We were waiting for Richard Medhurst to arrive and join our panel at the Beautiful Days festival, when he was arrested and imprisoned for 23.5 hours. Obviously we were all worried sick about him.

I was arrested at Heathrow Airport under the Terrorism Act, Sec 12 because of my reporting.

6 police officers were waiting for me at the entrance of the aircraft.

I was held for almost 24 hours and questioned.

I believe I'm the first journalist to be arrested under this… pic.twitter.com/pbf6q5dXIf

— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) August 19, 2024

It is now becoming easier to list the truly dissident UK journalists who have not been arrested for terrorism than those who have! This fascist ploy of labelling journalists as terrorists is incredible.

Richard’s case is slightly different to that of other journalists including myself, John Laughland, Vanessa Beeley, Johanna Ross, Kit Klarenberg and many more to suffer the same treatment, in that Richard was specifically held under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act – which outlaws support for a proscribed organisation.

Yes, you are reading that right. You can go to jail for 14 years for expressing an opinion in support of a proscribed organisation.

We now have an extraordinary conflict between UK domestic law and international law.

The International Court of Justice has just last month stated definitively to the UN General Assembly that the Israeli occupation is illegal and it is the duty of states not to support it.

279. Moreover, the Court considers that, in view of the character and importance of the rights and obligations involved, all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. They are also under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It is for all States, while respecting the Charter of the United Nations and international law, to ensure that any impediment resulting from the illegal presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the exercise of the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination is brought to an end. In addition, all the States parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention have the obligation, while respecting the Charter of the United Nations and international law, to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law as embodied in that Convention.

Yet it is perfectly legal in UK domestic law for zionists to state that they support the Israeli Defence Force and they hope that the IDF kill every Palestinian in Gaza.

Indeed zionists state this all the time, supporting an action that is entirely illegal in international law, and no action is ever taken against these zionists by the UK state.

Members of the IDF who have actually participated in the genocide are able to come and live in the UK unmolested.

In stark contrast to the illegal acts of the occupying power, the Palestinian people do have the right of armed resistance in international law.

This right is founded on the right of self-determination in the UN Charter and is encapsulated in the First Protocol of the Geneva Convention (1977) Article 1 Para 4:

The situations referred to in the preceding paragraph include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

Yet under UK law it is legal to express support for the completely illegal operations of the IDF (illegal even without considering the question of Genocide!) while it is illegal to express support for completely legal acts of resistance by certain Palestinian groups.

Let me spell this out again.

It is legal in UK law to support Israel’s genocidal and illegal acts of colonial occupation, but illegal in UK law to support Palestine’s legal acts of armed resistance to colonial and racist occupation.

The Protocol to the Geneva Convention makes clear that those engaged in armed resistance against occupation are both entitled to the same humanitarian protections, and obliged to respect the same humanitarian law, as other combatants.

There is a fascinating twist here from the days when Robin Cook was Foreign Secretary and I was Deputy Head of the FCO Africa Department. In 1998 the First Protocol of the Geneva Convention was incorporated into UK law, and the United Kingdom made a very telling reservation.

British law stipulates that the First Protocol’s recognition that a person not wearing uniform may still be a lawful combatant, and entitled to the full protections of the Geneva Convention provided he carries his arms openly, applies only in occupied territory or when engaged in fighting colonial or racist occupation.

Let us look at that more closely.

Schedule H of the UK Geneva Conventions Act (First Protocol) Order 1998 states that

ARTICLE 44, paragraph 3

It is the understanding of the United Kingdom that:

the situation in the second sentence of paragraph 3 can only exist in occupied territory or in armed conflicts covered by paragraph 4 of Article 1;

… which means that this provision of the First Protocol:

Recognizing, however, that there are situations in armed conflicts where, owing to the nature of the hostilities an armed combatant cannot so distinguish himself, he shall retain his status as a combatant, provided that, in such situations, he carries his arms openly:

(a) During each military engagement, and

(b) During such time as he is visible to the adversary while he is engaged in a military deployment preceding the launching of an attack in which he is to participate.

