Fake ‘Anti-Terrorism’ Arrests and Charges Against Opponents of Gaza Holocaust!
The recent arrests on fake ‘anti-terrorism’ charges of Tony Greenstein, who is a long-time defender of Palestinian rights, was one of the founders of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), and is a leading member of the Socialist Labour Network (SLN), and of Mick Napier, a leading figure of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) are transparently fraudulent. They are a deliberate, premeditated attack on democratic rights of opponents of the rampant Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
The accusations against them, of giving support to a ‘proscribed organisation’ (Mick Napier has actually been charged with this) are in both cases insulting to anyone of normal intelligence. Both of these individuals are long-time labour movement and socialist activists and the supposition that either of them is in some way a supporter of either the political or military wing of Hamas (a nationalist organisation with a dominant Islamic religious ideology), both of which are proscribed by the British government, is obviously a complete fabrication.
Both have had imposed on them outrageous bail conditions aimed at stopping them from campaigning for the Palestinians, from using the internet and social media and even mobile phones (without police surveillance), and in Tony’s case from staying overnight away from his home, which affects personal arrangements for the care of his disabled child. In Mick’s case, he has been banned from the centre of his native Glasgow, and from all protests. Tony has similar bans from protests, even though he has not actually been charged. Furthermore, since recently he was given a suspended sentence after being convicted in an earlier rigged trial for ‘criminal damage’ against the criminal armourer of Israeli genocide, Elbit Systems (an Israeli arms company which operates in Britain), as part of Palestine Action, this fraudulent potential charge puts his freedom at risk.
The attempt at suppressing public political protest and dissent is transparent here. This has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘terrorism’ and makes a complete mockery of the concept even in bourgeois terms.
What they are actually being attacked for is expressing support to the Palestinian people in their just struggle against Zionist oppression, ethnic cleansing and mass extermination. This struggle is under the leadership, in part, of Hamas as well as other trends within the Palestinian body politic, from secular nationalists such as the principled wing of Fatah, bourgeois democrats like the Palestinian National Initiative, to communist-inclined trends such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as well as other religious trends like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Its laughable that Mick Napier and Tony Greenstein are being associated with supporting Hamas as a political trend; such allegations could only be made by conscious liars and wannabe perjurers. There are plenty of such people in the Friends of Israel factions of all the major bourgeois parties, and no doubt senior police officers who inhabit the same ruling class milieux. The fact that such crooked cops and the politicians giving them their marching orders cannot escape from, is that under bourgeois ‘international law’ even, the right of an oppressed and occupied people to resist their oppressors is explicitly legal and indeed sanctified – provided it can be enforced against big money, and the power of capital, Zionism and imperialism to subvert even elementary formal democratic rights under (bourgeois) democracy.
Obviously, where the Western ruling classes are using a law against a particular organisation (characterised as ‘terrorist’) to try to justify the mass terrorism and murder of their own ally, the Israeli racist ethnocracy, statements made in support of the Palestinian people which proceed under the leadership of trends like Hamas, can be mendaciously distorted and taken out of context in order falsely accuse activists of giving support to a particular trend. The ruling class resorts to such mendacity because it does not (yet) dare to proscribe support for the Palestinian people tout court, renouncing bourgeois international law, and thereby openly embrace Nazi-like genocide. Though it is doing this by stealth on behalf of the current Israeli regime, which includes open fascists like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who outflank the prolific mass murderer Netanyahu from the far right, that is really what they are trying to do.
The other thing these lowlifes are doing is falsely accusing Palestine solidarity activists of ‘anti-Semitism’, for noting the similarity of Israel’s genocidal slaughter with Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. But the problem is that the resemblance is strictly factual, so they end up arresting people for saying things that anyone with any basic humanity who is not blinded by bigoted pro-Zionist racist prejudice should say. Thus Ranjeet Brar, a leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist Leninist) was arrested a few weeks ago for selling a clearly anti-racist, anti-Zionist pamphlet whose cover equates the Zionist use of the Star of David with the Nazi use of the Swastika.
Of course, both were originally pure religious symbols, the Swastika for Hinduism and some forms of Buddhism, the Star of David for Judaism, but their dominant contemporary meaning is genocidal. The police have put out ‘wanted’ posters for other protesters making similar points about Israel’s Nazi-like practice. The earlier police arrest of Yael Khan, a Jewish woman many of whose family were murdered in the Nazi holocaust, for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’ for talking about the ‘Gaza Holocaust’, completely backfired – charging such a person with racism against themselves was a complete non-starter legally – she was released without charge or any bail conditions.
