On Thursday I will be Charged Under the Terrorism Act 2000 with Expressing an “Opinion or Belief” that the Government doesn’t like – We are sleepwalking into an Orwellian Police State

 Of One Thing We Can Be Certain – This is Not About Fighting Terrorism but Suppressing Freedom of Speech

I hope to see you on Thursday morning at 9.45 a.m. outside Westminster Magistrates Court, 1818 Marleybone Road, London NW1 5BR.

I would also ask you, if you can afford it, to contribute to my Crowdfunding Appeal Stopping the Police Persecuting Palestine Solidarity Activists.

On December 20 2023 my home was raided at 7 a.m. in the morning by South-East Counter-Terrorist Police who informed me that I was being arrested on suspicion of committing an offence under s.12(1)A of the Terrorism Act 2000.

This is what Starmer and Lammy Support By Approving Arms Sales 

What you may ask was my offence? Planting or conspiracy to plant a bomb? Assassinating war criminals Starmer and Lammy? Not a bit of it. The Police referred to a tweet I had posted a month before which expressed support for Palestinian Resistance in its fight against Israel’s genocidal occupation of Gaza.

I understand that the charge that has now been laid relates to a blog which I posted on October 7, Full Support for the Gaza Ghetto Uprising. Its subtitle referred to the hypocrisy of Biden & those who support Ukrainian resistance but condemn Palestinian resistance.

I referred to the Commander of the Warsaw ghetto resistance, Marek Edelman, who compared their resistance with that of the Palestinians. This is not of course a message that is welcome to the British state.

Despite the BBC and British press commenting favourably on the Syrian Jihadists of the HTS, who are still proscribed, there have been no arrests!

There can be no doubt about the intention of s.12(1A) of the Terrorism Act. It states quite clearly:

A person commits an offence if the person (a) expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, and (b) in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation.

The word ‘supportive’ is a weasel word. It is intentionally ambiguous or misleading. If what you say about a proscribed organisation is at all positive, that can be held to be supportive, regardless of whether it is true or not. This legislation deliberately embeds lies into British law.

The result is that when writing an article you must look over your shoulder in case what you write might offend the Zionist lobby which may report you to the Thought Police. This is the stuff of 1984. We are sleep walking into an Orwellian Dystopia. It cannot help but chill freedom of speech and is clearly contrary to Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights which guarantees the right of freedom of speech and expression.

William Tyndale died at the stake because the state disapproved of what he said

The second part of s.12(1A) criminalises the expression of an opinion or belief if the person is reckless as to its effect on someone who reads it. This is the stuff of police states. Recklessness forms part of the mens rea in criminal cases such as gross negligence manslaughter. Where the defendant was aware of the risks involved but nonetheless pursued a particular course of conduct and someone died they may be held liable. It is known as Cunningham recklessness.

Such a test is completely inappropriate when it comes to someone’s opinion or belief. We are not dealing with any fatal consequences. What is really intended is that you should keep your mouth shut when talking about a group that the government doesn’t like, which it defines as ‘terrorist’ or else face the consequences.

In the case of the expression of one’s opinion nothing need happen but you are held to be reckless as to whether someone might support the said organisation. Only a liar and a bully like Priti Patel could introduce such a clause into law.

I must confess that when I write an article, I hope that this is not used in evidence against me (!), I don’t think of consequences in terms of what my readers might do. I wonder if people understand the points I’m making, I wonder how many hits it may get and what readers think of the article but as regards what they might do? Nothing. Only a police state could think of introducing such a subjective law.

There is the question of what is or is not terrorism. Section 1 of the Terrorism Act defines terrorism as the use or threat of violence designed to influence a government. This is completely inappropriate when applied to a resistance or anti-colonial movement. Israel is not the government of Gaza. It is an occupying power whose occupation has just been ruled illegal by the highest court in the world, the International Court of Justice. Since the occupation is illegal how can resistance to it anything other than legal?

