My Prosecution for ‘Terrorism’ Required the Permission of Attorney General Richard Hermer

Who Passed the Decision to his Zionist Solicitor-General, Sarah Sackman, Vice-Chair of the  Jewish Labour Movement 2015-2024 - Bias? Perish the Thought

The Labour Files – Episode 1 – The Purge I Al Jazeera Investigations

The law is quite clear in respect of prosecutions under the Terrorism Act 2000. Under s.117(2A), in the event of a prosecution that relates to ‘a purpose wholly or partly connected with the affairs of a country other than the United Kingdom’ the consent of the Attorney General Lord Richard Hermer is required. In the event that he has a conflict of interest then he can hand the decision to the Solicitor General.

The Solicitor-General was Sarah Sackman, who was an officer of the Jewish Labour Movement, an ardently Zionist group, for 9 years. We don’t know for certain why Hermer passed the decision to Sackman but it would seem that it was his confession to the Jewish Chronicle that ‘I actively support a range of Jewish and Israeli organisations’ and that ‘I have dear family members currently serving in the IDF.’

Sackman however had no such scruples as you would expect from someone who is an ardent Zionist activist. Whereas Hermer has a record of being identified with human rights issues and opposed to the occupation of the West Bank, Sackman has never spoke out once against the Occupation, still less the genocide.

Sackman has been far more involved in things to do with Israel and Zionism as Vice Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement from 2015-24. She registered her position as JLM Vice-Chair in August 2014. It is not known exactly when she resigned but it’s possible that when she approved my prosecution she was still an office holder.

It is however clear that Sackman was personally involved in the JLM targeting me in the Labour Party for suspension and then expulsion in 2016. In the Leaked Labour Report that was issued in 2019 it was reported that Laura Murray from Corbyn’s office had emailed the head of the Governance & Legal Unit, John Stolliday, informing him of the JLM’s ‘frustration’ that mine and other cases had not been heard. The JLM had been pushing hard for our expulsion. As Vice-Chair Sackman could hardly have been unaware of this. The conflict of interest is blindingly obvious.

Saying what the British State Doesn't Want to Hear is Now 'Terrorism'

Sackman is supposed to reach a decision on cases like mine on the basis of what is in Britain’s national interest. The reality, as she has readily admitted, is that her allegiance is first and foremost to the Apartheid state.

Sackman served as a law clerk in the Israeli Supreme Court. Her grandfather Solomon Seruya was an Israeli ambassador to the Philipenes (1976-8). By her own admission she visited Israel on a yearly basis.

She has a maternal aunt and three cousins who live in Jerusalem. They will all have served in the IDF and today they are likely to be reservists. My statements supporting October 7 and the right of the Palestinians to self-defence against an occupation that has gone on for over 58 years, are not likely to have endeared me to her. 

Sackman is on record as saying that “The events of October 7 are the worst in my lifetime as a Jew,” To have her making the decision as to whether I or anyone else should be prosecuted is like putting Nick Griffin in charge of race relations or Harold Shipman in charge of the Geriatric Unit of a hospital.

Jewish anti-Zionists are the bête noir of people like Sackman. The JLM, despite pretending to be a progressive Zionist organisation, has not once expressed any reservations about the genocide in Gaza. Quite the contrary. She made it clear that she was opposed to the issuing by the International Criminal Court of warrants for the arrest of Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant as war criminals. 

On May 24, 2024 she told the Jewish Chronicle that:

she had conveyed Jewish community’s concern over the decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan to seek arrest warrants for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant to shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, who said last week he supported ICC process.

Sackman is fully aware that Israel never prosecutes torturers or abusers - instead it prosecuted the Military Advocate General who leaked the video above

Sackman told the JC: 

I trust the Israeli people to hold their leaders to account, and I think they will in due course. I think the request to issue warrants in the middle of a war was unjustified.

Sackman not only demonstrated her Zionist fanaticism but her ability to lie without flinching. Israel has never held members of the IDF to account because of their war crimes or murder of Palestinians. The idea that under the current far-right Israeli government that could happen is testimony to the fact that there is no difference between Labour and Likud Zionism.

