Jailing of Palestine Supporters is Starmer’s Latest Enthusiasm
JVL Introduction
The arrest of Richard Medhurst at Heathrow last week was an amber light, yesterday’s arrest at home of Sarah Wilkinson turns the light to bright red.
Sarah’s claimed ‘offence’ is to be a supporter of terrorism. This was manifested by posts marvelling at the audacity of the October 7 breakout from Gaza, made well before the scale of he killing and abductions that followed were known. Another count was her praise for Ismail Haniyah after his assassination by the Israelis. Haniyah may or may not be praiseworthy but he was, at the time of his murder, trying to move Hamas towards a negotiated ceasefire. The distinction between dissent from British government policy and support for terrorism seems to elude Keir Starmer.
Anyone looking or supporters of terrorism in Britain would be better employed tracking down those sending funds to terrorist settlers who are murdering and evicting Palestinians in the West Bank. If that is too difficult, then fingering the collars of past and present Government ministers who are supplying arms to the genocidal Israeli army; their addresses are well known.
Keir Starmer must be high in, if not leading, the league table of human rights lawyers with an affection for authoritarianism.
MC
This article was originally published by Jonathan Cook's substack on Fri 30 Aug 2024. Read the original here.
Starmer's purges of Labour have mutated into the jailing of Palestine supporters
Britain’s authoritarian new prime minister is expanding the scope of already draconian laws to redefine his critics as ‘supporters’ of terrorism
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We need to be arguing the Hamas has clearly become an army of Freedom Fighters against an army of genocidal, ethnic cleansing, colonial Zionists mis-named “Settlers”, backed by the Israeli military in an already-settled land. The evidence is plain in the hundreds of illegal Zionist-only colonies in occupied Palestine.
A very disturbing article, that now identifies the extension of the meaning of ‘supporter of terrorism’, or a proscribed organisation, to the same illogical level as has been used in identifying so-called ‘anti-semitism’ as a tool for crushing dissenting voices within the Labour Party, especially concerning the awful situation in Gaza. Sadly, the general public are simply unaware of this creeping authoritarianism. The respectability of the title of Human Rights Lawyer, and one time Chief Prosecutor , is an effective shield against accusations of Starmer’s deeply prejudiced judgments and actions.
However, is it possible to glean any evidence that Keir Starmer has directly influenced the police action, in the same way that Margaret Thatcher appears to have used the police service as a paramilitary force against the miners? A former Chief Prosecutor and current Prime Minister is a combination that needs careful watching.
John hall is correct, but I am curious as to why he things ‘settlers’ misnamed?
Arresting people for supporting Freedom Fighters is indeed outrageous, but pro-human rights (and thus Palestinian rights protesters), have only ourselves to blame. For years we have allowed ethnic cleansing, colonial Zionist terrorists to be described as “settlers”, (in an already-settled land!) We have not complained strongly enough that all the illegal, Jews / Zionist-ONLY colonies in occupied Palestine represent blatant ethnic cleansing or that “radical” Rabbi (Lev?) called for the flattening of Gaza in 2012 and that Netanyahu’s deliberate lax security on October 7th and death of “civilians”, (ex -army, reservists etc ), under the Hannibal Directive provided the “justification” for doing just that.
IF it was possible and affordable for ordinary people to have immediate recourse to expert legal advice and to assistance in suing the police for wrongful arrest THEN these encroachments on our civil liberties might not be happening as often as they now are.
Maybe others see it a bit differently but I have concluded the following : Terrorism, formerly known as being a savage, is on paper “legality” of the state to kill innocents for political ends and the “non-legality” of “non-state” actors to retaliate in kind. In reality what we see is a racist and depraved game of provocation, systematically ignored, until the victims finally, inevitably retaliate in kind. Then the same agents that dutifully hid the predations and cruelties of the real aggressors do the exact opposite when retaliation crosses the line. This is actually a useful milestone for the real aggressors – henceforth their victims are deemed to be irredeemable savages that quite simply don’t deserve whatever it was that was stolen from them in the first place, and now deserve literally any form of indiscriminate violence. Against them, indiscriminate violence is now actually heroic. If you are part of the identity group whose (lowest) miscreants are behind this, and you have the perception, decency self-respect to object to this depravity and gas lighting seemingly in your name, you will be branded a race traitor, or similar. Unfortunately our democracy has descended into a game played almost exclusively by people who are well versed in this craft. The whole vile, idolatrous charade serves to highlight those who worship power, and those that don’t .
Last autumn a row erupted over the then Home Secretary’s attack on the Metropolitan Police for its handling of pro-Palestinian protests. In an article in The Times, Braverman accused the force of applying a “double standard” to its policing of protests. She claimed aggressive right-wing protesters were “rightly met with a stern response”, while “pro-Palestinian mobs” were “largely ignored”. The comments were condemned both by former police officers and MPs, as they were seen as undermining the independence of the police. In the event the police asserted their independence from politicians by continuing their previous approach.
There is a long way between a person being subject to a police investigation and them being locked up. For a start there is the question of whether it will result in a prosecution, or whether it will be dropped due to that old favourite ‘not in the public interest’, and if it does there is the small matter of a trial.
This seems to me more like a rerun of a scenario we are all too familiar with. Some pro-Israel troll excavates every last social media post, finds something they can make a song and dance about, and reports it to whoever they think will be afraid of being called anti-semitic if they don’t take some action.
I don’t much like Starmer, but I don’t think he is likely to be able to implement a police state anytime soon.
This is a worrying development and is a continuation of the arrests in the climate change debacle. What a country we have become.
It is important to understand the parallel between the genocide in Israel and the global ecocide that we execute daily. The Zionist project was always rooted in pronatalism and eugenics. Likewise, growth economics is the systematic destruction of biodiversity to accommodate ever more humans. Our modern techno-industrial lifestyle assumes human life to be superior to other life forms, in the same way that Zionist assume Jews to be the ‘chosen’ people of the God of Israel. We are daily committing ecocide, and military action in any form is not something that we can afford at this late stage in ecosystems collapse. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-conned-from-cradle-barbara-williams-ga5ze/