The British State is Waging War Against Freedom of Speech on Palestine Because It Knows It’s Lost the Argument
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Justice
for Tony Greenstein – Electronic Intifada
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On 20 October 2023 I was arrested at 6.30 am at my
home. My crime was posting a tweet one month before supporting the Palestinian
resistance. My response was that ‘this is
Orwellian’.
The same scenes have been re-enacted up and down the
country against people like Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Barnard. Eleven months
later I was charged with inviting support for a proscribed organisation, Hamas,
based on a blog
I had published on October 7.
The Gaza Ghetto Breakout
My trial begins on Monday 5 January 2026 at
Kingston Crown Court. I am charged with ‘terrorism’ for writing a blog supporting the Gaza Ghetto Uprising and the
right of the Palestinians to resist Israel’s unlawful occupation of Gaza.
The comparison between the Warsaw Ghetto and
Gaza was not mine but that
of Marek Edelman, the last Commander of the Jewish Resistance in the Warsaw
Ghetto.
Terrorism
Israel has had a permanent license from the
West to commit genocide and war crimes, not just from October 7 but since the
occupation of Gaza in 1967. But if the Palestinians resist then that is
‘terrorism’.
Everyone understands what the ordinary meaning
of terrorism is. It is someone planting a bomb
in the Manchester Arena and killing 22 people. It is the ISIS
attack on the Bataclan concert in Paris by ISIS that killed nearly 100
concert goers. It is Israel dropping hundreds of 2,000
lb bombs on refugee camps.
Our government not only denies that this is terrorism
but together with the US and Germany it supplies Israel
with the arms with which to carry out its genocide and ethnic cleansing. All
Israel’s massacres are ‘self defence’ according to Keir Starmer and David Lammy.
The fact is that our
rulers have created the very terrorism that they purport to protect us against
by introducing police state laws. Who created ISIS if not Britain and the
United States by their illegal invasion of Iraq? ISIS did not exist before 2003
and the US in its efforts to ward of Shi’ite attacks on its soldiers fostered Al
Qaeda in Iraq which later morphed into ISIS.
As Hilary Clinton admitted, the West sponsored
and encouraged the growth of the Mujahadeen and provided it with weapons and
money. Of course there was blow back, as there was when Salman
Abedi was encouraged
by MI5 to go to Libya to join the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was
trying to overthrow Colonel Ghadaffi. The families of those who died in Manchester are suing MI5.
Hillary Clinton: "we have helped to create the problem we are now fighting"
The destruction of Palestinian society, its schools
hospitals and universities, is acceptable to these genocidal freaks. They deny
there is genocide. Yet Starmer argued that the
killing of 8,000 people at Srebenica was genocide.
Mowing down those queuing for food, starving
children to death and attacking first aiders is treated as acceptable. Zionist
violence is fine when perpetrated against unarmed Palestinian civilians. But if
the people of Palestine lift so much as a finger against their occupiers then
that is a new holocaust.
In July 2024 the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Gaza unlawful. Yet according to the British government the Palestinians have no right to resist Israel’s occupation and siege. By the same light French resistance to the Nazis was terrorism. Our law is based on the same principles that enabled the violence of the British Empire.
It is worth recalling the words of the American Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776.
We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish
it, and to institute new Government,.... But when a long train of abuses and
usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce
them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off
such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Israel has reduced the situation of
the Palestinians to absolute despotism. Their property is not theirs, their
olive groves are burnt down, their land legally stolen. Israel’s brilliant
judges have even invented the concept of stealing
in good faith.
Palestinians cannot travel without
encountering checkpoints. Their children cannot
walk to school without being tear gassed. They have no hand in the laws
that govern them and if they infringe these laws they are tried in Military
Courts which have a 99.74
conviction rate, higher even than the Nazi Peoples’ Courts under Roland Freisler.
John Stuart Mill
One right that is inalienable is freedom of speech.
As John Stuart Mill, Liberal MP from 1865-8 wrote
in his most famous pamphlet On Liberty:
The
object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle... That principle
is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or
collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number,
is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to
prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a
sufficient warrant.
Mill was quite clear. No society had the right to attack or restrict
freedom of speech and opinion unless it was to protect others. It was called
the ‘harm principle’.
October
7
Israel portrayed October 7 as a second
holocaust. As someone who lost a large part of his family in the Nazi holocaust
I reject this comparison. Jews were killed by the Nazis because they were Jews,
Israelis were killed because they were occupiers.
It is alleged that on 7 October 2023 Hamas committed
many atrocities. There were undoubtedly some. No resistance organisation in
history has been 100% pure. How can it be otherwise when the occupier, whether
Israel, the French in Algeria or the British in Kenya is prepared to commit any
atrocity and kill any number of people to maintain their rule?
Atrocity Propaganda
Since October 7 the
Israeli government has constructed an atrocity propaganda narrative that
outdoes anything that the British did
in World War One. It alleged that Hamas had perpetrated
mass rapes, beheading and even baking babies. They were following a well worn
path. This was the standard reaction of colonists to slave rebellions and the
revolt of indigenous people.
