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…
Establishment controlled speech has always existed everywhere even when we propagandize “our side’s” freedom of speech. If elections or speech could change anything, it is controlled (would be made illegal is anarchist quote).
Divisive speech is highly permitted because nazi ideas support oligarchy and Zionist supremacism. Elon Musk going to UK and telling “white pride” groups that they need to overthrow Parliament (violently, if asking politely wouldn’t work) or be exterminated by immigrants is permitted speech by UK establishment. Replacement theory, even as a neo nazi ideology, is fundamentally a Zionist supremacist ideology because the dangerous immigrants are those who might disagree with “establishment values” such as genocide absolutism.
And Flyingsquid feld to that country? Shits getting just as bad if not worse then the USA
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.
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…
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. 🤷
Crazy they keep talking about China and Russia…
We(the US) are currently blowing up random fishing boats and taking tankers in Venezuela… what we did to Iraq… Iran… Cuba… every South American country ever… not to mention Korea and Vietnam.
The west IS THE EVIL EMPIRE. It’s not even close. No one is as bad as us. We aren’t rich as fuck because of “freedom and democracy”, we are(have been finally waning) because of the dirtiest mob shit you can think of. Since ww2 boot firmly on the throat of the entire world.
Just to head off about Russia:
The US(NATO tomato tomato) absolutely did move to isolate Russia. Whether you are moving honestly with arms or whispering in ears and propagandizing like the fucking devil, war is war. The west brought this war to Ukraine with their insidious posturing and it is wild how good the propaganda has been(and is, they will be in here) obscuring that fact. NATO movements regarding Ukraine and isolating russia was commonly discussed a couple years ago. Now it’s surprised pikachu and/or straight denial whenever it’s brought up. We forced Russia hand there. 100%. It’s like playing chess for your life, you aren’t mating my king before I flip the table.
Loved your very informative, factual and invigorating rant! ❤️
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. 🥲
I am in the US. The fact we are told that we can’t criticize someone because that makes us racists is one of the issues fueling far right discontent in my opinion. People are tired of working hard to barely make ends meet while sending billions to Israel too. My Trumper parents have been complaining about it for at least 30 years. Plus they have free higher education and medical care while we have paralyzing debt and bankruptcy for the same.How do they still need our money?
It all seems like Israel was set up to be a money laundering scam from the beginning. It seems convenient that the government who needs all our money also just happens to be the ones whose gov (not individuals) has used the common people’s sympathies for those who endured the Holocaust to also do highly unethical shit for decades while claiming any criticism is antisemitic. I have begun to wonder if the people who benefit the most are even really Jews at all. I think many probably are not. I’m not virtue signaling here, but I’m implying that non-Jewish elites around the world and many in Europe probably benefit from the arrangement.
The fact is people here are sick and tired of people saying they are racist if they are pissed that tax dollars go to Israel. It’s not working any longer. So now criticism is terrorism in the UK? Things are getting crazy fast.
This is causing harm to Jews in the US as well. They are good folks and now have to be worried about actual radicals here hurting them over all this. It’s really sad. Per usual, entities in power cause trouble and common people suffer.
I would be interested in seeing the details of this case. The article is a bit vague.
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?
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 🤔
Not just the Chinese. The rest of the world said, “Sure, Jan.”
What a beautiful and vibrant democracy 🤗
