cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40907042
On 5 January I will go on trial at Kingston Crown Court charged with an offence under Section12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The maximum penalty if found guilty is 14 years in gaol. There are others due to follow me.
You might be forgiven for thinking that my ‘offence’ was preparing a bomb intended for the Israeli Embassy. In fact, it was disagreeing with government policy and received opinion.
I was arrested on 20 December 2023 by Counter-Terrorism Police in a dawn raid under the Terrorism Act 2000. My ‘crime’ was posting a tweet, one month previously, saying that I supported the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli Defence Forces.
The anti-terrorism police are reminiscent of the Thought Police (Thinkpol) in George Orwell’s 1984, who spent their time hunting down “thought crime.” Britain’s equivalent of seized my electronic devices – computers, laptop, mobile phone etc. When I applied to the courts to recover these items, the police justified their retention by saying that they provided a ‘highly relevant insight’ into my mind.
The aim of Orwell’s Thought Police was to enforce mental conformity, ensuring citizens police their own minds. In his Expert Witness Statement in the Case for the Deproscription of Hamas, Jonathan Cook, a journalist who has worked on The Guardian, The Observer and The Times amongst other papers and a recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism in 2011, wrote:
Over the past several months, I have been watching with growing professional alarm – and personal trepidation – what I can only describe as a campaign of political intimidation and persecution of a number of journalists in the UK. The journalists who have been targeted share one thing in common: they report and comment on Israel’s actions in Gaza from a critical perspective that judges those actions to be genocidal…
What a beautiful and vibrant democracy 🤗
This is why the Chinese don’t take us seriously when we boast about our “freedom of speech” LOL
Do people in the UK actually think they have freedom of speech?
Not just the Chinese. The rest of the world said, “Sure, Jan.”
You can say anything and be anything as long as it doesn’t affect the empire. Basically, any freedom of speech experienced is thanks/conditional to the irrelevance of that speech. 🥲
Is this about China or the UK? I think there are some things you can say in China but not in the UK, provided it doesn’t regard the authorities
This is about the entirety of the West, mainly the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon countries. Idk how it goes in China, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it weren’t that dissimilar.
Interesting 🤔
This type of shit is what happens in russia for posting “maybe we shouldnt kill our neighbours?”;
good job UK /s
In America you get kidnapped for just being brown and your white neighbours will just be like “oh well”. The West has always had a monopoly on violence and amorality, we don’t need to compare them to Russia. 🤷
Unfortunately the media are complicit in equating anti Zionism with being racist against the Jews. They call this anti-semitism even though the origin of this word is from the right wing Jew haters themselves in order to make their hate of the Jews more palatable to the general populace. The right wingers always need somebody to hate, it used to be the blacks, then the Jews , then the Asians and now it’s the gays and the Muslims.
Israel has certainly the right to exist, but so do the Palestinians in their state. I don’t have blind folds, I see there are many radical Muslims who hate Jews and westerners but in order to create peace, the west cannot simply equate every protest against the actions of Israel with hating Jews. It’s wrong, it’s immoral and it holds us back.
Israel has certainly the right to exist
I disagree. The Israeli PEOPLE do, but the inherently discriminatory apartheid state doesn’t.
The colonial structure created by the British and the French and then overseen by the USA after the redistribution of power of WW2, which has just been used to destabilise the region and as a military base for more depraved and inhuman incursions, should have never been a thing. 🥲
And Flyingsquid feld to that country? Shits getting just as bad if not worse then the USA
Yep. I honestly don’t blame him for leaving the increasingly transphobic US for the sake of his child, but to TERF Island? Hopefully the US gets better soon so he and his family can live in peace again
Soon it’ll be a year without him…
LyingSquid would have loved to see Palestinian protestors rotting away in gaol. He was a Zionist shitbag.
I wonder what happened to the rest of the accounts that were spamming pro-Israel articles and harassing “tankies”. They all seem to have disappeared right when the election was over…
I would be interested in seeing the details of this case. The article is a bit vague.
