Nazis promoted is alive and well in Israel. The Police are there to uphold the existing inequalities of society in the name of ‘the rule of law’. They are not paid to think and very few of them do think outside narrow parameters.

That is why the Metropolitan and other police forces are regularly found to be full of narrow minded bigots such as the officers at Charing Cross Station whose WhatsApp messages finally did for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and Bigot, Cressida Dick.

As far as I’m concerned the bail conditions are unlawful and have nothing to do with repeating an offence that did not occur so I do not feel bound by them. I will be pleading not guilty and seeking to bring a number of witnesses if the Crown Prosecution Service is stupid enough to charge me.

In the event that the CPS does not bring charges then I will sue the police for false and malicious imprisonment since I spent approximately 7 hours in custody besides incurring other expenses. The only way to punish the police for their dictatorial behaviour is to hit them in the pocket although, since they can draw on unlimited public money, one suspects that they will not reform.

What happened is that arch-Zionist agitator and thug Richard Millett, who sued Jeremy Corbyn and then backed off, made a malicious complaint to the Police. The Police as is always the case bend over backwards to appease these racists.

That is why I am setting up a Crowdfunder in order that I can fund both future civil litigation and also take legal advice about the present charges (since I am not entitled to legal aid until charges have been laid).

I would therefore ask those of you who are able to contribute to do so. My Crowdfunder ‘Stopping the Police Persecuting Palestine Solidarity Activists’ is now live.

Tony Greenstein