My Trial at Kingston Crown Court Begins on 5 January 2026 – My Charge? Supporting the Right of the Palestinians to Resist The Occupation
Please Register for the Webinar on December 11th 6 pm
'Freedom of Speech and
Protests Against Genocide are not Terrorism
Background to My Arrest
Nearly
two years ago I was arrested
in a dawn raid by a dozen police officers. My ‘crime’ was posting a tweet a
month before. A Zionist had asked me to say 3 words ‘I support Hamas’. I responded
and said ‘I support the Palestinians,
that is enough. And I support Hamas against the Israeli army.’
If anyone should have been charged with inviting support for Hamas it is James!
The
Prosecution will say that it is a crime to support the resistance of
Palestinians to the genocidal Israeli army because Hamas is a terrorist
organisation. Using this ‘logic’ it would have been a crime to support the
French Resistance, whom the Nazis also termed terrorists. My response at 6.30
a.m. was just 3 words ‘this is
Orwellian’. Perhaps rape and
burglary had gone out of fashion? The Police were therefore left with no choice
but to go into the business of thought crime.
In
fact rape has effectively been decriminalised because the police say they don’t have the
resources to deal with it. However they do have dozens of police available at a
moment’s notice to go arresting supporters of the Palestinians as ‘terrorists’.
Indeed the Metropolitan Police seem to do nothing else these days.
But perhaps, given the Met have a rape and misgyny
problem, with officers such as Wayne Couzens, the
murderer of Sarah Everard and David Carrick, it is safer to concentrate on ‘terrorism’.
Earlier today we were made aware of plans for a pro-Palestine protest outside St John’s Wood Synagogue this afternoon.
— Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) November 23, 2025
We understand why the group's decision to protest at this location will cause concern to some communities.
There is no legal mechanism to ban the protest from… pic.twitter.com/sg58LqLna9
This begs the question - why would the Met want to ban a demonstration? The Police have now become the judges of what is an acceptable protest
What
the Met are doing is supporting British foreign policy which is giving support
to the genocide in Gaza. Having received no less than 9 complaints from
Zionists like @Heidi Bachram, they decided to spare no expense in arresting me.
Ms Bachram was operating in the best traditions of Jews who had betrayed
fellow Jews to the Nazis.
I
was arrested initially under s.12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000 which makes it an offence to ‘express an opinion or belief that is
supportive of a proscribed (i.e. terrorist) organisation.’
My Police interviewers
did not understand when I told them that I would have supported the Devil
himself against the IDF. I gave them the
example of how, in 1944, over 200 Jews deserted from the Polish Home Army (AK) because
they had been told by their officers that they would be shot in the back when
they went into action.
A saying common in AK was
that ‘‘Every Pole has two bullets—the
first for a Jew and the second for a German,'” It caused a major
scandal when Tom Driberg MP raised it in the House of Commons, against the
wishes of the Board of Deputies. Anti-Semitism was rife in AK so it is unlikely
that I would have supported it.
However when AK led the
Warsaw Uprising in 1944 against the Nazis then of course I would have supported
it. The same with Hamas. I support it against a genocidal army but not against
its own people.
Hamas was elected
by the Palestinians in free elections in 2006.
What proscription effectively is is a racist definition of all
Palestinians as terrorists. Britain has no business defining a group fighting
the occupation of their own country as ‘terrorist’ whereas the Israeli state,
which is illegally
occupying that land and committing genocide is certainly a terrorist state
but one acceptable to the British state.
What is being embedded in
British law is its foreign policy. It is political opinion which is cemented
into the law, which is a complete abuse of the law which is there to regulate
behaviour not opinion.
As John Stuart Mill
argued in ‘On Liberty’ [Chapter 1,
2003 ed.] that
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his
will, is to prevent harm to others.
In
the eyes of the law and prosecution Hamas are ‘terrorists’ when it is abundantly
clear that it is the Israeli state which is a terrorist state. By comparison
Hamas are akin to virginal choir boys.
As Lord Carrington,
Thatcher’s first Foreign Secretary said, ‘one
man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.’ All resistance
organisations are termed ‘terrorists’ by those they oppose. The Czech and
Yugoslav resistance were called ‘terrorists’ by the Nazis.
We live in authoritarian
times when protest and opposition to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza is equated
with terrorism and dissent is equated with subversion. The latest outrage is a
senior government lawyer declaring, at
the trial of Natalie Strecker on charges of ‘terrorism’ in Jersey, that international
law should be disregarded.