Acts which comply with the requirements of this paragraph shall not be considered as perfidious within the meaning of Article 37, paragraph 1 (c).

… only applies in UK law where:

The situations referred to in the preceding paragraph include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

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.

Hamas and Hezbollah are acting legally in UK law in terms of the Geneva Convention First Protocol Order of 1998, but expressing support for them is nevertheless illegal because the proscription of an organisation is an entirely arbitrary power of the executive.

When I ran the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s South Africa (Political) Desk in 1985, it was the firm position of the Thatcher Government that the ANC was a terrorist organisation and that Nelson Mandela was rightly and correctly imprisoned as a terrorist.

The notion that governments can fairly and impartially designate “terrorists” is very obviously nuts.

It is important to add that this analysis of the legal position in no way implies that I do, or do not, approve of Hamas or Hezbollah. In general I am not in favour of mixing the state and religion, so I come from a very different place and have my criticisms.

But it is also important not to be scared to state that the proscription of Hamas as a terrorist organisation does not align with the UK legal position in the First Protocol Order that specifically recognises the right of an occupied people to armed resistance.

It also causes great confusion. It is, for example, only the military wing of Hamas that is a proscribed organisation. So far as I can tell, it would not be illegal to state that Hamas did a very good job of running Gaza’s schools and hospitals.

But it is very difficult to be sure – the law and its application are arbitrary and not foreseeable.

When I stood for election in Blackburn, I had the specific endorsement of the Palestinian Foreign Ministry which had been engaged with the South African delegation in the ICJ Genocide case against Israel at the Hague.

I was then also (unsolicited) offered the endorsement of Hamas. This caused some head-scratching and I consulted an eminent lawyer. He advised that while it would be illegal for me to endorse Hamas, it would not be illegal for Hamas to endorse me.

Particularly so if it came from the political and not the military wing.

I thought this sounded great fun, but perhaps not great enough fun for me to spend several years of my life fighting the case from inside a prison cell. So I did not take up the offer.

Any law which states you can be jailed for fourteen years simply for expressing an opinion is a very bad law, no matter what that opinion may be.

To use such arbitrary power to seek to silence those who are opposing a most dreadful genocide, is the action of an over-mighty state led by evil people.

I think it is most important that we are not silenced. Hence this article. Most of my friends are advising me I should travel abroad for a while once again, and I am trying to make up my mind about this. I should be grateful for your views.

The UK is plainly not a safe place for political dissidents.

The reason for this galloping authoritarianism is of course panic by the political class that they have lost popular consent, particularly for zionism in view of the appalling genocide in plain view by the terrorist settler state.

To conclude on an optimistic note, here is a photo of the gathering that Richard was prevented from joining. It brought together at Beautiful Days a few of the wonderful people who will not be silenced, and who will be remembered as being on the right side of history.

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The purpose of Scottish Independence is not to replicate the UK state on a smaller scale with a prettier flag. The purpose is to eschew the imperialist past, stop invading other countries, and build a fairer and more equal society both domestically and internationally.

I thank God I was alive and campaigning in 2014 when for a joyous few months a better world seemed within our grasp; genuine transformational change to a better society was almost tangible, we only had to reach for it.

In all the speeches I gave in that campaign, I concentrated on international relations, because others were covering domestic policy comprehensively and brilliantly, and because Independence at essence is a factor of international relations: it is the standing of a state in relation to other states.

The more radical vision I proposed was well received everywhere. I spoke of a Scotland without enemies, without nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers, with genuinely defensive defence forces, not part of the organised aggression that is NATO.

I remember Glasgow Green erupting in cheers when I quoted James Connolly to a huge crowd:

When it is said that we ought to unite to protect our shores against the ‘foreign enemy’, I confess to be unable to follow that line of reasoning, as I know of no foreign enemy of this country except the British Government

I should add that having then addressed grassroots meetings of every conceivable size over months, on pavements, in meeting rooms and church halls or on stages in parks, not a single person ever turned round and said to me “Oh no, I think we should stay in NATO” or “I think Trident is essential”.

