https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/uk-police-have-arrested-another-pro
Supporters of Palestine are being picked off, one by one
Aug 29, 2024

What seems clear now is that UK counter-terrorism police have a list of every pro-Palestinian journalist, blogger and prominent social media user, and they’re trawling through their posts to find an excuse to arrest them. If you wonder why France is so keen on capturing Telegram, it’s because it’s an intelligence goldmine with vast activist networks hidden behind end-to-end encryption. They’re not going after child traffickers, they’re going after dissidents. It’s the same pattern across the empire.

In the UK, the number one target right now is anyone who opposes genocide. Just stop and think about what that says about our police.

A genocide is taking place. Genocide is the worst crime human beings can commit. Publicly supporting genocide is a war crime, and not a single person that I know of has been arrested for supporting the IDF, but people are being arrested for supporting Palestinians. They are accused of terrorism.

Now whichever way you square it, genocide is a bigger crime than terrorism. It’s two or three levels beyond in the scale of its destructiveness and casualty rate, but our police don’t think support for genocide is a crime worth pursuing. Opposition to it is…

It’s about a week since Richard Medhurst was arrested for criticising Israel on social media. Today, news has broken that a pro-Palestinian journalist called Sarah Wilkinson has been arrested too. Another Twitter user, who I assume is Sarah’s partner, or maybe a relative, called Jack Wilkinson, posted the following:

The police came to her house just before 7.30am. 12 of them in total, some of them in plain clothes from the counter terrorism police. They said she was under arrest for "content that she has posted online." Her house is being raided & they have seized all her electronic devices.

Sarah Wilkinson works for a news and media company called MENA Uncensored who shared the following letter on social media:

Under the Terrorism Act, Sarah could face up to 14 years in prison if she is found guilty of posting things the government doesn’t like on social media. She was not the only person to be targeted either because Palestine Action is reporting that Richard Barnard has had his house “re-raided” by counter-terrorism police.

If you trawl through Sarah Wilkinson’s Twitter timeline, you will see she regularly posts content highlighting Israel’s war crimes:

One scroll through Sarah’s timeline should be enough to turn any thinking person against the brutal IDF, and that is no doubt why police want her to be silenced. My guess is they probably found a post from Sarah that indicated support for Palestinian resistance, as that is the excuse they normally use, so let’s just tackle this…

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Now there is quite possibly a government agent assigned to my blog at this point, so let’s take a moment to say “hi” to this person! I would kindly ask they read my article in full because any sentence could be misconstrued, and context is essential here.

Lots of social media users are pointing out that Palestinians have a right to resist occupation under international law and police seem to be interpreting this as support for terrorism. It is perfectly true that Palestinians have the legal right to resist those who are imposing an illegal occupation, as long as they stay within international law when they fight back. The rules of war must always be respected.

When a person expresses support for the Palestinian right to resist, in almost all cases, they are talking about legal methods of resistance. Yet the assumption is they support the killing of civilians. In almost all cases, this is not true.

Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein explained it something like this: When Palestinians resort to acts of violence against civilians, he doesn’t support that, but he refuses to condemn those men and boys because he sees their violence as something like a slave revolt.

We are talking about people who’ve spent their lives in the unimaginable desperation of a brutal occupation. In many cases, they are fathers who’ve held the mangled bodies of their daughters in their arms or orphaned boys who’ve lost their parents under a mountain of rubble. They are dealing with a trauma we can’t comprehend, and from their standpoint, every Israeli is an occupier.

The intentional killing of Israeli civilians by the resistance is a war crime, but it is not a bigger war crime than genocide perpetrated by a brutal occupying force. Therefore, support for Palestinian resistance cannot sensibly be considered a bigger crime than support for the IDF. Yet our police think genocide, and support for it, is the lesser crime. How can this be acceptable to any reasonable person?

Now the justification police would use is that Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK, therefore, they have no choice but to treat these social media users and journalists as terrorists. However, no one seriously thinks they are terrorists, and - this is important to understand - the International Court of Justice has advised we must end all support for Israel until the invasion stops.

Any support for the state of Israel, even trade, certainly selling weapons, could potentially be a violation of international law. Cheering on Israel’s genocidal actions is absolutely a war crime.

I’ve made this point a thousand times and I’ll make it a thousand more: Sir Keir Starmer said loud and clear on television that Israel has the right to cut off food, water, and medicine to a civilian population. Even worse, Starmer supplies weapons to Israel. Therefore, you can make a far stronger case that Starmer is guilty of genocide than Sarah Wilkinson is guilty of terrorism. Yet there is no arrest of the prime minister. No arrest for social media users who post grotesque videos celebrating Israel’s brutality. No indication that any IDF soldier who returns to the UK will be prosecuted.

Terrorism and genocide are horrific, but one crime is orders of magnitude bigger than the other. However, you will only see it this way if you care about Palestinians as much as you care about Israelis. Some of us feel our hearts break whenever a Palestinian or Israeli is killed. Some of us desperately want the violence to stop immediately and all those who are guilty of war crimes to be held accountable.

Sadly, the British police seem interested only in holding people who support Palestinian resistance accountable, not those who support 76 years of Israeli occupation and genocide. The double-standard could not be more disturbing.

All of us in the UK who write about Israel/Palestine live in fear our doors could be kicked in any day, just because we want the slaughter of children to stop. Personally, I don’t support violence in any conflict and my position is always that there should be a peaceful solution. Does that make me an extremist in the eyes of our police? I honestly don’t know.

Here is another point I will make again and again: the attacks on social media platforms and users, independent journalists and websites, amounts to the largest scale censorship effort we’ve ever seen. We are seeing the empire attempting to seize control of the entire internet and what is that if not totalitarianism?