When Israeli soldiers were captured on video anally raping a Palestinian prisoner, who was left paralysed, not only did a mob attack the torture camp where they were held, Sdei Teiman, but 65% of Israelis said that the rapists shouldn’t face criminal prosecution.

Instead the Military Advocate General who leaked the video of the rape to the media, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, was arrested. In Israel the whistle blowers are the ones who get punished not the war criminals but this shows more clearly than anything that Sackman is a genocide apologist.

On their website the JLM lists amongst their aims:

To maintain and promote Labour or Socialist Zionism as the movement for self-determination of the Jewish people within the state of Israel.

Amongst their ‘values’ they exist:

To promote the centrality of Israel in Jewish Life and its development on the basis of freedom, social justice and equality for all its citizens.

This is based on the World Zionist Organization’s Jerusalem Program, to which the JLM is affiliated, which states that

The foundations of Zionism are the unity of the Jewish people, its bond to its historic homeland Eretz Yisrael, and the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, its capital, in the life of the nation.

One of the cardinal axioms of Zionism is that Jews, wherever they live, are part of one nation. Sarah Sackman is signed up to this nonsense. So the idea that she can make a decision on what is in the British ‘national interest’, whatever that is, when it comes to prosecuting anti-Zionists is patently absurd.

At a hustings in May 2015, the Times of Israel described how 

Sackman was the last person to make a decision as to who to prosecute for their comments on Israel and Gaza. In whose interests was she making the decision? She should not have had any hand in any decisions as to who to prosecute.

Sackman’s comment that the issue of Israel was “something that is deeply personal and emotional,” is precisely why she should not have been anywhere near the decision.

My barrister has therefore submitted an appeal to the Court of Appeal alleging bias. In particular that Sackman’s allegiance to the Israeli state conflicts with her ability to rule on what is in Britain’s interest.

Whereas it is not in Britain’s interest to criminalise supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of genocide as ‘terrorists’ it is very much in the interests of the Israeli state to do so.

And if this was not enough then Sackman, in a joint article with Mike Katz, the former Chair of the JLM, in the Jewish News of March 26, 2016 explicitly attacked me. It beggars belief that she did not disqualify herself from taking a quasi-judicial decision. She wrote, in an article on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party that:

A senior Labour peer has been appointed to investigate the activities of the Oxford Labour Club and other problematic figures such as Tony Greenstein have been suspended. These are welcome first steps and a reflection of how seriously party officials take the issue [of anti-Semitism].

It is clear that her reference to me as ‘problematic’ was a lawyer’s way of saying that I was anti-Semitic. This is what the article, an internal Zionist debate with Jonathan Arkush, the then President of the Board of Deputies, was about.

The fact that Sackman thought it was ok to have anything to do with my prosecution for ‘terrorism’ i.e. freedom of speech on Palestine shows just how corrupt both she and our legal system is and how the fiction that the law officers are separate from the political hurly burly is just that.  A fiction.

Tony Greenstein

An Open Letter to Liberal Democrat MPs – Why Are You Silent Over the Hunger Strikes? Have you lost your tongues as well as your conscience?

Despite Being the Third Largest Parliamentary Group with 72 MPs, only 4 Lib Dems have signed Early Day Motion 2386

An Israeli Calls Israel for What It Is - a State Resembling Nazi Germany

There was a time when the Liberal Party claimed, under Jo Grimond, to be a radical party of the left and a defender of civil liberties. With its marriage to the Social Democrats that went by the board.

In 2010 it got into bed with David Cameron’s Tories in the Coalition government and were virtually eliminated at the 2015 election after having gone back on their promise not to increase tuition fees. They also paved the way for Brexit.

Under Vince Cable, the Business  Minister, the Post Office was privatised and virtually given away to the private sector. Privatisation, which has transferred £200 billion from the public purse to the billionaire class since Thatcher pioneered it, was fully supported by the Lib Dems.