The Israeli narrative of mass Hamas atrocities
against babies was crucial in the justification of the genocide. It is now accepted
that only one baby, Mila Cohen in Kibbutz
Be’eri, died.
Israel’s own social
security statistics confirm this.
But this did not stop the
Daily Mail leading
with ‘This was a holocaust pure and
simple’ alleging that Hamas beheaded 40
babies. Virtually
all the British press led with these false accusations, The
Times included and not one of
them has withdrawn the story.
Before Israel had a chance to fabricate its
narrative my eye was caught by an article on October 8 in the
Times of Israel which described
what happened in Kibbutz Re’im after a fight in which a Hamas militant killed a
father and his partner. The mother of the surviving children, Reut Karp, told
how
The
terrorist calmed down my Daria and Lavi, covered them in a blanket, took lipstick
and wrote on the wall: ‘The al-Qassam [Brigades] people don’t murder children.’
It was also alleged that Hamas had killed hundreds
of civilians. It now appears that it was
the Israeli state itself which killed most people through using the Hannibal
Directive, which was originally devised
in Lebanon in 1986. The Hannibal Directive states that it is better to kill a
soldier taken captive than to allow him to be swapped for hostages at a later
stage.
On October 7 the Hannibal Directive was applied
to civilians and every car that was thought to be heading for Gaza was bombed.
The resulting car
graveyard
makes it clear that most of the damage was from Israel’s Apache helicopters. Hamas
did not have the firepower to do the damage to the cars that the Apaches did.
In addition at Kibbutz Be'eri we know that General
Barak Hiram ordered tank commanders to
fire at the houses in order to kill the Hamas militants, despite the fact that
they also killed the inhabitants of those houses.
The Misuse of the Terrorism Act 2000
When the Terrorism Bill was debated in Parliament in December 1999, in response to the suggestion
that those supporting the Kurdish opposition to Saddam Hussein could be charged
with terrorist offences, Home Secretary Jack Straw suggested that such an idea
was the product of a ‘fevered imagination.’ Yet today the Kurdish Workers
Party, the PKK, which opposes another dictator, Recip Erdogan, is
proscribed.
Straw responded to accusations that the widening of
the definition of terrorism could encompass protest groups and international
solidarity activities by saying that ‘the
broadening of the Bill covers domestic terrorism.’ If a week is a long time
in politics then 20 years is an eternity.
The British government has been complicit in
the Genocide. That is why it has refused to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza
as a genocide despite human rights organisations being unanimous that a genocide has taken place. The Association of Genocide Scholars and even eight
former Supreme Court and Court of Appeal judges (Baroness Hale, Lord
Sumption, Lord Wilson, Lord Carnwath, Sir Stephen Sedley, Sir Alan Moses, Sir Anthony
Hooper and Sir Richard Aikens) have reached a similar conclusion.
The use of the Terrorism Act against
dissenters, bloggers and writers has been their response to the massive
Palestine solidarity movement that has grown up. Mine is the first such trial.
Our rulers try to control our ability to think
by redefining concepts such as ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘terrorism’ into their
opposites. Anti-Semitism, which is hatred
or hostility to Jews as Jews has been redefined as hatred of Zionism and
Israeli racism via the IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism and its 11 illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’, seven
of which are about Israel.
The leaders of British Zionist organisations have
been recruited by the Police and Media to parrot how ‘offended’ Jews are that
people take offence at the pictures of starving Palestinian children. It is no
surprise that the Metropolitan Police have adopted
the Zionist IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which is no definition at all.
Orwell noted
how atrocities are downplayed by describing them in neutral language:
political
language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy
vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants
driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on
fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of
peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no
more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification
of frontiers.
Orwell defined
liberty as ‘the
right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ Today
if you do that you will be called a ‘terrorist’ and arrested. The British
security state doesn’t appreciate criticism of its foreign policies. As Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights observed, the proscribing of
Palestine Action:
misuses
the gravity and impact of terrorism to expand it beyond those clear boundaries,
to encompass further conduct that is already criminal under the law".
Challenging the States’ right to define what
is and is not terrorism has itself become a form of ‘terrorism’. When Palestine
Action was proscribed and people
sat with signs saying they supported PA and
opposed genocide they were arrested in their thousands.
If anyone should have been arrested it was the
owners of Elbit, an Israeli arms company which manufactured drones used to kill
children. But in Starmer’s dystopia those who seek to prevent the manufacture
of child killing machines are the criminals.
In the words of John Dugard, Professor of Law and
ad-hoc Judge of the International Court of Justice ‘The
label of ‘terrorist’ is being used in a bid to discredit and silence opponents.
Terrorism has been redefined in s.1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 as a threat to
health and safety, destruction of property or attacking a computer system.
