Protest Laws Should Be Viewed As Efforts To Ban Criticism Of Israel
Laws aimed at pro-Palestine protests should always be looked at as efforts to ban criticism of Israel. That’s what we’re seeing in the UK as the prime minister encourages the prosecution of anyone who says “globalise the intifada”.
“If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted,” said Keir Starmer during a Thursday press conference. “It is racism, extremely racism and it has left a minority community in this country scared, intimidated, wondering if they belong. So, I say again this government will do everything in our power to stamp this hatred out.”
The UK has already banned any expression of support for the activist group Palestine Action, and recently passed a ban on repeat protests, and has already arrested demonstrators for using of the word “intifada” in their pro-Palestine activism on the basis of “racially aggravated public order offences.” And now the prime minister wants them all to be prosecuted with increased aggression.
This is all a thinly-disguised effort to throw a chilling effect over the entire pro-Palestine protest movement. The goal is to just keep adding more and more protest laws until nobody’s willing to attend a pro-Palestine demonstration without a lawyer present to advise them on exactly what they may and may not say if they want to avoid being sent to prison.
Starmer’s comments were made in response to a non-fatal stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green on Wednesday, which the prime minister instantly labeled an “antisemitic attack” and which police say is being treated as a terrorist incident.
The entire western political/media class has of course seized on this opportunity to shriek about antisemitism, and to demand crackdowns on anti-Israel speech and pro-Palestine demonstrations. Here in Australia this story has been receiving frenzied wall-to-wall coverage in our propagandistic mainstream press, despite the fact that it’s a story about a non-lethal stabbing on an island on the other side of the planet which experienced some 53,000 blade-related crimes last year.
Inconveniently for all the narratives we’re seeing advanced about Jew hate and terrorism, there is as of this writing no public evidence that the attack was motivated by hateful ideology. Britain’s Channel 4 News reports that the suspect, a Somali-born British citizen named Essa Suleiman, had left the care of a psychiatric hospital just days before the attack, and that he has an extensive history of mental illness and violent behavior. In 2008 Suleiman was reportedly incarcerated for assaulting a police officer and his dog; we can probably assume the police dog was not Jewish.
Also inconvenient for the antisemitic terrorism narrative is the fact that the two Jewish men weren’t the only victims of Suleiman’s rampage that day. On top of his charges for the Golders Green attack, Suleiman also stands accused of attempting to murder his longtime acquaintance Ishmail Hussein earlier in the day. I’m not an expert at these things but “Hussein” doesn’t sound like a Jewish surname to me, and I think we can safely assume that if there was a third Jewish victim that day it wouldn’t have been kept a secret from the press.
If I saw someone go on a stabbing spree attacking Jewish and non-Jewish people immediately after leaving a psychiatric hospital, my first thought would not be “This was definitely a politically motivated act of antisemitic terrorism.” My first thought would be that this was a mentally ill man who was failed by the system, who flipped out and put lives at risk during some kind of psychotic break.
In 2020 Suleiman was reportedly referred to Prevent — an early-intervention government program designed to steer vulnerable members of the public away from extremism — but his listing was shelved shortly thereafter. We can only speculate at this point, but this could easily have occurred because the relevant authorities deemed that any red flags his behavior might have thrown up were the product of mental illness rather than any dangerous ideology, after which they tossed his file in the “not our problem” bin.
The fact that Suleiman’s violence was not directed only at Jews, combined with the fact that he was struggling with severe mental health issues at the time, would seemingly make it very difficult to prove that his spree had the political or religious motives of a terrorist. Which may be why as of this writing he has only been charged with attempted murder rather than facing any terrorism charges.
As you can see, the narrative that this was an antisemitic hate crime necessitating sweeping authoritarian measures is about as flimsy as it gets. But they’re shoving it through anyway, as hard as they can. They are doing this not to protect Jews but to protect the information interests of the state of Israel, with whom the western empire is intimately intertwined.
I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no greater threat to free speech in the western world than Israel and its supporters. The whole of western society must resist tooth and claw the mad push to stomp out our right to oppose war, genocide, apartheid, and injustice.
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They already showed their hand when it was made illegal to call genocide genocide.
Well done for publishing and saying - Peace be upon you by Gaza and Jerusalem - Honour and victory are the allies of the axis of resistance and its allies, and humiliation and shame are for the axis of evil, Epstein Class (USA, Britain, France, Turkey, Qatar, UAE, NATO Governments, Zionist and Israel) and its allies.