… and I said nothing because I was not Palestine Action. I’m not political, you see.”
Not political. Here’s 25 year old US airman Aaron Bushnell, on FB eighteen months ago …
MANY OF US ASK OURSELVES, “WHAT WOULD I DO IF I WAS ALIVE DURING SLAVERY? OR THE JIM CROW SOUTH? OR APARTHEID? WHAT WOULD I DO IF MY COUNTRY WAS COMMITTING GENOCIDE?”
THE ANSWER IS, YOU’RE DOING IT. RIGHT NOW.
… just hours before standing outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington to douse his uniformed body in what Americans call ‘gas’. He fumbled a second or two with his cigarette lighter, but did not fail in his mission.
*
Yesterday I posted a few words and many photos of the march for Palestine in London, July 19. My theme being the normality of protesting a genocide, I made only cursory reference to:
Britain’s first ever home secretary to place a non violent direct action group on the list of proscribed terrorist orgs. Tell me we’re not being pushed down a very slippery slope to a dark abyss.
Here’s Kernow Damo (edited) the following day:
This month’s proscription of Palestine Action, a non violent network targeting arms manufacturers supplying Israel, gave legal cover to a crackdown. This weekend over 100 people were arrested: 55 in London, 17 in Bristol, 16 in Manchester, 8 in Truro, many just for holding placards. No reference to the banned group was needed. The words ‘Palestine’ and ‘action’, together on banners, triggered arrests.
Evidence of abuse is overwhelming. In Glasgow a 64 year old man was detained for a sign declaring, “Genocide in Palestine. Time to take action!” Police claimed the words aroused reasonable suspicion.
In Canterbury, armed officers threatened a woman with prosecution for holding a Palestinian flag and ‘Free Gaza’ placard. In West Yorkshire a retired head teacher was arrested for holding up a Private Eye article explaining what Palestine Action is.
A high court judge has ruled such applications of the law unlawful, yet officers say they would treat anti-genocide flags and slogans as evidence of terrorist support. This is not rogue policing. It’s a coordinated policy of intimidation by a government far too close to Israel.
Apropos that Yorkshire head teacher, Kernow cites a Skwawkbox piece with footage of another of the weekend’s arrests, of the Liverpool Labour veteran Audrey White, to whom I paid tribute three years ago. Her supporters chant “shame on you”, as police bundle her into a van with as much courtesy and respect as can be accorded a seventy-six year old you’re manhandling into a paddy wagon, but that won’t last. These things develop a momentum of their own.
Over to fifteen minutes forty-four seconds of Damo on how “our” support for a colonial settler regime 2,000 miles away has come home to erode hard won freedoms and civil liberties in the land which did most to bring that racist enterprise into being.
* * *
A random thought:
The Terrorism Act seems to be being applied selectively in regard to these protests in that if it were being applied consistently everyone on these demonstrations would be arrested.
And from the perspective of the police this is a practical approach as well as an intimidatory tactic, as any attempt to consistently apply the approach we are witnessing would end up overwhelming the system. Attempting to arrest everyone on these demonstrations, which could number several thousand or even several hundred rather than twenty, thirty, forty or fifty, is a whole different ball game in terms of scale and practicality.
How would the system process so many at the same time? How many police would be required, and how much time and space would be needed, if everyone on a demonstration turned that approach on its head and insisted that they too be arrested the moment the police moved in to arrest anyone, from one solitary individual to a handful of all those on the demonstration?
“I am Spartacus” needs to be turned from a slogan into a tool to swamp and break the tactics being employed.
‘One arrested. All arrested!’
Agreed.
The British State is well versed in repression. Other direct action groups like Just Stop Oil are debarred from courtroom defences on ground of preventing a Greater Crime. And how far are we from removing the right to a jury trial?
Addendum:
The arrest of Audrey White:
https://skwawkbox.org/2025/07/21/video-shows-appalling-police-brutality-toward-anti-genocide-76yo-audrey-white/
Compare and contrast:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdr3716kd8mo
“20 July 2025
Updated 5 hours ago
Six people have been arrested during the latest protest outside a hotel used to house asylum seekers in Essex.
Bottles and smoke flares were thrown towards police vehicles during the demonstration, which saw more than 1,000 people gathered at the site of the Bell Hotel in Epping…..
……The disorder followed the arrest and charge of an asylum seeker last week on suspicion of alleged sexual assaults in the town……
…….Police put in place a Section 35 dispersal order to “prevent further crime or anti-social behaviour” overnight.”
Bottles and flares thrown at police from a crowd of around a thousand and only six arrests?
Supporting terrorists is very wrong.
Once they’re finished with the peacemakers in a place where freedom of speech once truly mattered, they’ll roll out the same formula across the entire EU. And it will be effortless—because in most Western countries, the very idea of freedom has faded into a vague memory. Let’s be clear: nothing and no one will stand in their way. Not until strong men—and women—rise from the ruins.
Indeed, Alain.
More powerful comment by Labour Heartlands’s Paul Knaggs:
https://labourheartlands.com/audrey-white-arrested/
Meanwhile, outside the British Embassy in Holland:
https://x.com/defendourjuries/status/1946604820460191937
Good stuff.
In the poverty ridden enclaves of social housing on the ASB (anti social behaviour) frontline categories of crime appear to creep under the police radar notwithstanding the fact that scarce resources cannot match the increasing complexity of social and policing problems in these areas. From these chaotic dystopian housing estates of UK PLC the retreat involving the juxtaposition of scarce social and police resources is to be compared with the instant and massive mobilisation of police resources in city town and country to enforce the proscription of Palestine Action and prosecute even a whimper or appearance of support for the organisation and the campaign to stop the genocide of the Palestinians by Israel and the West. This must surely render the politicisation and for that matter the de socialisation of the UK Police on a grand scale!