Of One Thing We Can Be Certain –The Terrorism Act is NOT About Terrorism – Its Purpose is to Support Racist, Repressive Regimes Like Israel
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Talk World Radio: Is
Opposing Genocide a Crime in the UK?
At 6.30 a.m. on 20 December 2023 I was awoken by the
Counter-Terrorism
Police SE. There were about a dozen in all. You could have been forgiven
for thinking that they had foiled a dastardly plot to blow up a bus or railway
station.
When I answered the door I was greeted by two
dishevelled plain clothes Police who informed me that I was being arrested for
a tweet I had posted a month before. Having posted over 60,000 tweets in all I
didn’t have a clue what they were referring to. My only response was ‘this is Orwellian’.
My crime was responding to a Zionist who had dared me to say ‘I support Hamas’. My response was that I supported the Palestinians but in the fight against the IDF I supported Hamas. As I explained at a Police interview, I would have supported the devil himself if he was fighting Israel!
I clarified this by saying that I wouldn’t have
supported the anti-Nazi Polish resistance politically given their anti-Semitism
but in the fight against the Nazis I would have wholeheartedly supported them
in the Warsaw Uprising 1944.
Most of my blogs have been critical of Hamas when they have acted against the interests of the Palestinians. However I'm not going to lie and call them 'terrorists' when they are a resistance group. Compared to the IDF Hamas are the equivalent of virginal choirboys
As a Jewish atheist I
was hardly likely to support Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement,
politically but in the fight against Israel I would have supported them in just
the same way I would have supported any anti-colonial movement.
The Terrorism Act Definition of Terrorism
The
Terrorism Acts Are Not About Terrorism but Suppressing Pro-Palestinian Political
Opinion
The Cambridge Dictionary definition of terrorism is ‘violent action or threats designed to cause fear among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims.’
The Miriam Webster definition of terrorism is ‘the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion’
The Brittanica Dictionary definition of terrorism is ‘the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal’.
The dictionary.com definition of terrorism is ‘the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives.’
The Oxford Reference Definition is ‘The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to inculcate fear.
Ben Saul, the UN Special
Rapporteur for the protection of human rights defined Terrorism as ‘the instrumental terrorization of the
public or compulsion of Government’.
Common to these
definitions is creating fear or terror in a civilian population in order to
achieve a political goal. The definition in the Terrorism Act does none of
these things.
The irony of Israel's war against Hamas is that Israel played a key part in its creation!
It doesn’t even mention the terrorisation of the public. It talks about intimidation of people or a threat designed to influence the government, which could include direct action groups.
It says that action falls
within the remit of the definition if it involves serious violence against the
person, endangers a person’s life, creates a serious risk to health and safety
(no company endangering the health of its workers has ever been prosecuted as a
terrorist) or threatens or disrupts an electronic system. All of these are existing
criminal offences.
14 years in prison as a TERRORIST
for a quote - DDN
This definition is so wide
that virtually any group could be accused of terrorism if the government dislikes
them. Any group that the government considers hostile can be proscribed as a
terrorist group. As a definition it is meaningless.
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I am charged under s.12(1)(a) inviting support for a proscribed organisation
It also means that any
group that friendly dictators don’t like can be proscribed. For example
Turkey’s Kurdish
Workers Party (PKK) is proscribed because we are friends with Turkey’s
semi-fascist dictator, Recip Erdogan. As David Anderson, the Independent
Reviewer of Terrorism wrote
in his 2012 Report on Terrorism Legislation:
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 if you
oppose a dictatorship like that in Myanamar you can be proscribed as a
terrorist. Because Britain isn’t friends with the Myanamar regime its
separatist opponents such as the People’s
Defence Force (PDF) are not
proscribed. However there is no difference in principle between the PDF,
Hezbollah and Hamas. They are all fighting foreign occupations or military
regimes.
One of the tweets that forms part of the prosecution case
People only started waking up to the dangers
posed by the Terrorism Act when Palestine Action [PA] was proscribed.
