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…
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…
That’s funny, I had the opposite experience.
I used to count on my front page of Lemmy to give me links to stories about Gaza that I wasn’t getting from the major news outlets. Every page had multiple posts about Gaza with stories and context I sure wasn’t getting from Reuters.
After the election they quickly became few and far in between. With most of them things I have heard about elsewhere, the Lemmy post only being good for discussion.
The volume dropped off, but also the tone changed. For the first year of the latest round of the murderfest, .world had a few very active posters that were rabidly pro-Democrat, and also rabidly pro-Israel. After the election, there was a brief period of “Trump is Palestine’s fault”, and then the tenor of the conversation turned generally anti-Israel, and those posters kinda vanished. The name that pops to mind is one “Rapidcreek”, and I notice the account stopped posting 11 months ago.
…I wonder if you’re not seeing non-reported news because lemmy dryed up, or is it just that now everyone else started reporting on Gaza, so the news is all known.