My ‘Crime’ is
Supporting Palestinian Resistance While the British State Aids Israel’s
Genocide
Hillary Clinton: "we created the problem we are fighting today" | How the US created al-Qaeda
On
December 20 2023 I was arrested in a dawn raid at my home by officers of Counter-Terrorism
Police SE. Their logo states that their objective is to counter
terrorism but today it is to criminalise support for liberation
movements and anti-colonial struggles – be they in Palestine or Kurdistan.
My
first reaction on being told I was being arrested for a tweet I had posted a month
previously was ‘this is Orwellian’ .At first I was led to believe
that I was being prosecuted under s.12(1A) of the
Terrorism Act 2000, ‘expressing
an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation’.
Now
I understand the prosecution is under s.12(1) of the Terrorism Act 2000
This
is a blatant attempt to criminalise support for any anti-colonial or resistance
organisation of the oppressed. Israel is in an illegal occupation of Gaza, as
it has been for 58 years but any expression for armed resistance against Israel’s
military and genocidal violence is a criminal offence.
We
only have to remember when Margaret Thatcher called
the ANC a terrorist organisation to know that none of this is new. There has
always been an attempt by governments to brand armed opposition ‘terrorist’.
The Nazis called the French and Czech resistance ‘terrorist’.
As
Professor
John Dugard KC, a distinguished South Africa International Lawyer and ad-hoc
judge of the International Court of Justice said:
Terrorism is
an emotive word that has no place in the assessment of the conduct of either a
government or a resistance movement. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s
terrorist. Few would today label members of the French resistance in World War
II as “terrorist” and most would have no hesitation in describing the Nazi
forces as “terrorist”. Yet today most western states refrain from describing
the acts of government forces as acts of terror but have no hesitation in so
describing the acts of resistance movements and other non-state actors.
The Central Criminal Court 'The Old Bailey'
The
use of proscription, be it against Hamas or the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party
is an attempt to shut down free speech on support for groups that the British government
does not approve of for political reasons. It has nothing whatsoever to do with
terrorism.
We
all know what terrorism is. It is the planting of a bomb in July 2017 that killed 22
young people at the Manchester Arena Ariana Grande Concert or the attack by
ISIS on the Bataclan concert in Paris that murdered some 100 people.
But
here’s the rub. Salman Abedi was allowed to
go to fight with Libyan jihadi groups in the fight against Colonel Gaddaffis’s
government by MI5.ISIS which carried out
the Bataclan attacks didn’t even exist before Britain and the United States illegal
attack on Iraq.
The
‘terrorism’ that is used as a pretext to attack domestic support for the
resistance organisations of the oppressed has in most cases been created by
western foreign policy. Hilary Clinton admitted that it was US
policy of supporting Jihadi fighters in Afghanistan which created Al
Qaeda.Every time that the British and
American states have employed far-right Islamist fighters to take out regimes
they don’t like there has been blow back.
And
today we see the blow back in terms of our own rights and civil liberties. It
is not me, Natalie
Strecker, Sarah
Wilkinson or Asa
Winstanley or Richard
Medhurst, all of whom have had their homes raided, computer equipment
stolen and been arrested and/or charged (except for Asa) accused of supporting
terrorism. That accolade belongs to the British government and the intelligence
agencies.
That
is what my trial and the trial of all the other people who have been arrested
is about.And that is why you should
join me on Friday January 31 outside the Central Criminal Court, the Old
Bailey, in London.
The
government has even attempted to roll back the right of jurors, derived
from the 1670 case of Edward
Bushells, to deliver a verdict contrary to a judge’s directions and in
accordance with their conscience with the arrest of
Trudy Warner and others who had the temerity to inform jurors of their right.
On
the eve of the First World War Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary uttered
the immortal phrase that summed up what was to come, when he said
‘The lamps are
going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’
I think if Judge Silas Reid is going to start imprisoning jurors for coming up with verdicts for the wrong reasons, he should also deny them food & water whilst they’re in gaol, to really lean into that ‘17th century judicial tyrant’ energy https://t.co/tSZZDbSa4Ipic.twitter.com/Y0mdBpPX1F
We
could well say the same today. Patrick Devlin, a former Law Lord, wrote
in his book Trial by Jury (1956) that
the jury system was ‘the lamp that shows
that freedom lives”. That too is under threat from judges like Silas Reid
who threatened
a jury at the Old Bailey with prosecution if they allowed their consciences to
interfere with the verdict. Reid’s action were an echo of the famous case of Bushell’s
in 1670, when a jury was imprisoned for 2 days and nights without ‘meat, drink, fire or tobacco’, because
they refused to return a guilty verdict.