What this definition does
not do is brand Israel’s government or any dictatorship, for example the UAE or
Saudi Arabia as terrorists. Israel has deliberately caused fear amongst the
Palestinians of Gaza with its genocide, yet it is not proscribed.
It is only those who fight
against dictatorship who can be proscribed. Terrorist states aren’t recognised
as such.
So although Israel is
widely recognised as a terrorist state guilty of genocide and ethnic cleaning
it is not proscribed because it is a state friendly to and sponsored by Western
imperialism. The same is true of Turkey. See Israeli
strike on Gaza school kills more than 100 people
Video shows moment of
Israeli strike on packed Gaza school shelter
When an Israeli fighter launched
a missile at children playing football in a school yard killing 30 that was
an act of terrorism as were many other similar atrocities. Yet
Israel justified it by saying that it was targeting a Hamas fighter.
Imagine that Hamas had targeted
Israeli school children playing football killing 30, there would have been a
massive outcry. It would have been seen as a terrorist act.
Yet we have continued to
supply parts for the F35 planes that killed the children. This makes the
British state complicit in Israel’s genocide. Andy Burnham is going down the
same path. Yet the Court of Appeal held
that the supply of F35 parts was lawful. This renders international law and
even British
law null and void.
This marble plaque, which is in the entrance hall to the Old Bailey describes Britain's most famous case, that of Edward Bushells when a Jury defied the instructions of the Judge to find the defendants guilty. Having been locked up for 2 days without food, water, fire or a chamber pot, the jury returned defiant. Those who refused to pay the judge's fine were imprisoned until a write of habeus corpus was issued. Judges hate it, Jeremy Johnson forbade all mention of it, but it is the right of every jury member to acquit someone regardless of the law if that is the only way to do justice.
Israel can get away with
committing a genocide and the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians
because it is fighting ‘terrorism’. Terrorism according to the Terrorism Act only
occurs when people defend themselves against the state not when the state kills
its citizens. Thus only the Palestinians are deemed ‘terrorists’. This is the
logic of the Nazis who also deemed violent opposition to themselves as
‘terrorism’.
Hamas won free and
fair elections in 2006. Israel and the West didn’t like the results and in 2007
a failed coup was attempted in Gaza. Hamas fought back
and took control. Israel promptly laid
siege to the territory. The results have been devastating. It has
reduced Gaza’s GDP by 50%:
Mass Unemployment. Severe limits on imports, exports, and movement caused high joblessness, over 50%. [1, 2, 3]
Decimated Industry: Manufacturing, local commerce, and agriculture shrank drastically. [1, 2, 3]
Aid Dependency: The majority of the population relied on international food distribution and humanitarian assistance. [1, 2]
Infrastructure and Basic Services
Water and Sanitation: Restrictions on building materials and "dual-use" equipment prevented upgrades to water treatment plants, leaving residents without clean drinking water. [1, 2, 3]
Power Crises: Chronic shortages of fuel for Gaza's sole power plant resulted in rolling blackouts lasting many hours a day [1, 2]
Healthcare Deficits: Medical facilities suffered critical shortages of specialized equipment, spare parts, and drugs, forcing patients to seek rare exit permits for external treatment. [1, 2]
Restrictions
on Movement
Isolated Population: The movement of students, professionals, and families in and out of the strip was heavily restricted to exceptional humanitarian cases. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Shrunken Livelihoods at Sea and Land: Israel restricted the fishing industry by shrinking access limits off the coast, and reduced access to fertile border farmlands. [1, 2, 3]
In 2001 Britain proscribed Hamas’ military
wing as a ‘terrorist’ group and in 2021, one of the most corrupt and despicable
politicians, Priti Patel, proscribed
the political wing of Hamas. This was a license for genocide.
It meant that any doctor,
nurse, teacher, lecturer, refuse worker etc., even if they had no connection
with the military wing of Hamas, was a legitimate target. This enabled Israel to
bomb and destroy virtually
every hospital or health facility, which is a war crime.
