Terrorism in red paint: Palestine Action leaves a calling card at RAF Brize Norton
Last Sunday, August 17, while I strolled the shores of Derwentwater, UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper took to The Observer with an opinion piece. Here it is, with my comments added along the way.
Palestine Action ‘is not lawful protest’
You’re right, Home Secretary. It isn’t. But as you know full well, that is not the issue. Palestine Action front liners have been numerous times prosecuted under laws of trespass and criminal damage – and numerous times acquitted by juries on the ground their actions were undertaken to prevent a greater crime.
At issue is not whether this group’s actions are lawful. At issue is whether any rational and fair-minded person would describe them as terrorism: a label most of us take to signify the use of lethal violence on human beings, innocent civilians not excluded, to further political ends.
But where her header offers strawman argument whose sole purpose is to muddy the waters from the get go – ask yourself: why would she want to do that? – Cooper’s opening sentence spills over into mealy-mouthed disingenuity.
Faced with the intolerable scenes of suffering and devastation in Gaza, people across the country are feeling desperate and angry about what is happening and many have joined protests on the street …
After decades of practice as an ambitious politician, such formulations trip off the tongue and pen of an Yvette Cooper as easily as from a Benjamin Netanyahu. Your proverbial Martian might reasonably conclude from her way of framing them that those “intolerable scenes” were Acts of God, not war crimes abetted by a government of which she is a senior member.
Isn’t such disassociation a hallmark of the sociopath?
What follows is the very lack of specificity – “if you only knew what I know” innuendo – which has characterised the home secretary’s increasingly shrill defensiveness ever since the ban was imposed, instigating a backlash that’s clearly rattled her.
… Each month, the police work with organisers to facilitate safe, lawful protests, and will continue to do so.
Over the last 18 months, hundreds of thousands of people have joined pro-Palestinian protests, while only a tiny minority have been arrested for breaking the law. Protest and free speech are an important part of our democracy and those freedoms will always be protected.
So long as they don’t get in the way of a genocide to which their own government is a party?
So anyone who wants to protest against the catastrophic humanitarian situation and crimes against humanity in Gaza, to oppose Israel’s military offensive, or to criticise the actions of any and every government, including our own, has the freedom to do so. The recent proscription of the group Palestine Action does not prevent those protests, and to claim otherwise is nonsense.
That proscription concerns one specific organisation alone – a group that has conducted an escalating campaign involving not just sustained criminal damage, including to Britain’s national security infrastructure, but also intimidation, violence, weapons, and serious injuries to individuals.
This “one specific organisation” closed down Ferranti in Oldham. A subsidiary of Israeli owned Elbit Systems, Ferranti made parts for weapons and surveillance equipment for use in crimes against humanity. An explanation far more plausible than the one Yvette Cooper offers for its proscription – “intimidation, violence, weapons, and serious injuries” – is that Palestine Action has been uniquely successful in disrupting both genocide and UK complicity in it
The more so when “intimidation, violence, weapons, and serious injuries” are so nonchalantly thrown around with neither substantiation nor even specificity.
The clear advice and intelligence given to me earlier this year from the UK’s world-leading counter-terrorism system, based on a robust assessment process, was that Palestine Action satisfies the relevant tests in the Terrorism Act 2000 and should be proscribed.
Some may think it is just a regular protest group known for occasional stunts. But that is not the extent of its past activities. Nor does it reflect disturbing information given to me that covered ideas and planning for future attacks.
Many of those important details cannot yet be publicly reported because of criminal proceedings. But if stunts were the only concern, its proscription would never have been considered in the first place, and it certainly wouldn’t have become the unanimous recommendation to ministers from the cross-government security expert review group.
It wasn’t though, was it? You’d think, after the Iraq bloodbath and its justification – ditto all we now know about Libya and Syria – we’d be more chary of taking the word of senior politicians on such matters. I can’t say whether Cooper is being extraordinarily economical with the truth, or telling a flat out whopper. Either way her goal here, as in the rest of her disgraceful piece, is to deceive.
How do I know? See my August 13 post, featuring former UK Ambassador Craig Murray. On the basis of a JTAC report secured in redacted form, he wrote:
The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre is not a committee which meets occasionally, but a permanently staffed organisation with premises inside MI5 HQ in Millbank. The JTAC consists of representatives of:
MI5 – the Security Service
MI6 – the Special Intelligence Service
GCHQ – electronic and communications surveillance
DIS – the Defence Intelligence Service
Customs & Excise Special Operations
The Border Force
Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command
The Home Office
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office
The Ministry of Defence
The Department of Transport
If Palestine Action deliberately attacked people … had foreign funding … attacked random Jewish businesses … planned a big terrorist act …
… the JTAC report would say so. It says nothing of the sort.