But
it is not only in Britain that the lamp of liberty is in danger of being
extinguished. In Germany, a state which 80 years ago was exterminating millions
of people it classed as subhuman, 2,500 Police forcibly
closed a Palestine Congress in Berlin, banning from the country the former
Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis.
Yanis
Varoufakis Describes How He Was Prevented from Speaking at a Palestine Congress
in Berlin by Germany’s Police
Germany’s
Support for Israel Mirrors Nazi Germany’s Support for Zionism
Today
the German state purports to be pro-Jewish but when it comes to Jewish
anti-Zionists, the German State is following exactly the same path as the Nazis took 89 years ago. The Nazis too
distinguished between Zionists, (good Jews) and anti-Zionists (bad Jews).
On
28 January 1935 Reinhard Heydrich, whom Gerard Reitlinger described as the ‘real engineer of the final solution’
issued a directive:
The activity of the Zionist-oriented youth
organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews …
lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership. (These
organizations) are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary
to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations
(assimilationists).
This can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz’s War Against the Jews
(p.118).
The result was that the
activities of Zionist groups were supervised with ‘more benevolence’ than comparable activities by non-Zionist Jewish
groups. The Gestapo and the SD (SS Security Service) ‘place(d) no restrictions on Zionist organisations.’ [Herbert Strauss, pp. 352-3.,
Jewish Emigration from Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses]
In May 1935 Das Schwarze Korps,
the paper of the SS, wrote that:
the Zionists adhere to a strict racial
position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own
Jewish state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on
their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been
baptized, in order to subvert National Socialist principles.
On
26 September 1935 in Das Schwarze Korps Heydrich wrote that the German government
Is in agreement with the great spiritual
movement within Jewry itself, Zionism, whose position is based on the
recognition of the unity of Jewry throughout the world, and the rejection of
all ideas of mixing in.[Francis Nicosia’s Zionism
and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany].
Heydrich was the Deputy to Heinrich Himmler, the head
of the SS and the second most powerful man in Germany to Hitler himself.
Ian Lustick, an Israeli political scientist,
described in The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture, (p.150) how, in the Eichmann Trial
Extraordinary precautions’ were taken to
prevent the name of Hans Globke, the closest advisor to Konrad Adenaeur, the
German Chancellor, from being made public.
In
1936 Globke, a senior official at the Interior Ministry, wrote a legal
commentary on the Nuremberg Laws which became standard in Nazi Germany’s
courts. It stipulated that sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans was a
crime even if they took place outside Germany. In 1938 he introduced a regulation requiring Jews
to take the first names, Israel and Sarah.
In
1941 Globke took part in drawing up
an ordinance that stripped Jews in the conquered nations of their citizenship
and allowed their possessions to be confiscated. A legal precondition for the
Holocaust. ‘Hitler’s
former henchman, was true architect of modern Germany’, The Times, 4.3.21.
Globke
also played a key role in the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons.
Protecting Israeli-German military and financial relations was paramount.[Lustick, fn. 27 p.150]
Israel was determined to avoid a little matter like the role of ex-Nazi
officials in the new German state coming between Israel and Germany. [ Lars Petersson, Hitler’s Deserters, pp. 123-9]
Berlin police just canceled the entire Palestine Congress. I was the only speaker that successfully finished a speech.
Salman Abu Sitta was cut off after 1 minute. Our livestream ended and electricity cut off.
It
is this that explains the strategic and military alliance between Germany and
Israel and why Germany is prepared to openly
support Israel’s genocide in Gaza, to the extent of joining it at the
International Court of Justice. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is merely the pretext for attacking
democratic rights in Germany itself.
After
all Germany took part in 2 genocides in the last century, so what is a third
genocide between friends? Indeed there was a direct link between the first genocide,
the extermination of the Herero and Nama people in South-West Africa (Namibia)
and the Holocaust.
It is no
surprise that Namibia’s anger boiled over when Germany offered to join Israel’s
case at the ICJ. It was in Namibia, then a German colony, that Germany’s
extermination program became the template for the Holocaust.
Eugen Fischer was the Nazi doctor who helped pioneer eugenics in the Third Reich. As
director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology (1927-42) Fischer
provided the ‘scientific’ rationale for the Nazi’s war of extermination.
