Open Letter to Brighton Argus Editor Arron Hendy

When the Police Arrest People for their Opinions It’s Not Terrorism they are attacking but Freedom of Speech 

Unlike Hendy & Wadsworth’s rag the Jersey Evening Post Declared ‘We should be defending our freedoms, not abandoning them’

Freedom of Speech in Britain, which is enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, was not handed down on a plate. It was fought for and people died fighting for it.

William Tyndale, the Father of the English Bible, was strangled and burnt at the stake. The Oxford Martyrs, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer were burnt at the stake for heresy.  Today the new heresy is to support the Palestinians and in particular to support their right to resist the genocide they are undergoing.

There was a time when the Argus had a vigorous correspondence column - not least about Free Speech and its limits

Anyone who dares to raise a voice in support of the right of Palestinians to defend themselves is guilty of supporting Hamas, a crime that is worse than rape or child abuse. No one has charged Justin Welby with covering up child abuse. He was allowed to resign in disgrace from the Church of England.

Arron Hendy - the Argus's Invisible Man

The ‘offence’ for which I have been charged, under s.12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000 states that it is an offence if someone:

a)      expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, and

(b)     in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation.

The maximum penalty is 14 years imprisonment though I have been told that the Sentencing Guidelines recommend 4 years for a first offence.  If like Hugh Edwards I had merely been found guilty of downloading hardcore child pornography I could expect a 6 months suspended sentence.

One would expect the press to stand up for freedom of speech and the rights of journalists, at least 3 of whom have been arrested or raided so far for supporting a proscribed organisation. In Jersey where Natalie Strecker, a long standing Palestine solidarity activist was raided and arrested, the local paper the Jersey Evening Post has been magnificent.

Genocide Supporter and rabid Zionist Jo Wadsworth took offence when I said she delighted in Palestinian children's deaths - so disappointed was she with the Comments section under the article about my charges, most people were outraged by what  had happened, that she deleted all of them!

However the Brighton & Hove papers – the Argus and the rancid Brighton & Hove News run by presstitute Jo Wadsworth, reported that I had been arrested for ‘terror offences’.

I therefore wrote an Open Letter to the Editor of The Argus (there is no point writing to Starmer groupie Wadsworth as her mind is as closed as a tin of sardines (& intellectually on about the same level!).

Arron Hendy is the invisible editor of The Argus. He once asked me to write a comment column for the paper but it became a little too radical for him and I gave up trying to say anything about Palestine. However I was the only person in the local press to oppose the scandal of the Council spending over £30 million on the now bankrupt i360.

The Argus prefers to forget when I was a columnist - and alone criticised a project that is now crippling the Council's finances

Hendy is the kind of person who can walk into a room without anyone noticing or even remembering whether he was there. He has edited the Argus for 7 years and ensured that in that time it has become little more than a vehicle for press releases.

Long gone is the time when the Argus had investigative or even court journalists. I can remember conducting employment tribunal cases where an Argus journalist sat in for the whole 3 or 6 days.

There was a time when the Argus was a campaigning paper.  Most notably it waged a fierce campaign in support of the repatriation back to Britain of Omar Degayes who had been held in America’s Gulag, Guantanamo.

Terrorism is about people planting bombs in tube stations, buses or opening fire on concert goers such as the Bataclan in Paris or the knife attacks on London Bridge. Terrorism is not advocating support for the right of the colonised to resist their occupiers. It isn’t about resistance to either Israel’s occupation of Gaza or the Turkish state’s occupation of Kurdistan.

Of course Hamas and the Palestinian Resistance are called ‘terrorists’. The British always called their colonial opponents ‘terrorists’ from the IRA to the Mau Mau in Kenya but the truth was, of course, that it was the British who terrorised the local population.

Thatcher and Reagan called the ANC 'terrorist' when it was fighting the Apartheid South African state.  Always the opponents of apartheid are the 'terrorists', never the racists.

However even Thatcher resisted the temptation to proscribe Sinn Fein knowing full well that it would close the door to any peace settlement. Not so the war criminal Tony Blair, who should have been locked up for an illegal  war in Iraq. Instead he introduced legislation that enabled the proscription of resistance organisations that were now called ‘terrorist’ organisations. It was however Priti Patel in 2021 who decided to proscribe, not just the military wing but the political wing of Hamas. The justification, if that is what it can be called merely stated that:

At the time [March 2001] it was HM government’s assessment that there was a sufficient distinction between the so called political and military wings of Hamas, such that they should be treated as different organisations, and that only the military wing was concerned in terrorism. The government now assess that the approach of distinguishing between the various parts of Hamas is artificial. Hamas is a complex but single terrorist organisation.

However we are not told why the Government’s assessment changed. In reality it was because Zionist lobby groups had been pressing for the change. It was political expediency that led to the proscription.

As we can see with the raid on the Kurdish community centre in Haringey, over support for the PKK, this legislation is very much part of the police and government’s racist attack on Black and migrant groups in this country.

We can also expect the billionaire press in Britain, both local and national, to support this attack on those who support liberation and resistance movements such as the PKK and Hamas.

Tony Greenstein