Well, we lost the Independence referendum, though it was far closer than anybody had imagined a year previously. The energies of the Independence movement were all diverted into the institutional structure of the SNP, which became temporarily dominant in Scotland.

But there all the energy and enthusiasm, all of that idealism, was dissipated by the leadership of a political class who turned out to be just the same as the political class at Westminster. Corrupt, greedy, self-serving and desperate for “respectability” and their role within the UK Establishment.

This has been brutally hammered home this week by Angus Robertson, the Scottish Government’s external affairs and culture minister, meeting the Israeli Deputy Ambassador to the UK in the midst of the current accelerated phase of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

Thank you @AngusRobertson for welcoming us to wonderful Scotland.

Discussed the unique commonalities between 🇮🇱-🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 and also emphasized the urgent need to bring back our 115 hostages.

Looking forward to cooperating in the fields of technology, culture and renewable energy. pic.twitter.com/sh2KeqRa9j

— Daniela Grudsky (@DanielaGrudsky) August 12, 2024

A Scottish Government spokesman confirmed that areas of mutual cooperation had been discussed before John Swinney, alarmed at the criticism from the membership, dribbled out a statement to say it was “essential” to meet the Israeli diplomat to “call for a ceasefire”.

The Scottish government spokesperson’s account aligned with Israel’s account:

The spokesperson said: “They discussed areas of mutual interest, including culture, renewable energy and engaging the country’s respective diasporas.

In 1985 my first big job in the FCO was running the South Africa (political) desk during apartheid there and while Thatcher was Prime Minister. As the US and UK stood alone against international calls to sanction and boycott South Africa, the Thatcher line was that contact was essential to promote reform.

The contact was of course in fact pretty well devoid of any advocacy of reform, other than a hurried mention so civil servants could say it had been raised. Instead, it was all about making money from apartheid.

Forty years on the SNP is pulling the same stunt as the Tories did over apartheid South Africa . As the ever brilliant Robin McAlpine put it:

Let me be really, really blunt; if calling for an end to genocide is only one item on your agenda for a meeting, you’re an appalling human. ‘Please stop killing Palestinian babies, oh, and would you like a Scotwind contract and an invitation to the Edinburgh Festival’? Fuck right off.

Swinney and Robertson are of course long term Zionists, as is almost the entire UK political class (and mark my words, there are few members of the British political class with their feet more firmly under the UK political structures table than Swinney and Robertson). Indeed, as I have previously explained, Zionism is a necessary badge of entry to the UK political class.

Here is Robertson with former Israeli government spokesman and Israeli Ambassador to the UK Mark Regev:

And here with Zionism's Lord Haw Haw, Mark Regev. pic.twitter.com/uqGm0eia9k

— Mark Hirst (@Documark) August 15, 2024

And here Robertson is with Israeli President Herzog, who was quoted directly by the International Court of Justice as giving an example of genocidal speech which was among the markers that justified their finding of a case to answer on genocide. Herzog also has signed bombs ready to drop on Gaza.

All of this begs the question, what other undisclosed meetings and contacts have @theSNP @scotgov been having with Israeli officials that weren't inadvertently revealed by Zionist representatives?

Scottish Government is not usually so coy!

Full disclosure needed. https://t.co/saruo7LMwg

— Mark Hirst (@Documark) August 15, 2024

Note Kirsten Oswald front left, Nicola Sturgeon’s close political ally. These last photos were taken before last year, but Israel’s illegal and genocidal actions have been in train for 76 years, not just 10 months.

First Minister John Swinney has a terrible record of collaboration with Israel.

Eden Springs was an Israeli settler owned water company, bottling water from the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights. They opened a subsidiary company in Scotland which was the subject of much controversy a decade ago, with a huge and successful boycott movement, especially among students.

