Yesterday marked one of the most shameful days in the history of the Metropolitan Police as they arrested peaceful protesters including a blind man in a wheelchair, an 81-year-old woman with Parkinson’s, a former British army officer, and a bunch of, um, Quakers. All of them were protesting against two things: the UK’s ongoing participation in the Gaza genocide and the proscription of Palestine Action. All of them were arrested under the Terrorism Act.
Imagine being the police officer whose job it was to wheel this man away. You can see the shame in his face as he lowers his head. These officers must know history is not going to judge them kindly, but they must also know just following orders is not okay. If I was a police officer, I would not have made those arrests, even if it cost me my job. Doing the right thing is infinitely more important than just following orders.
Yesterday police made twice the number of counter-terrorism arrests than they did in all of 2023 and one-fifth of those arrested were over 70. One police officer was wearing a hat that suggested he came from a Welsh police force. Remember this when police say they can’t send any officers out after you’ve been burgled. Police are dealing with the real criminals now, and the real criminals include quakers. Yes, quakers were arrested.
I vibe with the sentiment, liberty for all and that jazz, but it’s a bit ableist to say a blind man in a wheelchair can’t be a terrorist.
Nobody does, especially not the UK government
Zionists are more important than your civil rights.
ZionistsThe colonialist self-proclaimed representatives of a white race who are right now mass murdering children of a “brown” race because of having born with the “wrong” ethinicity are more important thanyourthe civil rights of the British riff-raff.FIFY
British governments have a long and shameful History of supporting Racist Fascists no matter what they do, from Pinochet to the government of Apartheid South Africa. Even Hitler was supported (there’s even a picture of the old Queen as a child being taught the Nazi salute by her uncle the then King) until he invade Poland.
Support for this specific Genocidal white colonialist nation mass murdering muslim children with authoritarian methods and de facto no concern for the civil rights of common Britons, is just the latest symptom of social and political regressivennes and even learned sociopathy amongst the British elites: they never really evolved beyond 19th century ways and “values”.
Same as the US.
The US used to have a streak of “everybody can make it” (back when it had higher social mobility than all of Europe, which isn’t the case anymore), whilst the UK’s streak all the way from the 19th century was “you should know your place” and it only got broken for a short period roughly covering the 60s and 70s (which, not by chance, was also their peak artistic time, both in Music and the Performing Arts) when anybody did have a chance to make it no matter where they came from.
Outside that, the country was dominated by the upper and middle class who from my own experience living there for over a decade and given my own cultural references when I got there (Dutch and Portuguese) are pretty culturally backwards and prone to being performative in how they act rather than genuine (the contrast with the Dutch is huge), the higher the social class the worst (the culture amongst the “old money” upper class is nasty: for example they will gloat - in a posh way - about any display of weakness, even amongst themselves).
Society in Britain is so stratified into social classes (and, given the pretty much non-existent social mobility, means it’s lifelong) that upper class people have their own accent, which is separate from regional accents. I know a number of spoken languages and this is the only country I know where the upper class has its own accent.
As far as I can tell the US doesn’t have this deeply calcified social strata with a dominant upper class with unchallenged ideas of what is “prim and propper” dating back to the 19th century, towards whom most of the rest of society looks up and who even have their own schools and ancient univerties providng a well travelled path from Cradle to “Captains of Industy” for their children. I mean, the US does have such people and structures, but they’re nowhere as dominant over society and the structures of power (for example, there literally are almost no Judges in Britain which did not attend one of such special schools as children) and what there is in the US hasn’t been in place and doing their thing for well over a century.
Very true. They tried dressing it up under a veneer of liberal postmodernism but the authoritarian, colonial brutality that characterises the English bourgeoisie has been laid bare by this genocide.
Indeed.
Having lived for over a decade in Britain, including the 2008 Crash and the Leave Vote and even having been involved in Politics there (in the Green Party), the only shocking element in this for me is the almost total removal of the velvet glove that was used to cover the iron fist (not total because they’re doing the usual disguising of authoritarian oppression as “Rule Of Law” as if it wasn’t them who put those Laws), since one of the most important things the British Upper Classes learn during their years in posh Public Schools is to manage appearances.
