Opinion

Is the UK government creating a 'Stasi' police force to silence Israel's critics?


October 23, 2024 

Students and workers with the SOAS Liberated Zone for Gaza shut down a Barclays Bank branch on Tottenham Court Road in London on 29 May 2024 [Giorgia Bianchi/Middle East Monitor]

by Yvonne Ridley
yvonneridley


Police forces in Britain are under fire following several incidents involving pro-Palestine campaigners and activists, as well as journalists, giving rise to fears that the police across the country have become tools of an increasingly repressive state.

Mick Napier, a veteran pro-Palestine campaigner, was banned earlier this month from setting foot in Glasgow after an example of “heavy-handed” policing outside Barclays Bank in the city centre. This drew parallels with the then East Germany’s notorious Stasi, a much-feared security service and secret police force operational from 1950 to 1990.

Emerging victorious this week from Glasgow Sheriff’s Court after the case against him was thrown out, Napier criticised Police Scotland for the force’s “heavy-handed and oppressive” tactics. He insisted that the millions of voices being raised in support of Palestine “will not be silenced”, and went on to express concern for the “jailing of journalists in Britain,” including Julian Assange, who was released in June this year after nearly fourteen years in prison, embassy confinement and house arrest in the UK.

In December 2022, MEMO catalogued what Napier has had to endure at the hands of Police Scotland over the past two decades. “To our mutual astonishment,” I wrote at the time, “the persecution of Napier could make him Britain’s most persecuted individual and a familiar face in Glasgow and Edinburgh courts where has appeared on scores of occasions over the year.”

The first charge against him of “racial aggravation” took more than a year and a half to be resolved, and involved more than 20 court appearances, which Napier described angrily as “beyond preposterous”. The ludicrous charges, more often than not thrown out of court or leading to the collapse of trials, demonstrate the desperation of pro-Israel lobbyists and their lackeys who want to destroy the retired college lecturer and his co-accused.

His first trial at Edinburgh Sheriff Court in front of Sheriff John Scott came to a grinding halt after the procurator fiscal told a packed courtroom that it was “racist” to say the words “End the siege of Gaza! Genocide in Gaza!” on a public street. The crime, added the Scottish legal official, would be made more serious by repetition.


Sheriff Scott ridiculed the procurator fiscal’s case.

“Our Article 10 free speech protections would be rendered useless and we would have to march in a demonstration carrying placards saying, ‘End war crimes in an unnamed Middle Eastern state’,” Napier pointed out.

Outlawing the word “genocide” in Scotland would more than likely have led to many more spurious arrests if the procurator fiscal had been allowed to proceed with the absurd case against Napier, given that Israel is being investigated for genocide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

READ: UN urged to declare northern Gaza a disaster zone, stop Gaza genocide

That case against the co-founder of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign was thrown out of court in December 2022. How it even got as far as the courtroom is a mystery, because “genocide” is an apt description of what Israel has been committing against the Palestinians for the past 76 years and counting. It started before the 1948 Nakba, when Israel was created in Palestine, built upon the terrorism of the Irgun and Stern Gang against both the British Mandate authorities and the indigenous Palestinians. These Zionist terror gangs have been turned into heroes by the occupation state of Israel.

The initial charge against Napier was breach of the peace, but it was ramped up to the far more serious “racial aggravation” a couple of weeks after the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown signed a precursor to the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. Napier went back to court in a process that took a total of three years at Glasgow Sheriff Court because the first presiding sheriff became gravely ill almost two years into the case.

“The Glasgow procurator fiscal’s case was that a placard we carried a few weeks after Israel’s Operation Protective Edge against the Palestinians in Gaza in 2014 was ‘racist’ because it included some ‘blood’ symbolising the 2,200 Palestinians killed in that murderous offensive,” explained Napier at the time. “The procurator fiscal, however, claimed that the blood symbol alluded to a medieval blood libel against Jews that they used the blood of Christian children in religious ceremonies. The sheriff threw out that charge.”

Happily, this robust defender of Palestinian rights has emerged from his years of trials victorious, with most charges dropped or thrown out of court. However, others have not been so fortunate, and have had their careers ruined and futures jeopardised by vindictive Zionists who refuse to accept any criticism of Israel’s brutal military occupation of Palestine.

“As the genocide in Gaza and slaughter in Lebanon continues, we cannot be constrained from protesting against Israel’s war crimes and raising our voices on the streets,” said a spokesman for the Gaza Genocide Emergency Committee on Tuesday. “Mick has been a stalwart figure for Palestinian rights and a valued voice throughout this past, terrible year. We must do all we can to protect our right to free political speech.”

The GGEC is organising a march of the headquarters of the BBC in Glasgow on Saturday to protest against its “suppressed reporting, avoidance of the word genocide and failure to relate the true extent of Palestinian suffering.”

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Meanwhile, Mick Napier’s unenviable court record is currently being challenged by the UK-based Palestine Action pressure group, whose members are at the centre of an ongoing legal farce of being arrested, detained and charged, only for their trials to collapse resulting in their release.