As Scottish Minister for Trade and Industry, Swinney actually gave Eden Springs £200,000 of Scottish government money to help them overcome the effects of the boycott.

Before that, as SPSC reported in 2012, John Swinney made a rare foray into the BDS arena: A subsidiary of Eden Springs, an Israeli water bottling company operating in Britain “turned successfully for help from the Scottish Government to deal with what the Israeli company called ‘a wave of protests…that is threatening the future of Eden Springs UK’”.

On January 5th 2010, a meeting took place between Eden Springs’ UK Managing Director Jean-Marc Bolinger and Scottish Minister John Swinney. The Scottish Government the following year gave £200,000 of Scottish taxpayers’ money to Eden Springs, some of which will end up as profits in Israel, taxed there and freeing up state funds for military aggression and further dispossession of the Palestinian people.

So, to use the modern phrase, Swinney and Robertson’s Zionism is a feature not a glitch. The SNP is just like the other parties in being led by career politicians for whom Zionism is an essential belief for admission to the UK Establishment.

This episode has served to highlight the difference between the continued aspiration of the Scottish people for a better state, in which foreign relations are conducted on ethical grounds, and the actual SNP political class who have precisely the same cynical and transactional approach to politics as their UK peers – they see it essentially as a tool to make a fat living.

The key point is of course that everybody cares about Gaza because of the immediacy with which we can see the devastating genocide on our mobile devices. The political and media classes cannot gaslight us that it is not happening.

Ordinary people look at creatures like Robertson with horror. Swinney is counting on the summer holidays and the traditional extreme deference of the SNP membership to enable him to ride out this storm.

Despite the best effort of the traitors to Independence who run the SNP, the extraordinary thing is that the dream has not died. Support for Independence has not fallen even as the SNP itself has dwindled to a despised rump of its former representation.

A huge well of support remains for anyone who can invoke again the spirit of 2014.

We are not far off that day. As come it will for a’ that.

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In Murder in Samarkand I describe how as a British Ambassador, when I discovered the full extent of our complicity in torture in the War on Terror, I thought it must be a rogue operation and all I had to do was make ministers and senior officials aware and they would stop it.

When I was reprimanded and officially told that receipt of intelligence from torture in the “War on Terror” was approved from the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary down, and it became clear to me that there was a deliberate promoting of false intelligence narratives through torture which exaggerated the Al Qaida threat to justify military policy in Afghanistan and Central Asia, my worldview was severely shaken.

Somehow I mentally compartmentalised this as an aberration, due to overreaction to 9/11 and the unique narcissism and viciousness of Tony Blair. I did not lose faith in western democracy or the notion that the western powers, on the whole, were a positive force when contrasted with other powers.

It is a hard thing to lose the entire belief system in which you were brought up – probably particularly hard if like me, you had a very happy life right from childhood and were highly successful within the terms of the governmental system.

I have however now finally shed the last of my illusions and I am obliged to acknowledge that the system of which I am a part – call it “the West”, “liberal democracy”, “capitalism”, “neo-liberalism”, “neo-conservatism”, “Imperialism”, “the New World Order” – call it what you will in fact, it is a force for evil.

Gaza has been an important catalyst. I am not lacking in empathy, but my knowledge of the horrid butchery by the Western powers in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya was an intellectual knowledge, not a lived experience.

Sirte, Libya, after Nato “liberation”.

Technology has brought us the Gaza genocide – which has so far killed fewer people than any of those earlier NATO member perpetrated massacres – in gut wrenching detail. I have just been looking at 75kg bags of mixed human meat handed over to relatives in lieu of an identifiable corpse, and am in shock.

That is not the worst we have seen in Gaza.

If only the people of Mosul and Fallujah had had modern mobile phone technology, what horrors we would know.

Incidentally, I tried to find you some images of the massive US destruction of Mosul and Fallujah in 2002‒4 and Google won’t give me any. It will, however, offer thousands of images from fighting there with ISIL in 2017. Which rather underlines my point about the extraordinary lack of imagery of the Second Iraq War.