On 29 November 1974
Britain proscribed the
IRA. It did not proscribe Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, despite pressure
to do so from the Unionists. Nor did it attack wounded IRA men in hospital in
the way Israel attacks wounded Hamas members. Imagine that Britain had fired
rockets at the Royal
Victoria Hospital in Belfast. There would have been uproar. Yet Israel has attacked
every single hospital in Gaza.
By any normal criteria, it
is the IDF that is a terrorist not Hamas. Yet it is with the Israeli state that
we have a military
alliance. Britain’s foreign policy is amoral and unethical.
International law
recognizes the right to resist the denial of self-determination, (General Assembly resolution 37/43,
para. 2) as does the International
Court of Justice. See Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024, Judge Charlesworth,
para. 23).
Rajiv Menon KC has been cited for contempt of court by Jeremy Johnson for informing the Jury of their Right to ignore MI5's Representative on the Bench
In July 2025 PA
was proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Over 3,000 people have been arrested as terrorists.
The average
profile of a terrorist in Britain today is a woman in her late 50s!
This was criticised by UN human rights experts who warned against misusing terrorism laws to stifle legitimate social and
political protest.
In the words
of John Dugard, an
international lawyer and ad-hoc judge of the International Court of Justice,
the label ‘terrorist’ is a bid to discredit and silence
opponents. The Myanmar military regime also has branded
the winner of its most recent elections as “terrorists”
Article 33 of the 1957
Geneva Conventions Act specifically prohibits state terrorism yet the
Terrorism Act 2000 excludes state terrorism from its ambit.
Those supporting proscribed groups face
up to 14 years in prison simply for displaying the group's signs, wearing its
clothing, or organising meetings in support of its goals.
After October 7 Netanyahu chanted 'Hamas=ISIS' but the reality was that Hamas and ISIS were deadly enemies and that Israel is now arming and supporting ISIS gangs in Gaza
The banning of PA was part of a
process that defines as ‘terrorist’ groups which oppose British foreign policy.
The irony of the Terrorism Act 2000
is that those proposing it, Blair and Jack Straw, did more to help create
terrorism than anyone. If there had been no Iraq War there would have been no
ISIS. It was the illegal invasion of Iraq and the sectarian policies which
followed that created
the ISIS.
There is nothing new about equating
resistance or national liberation movements with terrorism. Both Thatcher and
Reagan called
Nelson Mandela a terrorist.
This danger was envisaged in the debate
on the Terrorism Act in December 1999 when Douglas Hogg, a former Tory Foreign
Affairs Minister raised the prospect that Kurds trying to oust Saddam Hussein
might be deemed terrorist.
Kurdish representatives came to see the then Foreign Secretary, the then Prime Minister and me, to obtain our support for their campaign to drive Saddam Hussein and his army out of north Iraq. On the face of it, that falls within the scope of action capable of constituting terrorism under clause 1.
I understand the right hon. Gentleman to be saying not that I am wrong, but that no one would be prosecuted for encouraging the Kurds to take such action, because of the discretionary power of the prosecution authority. That, however, is a profoundly unattractive situation.
Mohamed Ibrahim is an American boy who was emaciated in Israeli prison for 10 months. pic.twitter.com/gG5ACxPzOf
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) July 23, 2026
In response Jack Straw accused
Hogg of having a ‘fevered imagination’ yet
exactly this same scenario has played out in respect of Turkey. Tom King, the
former Tory Defence Secretary then commented that
We then come up against exactly the problem that the hon. Member for Islington, North [Jeremy Corbyn] mentioned: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
This phrase was first coined by British novelist Gerald Seymour
in his thriller novel, Harry’s Game. Yesterday’s terrorist has a habit of
becoming the future government. ‘Terrorism’ has become the government’s weapon
of choice against those they dislike.
The misuse of the term ‘terrorist’ is part and
parcel of the attack of the British state on democratic rights. Both Tory and
Labour governments have introduced successive laws restricting the right of
protest.
Under International Humanitarian Law the principle is clear: Hospitals are protected, because of their life-saving function for wounded & sick.
