The 1960s apartheid govt of South Africa labelled the ANC as terrorists and used a compliant judiciary to suppress their activists and supporters. Today's British govt uses the same tactics against Palestine Action and its supporters.
Here's a photo of Judge Quartus de Wet who sentenced Nelson Mandela to life in prison, alongside Judge Jeremy Johnson who yesterday sentenced four Palestine Action activists as terrorists, even though they were never charged with terrorism, because such a charge would've been thrown out by every jury in the land.
Johnson would have fitted in very well in South Africa's apartheid regime.
The British legal system allows for activists to be sentenced as terrorists without a terrorism charge on the whim of a judge, who kept the jury in the dark about their conviction for criminal damage being repackaged at sentencing, gagged the defendants on presenting motive, gagged the defence on referring to jury equity in closing or from informing the jury that the judge cannot force them to convict, ruled that the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ could not be used in court, ordered the defendants’ own notebooks and writings redacted to remove references to Elbit’s arms supply to Israel, dismissed an abuse of process application which documented meetings between Elbit, Home Office, Attorney General and the Israeli Embassy concerning the prosecutions, remanded three of the four convicted defendants in custody between verdict and sentence without support from the prosecution, and restricted the entire British press for the better part of a year from reporting on his own pre-trial rulings on the terrorism connection, the restrictions on defence motive evidence and that he referred the defence for contempt after his closing address in the first trial, a first in British legal history.
I’m struck by the fact that very few in the politico-media elite of this country seem to care just how much this degree of subservience to and connivance with murderous foreign interests (the United States and its genocidal satellite state) undermines the political legitimacy of the judiciary and the state as a whole. In fact, those who don’t actively support this (too many to count) seem perfectly happy in their complacency.
Some empty ambulances got significantly more empathy and more vigorous responses from the political and media establishment than Black and brown people’s homes getting targeted and set on fire. Some with kids in. This is the hierarchy in action.
Asked about Belfast Mark Rowley talks about people overseas whipping up division to create disorder & he specifically mentions Russian & Iranian state actors
Its not Russia & Iran orchestrating the far right violence we're seeing, but Rowley has a job to do & he's doing it
Talking about “rising tensions” or “unaddressed concerns” without explicitly mentioning that the concern is “there’s people who aren’t white living near me, and I’m prepared to use violence to change that” is fash talk too