Subsection 2 of Section 1 states that the action must involve serious violence to a person, serious damage to property, endanger a person’s life, create a serious danger to health and safety and be designed to interfere with or seriously disrupt an electronic system. These provisions are not what most people call terrorism.

The irony is that the Israeli state itself played a key role in the formation of Hamas

Damage to property, health and safety or the disruption of electronic systems have their own criminal offences. There is no need to invoke the use of terrorism unless there are hidden motives and specific political objectives in mind. It is, after all, highly unlikely that a company which puts its workers at risk will be charged with terrorism, though it would be nice if they were!

Thatcher and Reagan both described the African National Congress as a terrorist organisation. If this law had been in operation back in the 1970s and 80s then support for the overthrow of Apartheid in South Africa would have been a criminal offence. Indeed support for any anti-colonial movement that used violence against the occupier would have been ‘terrorism’. This is the law of the occupier, the racist, the imperialist. It is no wonder that Starmer and Attorney General Hermer and his Zionist Deputy Sarah Sackman are so happy to use it.

Today the law is being used by the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police to attack the Kurdish community in London who largely support the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) who are conducting a struggle against the semi-fascist Turkish state of Recep Erdogan. Erdogan is trying to ban and has severely harassed the HDP, which obtained 6 million votes at the last election.

The ban on the PKK in effect means supporting Erdogan, who has been waging his own genocidal war in Kurdistan, which Turkey occupies. It is another example of how this so-called anti-terrorist law is being used to support colonial oppression and fascism. See Banning the pro-Kurdish HDP in Turkey is a move towards fascism.

Terrorism is quite simple to define. It is the use of violence against civilian populations by groups which have no mass base, the intention of which is to coerce or frighten them. The Israeli state is the classic example of a terrorist organisation. ISIS and Al Qaeda similarly. Neither ISIS or Al Qaeda have any mass base and have never been elected by anyone.  That is why they send people to Europe to commit random acts of mass murder such as at the attack on the Bataclan in Paris when 130 people died and hundreds were injured.

Hamas, Hezbollah and the PKK are entirely different organisations from ISIS. They operate within the territory of their own countries. They have never planted bombs in this country. Hamas was elected in 2006 by the majority of Palestinians. However the US and Israel didn’t like the result so they ignored it and in 2007 Gaza was subject to a suffocating siege and repeated attacks on it which Israel’s military called ‘mowing the lawn’. Thousands died in these attacks but to reptiles like Starmer and Lammy Palestinian deaths are of no consequence. Assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin stated in 1992  that “I would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won’t happen, and a solution must be found”.

John McDonnell MP speaking truth to power -

Its time to act now. All arms licences need to be closed down. When will this government stop selling weapons to Israel who seem to be using their right to defend themselves as an excuse to kill children? pic.twitter.com/YjrLO5jJGf

— Mish Rahman (@mish_rahman) December 16, 2024

Anti-colonial resistance struggles are lawful under international law. The Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 include the protection of peoples fighting against colonial domination and occupation and against racist régimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.  Likewise UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) confirms that those living under colonial domination have the right to struggle to remove that occupation.

Nothing in this Definition, and in particular article 3, could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right and referred to in the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination: nor the right of these peoples to struggle to that end and to seek and receive support, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration.

International law and the Conventions in question are part of British law. See Do Palestinians have the right to resist, and what are the limits?

Furthermore, the Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions (1977), to which Palestine acceded in 2014 (joining over 160 countries), in its Article 1(4), classifies conflicts in which peoples are fighting against alien occupation and racist regimes as armed conflicts. Individuals engaging in such “fighting,” if captured, should be afforded the status of prisoners of war, meaning their fighting is legitimate.