The Genocide
Convention and the European
Convention on Human Rights, both passed in the wake of the Nazi holocaust,
are effectively dead in the water, murdered by the new imperialism of which
Trump and Starmer are such excellent representatives.
Starmer's
hypocrisy over genocide - he argued there was genocide in Vukovar but no
genocide in Gaza
Starmer, the ‘human
rights lawyer’ argued that the massacre in Vukovar
in November 1991, when 1,200 civilians were murdered, was a genocide but the possibly
hundreds of thousands killed in Gaza are not a genocide despite the clear statements
of Israeli government ministers of their desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
We caught up with former
Labour MP Chris Williamson at the Your Party conference
Last week we had the
spectacle of the Government’s ‘Justice’ Ministry blatantly
trying to fix the outcome of Palestine Action’s Judicial Review by having
the judge hearing it, Martin Chamberlain, removed and 3 pro-Israeli, security
judges replace him.
The new judges are Dame
Victoria Sharp, Dame Karen Steyn and Sir Jonathan Swift. All right-wing
and all pro-Israel. There is an excellent
article on Electronic Intifada giving the background to these stooge
judges. All are paid up members of the British Establishment.
As part of his
authoritarian agenda Starmer is now trying to introduce ID cards, an essential
part of the surveillance society that reduces us to mere numbers. And in order
that juries don’t continue to acquit defendants whom the Establishment believe
are guilty, Starmer and Lammy are proposing to abolish juries for all but the
most serious cases of murder and manslaughter.
My Trial On 5 January 2026
The Crown Prosecution Service [CPS] then changed tack and charged me
under s.12 of the TA with ‘inviting support for a proscribed
organisation’ on the basis of a blog, Full
Support for the Gaza Ghetto Uprising
and four tweets. Of course I did no such thing and indeed I have long
been a critic of Hamas’ conservative politics, see e.g. my condemnation
of their use of torture, however I’m not prepared to demonise them either. In
resisting genocide I have no hesitation in supporting them against the mass
murderers of the IDF.
The
CPS had to get the Attorney General, Richard Hermer’s approval for the
prosecution to go ahead. Given that Hermer has “dear
family members currently serving in the IDF” that was not too difficult.
The
police have not once arrested supporters of Israel’s genocide despite aiding
and supporting genocide being a criminal offence under the International
Criminal Court Act 2001. The CPS and
Attorney General Hermer are selective about which laws they implement.
Although
the issue of Palestine-Israel is always posed in the mainstream media in terms
of Israel’s ‘right of self-defence’ it is the Palestinians’ rights of self
defence which is at the heart of the issue of whether they were entitled to
break out of Gaza on October 7.
Palestinians
in Gaza had been under siege for 17 years They were subject to the Israeli policy
of ‘mowing the lawn’, i.e. periodic massacres and bombing aimed at keeping the
population quiet and submissive whilst they got on with their project of
ethnically cleansing the West Bank before turning their attention to Gaza.
This
was in conjunction with another policy of putting Palestinians in Israel ‘on a diet’. As Dov Weissglass, the
lawyer and adviser to then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained: ‘The
idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.’
The figure arrived at was 2279 calories a day, 8% less than previously
calculated. It is reminiscent
of Nazi calculations as to how much food they would allow into the ghettos.
They too made calorific calculations.
How Israel is replicating Nazi starvation tactics | Soumaya Ghannoushi | MEE Opinion
The
project Israel is embarked upon is that of a Greater
Israel. This involves the occupation of land in all the neighbouring
countries, the biblical Greater Israel or Eretz
Yisrael (Land of Israel) which has always been the Zionist goal. That is
why Israel is the only state in the world not to define its borders.
At
the present moment Israel is in occupation of parts of Lebanon and Syria,
without a squeak of protest from the ‘international community’ or the ‘rules
based order.’
October
7 forced changes in the plan. Gaza
became the primary target although violence has increased massively in the West
Bank where whole villages have had to be abandoned as a result of violence from
settlers and the army. Over
one thousand Palestinian civilians in the West Bank have been killed by the
Israeli military or settlers since October 7.
October
7 was intended by the Palestinian resistance to be a short operation aimed at
capturing Israeli hostages and exchanging them for the thousands of Palestinian
hostages who had been convicted of the ‘crime’ of opposing an illegal
occupation. Israel’s military courts
have a 99.74% rate
of conviction and one-third of Palestinian prisoners, hundreds of whom are
children aged 12 and upwards. They are
held in Administrative Detention without any trial. Palestinian prisoners are
as much hostages as the Israeli hostages were.
oh my god. One of the three authors of the New York Times' "mass rape" atrocity propaganda hoax is Anat Schwartz. She liked posts calling for Gaza to be turned into a "slaughterhouse". This the person the NYT hired to write about Palestinians and frame them as sub-human monsters pic.twitter.com/vlaKLVxwil
— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) February 24, 2024
Israel
used October 7 to create a genocidal narrative. Instead of a well planned
military operation it was alleged to be an orgy of atrocities – mass rapes and
the wanton killing of babies. The original story of ‘40 beheaded babies’ has
been completely discredited but almost
a dozen British newspapers — including The
Times, Metro, The i, Daily Express, The Scotsman, and Financial Times ran stories on their front pages citing Israel’s
i24 claims. None have retracted.
In
fact only one baby, Mila Cohen, died on October 7 and that accidentally. This
is confirmed
by Israel’s own social security statistics.
‘Rape
atrocities’ were a well worn racist, colonial narrative in which the indigenous
population and Black people were portrayed as savages with the men being
portrayed as having uncontrolled sexual appetites and urges. This was not
dissimilar to how Jewish men were portrayed
in Nazi Germany.
The
Israeli government constructed a similar narrative. Israel’s October 7 rape
atrocity narrative was given legs by the New
York Times in Screams
Without Words. Anat
Schwartz, an Israeli, was assigned to cover the allegations that Hamas
systematically used sexual assault as a weapon of war during the October 7
attack.
The NYT article has long since been discredited. Schwartz was soon discovered to have liked a tweet supporting turning Gaza into a slaughterhouse. The Intercept demolished the NYT’s propaganda piece in “Between the Hammer and the Anvil” The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé.
The
article’s prime example of a woman who had been raped and killed, Gail Abdush,
was contradicted by her own family. Even
the NYT’s Daily podcast refused
to run the story. Schwartz was dropped but the NYT refuses to admit that Screams
Without Words was fiction rather than a serious piece of investigative
journalism.
The
final nail in the coffin of the rape atrocity story was the admission
by Moran Gaz, who was in charge of Israel’s Southern Prosecutor's Office, that
she had no rapes to investigate or people to charge. In December 2024 Ynet, the widest circulation Israeli
newspaper, published an interview with Gaz, saying that
In the end, we have no
complainants. What was presented in the media compared to what will ultimately
emerge will be completely different.
But
the damage had been done. As the old
saying goes,
by the time the truth gets its boots on a lie has travelled half-way round the
world.
The
atrocity propaganda was carried by the mainstream media but when it was proven
to be untrue, there was no admission of fault. This is how BBC style propaganda
works.
The
British first invented
atrocity propaganda against the Germans in the first world war. Israel has
perfected it to a fine art. The depiction of Hamas as ‘terrorists’ is of a
piece with this atrocity propaganda.
The
definition of ‘terrorism’ in the Terrorism Act 2000
is wide enough to allow the government to demonise anyone they want to. It
gives the government of the day an arbitrary power to classify anyone they
dislike as ‘terrorists’ regardless of who they are. Hamas military wing was
proscribed in 2001 and Priti Patel, a crook who became Home Secretary, proscribed
its political wing in 2021.
This
decision was a warrant for genocide. Hamas was the elected government in Gaza
and formed an administration. Civilians who were members of its political wing
included doctors, teachers, nurses and academics. By branding the political
wing a terrorist organisation this gave the green light to Israel to attack
hospitals, schools and universities because ‘terrorists’ were working there.
The ban on commenting on Hamas is a clear
breach of Article 10 of the ECHR
on freedom of speech, which our judges
have done their best to negate.
Hamas
is a resistance organisation, which Netanyahu did more than
most to create and support in his effort to combat a Palestinian state.
Because
my trial is imminent I am organising a webinar around not only my case but the
attack on Palestine solidarity activists. Natalie Strecker is awaiting a
verdict in a similar trial in Jersey and her charges are similar to those
facing me. The trial of the first six of the Filton 24 has already begun.
Richard Medhurst who is speaking also faces the prospect of being charged. Despite being a journalist he is the ‘wrong
type’ of journalist.
Please
register and join us and also get involved in the campaign against the
persecution of Palestine solidarity activists. I am calling for a demonstration
outside Kingston Crown Court on January 5th at 9.30 and for people
to attend the trial which is estimated to last a week. It is important that the
movement makes its presence felt.
Tony
Greenstein
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Stopping
the Police Persecuting Palestine Solidarity Activists