The definition of terrorism in the TA 2000 is wide
enough to drive a coach and horses through. It can encompass virtually any
group that the government doesn’t like. The power to proscribe groups is
arbitrary, the decision of the Home Secretary alone. This in itself is one of
the characteristics of a police state.
If this redefinition involves an attack on freedom
of speech we can be sure there will be judges on hand to say that it is a
proportionate response to an unknown threat and compatible with the European
Convention on Human Rights. When the word ‘terrorism’ is uttered judges tend to
go weak at the knees.
Although the Supreme Court expressed its
unhappiness with the current definition of terrorism in R
v Gul [2013] UKSC 64 it wasn’t willing to interpret it in the light of
Article 10 of ECHR and read it down. They said:
While
acknowledging that the issue is ultimately one for Parliament, we should record
our view that the concerns and suggestions about the width of the statutory
definition of terrorism.... Any legislative narrowing of the definition of
“terrorism”, with its concomitant reduction in the need for the exercise of
discretion under section 117 of the 2000 Act, is to be welcomed....
David Anderson, the Independent
Reviewer of Terrorism, in his Report
of June 2012 similarly wrote:
As
presently drafted, the definition is so broad as to criminalise certain acts
carried out overseas that constitute lawful hostilities under international
humanitarian law.... the current law allows members of any nationalist or
separatist group to be turned into terrorists by virtue of their participation
in a lawful armed conflict, however great the provocation and however odious
the regime which they have attacked.
In other words the so-called Terrorism Act is
a means of supporting friendly terrorist regimes. In his 2014 Report
Anderson wrote of the
the
extraordinarily broad definition of terrorism under UK law, and the heavy
reliance that is placed on the wise exercise of discretions by Ministers,
prosecutors and police.’
Yvette Cooper demonstrated just how broad the
definition of ‘terrorism’ is when she banned Palestine Action. Her shallowness and
dishonesty was demonstrated when she appeared
in the House of Commons in the purple colours of the Suffragettes. If any group
could have been called ‘terrorist’ then it was the Suffragettes who bombed
and burnt their way to universal suffrage.
Anderson wrote that
It
seems that the writing of a book, an article or a blog may therefore amount to
terrorism if publication is “for the
purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.. designed to influence the government and
liable to endanger life or create a serious risk to health or safety.”
Which is a way of rendering illegal any
revolutionary ideology such as Marxism. It is what they used to call sedition, the overthrow of capitalism.
Anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism are certainly out. Only capitalist and
imperialist violence is allowed.
Anderson wrote that ‘The consequences of publication as
a terrorist action stretch well beyond the national security sphere.’
and gave the example of an anti-vaccination article which might be held to
cause a risk to public health, which is one of the grounds on which something
can be called ‘terrorism’. He also wrote
Nor
does the potential for exorbitant application of the terrorism laws end there.
The vast penumbra of ancillary offences and powers has the potential greatly to
magnify the “chilling effect” of the broad definition.
Anderson concluded that
a) To afford over-broad discretions to Ministers, prosecutors and police is undesirable in itself. As the Supreme Court maintained in R v Gul, it leaves citizens in the dark and risks undermining the rule of law.
b) To render people subject to the terrorism laws whom no sensible person would think of as terrorists risks destroying the trust upon which these special powers depend for their acceptance by the public.
c) To bring activities such as journalism and blogging within the ambit of “terrorism” (even if only when they are practised irresponsibly) encourages the “chilling effect” that can deter even legitimate enquiry and expression in related fields.
Fiona Sharpe Shouting Racist Abuse at a Palestinian Who She Got Arrested When She Claimed She Was the Victim - the Magistrates Threw the Case Out and Warned Her About Perjuring Herself After Film Evidence Was Produced - Which is why the Police Have Awarded Her a Medal for her Snitching - see here for details
The Context of What is Happening and What We Can Do
Yet this has now happened in my case and those
of other activists. Not only are the Police monitoring social media instead of
tackling genuine crime but they are encouraging the mentality of the Gestapo/
Stasi informer. Zionists such as Heidi
Bachram and Fiona
Sharpe, known liars who were caught
out last week trying to cancel
Reginald Hunter are reporting peoples’ names to the Police who are only too
happy to act on them.
At the same time rape
has all but been decriminalised as the Police claim they don’t have enough resources.
It is not resources but where Police priorities lie and they are clearly more
happy to criminalise those who say things they don’t like than to solve cases
of rape. The question is why?
That is why my case is important. This
government supports a terrorist state, Israel, which is openly embarking on
extermination and ethnic cleansing. Its leaders are quite open about their
desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its inhabitants yet Starmer and Lammy
see nothing, say nothing and hear nothing.
Heidi Bachram - following in the footsteps of Gestapo & Stasi Informers - Wears a Scowl Most of the Time She is Awake
Yet it is critics of the genocidal policy of
this government, including Jewish critics, who are now being subject to the
tender mercies of the Anti-Terror Police who are now the equivalent of Orwell's
Thought Police.
Tony Greenstein
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