- Craig Murray: Hunger Strikes and Court Cases
Posted by sashimi
on December 17, 2025, 4:16 am
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16 Dec 2025 https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2025/12/hunger-strikes-and-court-cases/ Fighting the proscription of Palestine Action has become more urgent as eight brave activists enter the crucial period of their hunger strike. 12 January has finally been set for the court hearing on holding a Scottish judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. I am frankly terrified for the hunger strikers. * Qesser Zuhrah * Amu Gib * Heba Muraisi * Jon Cink * Teuta Hoxha * Kamran Ahmed * Muhammad Umer Khalid * Lewie Chiaramello (a diabetic so on modified hunger strike or he would die very rapidly). The Starmer government is quite prepared to let them die: to emphasise devotion to Israel, to show their Zionist donors they are earning their money, and to reinforce the hardline macho image they believe appeals to Reform voters. Indeed I have no doubt that Starmer, Mahmood, Lammy and Cooper hope for their deaths as a political positive; just as Thatcher thought she would win plaudits for facing down IRA hunger strikers. It is important to state that none of the hunger striking prisoners has been convicted of anything - all are on remand - and none of them was in any way involved in the incident in which a policewoman was allegedly injured. The coordinated response from government and other Zionist troll farms and stenographers is that none of the hunger strikers deserve sympathy as "a policewoman was hit by a sledgehammer". It remains astonishing to me that this assertion is constantly and stridently made by the state and its myriad acolytes, despite the rules against prejudicing a jury trial. This stance ignores the detailed accounts of the trial itself which paint a far more complex picture. ... The judicial review of Palestine Action in the High Court of England and Wales appears to have been "fixed". The last-minute change of judges - including the total removal of the original judge from the panel - and the conduct of the review, have left little room for optimism. My own most striking impression from that judicial review is the difference in how the judges treated the counsel for Huda Ammori and the counsel for the UK government. ... My favourite moment in the English judicial review was when Raza Hussain quoted the Proscription Advisory Committee's recommendation to Yvette Cooper that Palestine Action should be proscribed because "Palestine Action kept hiring good lawyers" and defendants kept being acquitted as it was difficult to prove guilt to the criminal standard. Yes, they really did say that. Palestine Action should be proscribed because it was being found by juries not to be criminal. By proscribing Palestine Action, this makes it a criminal offence of strict liability to support it, whether or not you were doing anything that a jury would have found criminal before the proscription. ... On right to a fair trial, it is worth noting that there is huge evidence of outside influence on the prosecutions, and there are communications between the police and prosecutorial authorities on the one hand, and Elbit, the Israeli Embassy, and various Zionist groups on the other, which have either not been released to the defence, or have only been released in very redacted form. In the day of the Filton trial which I attended, I found the parts the jury was not allowed to know (when they were sent out) particularly interesting. I cannot tell you more than that until the trial is over. We can help lift the proscription of Palestine Action if we win the judicial review in Scotland. We have finally been given a court date of 12 January at 9:30am in Edinburgh. |
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