Maybe the dropping of the posh façade is due to the influence of America or maybe it’s because they learned from the decade of Austerity after the 2008 Crash that in Britain the anger of the many is easily channeled against powerless minorities such as immigrants and the poor and there is a veritable bottomless pit amongst the “riff-raff” of people who will relentlessly defend the actions of “their betters”.
Please don’t write shit like that without a /s mo matter how obvious.
here in the US, they won’t even declare the KKK as a terrorist org, but holy hell will they happily go after brown people
Here’s a reminder that modern gun control laws in the US got started during the civil rights movement by conservatives, because lawmakers were scared of black people owning guns.
The civil rights protestors realized that peaceful unarmed protests were quickly and violently busted… Cops had no qualms about dragging protestors around, beating people, firing into crowds, etc… But peaceful heavily armed protests had cops politely watching from across the street. Because firing into a crowd is a lot less appealing when the entire crowd can immediately return fire.
When conservative lawmakers saw heavily armed protestors on the front steps of their capitol buildings, and saw police completely unwilling to break the protests up, they got really fucking sweaty really fucking quickly. So Ronald Reagan (yes, the same Reagan who is treated as a paragon of conservative values by conservative talking-heads), and the NRA (yes, the same NRA who lobbies for looser gun control laws in the wakes of school shootings), co-authored and quickly passed the Mulford Act. At the time, it was the single most restrictive gun control law that had ever been passed, and it set the stage for modern gun control laws.
you’re smearing a lot of distinct point of history together, but the premise isn’t wrong.
Ronnie got upset because it wasn’t some civil rights march protester, it was BLACK protesters, specifically Black Panthers. That’s what specifically motivated the NRA et al. The idea of minorities, armed, actually standing up for their rights.
That’s fair and it should be officially a terrorist org, but on the flip side there have been many actions taken against the KKK leading to their large decline over the decades, including in the 1960s when FBI Director Hoover and Agent Roy Moore setting up new field offices in Mississippi and holding many of them accountable as well as uncovering and making public new murders that otherwise went under the radar. There was also a large deradicalization programs that effectively reduced members of such groups and prevented crimes, the programs which grew in scale under Obama and were torn down by Trump.
And mississippi only got that federal scrutiny after they kidnapped and murdered white protesters along with people of color. If the KKK hadn’t gone that far, I’m not sure we would have seen that federal response.
Pretty sure it had more to do with the church bombing that killed 4 little black girls, but you clearly can’t accept any examples of goodwill from whom you view an enemy.
…
you do realize there’s a difference between mississippi and alabama, right?
like, I know it’s all the south and racism kinds to smear the boundaries but I was specific in my wording because I meant mississippi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_Street_Baptist_Church_bombing <-- alabammy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Schwerner <— mrs’ssippy
man, sometimes I feel nuance is entirely lost on this crowd because they’re so quick to attempt to correct what they’re either misreading or misunderstanding.
So because of some imaginary lines you reject the correct timeline of events?
So because of some imaginary lines
so we should just mash up all the events for all the places into some kind of quantuum hyperstate because you can’t tell the difference between one and the other?
you reject the correct timeline of events?
and when did the fbi actually start acting against the KKK in the place we were discussing, mississippi?
did they start cracking down hard on those mississippi klansmen when those poor children were murdered?
did they start cracking down hard on those mississippi klansmen when those poor children were murdered?
YES. YYEESSS.
The propaganda framing from the BBC on the arrests has been truly ludicrous. They described the protesters attempts to “evade detection” by bringing blank pieces of paper along, explaining they would only write messages on the cards if more than 500 people turned up.
“Our correspondent… has been telling me how protesters carefully planned to evade police detection while carrying placards as part of their protest,” the newsreader explained as though she was describing the most sinister plot ever uncovered.
Remember when liberals were outraged when Russian protesters were arrested for showing blank pieces of paper?
The UK is now in the same stage of slide toward autocracy, evidently.
What is it with liberals literally only seeing bug problems when it’s in other countries.