Of the current genocide in Gaza, again I found myself naively thinking at some point this will stop. That Western politicians would not in fact countenance the total destruction of Gaza. That there would be a limit to the number of Palestinian civilian deaths they could accept, the number of UN facilities, schools and hospitals destroyed, the number of little children torn into shreds.

I thought that at some stage human decency must outweigh Zionist lobby cash.

But I was wrong.

The Ukrainian attack into Kursk also has a profound emotional resonance. The Battle of Kursk was arguably the most important blow struck against Nazi Germany, the largest tank battle in the history of the world by a wide margin.

The Ukrainian government has destroyed all the monuments to the Red Army which achieved this, and denigrates the Ukrainians who fought against fascism. By contrast, it honours the very substantial Ukrainian components of the Nazi forces, including but not limited to, the Galician Division and their leaders.

Kursk is therefore a place of great symbolism for Ukraine to attack now into Russia, including with German artillery and armour.

German politicians seem to have an atavistic urge to attack Russia, and support the genocide of Palestinians to an astonishing degree.

Germany has effectively ended all freedom of speech on Palestine, banning conferences of distinguished speakers and making pro-Palestinian speech illegal. Germany has intervened on Israel’s side in the genocide case before the ICJ, and intervened at the ICC to object to an arrest warrant against Netanyahu.

I do not know how many civilian dead would assuage German lust for the expiatory blood of Palestinians. 500,000? 1 Million? 2 Million?

Or perhaps 6 Million?

The West are not the good guys. Our so-called “democratic systems” give us no ability to vote for anybody who may get into power who does not support the genocide and imperialist foreign policy.

It is not an accident and it is not genius that makes a man-child like Elon Musk worth 100 billion dollars. The power structures of society are deliberately designed by those with wealth to promote massive concentration of wealth in favour of those who already have it, exploiting and disempowering the rest of society.

The rise of the multi-billionaires is not a fluke. It is a plan, and the misallocation of more than adequate resources is the cause of poverty. The attempt to shift blame onto the desperate constituents of waves of immigration forced into life by Western destruction of foreign countries, is also systematic.

There is no longer any free space for dissent in the media to oppose any of this.

We are the Bad Guys. We resist our own governing systems, or we are complicit.

In the United Kingdom it falls to the Celtic nations to try to break up the state which is a subordinate but important imperialist engine. The paths of resistance are various, depending where you are.

But find one and take one.

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I cannot think of a period in my lifetime when so much was happening in the world so quickly with which it feels that, as a reluctant UK citizen, I have a direct connection and indeed responsibility.

Race riots in the UK, the genocide in Gaza, the attacks on civil liberty and decline in effective democracy across the western world, the ever darkening reach of mass surveillance, including of the individual’s use of currency; those are just a few of the issues in play and the links between all of them are intimate and inextricable.

I do not believe that the race riots have been fomented in order to provide an excuse to crack down further on civil liberties. But that Starmer – whom I suspect will prove to be the most authoritarian Prime Minister in British history – is seizing on them for that prupose is undeniable.

In particular the announcement that the already deeply worrying Online Safety Act will be amended, to give the state still greater power over information sources like the one which you are currently reading, could signal a massive blow to internet freedom.

Publication of “misinformation” is to be criminalised – which means the official narrative will be enforced on social media.

Given that, for example, the government has relentlessly promoted the demonstrably false stories of mass rape by Palestinians on October 7, while studiously failing to notice the vast amount of unquestionable evidence in the last fortnight of systematic rape of Palestinian prisoners on a vast scale by the Israeli Defence Force, no reasonable person can fail to understand the danger of the enforcement of state-approved “truth”.

Articles like my dissection of the state narrative on the Skripals look set to be deemed a threat to the “online safety” of the nation. Alternative narratives over Covid, over 9/11, over the death of David Kelly – any deviation from the official line is liable to be deemed criminal.

