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 asgross 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”.
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 thatthose 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 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