… The reason Yvette Cooper has proscribed Palestine Action is that she is a member of Labour Friends of Israel and has received £215,000 from the Zionist lobby – which is £215,000 more than Palestine Action ever received on behalf of a foreign power. 1
Back to Ms Cooper:
Palestine Action has claimed responsibility for – and promoted on its website – attacks that have seen those allegedly involved subsequently charged with violent disorder, grievous bodily harm with intent, actual bodily harm, criminal damage and aggravated burglary. Charges that include, in the assessment of the independent Crown Prosecution Service, a terrorism connection.
Many people will also know about the attack on RAF planes at Brize Norton, but fewer will have read about the Jewish-owned business in north London badly vandalised in the dead of night by masked men just three weeks before.
That allusion to Jewish businesses really is the pits. Since Palestine Action’s raison d’etre is to make life hard for the war criminals in Palestine, it will of course target Israeli business interests on British soil 2 – and since Israel is a racist ethno-state, these will be disproportionately Jewish owned. What Cooper seeks to imply – deliberately, recklessly, despicably, and wholly of a piece with her government’s efforts to paint attacks on Israel as antisemitic – is that Palestine Action targets such businesses because they are Jewish, as distinct from Israeli, owned.
She plays with fire to save her own neck.
Or the attack on a Glasgow factory that caused the sentencing sheriff to say: “Throwing pyrotechnics into areas where people are being evacuated could hardly be described as non-violent.”
Pyrotechnics is in this context a fancy word for fireworks. Oddly enough, these do not feature heavily in the arsenals of Al Qaeda. Nor were they tools of choice for the ANC, IRA or for that matter the more militant of the suffragettes she professes to admire.
Or the “underground manual” that encourages the creation of cells, provides practical guidance on how to identify targets to attack and how to evade law enforcement. These are not the actions of a legitimate protest group.
Again the strawman argument. No one, Palestine Action included, is saying this group abides by the law. If you set out with serious intent to disrupt a genocide to which your own government is a party, you will of course fall foul of the law.
And organise accordingly.
But I’m talked out on this. On the same day it ran Yvette Cooper’s piece, The Observer ran one – Proscription was disproportionate and has had a chilling effect – by Palestine Action co-founder, Huda Amorri. Check it out.
Palestine Action co-founder, Huda Amorri
Speaking of chilling effects, a third piece that day serves as case study in how the snail’s pace of a criminal justice system no less neoliberally underfunded than the rest of our rotting public infrastructure has itself been weaponised. See John Simpson’s piece on Clare Hinchcliffe, her daughter a Palestine Action heroine held without charge in a top security jail for more than a year.
Happier times: jailed Palestine activist with mum, Claire Hinchcliffe
Meanwhile here, without further interjection from me, are the home secretary’s closing words.
For a home secretary to ignore all those security assessments, advice and recommendations would be irresponsible. Protecting public safety and national security are at the very heart of the job I do. Were there to be further serious attacks or injuries, the government would rightly be condemned for not acting sooner to keep people safe.
Public protests on the Gaza crisis will continue through the summer, and the overwhelming majority of those involved do not and will not endorse violent and criminal tactics. That is why the proscription of this group is not about protest or the Palestinian cause. In a democracy, lawful protest is a fundamental right but violent criminality is not.
Some of those holding placards in direct support of Palestine Action may not know the kind of organisation they have been promoting: its violence, intimidation, or future plans and aspirations. But that is all the more reason why no one should allow desperate calls for peace in the Middle East to be derailed into a campaign to support one narrow group involved in violence here in the UK.
Because it is those calls for peace that should be the most urgent focus now. Each day the humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens, the conditions for hostages deteriorate, the prospects for peace are diminished, and the scenes of children being shot and starved get ever more horrific.
An immediate ceasefire, release of the hostages and urgent humanitarian aid are vital. So too is the pathway the prime minister has set out to the recognition of a Palestinian state, now supported by Australia and Canada as well as France.
* * *
- Craig misses a trick. The slush funds to politicians are surprisingly modest. While £215k is not to be sniffed at, can it really buy a figure of Cooper’s seniority? The real corruption, across the West at large, comes less from how much the Lobby spends on bribes and junkets; more from how much it will spend to besmirch those who don’t toe the line. When it comes to winning hearts and minds a mix of fear and greed is more effective than either alone. Finally, let me restate my frequently aired view that while the Lobby is powerful, that power is rooted in the alignment of Western imperialist interests with those of the colonial settler state.
- In truth I’m being too generous to the home secretary here. I stand open to correction but to the best of my knowledge PA don’t even target Israeli owned businesses per se. They target businesses – primary, secondary or tertiary, and whether or not Israeli owned – whose activities aid the genocide.