— ICRC (@ICRC) November 2, 2023
Yes, they can lose their protection, but this is not a free license to attack. @CDroegeICRC, ICRC Chief Legal Officer, explains 👇 pic.twitter.com/ZbhHkvmd0y
The Use of Terrorism & Public Order Laws to
Suppress Political Dissent and the Right to Protest
There has been a raft of
repressive legislation introduced recently. All with one objective. Restricting
the right to protest. Direct action groups have been particularly affected.
Passed in April
2021, the Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act 2021 enabled courts to
classify any non-terrorism offense carrying a sentence of more than two years
as having a "terrorist connection". This was used by Judge Jeremy
Johnson to increase
the sentences of the Filton 4.
Amnesty International argued
that in cases of criminal damage committed during direct action this would
invert the principle that the conscientious motivation of the defendants should
be treated as a mitigating factor. Instead it would become an aggravating
factor resulting in heavier sentences than normal. The Filton 4 are officially political
prisoners.
One of the tweets which is party of the prosecution case
Passed in April 2022, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (PCSCA)
introduced Noise-based
restrictions, restrictions on one-person protests and a Statutory Public
Nuisance offence of causing "serious
annoyance" punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The Public
Order Act 2023 criminalised specific direct-action protest tactics and
targeting mechanisms:
Locking-on offences and the possession of items (like glue or bike locks) intended for this purpose.
Infrastructure protections which created harsh new criminal offenses for disrupting major transport works, blocking highways, or interfering with key national infrastructure.
Expanded Stop and Search and Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPOs) which created civil court orders that ban individuals with previous protest convictions from attending future demonstrations.
Starmer’s gift to
repressive policing was the Crime and Policing
Act 2026 which targeted modern protest tactics and
added localised restrictions including Cumulative disruption, Face-covering bans, Protected
zones which introduced restrictions on
holding demonstrations near places of worship and banned the act of climbing on
war memorials.
Section 166 allowed senior
commanders in off-site control rooms to impose operational conditions on
ongoing protests.
These public order powers increasingly intersected
with counter-terrorist powers such as the Expanded Use of Proscription (Terrorism Act 2000).
The statutory Prevent duty has conflated activism with extremism.
Counter-terrorism policing guidance explicitly linked peaceful environmental
and direct action groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace
with neo-Nazi groups as ideologies to monitor.
Who is really behind IRCG ban and
what will it mean?
The latest piece of repressive legislation is the National Security
(States Threat) Act. Receiving information from a group which has been proscribed
is now to be made an offence too. There is an excellent interview by Owen Jones
with Paul Holden below which I suggest people watch.
The Terrifying New Law You Haven't
Heard Of
As
Jonathan Cook pointed
out Shabana Mahmood explained
her vision of an all-powerful, all-seeing surveillance state of the kind that
George Orwell depicted in his novel 1984
by comparing it to the “panopticon”, which philosopher Jeremy
Bentham’s perfect prison: a central watchtower (the state)
surrounded by a circle of cells where the inmates (the public) would be visible
at all times.
Mahmood
was the one Minister that Burnham did not move or sack. It clearly demonstrates
that Burnham is a continuation of, not a break from, the legacy of Keir
Starmer. See UK
state threats bill could pull British journalists into terror prosecutions,
experts say
The
Police Identified Me as a Member of H@mas Fahad Ansari and the Deproscription Bid:
In April 2025,
Fahad Ansari submitted a formal application to the UK Home Secretary to lift
the total ban on Hamas. The legal team argued that the 2021 full proscription
was politically motivated and unlawfully restricted political expression. The
Home Office rejected the request in July 2025, leading to an active appeal
before the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC).
This was politically unpopular. Senior
political figures - including then-Shadow Home Secretary Robert Jenrick and the
misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitism
reported Ansari to the Solicitors Regulation Authority demanding he be struck off for
"sympathy for terrorists" thus inciting
violence against him.
The Police took their revenge. Coming back from a
holiday with his family Ansar was subjected to a Schedule 7 Airport Stop in
August 2025. He was detained for three hours at
Holyhead Port. Police Officers fingerprinted him and forced him to hand over
his passcode under threat of arrest.
