The penalty for disagreeing with government policy on Palestine is 14 Years in prison |
On 5 January I will go on trial at Kingston Crown Court charged with an offence under Section12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The maximum penalty if found guilty is 14 years in gaol. There are others due to follow me.
You might be forgiven for thinking that my ‘offence’ was preparing a bomb intended for the Israeli Embassy. In fact, it was disagreeing with government policy and received opinion.
I was arrested on 20 December 2023 by Counter-Terrorism Police in a dawn raid under the Terrorism Act 2000. My ‘crime’ was posting a tweet, one month previously, saying that I supported the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli Defence Forces.
The anti-terrorism police are reminiscent of the Thought Police (Thinkpol) in George Orwell’s 1984, who spent their time hunting down “thought crime.” Britain’s equivalent of seized my electronic devices – computers, laptop, mobile phone etc. When I applied to the courts to recover these items, the police justified their retention by saying that they provided a ‘highly relevant insight’ into my mind.
The aim of Orwell’s Thought Police was to enforce mental conformity, ensuring citizens police their own minds. In his Expert Witness Statement in the Case for the Deproscription of Hamas, Jonathan Cook, a journalist who has worked on The Guardian, The Observer and The Times amongst other papers and a recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism in 2011, wrote:
Over the past several months, I have been watching with growing professional alarm – and personal trepidation – what I can only describe as a campaign of political intimidation and persecution of a number of journalists in the UK. The journalists who have been targeted share one thing in common: they report and comment on Israel’s actions in Gaza from a critical perspective that judges those actions to be genocidal…
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(This) has been justified under an expansive interpretation of both Section 12 of the 2000 Terrorism Act and Sections 1 and 2 of the 2006 Terrorism Act. These laws tightly restrict commentary about Hamas and other Palestinian organisations the UK government has proscribed.
I now find myself in a situation where, for the first time in my 36-year professional career, I am no longer sure what by law I can write or say in my capacity as a journalist on an issue of major international importance.
The fact that Hamas was freely elected as the government of Gaza in 2006 is irrelevant. By opposing Israel militarily they have become ‘terrorists’.
I have been charged ‘inviting support for a proscribed organisation’. By posting a