On Shark Island in SW Africa Fischer ran medical breeding
experiments on the camp’s inmates. Racist ideas developed in the colony were
brought back to German institutions along with the Africans’ skulls.
Fischer conducted medical experiments on children born
from the rape of African women. His research inspired Adolf Hitler and
in the 1930s, Fischer taught his racist theories to Nazi doctors. One
of his students, Joseph Mengele, was responsible for the medical experiments in
the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
In 1939, Fischer
declared
When a people wants … to preserve its
own nature, it must reject alien racial elements,… The Jew is such an alien
and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off.
An organisation named “Commission Number 3” was created by the Nazis to
deal with the so-called problem of the “Rhineland Bastards”. This was organised
under Eugen Fischer. It was decided that the African-German children would be
sterilised under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased
Offspring.
The programme began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report
on all “Rhineland Bastards” under their jurisdiction.
Liberal
Jews in Germany referred to the Zionists as ‘volkish’ or racial Jews. In
Romania the Zionists were referred to by other Jews as ‘Hitler Juden (Jews)’.
So when the modern day German State favours Zionist Jews they understand their
ideological affinity
Why
Does the German State Favour the Zionists?
The
German State never deNazified after the war. In many cases the same civil
servants, the same judges and police chiefs continued to play the same role
that they had played in Nazi Germany.
Hostility
after the war to Germany was very great, given the millions who had died at its
hand. With the division of Europe into East and West, it was crucial to NATO
and the Western Alliance that West Germany be integrated into the West’s
military alliances. At the time there was a vigorous campaign against
Germanre-armament.
It
was through Israel that Germany was rehabilitated and the price it paid was
billions in reparations, which were meant for the holocaust survivors but were
paid to the Israeli state. Israel stole
the reparations together with the Jewish
Claims Conference. To this day Israel keeps over a third living in poverty,
choosing between heating and eating.
Reparations
and Restitution
Yad
Vashem, the Israeli state Holocaust museum boasted
that West Germany’s government ‘realized
that paying reparations would help accelerate West Germany's acceptance by the
Western powers.’
Through
reparations and direct transfers of weapons Israel paved the way for the
integration of West Germany into NATO. But there was a political price. Israel
was not to make an issue of the presence of Nazis in Konrad Adenaeur’s
government.
Germany
and Britain’s Attack on Democratic Rights
On
December 20th I was arrested under s.12 Terrorism
Act 2000 for having posted, a month before, a tweet
supporting Hamas, a proscribed organisation. Although Hamas’s military wing,
the Al Quassem Brigades had been
proscribed in 2001 its political wing had not been proscribed until 2021.
No
justification has ever been given for why this further step had been taken
although the Zionist organisations had long been lobbying for it. The
government’s explanation
was that:
Hamas IDQ was
proscribed by the UK in March 2001. At the time 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.
No
indication was given as to what this assessment was or what had changed since
2021. In fact there is no evidence whatsoever that Hamas is a single
organisation any more than the IRA was a single organisation between 1969 and
its ceasefire.
A Palestine solidarity demonstration in the
Potsdamer Platz area, Berlin, October 15, 2023. The police suppressed the
demonstration shortly after authorizing it.
If
Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing had been proscribed along with the IRA then
there would have been no Good Friday peace
agreement. The ban on Hamas makes it clear that the British government,
despite pretending to oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, in
practice does the precise opposite.As
the current genocide demonstrates, the real terrorists have always been the
Israeli army and government.
Hilary Clinton Admits to Creating Al
Qaeda
Hamas
has never operated outside Palestine. It was elected, in
free and fair elections, by the Palestinian people in 2006. Comparisons with
ISIS are nonsense and merely police state rhetoric. If anyone is responsible
for ISIS and Al Qaeda it is the United States. There was no ISIS before the invasion
of Iraq and there was no Al Qaeda before the West began funding Islamic
fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan in order to overthrow the secular
pro-Soviet government there.
During
the 1980s the Israeli government was instrumental in creating Hamas, for similar
reasons. It wanted a Palestinian counterweight to secular Palestinian
nationalism.
Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the
Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance
the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and
leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by
Yasser Arafat (who referred to Hamas as “a
creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli
government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the
military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is
Israel’s creation,”
Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for
more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. In the mid-80s, Cohen
wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play
divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists
against Palestinian secularists. See Blowback:
How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It
Today Hamas
is enemy no. 1. ‘Terrorism’ is a term of abuse that one hurls at one’s
opponents. It has no intrinsic meaning. As Lord Carrington, Margaret Thatcher’s
Foreign Secretary admitted‘one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s
terrorist.’ In other words ‘terrorist’ is a label to stick on your
opponents.
The Nazis
too labelled their opponents ‘terrorists’ or ‘bandits’. To them the Maquis, the
French Resistance, was a terrorist group as were the Partisans and all those
who fought against them but the British had no problem at the time allying with
them.
That is
why Britain’s anti-terrorist legislation is based on a lie. Hamas is no more of
a terrorist than any number of groups that the US and Britain has funded when
it founded convenient.
Hamas has
never operated outside Palestine. Unlike ISIS it did not send operatives to
blow people up in Europe such as at the Bataclan massacre
in Paris in 2015 which both it and Islamic Jihad condemned.
Prevent & The Use of
Anti-Terrorism To Silence Dissent – The Thinking of the Thought Police
The
British state has been very adept at exploiting terrorism in order to
politically attack their opponents and in particular Muslims. It has laid the
basis of Islamaphobia. Prevent was first introduced by
the Blair government in 2006 to counter terrorism.
Since
the passage of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act July 2015 there has been
what is known as the Prevent
Duty. Schools, Universities and a wide range of public sector bodies have a
legal responsibility to “have due regard
to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”.
It
is based on the bonkers idea, which the Police have adopted wholesale, that
non-violent ‘extremism’ is the conveyor belt to terrorism. It is bonkers
because there is no proof of this theory and because the causes of terrorism are
self evident. Little things like America and Britain’s illegal invasion of Iraq
that MPs voted for and Blair lied for with the story of Weapons of Mass
Destruction.
Terrorism
has causes and they are down to the fact that Western imperialism insists on invading,
bombing and destabilising countries in the Global South in order that they can
extract their wealth.
In
Libya a country under the unified government of Muammar Ghadaffi was bombed
by NATO countries and the result was a failed state which included ISIS and a
refugee crisis.
The
same
happened in Syria where the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar funded and supplied
weapons to a host of Jihadi groups in their efforts to overthrow the Assad
regime. Not surprisingly this gave ISIS a headstart and as in Afghanistan, the
West’s Frankenstein turned against them. This is what creates terrorism not
radicalisation.
Prevent
operates on the basis that people are ‘radicalised’ by ‘extreme’ views and then
are susceptible to recruitment by terrorists. No proof has ever been found to
back up this nonsense. If anything Prevent
is likely to create the very problem it’s designed to overcome.
It
is no accident that the vast
majority of people targeted by Prevent are Muslims and that support
for Palestine is one of the indicators that someone is susceptible to being
drawn to terrorism.
When
I was remanded in Birmingham prison for a week in 2021, after having been arrested
going on a Palestine Action outing, I was asked at the prison reception whether
I was an ‘extremist’.I asked her if she
knew what an ‘extremist’ was and she confessed she didn’t.
I
then explained that all those who fight for their freedom and democratic rights
are called extremists and I gave as an example the Suffragettes who were called
‘extremists’
and ‘terrorists’.
Today they have plaques in the House of Commons and statues commemorating them
but in their time they were vilified by people like Churchill.
Next
thing I know, the Jewish Chronicle said I was comparing myself to the Suffragettes.Some people just don’t get it.
Last
Thursday I went to court challenging
the Police seizure of my computer and electronic equipment. Although most of it
has no value to the Police they insist on hanging on to it.
I
brought an action under s.1 of the Police Property Act 1897. The matter was
adjourned to a later date. For the hearing the Police officer in charge of my
case, Chris Beckford from the Anti-Terrorist Police prepared a witness statement.
It was very interesting and gives a good insight into the mentality of Britain’s
Thought Police.
In
his statement Beckford stated on page 2, paragraph 7 that:
Itisimportanttotheinvestigation that we fully understand Mr
Greenstein’s mind set and ideology.
This not only comes from public sources, ie his
blog and socialmedia,butfromhisinternetsearchhistoryandcommunicationwithothers.How,andindeedif,hetalksaboutHamas with others away from the public
domain provides highly relevant insight
into MrGreenstein. (my emphasis)
This
isn’t ‘anti-terrorism’ it is the thought police. An insight into someone’s mindset
and how they think. Not once in the course of two interviews lasting about 2.5
hours was I asked about any bombs I had made or planted.