One thing is clear. The Lib Dems are not a left-wing party. Indeed the old adage holds that if you scratch a Liberal you’ll get a Conservative.

Under the lamentable Jo Swinson as leader they joined in the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign against the Labour Left and Corbyn with gusto.  Their two most prominent pro-Palestinian figures – Baroness Jenny Tonge and David Ward MP - were both forced out of the party. The defeat of Swinson at the 2019 General Election by the SNP was the best result on a miserable night.

The Lib-Dems have an appalling record on Zionism and Palestine. They have given full support to the Apartheid, Jewish Supremacist State that has leading Jewish Nazis in the most powerful positions of Finance and Police. They have also been silent over the genocide in Gaza in contrast to Ukraine.

Jeremy Corbyn's Speech on the Hunger Strikes - Labour MPs Laugh as Young People Are Dying

A day ago I wrote to the 72 Lib-Dem MPs asking why only four of them have signed Early Day Motion 2386 calling on the government to intervene in the hunger strikes by 6  Palestine Action supporters to ensure that the Filton 24 are freed on bail. Andrew George was one of the original sponsors and the other three – Layla Moran (herself of Palestinian origin), Alistair Carmichael and Ian Roome signed very late in the day.

The Lib Dems have 11% of the total MPs in the House of Commons yet they only comprise 6.5% of the 62 who have signed. This for a party which purports to take a pride in supporting civil liberties.

The issues are quite clear. All the hunger strikers are unconvicted prisoners, charged with minor criminal offences such as criminal damage and yet they are being held under ‘terrorist’ conditions despite being completely peaceful. Bail has been refused repeatedly and one judge who did grant bail, Bobby Cheema-Grubb, had her decision immediately appealed to the reactionary Court of Appeal and found herself taken off further cases of this nature.

But then Liberals have always had a bad record in terms of basic democratic rights. It was a Liberal government under Asquith that gaoled the Suffragettes and passed the Cat and Mouse Act. MPs, including the wretched Yvette Cooper lionise the Suffragettes today but in their time they too were called terrorists. Indeed, in comparison with Palestine Action they were terrorists.

From 1912 to 1914 the Suffragettes orchestrated a widespread campaign of arson and bombings targeting churches, post boxes, railway lines, and the homes of politicians. This included an attempt to burn down the home of the Chancellor, David Lloyd George.

They invented the letter bomb, which injured several postal workers. They placed bombs on public transport and in crowded places like Westminster Abbey and the Theatre Royal in Dublin while audiences were present. Assaults on politicians and public officials with whips and other objects occurred and a fire at Portsmouth dockyard in 1913 killed two men, and other fires killed two men and several horses in rural Bradford.

According to the definition of terrorism in the Terrorist Act 2000 the Suffragettes were without doubt terrorists. But here is the strange thing. On the very day that the proscription of Palestine Action was voted on in Parliament, the Home Secretary, the vile hypocrite Yvette Cooper appeared in the Commons with other female Labour MPs in the purple colours of the Suffragettes.

And people still say we should respect the law that is passed by crooks and criminals like Starmer, Cooper and Lammy.

Ed Davey the Lib Dem leader is an Establishment politician from head to toe. As Post Office Minister he ignored the scandal of the Post Office workers, initially refusing even to meet Alan Bates their  organiser. Even after he met Alan he took the official view that nothing was wrong.

983 sub-postmasters were falsely convicted. A quarter, 236, were gaoled. The only thing that can be said in Davey’s defence is that the Judges who sentenced the sub-postmasters never once asked how it was that there were so many dishonest postmasters still less questioned the ‘computer is right’ law that led to their convictions. At least 13 involved in the affair took their own lives.

Secret tape reveals Paula Vennells was told of faulty Horizon software | ITV News

However the Lib Dems have denied any responsibility at all. After all Ministers were lied to by their officials and that absolved them of any need to have made further enquiries.

