Craig Murray: Richard Medhurst and the Right to Armed Resistance
Posted by sashimi on August 21, 2024, 7:40 pm
20 Aug 2024
So, and it is absolutely important this is understood, the right to fight against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes is not only an absolute right in international law, it is also a specific right in UK law.
And UK law further specifically recognises that when fighting colonial domination, alien occupation and a racist regime you do not have to wear uniform.
Applying this to 7 October, it means that those armed Palestinian combatants who were not members of a proscribed organisation (see below) were engaged in legal armed struggle in terms of UK law, provided they respected international humanitarian law in so doing.
Which makes the recent clarifications that the majority of civilian casualties were killed by the IDF and that the mass rapes and beheaded babies stories were a total fabrication, still more important.
Every colonial or racist power that has ever faced armed resistance has always characterised the native peoples resisting as "terrorists", "savages" or similar. Asymmetric warfare is by nature unconventional. The systematic and often legalised atrocities of the coloniser will indeed often spark uncontrolled acts of rage that rightly fall outside what international humanitarian law will condone.
So we now have the situation that Richard Medhurst is arrested for allegedly supporting armed resistance that is not only undeniably legal in international law but is also specifically legal in British law.
The source of this conundrum is the extraordinarily arbitrary power of proscribing an organisation.
Now to proscribe an organisation the government does not have to prove its actions were illegal, either under international law or UK law. An organisation is proscribed simply on the basis that the government says so.
If the government proscribed the Girl Guides, you could get up to 14 years in jail for expressing support for the Girl Guides, and no amount of argument in court that the Girl Guides is not in fact a terrorist organisation would help you.
on August 21, 2024, 7:40 pm