The
only questions related to articles on my blog or a speech I made at Holocaust
Memorial Day on January 27. Counter-terrorism has become the policing of
peoples’ minds and what they can say. And there are still fools, knaves and
liars like Starmer and Sunak who pretend that this has something to do with
peoples’ safety when it is about restricting what we are and are not allowed to
say.
In
the final paragraph of his witness statement Beckford wrote that:
The return of
the property to Mr Greenstein at this stage would be prejudicial and
compromising to the investigation as to whether he supports a proscribed
terrorist organisation, and whether there is a wider risk to the public that
they will be subjected to this support.
So
what is this risk to the public? That they will be blown up by my words and
thoughts? Chris Beckford is anxious to ensure that no one will be subjected’ to
my views on Hamas and the Palestinians. Some might call this censorship but I
would be loathe to do so.
This
is not just a paper exercise. I was reported to the Police by Zionists and one racist
in particular by the name of Heidi Bachram. The Zionist
movement in this country is busy trying to extinguish our freedom of speech
having done much the same in Israel.
The
corrupt rogues and thieves who govern us go scot free. Billions
of pounds went to the crooked cronies of the Tories via a VIP channel for
procurement. Yet the Police are not interested in investigating corruption,
perjury or miscarriages of justice. To date just 2 people have been
investigated over the Post Office conspiracy to jail and convict nearly a
thousand innocent sub-postmasters. The Met Police are not interested in crimes
by the rich and powerful.
Clamping
down on free speech in this country or playing the part of the Gestapo by Germany’s
police is what freedom under capitalism means in the 21st century as
world war comes ever closer and climate catastrophe signals the end of the
human race.
So
I guess I am an ‘extremist’ because i want to abolish capitalism before it
abolishes us.
From 1670
Onwards Juries Had the Right to Decide Cases According to their Own Conscience
& Conviction – That is What is Now at Stake in the decision of the Court of
Appeal in Colston
The right to acquit on conscience
As people may know, together with 3 others, I was convicted recently
at Wolverhampton Crown Court of the heinous offence of ‘intending without lawful excuse to destroy or damage property belonging
to UAV Engines Ltd.’ which is owned by Elbit Systems Ltd, the Israeli arms company.
The British state and its Judiciary, have always put a higher
premium on the protection of property than the protection of people from that
property, in the case of arms factories. Likewise those who pour effluent into
the rivers and pollute the seas around us are immune from criminal prosecution
unlike those who protest against the pollution.
As capitalism lurches from economic to environmental crisis,
it lashes out like a wild animal. We see that in the nuclear poker game that is
being played out in Ukraine as NATO wages a proxy war against Russia.
The POA allows police to pre-emptively arrest demonstrators
is a new low but nothing is too low for the supine Labour ‘Opposition’ under
Starmer, the Zionist
without qualification. Labour MPs were ordered to abstain on the 3rd
reading and Starmer has promised to
allow the Act to ‘bed in’.
Meanwhile the Judiciary, after a relatively liberal spell
under Lady
Hale and before her Lord Neuberger, as President of the Supreme Court, has
reverted to type as the enemy of civil liberties. Epitomising this is the Lord
Chief Justice Ian Burnett.
The political establishment – from Cruella Colston Starmer, Braverman to Keir
Starmer – reacted with horror at the decision of a Bristol jury to acquit
the 4 demonstrators who rolled mass murderer and slave trader Edward Colston
into Bristol harbour. Braverman’s reaction was to be expected but it spoke
volumes about Starmer’s taking the knee during the Black Lives Matter ‘moment’
as he called it. Racism and Starmer go together like Tom and Jerry.
The Colston verdict or rather the judge’s directions that the
defence could employ human rights defences in a case involving criminal damages
was overturned at the end of last year by the Court of Appeal in a referral
from Braverman in Attorney
General’s Reference No. 1 2022.
According to Judge Chambers Rosa Parks was wrong to break the segregation laws in the Deep South of America
Here is how Henry Hill of Conservative Home saw
it:
It was easily missed,… but the Court of Appeal yesterday afforded an
important victory to Suella Braverman.
As Attorney General, she asked it to review the judgement in the
‘Colston Four’ trial, which saw four vandals acquitted on the grounds that
tearing down a public artwork was protected under human rights
legislation.