Police downloaded and copied the
contents of his work mobile. Ansari's legal team argued that the phone's
contents are protected by legal
professional privilege
and that police targeted him specifically due to his representation of Hamas.
In March 2026, the High Court ruled
that Ansari was not entitled to see national security evidence
used by the police to justify the phone data inspection.
In May 2026, court submissions
revealed that police documents had falsely listed Ansari as a "member" of Hamas
rather than its legal representative. Ansari’s counsel stated this proved the
stop was a targeted operation to access his files.
One of the tweets that is part of the prosecution case
Criticism
of the Terrorism Act’s Definition of Terrorism
In
April 2026, five UN human rights special rapporteurs issued
a joint
letter calling the UK government’s actions ‘harassment, intimidation and misuse of counterterrorism
powers’, warning that the case
sets a dangerous precedent threatening lawyer-client confidentiality worldwide writing:
The view of the United Nations Human Rights Committee that the predicate definition of terrorism in section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 is itself over-broad and “unduly restrictive of political expression”, and has been criticized also by the two Independent Reviewers of Terrorism Legislation and the UK Supreme Court in R v. Gul (2013).
This Blog Summarises my Position - I Support the Palestinians
The Independent
Reviewer of Terrorism, David Anderson, in his 2012
Report on Terrorism suggested that there was
‘a case for shrinking the definition of terrorism... the definition is so broad as to criminalise certain acts carried out overseas that constitute lawful hostilities under international humanitarian law. Examples include UN-sanctioned use of force and acts of violent rebellion against oppressive governments, even where such acts target only military objectives and minimise civilian casualties.
The Supreme Court in Gul
spoke of the ‘undesirable consequences of the combination of the very wide
definition of “terrorism” and the provisions of section 117.
Anderson also observed
that
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
And that is the problem. The definition of terrorism
is wide enough to let a coach and horses through it. It gives a massive
discretion to the Home Secretary.
Most people, whatever their views of the NATO proxy
war, would agree that the Ukrainian people have a right to resist Russian
occupation, especially outside the Donbas area.
One of the main groups on the Ukrainian side is the neo-Nazi
Azov Battalion. Nicholas Lazaredes reported
that:
The first thing you notice as you walk through the
corridors of the Azov battalion's base in Mariupol are the swastikas. There are
many — painted on doors, adorning the walls and chalked onto the blackboards of
this former school, now temporary headquarters for the Azov troops.... When I
point to another symbol of the Third Reich etched on the wall, that of Hitler's
"SS", he simply shrugs and says: "We are nationalists, but we
are not Nazis."
Its founder Andrew Biletsky, declared
in 2010 that the Ukrainian nation’s mission was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led
Untermenschen [subhumans]” Starmer,
who was so dedicated to rooting out anti-Semitism, didn’t think of proscribing
the Azov Battalion!
Sarah Sackman - Loyal to Israel and a Supporter of Israel's Apartheid Jewish Supremacist State
The Supreme Court also spoke about s.117 of the
Terrorism Act 2000 and the fact that discretion as to whether to prosecute lay
in the hands of the DPP and Attorney General.
The Crown’s reliance on prosecutorial discretion is intrinsically unattractive, as it amounts to saying that the legislature, ... has in effect delegated to an appointee of the executive,... the decision whether an activity should be treated as criminal for the purposes of prosecution.
In my case the decision whether to prosecute was
delegated to the Solicitor General as the Attorney General had concluded
that having family members serving in the IDF disqualified him from making a
decision.
Sarah Sackman attacked me by name in an article yet the Court of Appeal saw no problem in her obvious bias
Who was the Solicitor General? None other than Sarah
Sackman, former Vice Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement who on 26 March 2016
attacked me by name in an article
in the Jewish News calling me ‘problematic’.
When this was appealed to the Court of Appeal the Judges found nothing wrong. See
my previous
blog on Sackman’s corruption
Tony Greenstein .
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