Meanwhile, with “two-tier justice” being the latest right wing mantra, we find that race rioters who set fires in inhabited buildings and threw rocks at policemen, in fact get lighter sentences than environmentalists involved in planning non-violent actions.

Predictably, we are already seeing the unrest used as a justification for increased usage of facial recognition technology. 24/7 state surveillance of the individual is no longer a wild dystopian fear.

Looking further afield, the narrative is moved on by the claims that an ISIS-linked terrorist in Austria planned to attack a Taylor Swift concert. This plays nicely into the Taylor Swift theme of the dance class where the girls were horribly murdered in Southport, and reinvigorates the flagging wave of Islamophobia.

Given that ISIS cooperates closely with both Israel and the CIA and has avoided attacking Israel or western targets, while I still can without being locked up may I express my scepticism at this item of news management.

Islamophobia is of course an important link between events here and in the Middle East. While there is of course a small Palestinian Christian minority, there is no doubt that hatred of Muslims is a large driver in the Israeli dehumanisation of Palestinians that paves the psychological grounds for genocide, mass rape and torture.

Here Israel is just acting as the Western colonial enterprise that it is. As the West has sought to seize the physical resources of the Middle East – the hydrocarbons of Iraq, Syria and Libya and the lands of the Palestinians – the deliberate promulgation of Islamophobia at home has driven public support for these ventures, though that public support is thankfully a dwindling commodity.

After decades of being fed nonsense about a war of civilisations and the dangers of Islamic terrorism, whipping up anti-immigrant mobs has not been difficult. It does not require too deep an analysis of the nexus of Islamophobia and wider racism to understand that.

But it is also true that Zionist interests have been extremely keen to stoke this unrest, as a counter-narrative to the mass popular support for Palestine which the genocide has engendered among western populations.

What’s causing the Islamophobic riots across the UK, and why now?

1. The riots have been instigated by the Zionist asset Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), who has been working for the State of Israel since 2009 as part of the so-called ‘counterjihad’ Islamophobia…

— David Miller (@Tracking_Power) August 3, 2024

It is also well worth reading this thread from Lowkey

Tommy Robinson has previously stated he would “fight for Israel in a war.”

This thread examines Robinson and EDL’s very clear material relationship with the Zionist Movement and considers the possibility that the racist attacks and pogroms in Britain are part of that fight.

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) August 4, 2024

It is also of course impossible to ignore the role of born-again Zionist Elon Musk and his cohort in whipping up the Islamophobic and racist narrative.

These people, of course, always support free movement for themselves. Elon Musk is in fact an immigrant from Africa, whereas “Tommy Robinson” is an immigrant in Spain.

Predictably the state has countered with the anti-semitism narrative, and rather hilariously they have yet again brought out the utterly ludicrous claims of the “Community Security Trust” of an increase in “anti-semitic incidents”.

This time the Trust are claiming a 210% increase in anti-semitic incidents, which is quite modest by their standards. I have pointed out again and again that any journalist with a Maths O-level would have been able to work out that their claims of increases in attacks between 45% and 300% every year for twenty years simply cannot be true or there would now be many hundreds of thousands of attacks on Jewish people per year and thankfully that is plainly untrue.

Every single year since 2005 the Community Security Trust has claimed an increase in anti-semitic incidents of between 42% and 300%. “Journalists” like Peston always retail this.
If true there would now be at least 36,000 violent anti-semitic attacks a year.
Average number of… https://t.co/Tf3Mx7mBj0 pic.twitter.com/bQbjITXgOg

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) October 10, 2023

I suppose if the lie works as propaganda, they simply stick with it. But there could hardly be a starker illustration of the pathetic enslavement of mainstream media journalists that nobody ever queries these plainly impossible claims.

It is also worth noting that as the CST – which gets £12 million a year from the Home Office – construes references to “apartheid Israel” as anti-semitic incidents, then the ICJ Opinion on the Occupied Territories would count as an anti-semitic incident by these Home Office sponsored standards!