To those who argue that Hamas, Hezbollah and the PKK have no right to resist Israel militarily, I point them to Stanley Cohen’s Palestinians have a legal right to armed struggle Al Jazeera 27.7.16. Cohen points out that the Israeli state was born in blood and fire. Its terrorism makes Hamas seem like amateurs:

On April 12, 1938, the Irgun murdered two British police officers in a train bombing in Haifa. On August 26, 1939, two British officers were killed by an Irgun landmine in Jerusalem. On February 14, 1944, two British constables were shot dead when they attempted to arrest people for pasting up wall posters in Haifa. On September 27, 1944, more than 100 members of the Irgun attacked four British police stations, injuring hundreds of officers. Two days later a senior British police officer of the Criminal Intelligence Department was assassinated in Jerusalem.

On November 1, 1945, another police officer was killed as five trains were bombed. On December 27, 1945, seven British officers lost their lives in a bombing on police headquarters in Jerusalem. Between November 9 and 13, 1946, Jewish “underground” members launched a series of landmine and suitcase bomb attacks in railway stations, trains, and streetcars, killing 11 British soldiers and policemen and eight Arab constables.

Four more officers were murdered in another attack on a police headquarters on January 12, 1947. Nine months later, four British police were murdered in an Irgun bank robbery and, but three days later, on September 26, 1947, an additional 13 officers were  killed in yet another terrorist attack on a British police station.  

Throughout this period, Jewish terrorists also undertook countless attacks that spared no part of the British and Palestinian infrastructure. Numerous attacks were carried out against the oil industry including one, in March 1947, on a Shell oil refinery in Haifa which destroyed some 16,000 tonnes of petroleum.

Zionist terrorists killed British soldiers throughout Palestine, using booby traps, ambushes, snipers, and vehicle blasts.

In 1947, the Irgun kidnapped two British Army Intelligence Corps non-commissioned officers and threathened to hang them if death sentences of three of their own members were carried out. When these three Irgun members were executed by hanging, the two British sergeants were hanged in retaliation and their booby-trapped bodies were left in an eucalyptus grove.

In announcing their execution, the Irgun said that the two British soldiers were hanged following their conviction for “criminal anti-Hebrew activities” which included: illegal entry into the Hebrew homeland and membership in a British criminal terrorist organisation – known as the Army of Occupation – which was “responsible for the torture, murder, deportation, and denying the Hebrew people the right to live”. The soldiers were also charged with illegal possession of arms, anti-Jewish spying in civilian clothes, and premeditated hostile designs against the underground (pdf).

Well beyond the territorial confines of Palestine, in late 1946-47 a continuing campaign of terrorism was directed at the British. Acts of sabotage were carried out on British military transportation routes in Germany.  The Lehi also tried, unsuccessfully, to drop a bomb on the House of Commons from a chartered plane flown from France and, in October 1946, bombed the British Embassy in Rome. A number of other explosive devices were detonated in and around strategic targets in London. Some 21 letter bombs were addressed, at various times, to senior British political figures. Many were intercepted, while others reached their targets but were discovered before they could go off.

Of course the British press, both locally and nationally, refuse to see that charges under the Terrorism Act have any connection with such subversive ideas as freedom of speech. ‘Terrorism charge over man's online comments was the BBC headline on my arrest. The headline in the Brighton Argus was Brighton man charged with terror offences over Hamas comments and Tony Greenstein charged with terrorism offence.

There are some who will say that it was the Palestinian resistance that breached international law when they seized Israeli captives and took them back to Gaza in order to exchange them for Palestinian captives. If this is unlawful under international law then so is the holding of 10,000+ Palestinians in Israeli captivity. A third of them have had no trial at all and the remainder are ‘convicted’ in Israeli Military Courts which have a 99.74% conviction rate.

We should also bear in mind, although our pitiful press won’t inform people of this, that Israel has regularly captured hostages to exchange for its own prisoners. The ‘liberal’ President of the Israeli High Court Aharon Barak held in 1997 that

a detention is legal if it is designed to promote State security, even if the danger to State Security does not emanate from the detainees themselves.

and that “detention ... for the purpose of release of ... captured and missing soldiers is a vital interest to the State.”

Tony Greenstein

How Zionism Rewrote the History of the Holocaust & Erased The Name of Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz to Warn Hungarian Jewry of the Danger of Annihilation

 Zionism was a Quisling Movement That Collaborated with the Nazis and Obstructed the Rescue Efforts of Others

To Register for this Webinar Please Click Here

https://tinyurl.com/yykp987e

To judge by its weaponisation of the holocaust in its war propaganda, people would be forgiven for thinking that during the holocaust the Zionist movement worked relentlessly to try and rescue Jews from Hitler’s clutches. Yet the reverse is the case.

Rudolf Vrba Interviewed by Claude Lanzmann

During the holocaust the Zionists did not want to know about what was happening in Europe. They had one goal and one goal only – to build their genocidal ‘Jewish’ state.  Indeed they did their best to obstruct the rescue efforts of others if the destination was not Palestine. That is why I wrote my book, Zionism During the Holocaust, to set the record straight.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just read the last chapter of Shabtai Teveth’s official biography of Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, which is entitled Disaster Means Strength. The disaster of the holocaust meant strength for the Zionists.

As Zionist historian Noah Lucas observed:

As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement. [A Modern History of Israel, pp. 187/8]

In November 1935 Ben-Gurion explained that:

To the disaster of German Jewry we must offer a Zionist response, namely, we must convert the disaster into a source for the upbuilding of Palestine.

In October 1941 as the holocaust was raging Ben-Gurion wrote:

Disaster is strength if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation. 29F [Shabtai Teveth, The Burning Ground 1886-1948, p. 853]

Tony Greenstein offers an excoriating account of how Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland falsified the historical record in his biography of Rudolph Vrba, the first Jew to escape Auschwitz.

One might wonder why Vrba's incredible story has been buried for decades, given how…

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) August 24, 2024

 

Rudolf Vrba

In 1935 the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which Gerald Reitlinger described as ‘‘the most murderous legislative instrument known to European history’.  It turned German Jews from citizens into subjects. Only the Zionists welcomed the laws. Zionist Executive President, Menahem Ussishkin, was effusive:

There is something positive in their [German Jewry’s] tragedy... and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would simply have converted to Christianity.

German Zionist leader Joachim Prinz explained that:

(The Jews) have been drawn out of the last secret recesses of christening and mixed marriages. We are not unhappy about it... The theory of assimilation has collapsed…. We want to replace assimilation by something new: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state, built according to the principle of purity of the nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind.  'Wir Juden' Berlin 1934, p.154 https://tinyurl.com/yxqvmaq5

The Zionists alone amongst Jews saw the advent of the Nazis as something positive. Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai and editor of the Histadrut paper Davar, as well as Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’ [Francis Nicosia, Zionism & Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p. 91]

When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30 1933 most Jews reacted instinctively by boycotting everything German. Not so the Zionists. They were eager to trade with the Nazis to build their ‘Jewish’ state and in August 1933 they reached a trading agreement with them, Ha’avara.

When the last major Jewish community in Europe was under threat, after the Nazi invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944, the Zionists suppressed the Vrba-Wetzler Report which, exposed Auschwitz, not as a labour camp but an extermination camp. But first a little background.

On April 10 Rudolf Vrba and his friend Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz with the purpose of warning Hungarian Jews what was in store for them. They had heard SS men talking about looking forward to Hungarian salami, the food that the deportees would bring with them. On April 24 after a perilous journey they reached Slovakia and set down what they knew to the Jewish Council there.

On or about April 29 Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism, paid his monthly visit to Bratislava and was given a copy. What did he do?  Spread the word far and wide?  On the contrary he took them to Eichmann, told him of them and agreed in negotiations that in exchange for a train out of Hungary to safety for 1684 Zionist and rich Jews, Kasztner would not only suppress the news of Auschwitz but positively misinform the Jews who were getting on the deportations trains.

