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…
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.