Of One Thing We Can Be Certain – This is Not About Fighting Terrorism but Suppressing Freedom of Speech
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 -
— Mish Rahman (@mish_rahman) December 16, 2024
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
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
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