One thing that the Lib Dems emphasise is that unlike the Conservatives and Starmer Labour, they are committed to civil liberties. Policy Paper 44 on their website is titled ‘Protecting Civil Liberties’ and it has this to say:

Liberal Democrats believe that everyone, whoever they are, should have civil liberties. Civil liberties are rooted in freedom of speech and expression, freedom of association and freedom of movement. They depend on equality of treatment before the law.

Yet this a lie. We have seen the Police banning demonstrations, rerouting them away from the BBC on the pretext that a synagogue was nearby, on the assumption that Jews support Genocide, and it would now seem the Met are banning repeat demonstrations with legal powers that they don’t have.  We have seen the Police conducting dawn raids on Palestine solidarity activists on the pretext that they have supported a proscribed organisation, Hamas. Yet throughout this wave of repression the Lib Dems have said nothing.

When it came to the proscription of Palestine Action, the first protest group to be classified as a ‘terrorist’ group the Lib Dems excelled themselves. The official party position was to abstain but 6 MPs Andrew George, Tom Gordon, Tessa Munt, Manuela Perteghella, Al Pinkerton, and Luke Taylor voted ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Their reason for doing so was that Starmer Labour, in its normal dishonest way, bundled the proscription with two neo-Nazi groups thus depriving MPs of the opportunity of voting for each group specifically.

Of course the principled thing to do would have been to vote ‘no’ to the bundle, as the purpose of the proscription wasn’t to outlaw groups which don’t even operate in the UK but to proscribe Palestine Action. But this is typical of the Lib Dems. When it comes to radical or uncomfortable groups they abstain or simply go absent.

It is clear that there has been political intervention at the highest levels in this matter. We know for a fact that the Israeli Embassy has intervened and been consulted on the whole question of Elbit prosecutions and on the banning of Palestine Action.

We also know that The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre and the Proscription Review Group were both against the proscription of Palestine Action. So the internment of the hunger strikers and the Filton 24, because that is what it is, is completely unjustified yet the Lib Dem MPs have sat on their hands.  Why?

Because the Lib Dems are committed as a party to supporting the Apartheid State of Israel. Israel is a state that has an official policy of using torture against Palestinian detainees, which is in illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel is at the present time incarcerating nearly 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, a third of them without even a trial, before a military court. The military courts themselves have a 99.74% rate of conviction.

Even the Nazi Peoples’ Courts, which were explicitly political, acquitted more defendants than Israel’s military courts. The acquittal rate in 1940 was 7.3%. It then fell to around 5% until 1944, when it rose to almost 12%. This is the state that the Lib Dems support uncritically, a racist police state and a Jewish supremacist state with ethno-nationalism at its heart.

That above all is why the Lib-Dems have been silent over the Genocide in Gaza and the Hunger Strikes in particular.

Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Sir Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police Commissioner – Yesterday You Were Anti-Semitic, Today you are Anti-Palestinian

Rowley Has Decreed that ‘Globalise the Intifada’ is A Crime – Today I Repeated It Twice in A Speech As Sussex Police Looked On

Please register here

https://qrco.de/bgWXRg

The attack on Jews at a Chanukah celebration in Australia has become the pretext for a crackdown on civil liberties and democratic rights. Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police Commissioner is to the fore in calling for the suppression of the Palestine solidarity movement.

Sir Mark Rowley, the Heinrich Müller of the Met

Rowley, as part of his efforts to use British Jews as the Trojan horse for a Police State has repeatedly refused to meet with anti-Zionist Jews or the Palestine Coalition whilst meeting with pro-Genocide Zionist groups. For him, anti-racist Jews are as much the enemy as Palestinians. 

Written evidence to Parliament by Palestine Solidarity Campaign states that

The MPS has so far refused repeated requests for an in-person meeting with representatives of the Jewish bloc and on at least two occasions the police have sought to prevent them joining the march on the grounds that, being Jewish, they were assumed to be counter demonstrators.

When people call out the racism of the Metropolitan Police we should remember that it began with colonial policing of the Irish, then moved onto Jews and is now manifested in  anti-Muslim and anti-Black racism.

On Sunday at midday I shall be one of 3 Jewish speakers at a webinar Scottish PSC is holding on the the killings in Australia. London’s Gestapo Commissioner Rowley, alongside his Manchester understudy Stephen Watson, announced that the chant ‘Globalise the Intifada’ was now an arrestable offence. In response I penned an open letter to Rowley.

Never has your racism @metpoliceuk been so clear. In your statement you say 'Our thoughts are with those who lost their lives, their families and those injured.'

When have you ever made a similar statement in respect of the thousands of Palestinians, nearly half of whom are… https://t.co/IgDnbp8wWT

— Tony Greenstein tonygreenstein.com (@TonyGreenstein) December 18, 2025

Dear Mark Rowley,

You issued a statement recently which said that ‘Antisemitic hate crime has surged, protests have intensified, and online abuse has grown since 2023.’ This is the method of Nazism. Juxtaposing completely different phenomenon.  Everything equals everything.

Your concern about racism is touching, even novel, given that you have turned a blind eye to it for so long. In February 2025 you told BBC's Today programme: "The public can have confidence in us." Your only gift is knowing how to lie. The very police station Charing X, whose racism and misogyny led to the sacking of your predecessor, Cressida Dick, was the subject of a Panorama programme Undercover in the Police which confirmed that you were a liar. Racism and sexism were everywhere.

As long as the Metropolitan Police are led by a racist there is no hope of reform. You have made it clear that the only racism you are interested in is ‘anti-Semitism’ – a prejudice not a form of racism. Attacks on Mosques and Muslims and Black people are no concern of you. The only ‘racism’ that concerns you is that against privileged White people .

The implication of your remarks were clear. Protests against genocide were responsible for the growth of anti-Semitism and on-line abuse. Such a sleight of hand is worthy of Goebbels and is indicative of nothing so much as your own dishonesty.

There is no evidence of a growth of anti-Semitism, unless you redefine it as opposition to Zionism, ethnic cleansing and genocide. But let us assume I am wrong and there is a growth in anti-Semitism, why is that?

The Israeli government and the Zionist movement have branded all opposition to the genocide in Gaza as ‘anti-Semitism’. If you oppose starving children you are anti-Semitic. Is it any wonder that some people believe them and then target Jews?

No one knows better than you the history of the Metropolitan Police. From the murder of Stephen Lawrence to the murder and rape of Sarah Everard and the canteen culture of Charing Cross Police, to say nothing of all the Black people you have murdered in the line of duty (Roger Sylvester, Mark Duggan, Chris Kaba et al.).

Senior Police officers even agreed to the police spying on the Stephen Lawrence Defence Campaign. A fish rots from the head down and the precondition of the Metropolitan Police reforming itself is your replacement.

When anti-Semitism was a genuine form of racism in the 1930s, anti-Semitism was rife amongst the Police. Today when Jews are the moral alibi and the pretext for the British ruling class support for Israel then ‘anti-Semitism’ is a concern of the Police.

When I asked Google’s AI ‘were the Metropolitan police antisemitic during the 1930s and sympathetic to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists ’, which was led by Sir Oswald Moseley, the results were instructive and shed a light on your concern about ‘anti-Semitism’ now.

It is also instructive to refer to Daniel Sonabend’s book ‘We Fight Fascists’ about the fight of the mainly Jewish Anti-Fascist 43 Group after 1945 and the anti-Semitism of the Metropolitan Police.

It describes how the head of 'G' Division, Superintendent Charles Satterthwaite shouted 'Fucking Jew bastard!' at a Jewish anti-fascist Murry Silver as he repeatedly  beat him, whilst two of his officers held Silver against the wall.  Satterthwaite was described by one member of the 43 Group, Lennie Rolnick as a 'first class anti-Semite who would have done well at Belsen (concentration camp)’.

Historian Dave Renton found that anti-fascists were three times as likely to get arrested as fascists.  Sonabend asked why this was and his answer was ‘Widespread anti-Semitism in the Metropolitan Police force’. Nor was Satterthwaite the only officer who made regular reference to the faith of the anti-fascist disruptors he was arresting. Two young Group members from the East End, a hairdresser's assistant called Vidal Sassoon and his friend Mo Levy, had a particularly nasty run-in with the law, which Sassoon described in his autobiography.