My theory is that, “Liberals” in the Anglo-Saxon style (though the rest are going towards it too) are pretty much Fascists with different lists of “good” races and “bad” races (the kind of people who would make fun of Trump’s Oval Office by saying “it’s like a Middle Eastern dictator” - so casually voicing prejudice about the Middle East) and that means they’re also Nationalists like the Fascists or at the very least think Western society is superior.
Certainly it would explain a lot of things, including how easilly for all their proclamations of being against Racism, they’ll support a Genocide mass murdering children in the tens and even hundreds of thousands as long the genociders are from a “white race” and the victims are “non-whites” - they were never against Racism, much less Discrimination in general, only against that which targets whatever minorities it’s currently fashionable to claim to defend and even in that they stick to mainly performative support and avoid doing changes with real impact in bringing Equality of Treatment when such changes would affected the Wealthy.
I experienced 2 cases here recently .
1 is was Blue MAGA complaining about using a screenshot of an anti-genocide post on X.
Really upset, bcs you can’t use X for something trivial as a genocide. It was hurting them in their much more important battle against Red MAGA.Yesterday (and today) I saw the many posts about the NZ woman (and kid) arrested for entering the US.
One of the comments was literally “even white people from white countries!”.
Instantly reminded me of this.So I look up this case and see it’s big news in NZ, US,etc…
I remarked that the woman didn’t have her travel documents and asked if they could name one of the 1000’s of brown people that suffered worse fates and unlike her forcefully got removed from their children and deported.
Despite having all their documents in order.They didn’t seem to notice their own (subtle?) racism and didn’t like me questioning these double standards.
It could only be about the bad thing Trump did and that I had no empathy for the woman.
Not much later I got banned 😂
But they weren’t arrested for showing blank pieces of paper. They were arrested after they wrote things on them.
Were they? That wasn’t clear to me. It sounded like they were arrested for planning to maybe write something.
From the article:
I’m unclear if anyone holding a blank piece of card was arrested
So I don’t know why you would think they were arrested for this.
So it’s unclear. Which is what I said.
You didn’t seem to think it was unclear when you wrote:
Remember when liberals were outraged when Russian protesters were arrested for showing blank pieces of paper?
The UK is now in the same stage of slide toward autocracy, evidently.
The only reason you had for saying that people in the UK were arrested for showing blank pieces of paper was a statement that said it was “unclear if anyone had been.”
So just to make this very clear, you’ve turned “It is unclear that X” into “X evidently happened”, and when I said that it didn’t you’ve said that you said it was “unclear.”
There have been plenty of reports of people being arrested for displaying the slogan “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action,” and no reports of people being arrested for holding blank pieces of paper, so it’s actually quite clear what happened - the random internet guy got a bee in his bonnet about the factual description of people making sure they made it to the demonstration in order to be arrested en masse (rather than in a trickle) and decided to use weasel words to make it sound like people got arrested for something ridiculous, and you took the bait.
and no reports of people being arrested for holding blank pieces of paper,
During the anti-monarchy protests, when Charlie got his hat on, there was.
To be clear I misunderstood when I made my initial comment. But from the article it’s not clear. I’m just asking if you know for a fact it didn’t happen and it sounds like you don’t know any more than the author does.
Paper! Believe it or not, jail.
What is non-factual or poorly framed about that?
Protestors didn’t want to get arrested without achieving critical mass, so to prevent being arrested before that point, they only wrote their signs after doing so.
It sounds like you want the BBC to be a mouthpiece for your views and interpret anything less than that as propaganda. If I can listen to a BBC report about it and come away a) with renewed disgust at the ban and b) understanding the tactics used by the protestors, what have they done wrong?
Hot to make sure that the Israeli jew does his genocide in peace. God forbid they find out that nobody appreciates them or their crimes.
UK sounds like a shitter america but with decent health care
There is muslims in the idf terrorists let’s not make it about jews
Yes the Muslims are driving this genocide. Israeli Jew dindu nuffin, my goy
Israelis are driving the genocide no matter their religion. There is proud muslim terrorists in the idf that like genocide. The problem is zionism not judaism
Israel is the Jewish state by law. That shit was blasted for generations as part of the propaganda to get westoid normie to be a useful idiot to enable the genocide.