Most recently, a jury was discharged after failing to reach a verdict in the trial of four defendants from Palestine Action charged with causing £700,000 worth of damage at the Teledyne weapons factory in Shipley, West Yorkshire. The four occupied the roof of one of the buildings at the site.


They accepted that they had damaged the roof tiles over a period of 17 hours.

During the trial, the defendants argued that they had acted in defence of the lives and property of Palestinians in Gaza, which they honestly believed were at immediate risk, and that they had to act to prevent a crime. They believed that the site was being used to manufacture components for weapons that were to be exported for use by Israel in the commission of war crimes and genocide in Gaza. They believed that this in itself amounted to the aiding and abetting of a war crime and so argued that their actions amounted to a lawful excuse.

The judge heard legal argument on the scope of lawful excuse and ultimately withdrew all the available defences from the defendants. Nevertheless, the jury was unable to reach a verdict and was discharged.

The BBC, which usually keeps its court reporters well away from such cases, covered the trial in full. Lawyers believe that the January ruling by the ICJ on provisional measures in proceedings under the Genocide Convention in the case of South Africa v Israel has made it much more difficult for the mainstream media to ignore cases like this.

Furthermore, last Thursday, British police raided the London home of investigative journalist Asa Winstanley and seized electronic devices using draconian laws which criminalise free speech. The police investigation apparently centres on social media posts and will almost certainly come to nothing. Winstanley’s colleagues at US-based Electronic Intifada say that the laws used against him “would blatantly violate the First Amendment, the constitutional guarantee of free speech and freedom of the press, were they to be applied in the United States.”

READ: EU lawyers slam Israel over attacks on Lebanon, Gaza

In mid-August, British journalist Richard Medhurst was arrested on arrival at London’s Heathrow Airport, and was detained under the Terrorism Act (2000). His phone and recording devices that he used for his work were seized. He is currently out on bail, having been charged over his coverage of the genocide in Gaza.

“Richard Medhurst’s arrest and detention for almost 24 hours using terrorism legislation is deeply concerning and will likely have a chilling effect on journalists in the UK and worldwide, in fear of arrest by UK authorities simply for carrying out their work,” said Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the UK’s National Union of Journalists, and Anthony Bellanger, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, in a joint statement.

Winstanley’s most recent investigative article, “How Israel killed hundreds of its own people on 7 October”, brought together a year of the Electronic Intifada’s reporting, along with new information, detailing Israel’s use of the notorious Hannibal Directive, a secret order that allows Israeli security forces to kill their own citizens rather than allowing them to be taken captive.

Winstanley is the author of Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, a book based on years of reporting on Britain’s Labour Party while it was in opposition. Since 2019, the Labour Party has launched an investigation and made legal threats in apparent retaliation for his fearless journalism.


Now that Labour is in government, it has the potential to use the full apparatus of the state against those it views as its own – or Israel’s – political enemies.

The lines are indeed becoming increasingly blurred, but it is clear to me that the raid on Winstanley’s home was intended to intimidate and silence him, as well as other journalists and activists.

A month earlier, pro-Palestine activist Sarah Wilkinson was reportedly asked to reveal the location of her contacts in Gaza when she was arrested by British police officers. Like Winstanley, she was forced to endure a morning raid by Counter Terrorism Police. “They said that she was under arrest for ‘content that she has posted online’,” explained her son Jack. She was later released, but is banned from using electronic devices.

On the same day as Wilkinson’s arrest, Palestine Action’s co-founder, Richard Barnard, was charged with three counts of “supporting a proscribed organisation”. Seven of the group’s members appeared in court on 13 August charged with violent disorder, burglary and other offences.

Both Medhurst and Wilkinson could face as much as 14 years in jail, although there are strong suspicions that neither of their respective police investigations has uncovered anything incriminating.

Such draconian action against pro-Palestine campaigners and journalists has provoked anger and disgust online, including from some of the more well-known pro-Palestine and free-speech campaigners. “Nineteen eighty-four has arrived and is alive and well in the United Kingdom,” said former Pink Floyd bassist and active pro-Palestine campaigner Roger Waters.

The Stasi secret police were monstrous, and while we are not there yet, thank goodness, the fact that our Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has banned Nelson Mandela’s grandson from entering the UK for a speaking tour suggests that this Labour government is becoming increasingly authoritarian in order to protect a rogue foreign state which is currently committing “plausible genocide”, in the words of the ICJ.

This should give us all serious cause for concern.

Is it purely coincidence that Prime Minister Keir Starmer and around half of his cabinet ministers have received donations from pro-Israel lobbyists, including Yvette Cooper?

I’ve always felt secure in my profession as a journalist. However, after this latest news about Asa Winstanley and Mick Napier, two people I consider to be friends and colleagues in the fight against the pernicious influence of Zionism on British politics and institutions, I wonder who is going to be next to get an early morning knock on the door.


The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.