Hill is quite right. The Court of Appeal under Sir Ian
Burnett, the Lord Chief Justice, ‘afforded an important victory to Suella
Braverman.’
The decision negated the decision of the Supreme Court in Ziegler that
obstruction of the road was protected by the European Convention of Human
Rights.
In our case under Judge Michael Chambers KC, all defences of ‘lawful
excuse’ were ruled out, despite the factory we targeted manufacturing engines
for drones which kill civilians.
The tortured ‘logic’ of Chambers and Debbie ‘ghoul’ Gould,
the Prosecutor, was that it was necessary to identify which engine goes into
which drone and which child it has murdered It is not enough to show that Elbit
drones comprise 85% of Israeli drones nor that they manufacture 80% of Israel’s
ammunition.
Acts ancillary to war crimes committed in other countries are
treated as committed in this country under Section 52 of the International Criminal
Court Act 2001. But Judges have effectively rewritten the law to grant
immunity to those who profit by the death of others.
Judge Chambers is very hot on drug dealers who convey their
wares down Britain’s motorways yet their crimes pale into insignificance
compared to the death and destruction of Elbi.
The twisted and artificial ‘logic’ of the judiciary is that
drones manufactured in Britain is ‘too remote’ from the war crimes they inflict
to be prosecuted. This is a racist rationale for the crimes of British imperialism
and its Israeli allies.
No such principle was espoused in the Nuremberg War Crimes
Trials and the prosecution of IG Farben which manufactured Zyklon B, hydrogen
cyanide, which was used to exterminate millions of people. No doubt if today’s
judges had participated in the Nuremberg war crimes trials
they would have argued that it was necessary to link each crystal of Zyklon B
with each person who was gassed.
The reality is that whenever
democratic rights and freedoms have been under attack – whether it be the Taff Vale Judgment
which overturned trade union protections for the right to strike, or the attacks
on the Suffragettes or the Official Secrets prosecution
of Clive Ponting – judges have always been the nodding dogs of a reactionary
Tory Establishment.
Whilst rogues like Boris
Johnson and Lady
Mone have immunity from prosecution over the Jennifer
Arcuri and COVID frauds, because the Met Police refuse to
investigate the crimes of fraud and embezzlement that have marked the Covid contracts,
those of us who take direct action against the participation of Elbit in war
crimes are prosecuted with the full force of the law.
That is why tomorrow there will be a Right to Protest meeting
in Brighton at the BMECP Centre, 10 Fleet Street Brighton.
There will also be a Zoom
meeting on Saturday 24 June with a host of speakers including Huda Ammori from Palestine
Action, Tim Crosland, Deepa Driver from the Defend Julian Assange campaign and Tony
Greenstein, one of 4 convicted Defendants.
The deportation of Julian Assange looms ever closer after the
decision
of a single High Court judge last week to reject his attempt to stop his
extradition to the United States for the ‘crime’ of having exposed US war
crimes in Iraq and elsewhere. The hypocrisy of British judges who deliberately
turn a blind eye to the war crimes of the US and British governments is nothing
new. The millions who died under the British Empire did so under the knowing
gaze of Britain’s judges.
As always
when confronted with challenges to state authority the judicial system seeks to
criminalise political protesters. In 1912 the Prosecuting
barrister in the trial of Emmeline Pankhurst said that:
Suffrage is not the issue, it is the criminal behaviour of the
suffragettes and their incitement to partake in militant activity at which 54
windows were broken
None of this is new. All challenges to the British state are
met with attempts to criminalise the protesters. But in ruling out all defences
of lawful excuse and in particular gaoling protesters for explaining their
motives to juries, there is an arguable case under Article 6 of the European Convention
of Human Rights:which states:
In the determination of his civil rights and
obligations or of any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a
fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and
impartial tribunal established by law.
How can a trial be fair when
the Defendant can’t explain his/her motives to the jury? Craig Murray described
how
The current
legal establishment will adapt themselves to the legal framework of whatever
sort is ordained by the rulers. Anybody expecting judges to defend liberties is
likely to be sorely disappointed. They will happily remove the ability of
juries to defend liberty too.
And to cap it all, despite what Judge Michael Chambers said viz. that:
“It’s a serious contempt to invite jurors to return
outcomes which are not in accordance with the facts, but in accordance with
their conscience.
The fact is that this is the common
law of Britain as evidenced
by the plaque to Edward Bushells on the Old Bailey.