The obvious mendacity and indeed rampant stupidity of these arrests are really manifestations of gutter-level anti-Arab racism by the cops and the far-right politicians, like Sunak, Cleverly, Braverman (who went too far in trying to ban mass pro-Palestine demonstrations and had to be sacked) as well as similar genocidal racists like Starmer in the Labour Party who back them up.
The racist Zionists in the government and its lackeys in the Starmer leadership of the Labour Party are hysterical about the popular antipathy for their support for genocide in Gaza. Both the government and Starmer publicly supported the ‘right’ of Israel to wage war on the population of Gaza using starvation as a weapon of war, as Human Rights Watch belated said about Israel’s blitzkrieg. Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant publicly announced Israel’s intention to deprive the population of Gaza, who he described as ‘human animals’, of food, fuel and even drinking water.
This is as clearly exterminationist as the Nazi use of gas chambers in Auschwitz and similar places, and the pathetic apologias put forward by mendacious apologists in the media, like Julia Hartley-Brewer and similar genocidaire hacks, that Gallant was talking about Hamas and not the population of Gaza, do not hold water at all. Hamas evidently have their own military supplies as any minimally efficient military force would. He was clearly talking about the population of Gaza itself.
Many Zionist political monsters have corroborated this including Netanyahu himself, who in a nationwide address cited the Biblical ‘Amalek’ tale where the ancient Israelites are supposed to have slaughtered the entire ‘enemy’ population, including women, children, babies and even owned animals, to motivate what Israel is doing in Gaza. Other leading politicians, such as Israel President Herzog and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett have mocked the idea that there are any ‘innocent’ civilians in Gaza, even babies. As is well known, over 10,000 children, including numerous babies, have been brutally slaughtered in less than three months of this demented genocidal massacre. The rate of child murder in what has now become the Gaza extermination camp has actually outpaced the average rate of child murder in Auschwitz in the four years of its operation from 1941-5.
But that didn’t stop the Sunak government, Cleverly, etc ad nauseum, from backing Gallant, Netanyahu, etc to the hilt, using grossly exaggerated claims of Hamas atrocities and brutality on 7th October as an alibi for supporting this genocide. Keir Starmer, questioned by Nick Ferrari at the beginning of Israel’s onslaught, clearly stated that Israel “has that right”, i.e., the right to deprive Palestinian civilians of food, fuel and drinking water – as noted, a clear act of genocidal intent. Fabricated blood libels about supposed mass rape, beheading and cooking babies, etc, were levelled against Hamas by these genocidaires to justify Israel’s slaughter.
The falsity of these claims has increasingly been exposed: many of the claims of rape and baby murder were fabricated by a racist outfit, ZAKA, founded by a notorious, convicted serial rapist (of victims of both sexes), and extremist Orthodox Jewish/Zionist fanatic, Yehuda Meshi Zahav. As the falsity of these claims was exposed, their current leader, Yossi Laudau, stated that anyone who questions ZAKA’s version of these events ‘should be killed’. The claims that Hamas massacred over a thousand civilians (in fact a third of the deaths on Oct 7th were from the Israeli military) have been exposed as fake given the now-proven mass application of Israel’s Hannibal Directive, the deliberate killing of their own troops and even civilians to prevent them being captured by an enemy. A number of accounts by Israeli survivors of the Oct 7th action have exposed how many of the civilians who died were killed by Israeli tank shells and Hellfire missiles. Much of the extensive damage done to cars and buildings around the kibbutzim and the music festival from which hostages were taken by Hamas show that heavy weapons were responsible which Hamas simply don’t have, but the IDF are armed to the teeth with. The most that can be said about the Hamas operation is that some non-Hamas elements followed them through the demolished Gaza fence and sought their own revenge on ordinary Israelis for previous barbarities committed against Gaza people. But compared to the mass Hannibal perpetrated by the IDF, this was a small proportion of what happened. This is what the evidence points to, and is becoming clearer as more evidence emerges as to what happened.
Not only should all charges be dropped against Tony Greenstein, Mick Napier, Ranjeet Brar et al, but those politicians from the Tory government, the bourgeois parties including Labour, who support repression against Palestine defenders, are complicit and guilty of aiding and abetting this genocide. We need an organised workers’ militia, millions strong, based on mass trade unions, to combat the bourgeois police, give them a “bloody good hiding”, in the words of Bernie Grant, and replace their socially useful functions. We need a workers’ government counterposed to all these despicable, racist, murderous parties which, far from criminalising opponents of genocide, will criminalise its supporters and subject them to revolutionary workers’ justice. These far right, murderous genocidal scum need to get what the fascist Russian Black Hundreds got from the revolutionary Cheka after 1917, or what Nazi human garbage (who failed to commit suicide) like Streicher and Frick got from the Nuremburg Trials.