Kasztner's Train for the elite

Of this there is no doubt. When Malchiel Greenwald called Kasztner a collaborator in Israel in 1953, he was sued by the Israeli state for libel by Kasztner. But it didn’t turn out as expected. Jews who had survived Auschwitz testified to Kasztner’s treachery. When David Rozner was asked why Kasztner would have been killed if he had set foot in Koloszvár, his home town, after the war, he replied, ‘Because he was the man who misled the Jews to believe in the good intentions of the Germans.’ [Ben Hecht, Perfidy p. 109].  

It later turned out that Kasztner had gone to Nuremberg to give evidence that exonerated some of Eichmann’s worst butchers like Hermann Krumey and Dieter Wisliceny. Not surprisingly Rudolf Vrba, who had done his best to ensure that the Vrba-Wetzler Report was distributed to other people, laid the blame at Kasztner’s door and that of the Zionist movement. The response of the Zionist historians was to erase Kasztner from historical memory.

In the Israeli school syllabus and holocaust texts there was no mention made of the two Jewish escapees or even the fact that there had been Jews who escaped from Auschwitz.

Vrba’s memoirs, I Cannot Forgive, were printed everywhere but in Israel. No mention was made of Vrba or Wetzler’s name in Yad Vashem, the obscene holocaust propaganda museum in Jerusalem where assorted fascists, neo-Nazis and racists now visit to pay their homage to the Israeli state.

In articles and publications the names of Vrba and Wetzler were never mentioned – they were ‘two Jewish chaps’ or ‘two Jewish prisoners’. In the words of Ruth Linn, an Israeli Professor of Education from Haifa University, who happened, by chance, to meet Vrba at the University of British Columbia,

‘The problem was that none of the escapers had even a ‘minimal layer of Zionist veneer.’ [Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz, a Culture of Forgetting p. 85].

Like Marek Edelman, the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Vrba was eliminated from the history books and by the holocaust industry because he didn’t fit into the Zionist narrative. Linn wrote that

Like Vrba, Edelman never ‘ascended’ to Israel, refusing to become the ‘dead and obedient hero who could be molded along with the political order of that time…. extremely inconvenient for the creation of a heroic Zionist condensing and compensating myth… Israel was not their home.’  Linn, pp. 6, 87.

As people may remember, over 2 months ago I wrote, for Electronic Intifada and my own blog, what Jonathan Cook called an excoriating review of Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist, a biography of Vrba. Freedland’s book was a cheap imitation thriller of Vrba’s own memoirs, I Cannot Forgive. It was dishonest in its justification of Vrba’s silencing.

I decided, at this time of genocide, that it would be appropriate to organise a webinar on the subject of Rewriting the Holocaust and we have an excellent panel of speakers. Stephen Kapos is well known to people as a child survivor of Budapest under the Nazis. Tom Suarez has written two amazingly researched books and Haim Bresheeth, from Jewish Network for Palestine is a long time Israeli-Jewish activist who has just been arrested whilst speaking at a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy, as I was a month ago.

The days when Israel and the Zionists had a monopoly over the holocaust are gone. The holocaust in Gaza demonstrates that Zionism has not learnt any lessons from the Nazi holocaust. On the contrary the Zionists believe that the Nazi holocaust entitles them to commit their own holocaust, a view that the German State also holds.

Ruth Linn, whose book, Escaping Auschwitz – A Culture of Silence exposed the machinations of Yehuda Bauer and the other establishment Zionist holocaust historians. I invited her to join the panel and initially she accepted. However Ruth Linn is a Zionist and she got cold feet about speaking with anti-Zionists. However you should read Linn’s Who’s afraid of the man who escaped from Auschwitz?  

Tony Greenstein

See Defending Vrba and Freedland on Vrba