Can’t undo it now that it is not convinient. But y’all keep trying.
If you can’t call the perpetrator, we will never get justice.
The perpetrators are israelis occupation supporter including muslims one and all it’s collaborstors like the PA which are majoritarly muslims
Yeah and the poles did the Holocaust 🤡
Yes, plenty of Poles collaborated with the Nazis to make the Holocaust work. For Poland alone, take a look at this article:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_pogroms_in_eastern_Poland
It’s good that you mention Poland by the way because their government(s) criminalize attributing any responsibility for the Holocaust to Poles:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendment_to_the_Act_on_the_Institute_of_National_Remembrance
what a stupid statement
Next they’re going to be arresting a deaf-blind quadruple amputee and charging them with terrorism offences. It proves the complete absurdity of the PA ban and the total abuse of terrorism law by the government.
nah. racist anti immigrant right wing reform voters will never be considered terrorists according to kieth
Race riots are just a bit of harmless fun, protesting genocide with blank paper is terrorism
From a different website:
Parliament in early July passed a law banning Palestine Action and making it a crime to publicly support the organization. That came after activists broke into a Royal Air Force base and vandalized two tanker planes to protest Britain’s support for Israel’s offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/uk-london-protest-pro-palestinian-law-action-1.7605253
extra funny given he previously cheered on this type of protest during the Iraq bullshit
They must be Quakering in their boots
The proscription of Palestine Action is ridiculous and shameful.
But so is this article. If you turned up in support of ISIS then you should be arrested whether you’re old or young, blind, deaf, in a wheelchair, doing cartwheels, or anything else. Disabled people are capable of supporting terrorist organisations and to pretend this is absurd is to miss the point and cynically look for sympathy where it won’t be found. Not only that, but being arrested for supporting a terrorist organisation doesn’t mean you’re “considered a terrorist.”
Criticise the actual problem - that the Terrorism Act gave the Secretary of State authoritarian powers that it never should have, and she has now used those powers to ban a group that protested a genocidal war through non-violent direct action.
palestine action didn’t do anything different than what keir starmer did.
Who is supporting isis?
Read it slower
Not sure why you’re asking. Do you just need examples of people convicted of supporting ISIS or do you have some other point?
Because you’re equating Palestine Action with fucking ISIS and indirectly called them a “terrorist organization.”
No, I’m using them as a suitable comparison because they are also a proscribed organisation.
The whole fucking point is that while PA is not a terrorist organisation, ISIS undoubtedly is. The fact that no-one has chipped in to say that (disabled) supporters of ISIS should be immune from prosecution shows that the principle of arresting people for supporting terrorist organisations is not the issue; the issue is that PA has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation when it is not one.
You can tell that I wasn’t “indirectly calling PA a terrorist organisation” because I said:
The proscription of Palestine Action is ridiculous and shameful.
and
she has now used those powers to ban a group that protested a genocidal war through non-violent direct action.
I am asking which of the protestors that supported Palestine action are supporting isis
If you turned up in support of ISIS
That “if” indicates that the sentence is a hypothetical. It’s not about the protestors in the article.
So you are off topic. The article clearly talks about those who was arrested simply for supporting palestine action
FYI if you had written “Who is supporting ISIS? because this article is about those who were arrested for supporting Palestine Action” then we could have been here 2 hours ago.
The article claimed that people should not be arrested for supporting Palestine Action if they are disabled. A gave an example where I think you should be arrested (and convicted) for supporting a terrorist organisation, even if you are disabled.
Do you fail to see the connection? Do you think disability should make you immune from arrest for supporting a terror organisation (like ISIS)?
The problem is not that disabled people were arrested, it’s that Palestine Action is not a terror organisation.
You truly earned that nick. Last time I knew a chick like that, she actually claimed to be a descendand of an old CIA. Which she gave such a kind description of, I knew she was a fucking asset. Also, that she didn’t even know it even though they fucking told her. Practically, anyway
Good luck getting that. I know better like the Ledger.
They never alleged they did.