One evening in Kilburn, we chased the fascists into a pub and were ourselves chased by the police. They arrested three of us. It took a long time to get to the police station which was only a few streets away. Two policemen held one of my comrades, Mo Levy, while a sergeant pounded him, beating him everywhere but the face, at the same time calling us 'dirty Jew bastards', 'fucking Yids who Hitler missed' and 'sons of foreign whores'.

Sonabend writes that

Knowing they were dealing with an institutionally anti­ Semitic organisation, the 43 Group's leadership were keen not to provoke the police. In fact, they went out of their way to be cooperative.’ 

Have the Police changed?  Yes in the sense they are no longer anti-Semitic, because the Jews are no longer on the left nor are they working class. Note that Sonabend described the Met as ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ just as Black people in the 1980s and 1990s were to describe the Met as institutionally racist.

Jews have changed and the focus of the Met’s racism has changed but that is all. The Metropolitan Police have changed the target of their racism but they are still the same old  uniformed racists.

Today support for Israel and Zionism is the political rationale for their Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism. Israel is the most anti-Muslim country in the world and has formed an alliance with anti-Muslim racists such as Tommy Robinson, who was an Israeli government guest recently as well as individuals such as Dutch fascist, Geert Wilders.

In your statement Mark you said that ‘Our thoughts are with those who lost their lives, their families and those injured,’ referring to Jewish victims of the Australian attack. Over 100,000 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds of thousands injured in Gaza.  Children have been starved to death.  Yet you haven’t even acknowledged the death and destruction in Gaza. Your thoughts are with Australian Jews but not Palestinian children. What other explanation for this is there other than racism? Palestinian lives don’t matter because they are an indigenous people, the victims of western colonialism.

In your pathetic statement you say of Jewish people that

Jewish children attend schools behind fences, guarded by security and routine police patrols. No community should have to live like this. That must change.’

Really?  If Jews are under siege it is a siege of their own and your making.  You are deliberately making Jews into targets as a justification for the British State's support for Genocide. They are your colonial pets, hostages for your own malevolent intentions. Jews are the justification for the State's increased repression.

You say ‘Current laws are inadequate’.  Really?  You have been given more and more powers yet always you are dissatisfied. Perhaps when we have a fully fledged police state you will be satisfied? Or maybe when juries are finally abolished so that servile judges can be relied upon to rubber stamp your arrests and prosecutions.

It is not for you to comment on the adequacy of the law. Still less is it for you to define that law. For most people the laws are already too repressive and we know from past experience that it will be trade unionists, climate protesters, housing activists - indeed anyone bar employers and the rich who will feel their effects. 

What you want is a police state where people like you dictate the political agenda.  And speaking of dictating the political agenda you have all but outlawed chants such as “globalise the intifada”. Well I for one will make sure to include at least one mention of how the Intifada should be globalised. 

That is why today at a demonstration in Hove outside the offices of Vile Kyle MP, I repeated the slogan ‘Globalise the Intifada’ to make it clear that we, not you, will decide what we say.  Sussex police officers just looked on. So are we to have different laws now for different cities?   The Intifada is an Uprising against an Illegal Occupation. It has nothing to do with British Jews, much as you would like to lay the blame for Israel’s genocide on Jews.

We will not allow you to dictate what we are allowed to say and not say. You are paid to implement the law not to make the law.

We refuse to be stampeded into a police state by those who use Jews as the pretext for abolishing freedom of speech. When the Police decide what we are allowed to say and not say then we are already on the road to dictatorship.

It is time to move on Mark Rowley. You belong in a museum alongside all the other dinosaurs such as your role model, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller. As long as you are head of the Metropolitan Police we can expect a continuation of the racism that led the Met 30 years ago to covering up for the killers of Stephen Lawrence.

Tony Greenstein