Finally, while the racist tide appears to be receding, I commend everybody who got out there to counter-protest. It is extremely dangerous to allow fascists the run of the streets and we must remain both nimble and active.

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UPDATE

The people of Blackburn scored a vital victory today against the forces of fascism as “Tommy Robinson”‘s overweight racist disciples were met with an overwhelming show of solidarity in the street, of which I was proud with my friends to be a part.

The fascists like to attack defenceless targets. Faced with the prospect of real resistance, they ran away.

Poor little Tommy is not happy in his Spanish hideaway, where he lives his life as an immigrant.

Blackburn should be a model of how to face down the fascists.

Yesterday I received a phone call from a police Inspector asking me to delete my tweet calling for people to assemble to prevent the far-right demonstration called for Blackburn today and tweeted out by “Tommy Robinson”, the well-known immigrant to Spain with the false name.

She also asked me not to come to Blackburn myself, and said that members of the community had contacted her and said I was an outsider coming to Blackburn to make trouble.

I am therefore on a train to Blackburn, a place where a number of people have been telling me to leave for weeks, but I genuinely can’t walk down the street without being warmly greeted by name by random locals.

Although our conversation was perfectly friendly and I have no complaints about the police Inspector, who seemed to accept that her telling me not to come was unlikely to work, I do rather object to the police telling me what to do.

There are a number of interesting questions raised by this. There is a wave of anti-immigrant far-right violence spreading across the North of England – Sunderland, Southport, Hartlepool and elsewhere – and recently London saw the largest fascist demonstration for many years.

The horrific murders of the poor little girls in Southport at a dance class have been seized on by the far right to foment anti-immigrant violence. This is such a well-established pattern now across the country that it is impossible to deny.

And yet the police inspector who phoned me did deny it. She told me to be aware that three little girls had died and this was about commemorating them. I replied it was not about that at all; it was about stirring up racial hatred against a community who had no connection at all to the murder.

Blackburn’s newly elected independent MP, Adnan Hussain, has also issued a call to people not to gather to oppose any far-right demonstration today. I believe this is mistaken. The wave of fascist violence across the country has gathered momentum precisely because it breeds copycat activity. Fascism has to be confronted and stopped.

That is not just a matter of explaining that poverty and deprivation is not caused by immigration but by an economic system designed to produce massive inequality of wealth. Fascism has also to be nipped in the bud by denying them control of the street. That is what we achieved with the Anti-Nazi League 40-odd years ago.

If you do not confront fascism and defeat it, it will grow.

How does this stand with my strong commitment to free speech?

In On Liberty, the great John Stuart Mill argued that to state that corn merchants are thieves and profiteers who starve the poor was perfectly valid. But to shout the same thing to a howling mob outside a corn merchant’s house was not valid freedom of speech.

It is not just the words, it is their context. This is a crucial insight (and it also carries a pro-freedom of speech weight against the sledgehammer of hate speech legislation which denies the importance of context and seeks to condemn simple forms of speech).

And I have no doubt at all that as for the likes of “Tommy Robinson” to be encouraging anti-immigrant speech in the highly ethnically diverse town of Blackburn, in the context of widespread anti-immigrant violence, this fits perfectly with Mill’s exception to free speech in the case of the mob and the corn merchant.

I hope all goes quietly and my journey is quite unnecessary. There are multiple far-right demonstrations today and perhaps this will not be one of those that gets nasty. But I shall be there ready to profess my truth and my opposition to fascism if called for.

Allowing fascists to speak and sitting mute ourselves – or being prevented from speaking by the police – is completely the wrong prescription.

I very much hope I don’t get arrested because I have to dash back to speak at the Free Palestine Film Festival this evening, Genesis Cinema, Mile End Road, London. Yesterday’s opening night was great and I will blog about it when life is less fraught. There may still be tickets for tonight – phone the cinema to check.

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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box: