This is the first time I have had to begin an opinion column with both a journalistic disclosure and a legal disclaimer. But hey ho, these are dystopian times we live in.

The disclosure: I was one of 20 people who contributed expert reports for a recent legal submission to the British home secretary, Yvette Cooper, calling on her to end the proscription of Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

You can read my submission – on the significant damage done to journalism by Hamas’ proscription – here.

If, as widely expected, Cooper does not approve the application, prepared by the London-based Riverway Law firm on behalf of Hamas, within the 90-day time limit, her decision will be referred to an appeal tribunal for judicial review.

The disclaimer: Nothing that follows is intended in any way to encourage you to take a more favourable view of Hamas. It is not intended in any way to encourage you to support Hamas. It does not endorse opinions or beliefs that are supportive of Hamas, as set out in the submissions calling for the de-proscription of Hamas.

The danger is this: under Section 12 of Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act of 2000, if anything I write, however inadvertently, encourages you to think more favourably of a proscribed organisation like Hamas, I face up to 14 years in jail.

The purpose of this article is to show how the law and the establishment operate together to stifle legitimate criticism of the Israeli occupation.

The law is so loosely worded that the British government, supported by a counter-terrorism police seemingly only too eager to please, can potentially arrest anyone praising the work of Gaza’s public hospitals in saving lives because Hamas is in charge of the enclave’s government, or prosecute anyone, including media outlets, giving a platform to Hamas politicians trying to advance a ceasefire.

If all this sounds crazy, given both that stating facts should not be illegal and that I cannot possibly know how anyone might receive and feel about any information regarding Hamas, then you are starting to understand why the application to the home secretary is so urgent and important.

Secret meetings

The UK may have declared Hamas’ armed wing a terrorist organisation a quarter of a century ago, but its political and administrative wings were added to the proscribed list much more recently – in 2021.

Which is why Cooper, the current home secretary, was misleading in the way she dismissively responded to the de-proscription application submitted to her office. She told LBC: “Hamas has long been a terrorist organisation. We maintain our view about the barbaric nature of this organisation.”

It was Priti Patel who, as home secretary, added Hamas in its entirety, including its political and administrative wings, to the proscription list shortly after she was rehabilitated and readmitted to Boris Johnson’s government in 2019.

Two years earlier, she had been forced to resign from her post as international development secretary in disgrace.

Why? Because she was found to have held 12 secret meetings with senior Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, without disclosing those meetings to her colleagues and while she was supposedly on a family holiday.

It later emerged she had also secretly met other Israeli officials in New York and Westminster.

Patel’s political career, to put it politely, has been distinguished by an evident attentiveness to Israeli concerns.

Undoubtedly her decision to proscribe Hamas’ political and administrative wings, treating them as identical to the armed section of the organisation, was high on Israel’s wish list.

It instantly degraded Britain’s political discourse so that it became all but impossible to discuss Hamas’ rule in Gaza or Israel’s blockade of the enclave in a balanced or realistic way. It resulted in a simplistic black-and-white picture of life in the enclave in which everything Hamas was bad – and therefore, by contrast, everything Israeli was good.

That would spectacularly serve Israeli interests two years later, when, following the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, Israel fed the western media entirely fabricated stories of Hamas “beheading babies” and carrying out “mass rapes”.

For months afterwards, as Israel set about murdering Palestinians in Gaza en masse and levelling their homes, the only question media interviewers directed at anyone criticising Israel’s actions was this: “Do you condemn Hamas?”

Even the ever-swelling death toll figures recorded by Gaza’s health ministry – proven to be so reliable in previous Israeli attacks that international bodies and the Israeli military itself relied on them – were suddenly treated as suspect and inflated. Independent research continues to suggest otherwise.

Western media outlets appended “Hamas-run” to the health ministry, and its casualty figures – almost certainly a massive undercount given Israel’s systematic destruction of the health sector – were now reported only as a “claim”.

In turn, these deceptions were implicitly used to justify Israel’s own, far greater atrocities in killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children, destroying the enclave’s hospitals and supporting infrastructure, while at the same time starving the entire population.

Eighteen months on, “evil Hamas” is still the story, not Israel’s all-too-obvious genocide.

Bullied into silence

Concerns about Hamas being proscribed in its entirety – not just its armed wing – are far from hypothetical, given the expansive wording of the UK’s Terrorism Act since 2019, when it was amended.

In particular, a revision to Section 12 means that anyone who “expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation”, and one that might “encourage support” for that organisation, is liable to arrest by terrorism police, prosecution, and up to 14 years in jail.

For expressing an opinion.

The wording is so vague that, for example, simply criticising Israel for committing greater and more numerous atrocities than Hamas could theoretically have the counter-terrorism police banging on your door.

To avoid prosecution, Riverway Law’s website dedicated to its application to the home secretary carries a legal disclaimer: “By entering this website you acknowledge that none of the contents can be understood as supporting, or expressing support for, proscribed terrorist organisations under the Terrorism Act 2000.”

Several independent British journalists and commentators – those whose careers are not dictated, and protected, by billionaires or the UK state broadcaster – have had their homes raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police or been arrested at the border as they return home.

One political commentator, Tony Greenstein – who also happens to be Jewish and a trained lawyer – is currently being prosecuted under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act. Others are under prolonged investigation. They have the threat of prosecution hanging over their heads like a sword.

The rest of us are meant to take note, feeling the chilling effect. Do we want the police breaking down the door of our homes at dawn? Do we want to be arrested on return from holiday, our partners and children looking on in horror?

The National Union of Journalists has called the police actions against journalists “abuse and mis-use of counter-terror legislation” and warned that they risk “threatening the safety of journalists”, as well as their sources.

Understandably, you may be barely aware of these repressive police tactics, which have been accelerating since Keir Starmer came to power. He, let us recall, personally approved, as opposition leader, Israel’s crime against humanity of blocking food, water and power to Gaza.

The BBC and the rest of the media have failed to meaningfully report these incidents – which are characteristic elsewhere of police states.

Is that because these media outlets are themselves cowed into submission by the Terrorism Act?

Or is it because they are simply mouthpieces of the same British establishment that made it illegal to express support for objectives which are the same as those sought by Hamas’ political, as opposed to military, objectives?

Let us remember – and it’s easy to forget, given how rarely such things are mentioned by the British media – that the same UK state that proscribed Hamas continues to arm Israel directly, helps ship weapons from other countries to Israel, supplies Israel with intelligence from British spy planes over Gaza, and provides Israel with diplomatic cover – all while Israel carries out what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) calls a “plausible genocide”, and while its sister International Criminal Court (ICC) seeks the arrest of Netanyahu for crimes against humanity.

The British government is not a neutral party in the levelling of Gaza, the decimation of its people by bombs, the ethnic cleansing of swaths of the enclave, or the starvation of the population. It is actively assisting Israel in its genocidal campaign.

The UK establishment is also, through its proscription of Hamas and the wording of the Terrorism Act, bullying journalists, academics, politicians, lawyers – in fact, anyone – into silence about the context of its complicity, into an unwillingness to scrutinise its rationalisations for collusion in genocide.

‘No civilians’

There are two main objectives behind Riverway Law’s submission to the home secretary against Hamas’ proscription as a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The first concerns the proscription of the entire organisation by the British government. This is the part of the legal submission that has attracted most attention – and which has been used to vilify the lawyers involved

As barrister Franck Magennis has explained, Riverway’s hands were tied because Patel – now the shadow foreign secretary – added Hamas to the list as a single entity in 2021, making no distinction between its different wings. That meant the lawyers had no choice but to petition for the entire group to be deproscribed.

The government set the terms of the legal debate, not Hamas or its legal representatives.

Hamas’ lawyers accept that its military wing meets the definition of a terrorist organisation under the terms of the UK’s Terrorism Act. They argue this law casts the net so wide that any organisation using violence to achieve political ends is covered, including the Israeli, Ukrainian and British militaries.

The establishment media have tried to smear Riverway and its barristers as Hamas “stooges” and supporters of terrorism – amply illustrating why the case is so necessary.

An openly hostile interviewer for LBC appeared to think he had caught out Magennis in some kind of ethical or professional lapse because he chose to represent Hamas without payment – as he must do under UK law because Hamas is a proscribed organisation.

The implication was that Magennis was so enthusiastically supportive of terrorism that he was willing to take on time-consuming and career-damaging work for free – rather than that he is doing so because there are vitally important legal and ethical principles at stake.

Not least, the proscription of Hamas’ political wing, including its governmental and administrative institutions, treats them as extensions of the armed struggle.

It breathes life into Israel’s patently ridiculous claims that all of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are really “Hamas command and control centres”, that Gaza’s doctors can be killed or arrested and taken to torture camps because they are “Hamas operatives” in disguise, and that Gaza’s paramedics can be executed because their rescue missions supposedly aid Hamas.

And worse, ultimately proscription supports Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements that there are “no civilians in Gaza”, a place where half the population are children.

Bargaining chips

The proscription of Hamas in its entirety ignores the fact that the group has political goals – ones Gaza’s population voted for 19 years ago to liberate themselves from decades of Israel’s brutal and illegal military occupation. Those goals are distinct from Hamas, yet expressing support for the objectives gives rise to the risk of being investigated by the police and prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Gaza’s people – the less than half who were old enough to vote two decades ago – were driven down the path of supporting armed resistance in the pursuit of national liberation for an all-too-obvious reason. Because Israel had refused to make any concessions to Hamas’ political rivals, headed by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank.

Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, has been using strictly diplomatic means – which Israel also opposes – to achieve statehood.

The proscription of Hamas sweeps out of view the fact that a people under occupation have a right enshrined in international law to use armed struggle against their military oppressors. It makes it perilously dangerous to show support for the armed struggle of Gaza’s Palestinians lest you are accused of breaching Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

Proscription sanctions the failure by western politicians and media to distinguish between Hamas actions on 7 October 2023 that accord with international law, such as its attacks on Israeli military bases, and illegitimate actions targeting Israeli civilians.

It reverses reality, treating all those Israelis held in Gaza as hostages who have been kidnapped, even those who are soldiers, while approving of Israel’s kidnapping of Palestinians in Gaza, from medical staff to children.

The latter are supposedly “arrested”. They are referred to by the western media as “prisoners”, even though most have not been charged or put on trial, and the main purpose of their detention seems to be as bargaining chips in an exchange for Israelis captive in Gaza.

And finally, since 2021, Britain’s proscription of Hamas’ political wing has effectively meant the UK has given its backing both to Israel’s refusal to talk to Gaza’s government, and to Israel’s near two-decade-old siege of Gaza that turned it into little more than a concentration camp holding 2.3 million Palestinians, further radicalising the population.

British politicians should understand quite how self-defeating such an approach is. After all, it was only through talking to Sinn Fein, the political wing of the “terrorist” IRA group, that Britain was able to negotiate a peace deal, the Good Friday Agreement, in Northern Ireland in 1998.

Hamas stated in its revised 2017 charter that it is ready to make territorial concessions with Israel – based on the traditional two-state solution.

And it does so again in its application to the home secretary, calling the two-state solution the “national consensus” among Palestinians.

The submission notes that Israel has repeatedly assassinated Hamas leaders, including Ahmed Jabari and Ismail Haniyeh, when they were close to concluding ceasefire agreements, in what looks suspiciously like attempts by Israel to undermine more moderate voices within the organisation.

Through proscription, Britain has handed Israel a permanent licence to refuse to test Hamas’ willingness to compromise.

Attack on lawyers

Robert Jenrick, Britain’s shadow justice secretary, has called for Riverway Law and its barristers to be investigated and struck off for representing Hamas – apparently forgetting the foundational principle in law that everyone, even serial killers, have a right to legal representation if the law is not to become a hollow charade.

The Terrorism Act includes provision for an appeal by proscribed organisations against their inclusion on the list. How are they to go through the legal procedure to appeal their listing apart from through lawyers?

Disgracefully, Starmer’s officials have once again kept their silence as Hamas’ legal representatives in the UK have been turned into targets for establishment abuse. The government is as complicit in the assault at home on basic democratic rights, such as free speech and the rule of law, as it has been complicit abroad in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

How would the Starmer government have reacted had the two British barristers who defended Israel against South Africa’s case against genocide at the ICJ last year been publicly maligned for doing so? Would it have been okay to tar those lawyers with the crimes against humanity committed by their client?

Fahad Ansari, director of Riverway Law, has written to the government, urging it to speak up in defence of this team’s right to challenge Hamas’ proscription, and warning that Jenrick’s “comments are not only reckless and libellous but amount to incitement against our staff members”.

He has reminded the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, of the previous murder of lawyers for taking on cases that challenged the British establishment, including Pat Finucane, who was killed by Ulster loyalists in collusion with the British security services, after he won several human rights cases against the British government.

Hamas’ submission makes the case that Patel provided several false grounds to justify the proscription of Hamas in its entirety.

Hamas disputes Patel’s characterisation of it as a terrorist organisation. It notes that international law allows people illegally occupied and oppressed to resist through military means.

Hamas’ former political bureau chief Mousa Abu Marzouk notes in his witness statement on behalf of Hamas that Hamas’ operation on 7 October 2023 was intended only to strike military targets, and that atrocities carried out by its fighters that day against civilians had not been authorised by the leadership and are not condoned.

It is impossible to know whether that claim is true.

It is also incredibly hard to draw attention to factors which could be said to support Abu Marzouk’s argument without also being alleged to have invited support for Hamas or as expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of Hamas – which would risk being accused of a criminal offence under Section 12.

In addition to the false stories spread by Israel, such as that Hamas “beheaded babies” and carried out “mass rape”, it is known that other, presumably less disciplined, groups broke out of Gaza that day as well as Hamas. Apparently no effort has been made to determine which groups carried out which atrocities.

And then there is the fact that an unknown number of the atrocities blamed on Hamas were actually caused by Israel’s green-lighting of its Hannibal directive, which authorised the Israeli military to kill its own soldiers and citizens to prevent them being seized. That included firing missiles into kibbutz homes and on vehicles heading towards Gaza, leaving only charred remains of the occupants.

The proscription of Hamas makes it legally dangerous to draw attention to the sickening acts of the Israeli government.

Also worth noting is that Hamas makes clear in its submission that, unlike Israel, it is ready to have its actions that day investigated by international bodies and any of its fighters who committed atrocities put on trial.

“We remain, as always, prepared to cooperate with any international investigations and inquiries into the operation, even if ‘Israel’ refuses to do so,” Abu Marzouk writes.

He calls on “the ICC Prosecutor and his team to immediately and urgently come to occupied Palestine to look into the crimes and violations committed there, rather than merely observing the situation remotely or being subject to the Israeli restrictions.”

Public demonised

Abu Marzouk points out that Britain is not a dispassionate observer of Israel’s genocide unfolding in Gaza. As the colonial power in Palestine for much of the first half of the last century, it permitted European Jews to colonise the Palestinian people’s homeland, effectively leaving the latter stateless.

“Unsurprisingly,” Abu Marzouk writes, “the British state continues to side with the genocidal Zionist coloniser, while proscribing organisations like ours that strive to assert Palestinian dignity.”

Which alludes to the second main purpose of Hamas’ application.

The British state has a legal obligation to prevent Israel’s current crimes against humanity and genocide in Gaza. And those in a position to shed light on Israel’s atrocities – and thereby add to the pressure on the British government and international bodies to fulfil their legal obligations – have a duty to do so too.

That means lawyers, journalists, human rights groups, academics and researchers should be as free as possible to contribute information and analyses that hold both Israel to account for its continuing crimes and the British state for any collusion in those crimes.

But as noted earlier, what Hamas’ proscription has done is precisely stifle expert discourse about what is happening in Gaza. Those who try to speak up, from independent journalists to lawyers, have found themselves vilified, bullied or threatened with prosecution by the British state.

Increasingly, this crackdown is being extended to the wider public.

Proscription has paved the way for the arrest and jailing of peace activist groups like Palestine Action trying to stop the UK-based arms manufacturer Elbit producing the quadcopters Israel is using to finish off civilians, including children, injured in air strikes on Gaza.

Proscription has paved the way for demonising mass public marches and student campus demonstrations against Israel’s genocide as pro-Hamas and “hate protests”.

Proscription has paved the way for the police to place ever-tighter restrictions on such demonstrations, to arrest the organisers, and to investigate prominent figures like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell who take part in them.

“Rather than allow freedom of speech, police have embarked on a campaign of political intimidation and persecution of journalists, academics, peace activists and students over their perceived support for Hamas,” the application argues.

But while those opposed to genocide find themselves maligned as supporters of terrorism, those actually committing crimes against humanity – whether Israeli leaders or British nationals taking part as soldiers in the genocide in Gaza – are still being welcomed in Britain with open arms.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy met his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar, in London last month for a so-called “private meeting”. The British government apparently agreed to Saar’s visit, even though it must have known it would trigger requests from legal groups for his arrest for war crimes.

British officials have also hosted senior Israeli military figures.

Meanwhile, a legal dossier handed to the Metropolitan Police last month against 10 Britons accused of committing war crimes in Gaza, such as killing civilians and aid workers, has made barely any ripples.

Where is the outrage meted out by the media and politicians for Britons who have chosen to travel to Gaza to fight with an army that has killed and maimed many tens of thousands of Palestinian children there?

There is more to say, but saying more risks arrest by the UK’s counter-terrorism police and jail time. Which is why ending Hamas’ proscription needs to happen as soon as possible.

And why the British establishment, from politicians to the media, are so determined to close ranks and foil the application.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

In their legal submission, they say “the proscription has hindered the group’s ability to broker a political solution to the conflict, stifled conversations in securing a long-term political settlement, criminalised ordinary Palestinians residing in Gaza, and undermined the possibility of a peaceful settlement”.

They also argue that being branded terrorists infringes fundamental rights and has a disproportionate impact on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and open debate and political expression, which makes sensible journalism and public discourse on Israel’s actions in Palestine impossible.

Hamas’s submission also points out that Britain’s Terrorism Act “covers all groups and organisations around the world that use violence to achieve political objectives, including the Israeli armed forces, the Ukrainian Army and, indeed, the British armed forces”.

And it claims proscription obstructs humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip because any form of assistance can be labelled “terrorism” if it is “seen as supporting a group that has been labelled a terrorist organisation”.

On the other hand, proscribing Hamas was a clever move because it makes it so much easier for Israel’s stooges at Westminster to avoid having to explain that regime’s far worse war crimes and crimes against humanity. We have to thank Priti Patel who, while International Development Secretary, was so taken-in by Zionist claptrap and so adoring of Israel that, in 2017, she reportedly had around a dozen meetings with Israeli politicians and organisations during a family holiday in Israel without telling the Foreign Office, her civil servants or her boss Theresa May, and without government officials present. This was not only a middle finger to the Ministerial Code of Conduct but a gross breach of security.

She was also said to have tried persuading colleagues to send British taxpayers’ money as aid for an Israeli forces project in the Golan Heights…. and she actually visited the Golan. As everyone and his dog knows, the Golan Heights is Syrian territory stolen in 1967 by the Israelis who have illegally occupied it ever since. Touring it with the thieving occupation army was another serious diplomatic blunder.

Patel’s meetings are said to have been arranged by Lord Polak, an official of the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1980s who joined the Conservative Friends of Israel in 1989, and served as its director for 26 years until appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for political service and made a life peer. It’s difficult to see what political service Polak performed for anyone other than the Israeli regime.

Patel was forced to resign but later restored to favour and promoted to Home Secretary. She proscribed Hamas’s political wing in 2021 with hardly a murmur of opposition. There seemed no legitimate reason for doing so unless it was part of the UK/US/Israel axis aim to bring about coercive regime change. But would that be legal? Are the Palestinians to be denied self-determination and the right to choose their own government? Well, yes, so it seems.

What’s to fear from Hamas?

No-one in the UK Government has properly explained, probably because no-one has bothered to sit down and shoot the breeze with them. Instead they eagerly welcome Netanyahu and his thugs with red-carpet hugs, handshakes and vows of affection and endless co-operation, and soak up the nonsense they talk.

And has anyone at Westminster bothered to read Hamas’s 2017 Charter? If so, did they notice Sections 16 and 20? They are reasonably in tune with international law while the Israeli government pursues policies that definitely are not.

16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
17. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.

Under international law the correct way to deal with the threat posed by Hamas is (and always has been) by requiring Israel to immediately end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and theft of Palestinian resources.

JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), who claim to be the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world, said of the genocide in Gaza: “We’re organizing a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of US Jews into solidarity with Palestinian freedom struggle.” Here’s an extract from their no-nonsense statement on the hostilities in Palestine.

“The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago. Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock.

For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege and daily humiliation. In recent weeks, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the holiest Muslim sites in Jerusalem.

For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.

For 75 years, the Israeli government has maintained a military occupation over Palestinians, operating an apartheid regime. Palestinian children are dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. Palestinians’ homes are torched by mobs of Israeli settlers, or destroyed by the Israeli army. Entire Palestinian villages are forced to flee, abandoning the homes orchards, and land that were in their family for generations.

The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to US complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation. The US government consistently enables Israeli violence and bears blame for this moment. The unchecked military funding, diplomatic cover, and billions of dollars of private money flowing from the US enables and empowers Israel’s apartheid regime.”

The Zionists’ Dalet Plan, or Plan D

It’s not just America’s complicity and Britain’s 110-years of betrayal that have brought us to this appalling situation. Plan D was the Zionists’ terror blueprint for their brutal takeover of the Palestinian homeland drawn up 77 years ago by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency, and relentless pursued by the Israeli regime to this day.

Plan D was a carefully thought-out, step-by-step plot choreographed ahead of the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood. It correctly assumed that the British authorities would no longer be there.

It’s a sign of the shoddy times we live in that the lawyers involved in the appeal case felt obliged to state that Hamas did not pay them or the experts who provided evidence for their submission, as it is illegal to receive funds from a group designated as a terrorist organisation.

Hopefully their appeal will skewer the Government’s utter hypocrisy and undying support for the real terrorists in the Holy Land. Priti Patel will have to reckon with the consequences of her actions in terms of the huge numbers of innocent lives lost or reduced to unimaginable misery.

I hasten to add that I am no supporter of Hamas. I support truth and justice, simple as that. And of course the Laws of Cricket.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Raoul Walawalker.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Bychawski.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Bychawski.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Seth Thevoz.

Last Friday’s decision by UK Home Secretary Priti Patel to authorise the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States is both deeply shameful and unsurprising. Her action paves the way for Assange to be tried under the 1917 Espionage Act, introduced by the US government shortly after entering World War I, with a sentence of 175 years if found guilty. In essence, the US wishes to set a legal precedent for the prosecution of any publisher or journalist, anywhere in the world, who reports the truth about the US.

Despite all the warnings from human rights groups, advocates of press freedom, Nils Melzer (then UN Special Rapporteur on Torture), doctors, lawyers and many other people around the world, it has long been clear that Washington is determined to punish Assange and make an example of him as a warning to others. As always, US allies will go along with what the Mafia Godfather wants.

US political journalist Glenn Greenwald noted that Patel’s act ‘further highlights the utter sham of American and British sermons about freedom, democracy and a free press.’ Assange is being persecuted relentlessly because he and WikiLeaks have arguably done more than anyone else to expose the vast extent of the crimes of US empire.

Greenwald added:

Free speech and press freedoms do not exist in reality in the U.S. or the UK. They are merely rhetorical instruments to propagandize their domestic population and justify and ennoble the various wars and other forms of subversion they constantly wage in other countries in the name of upholding values they themselves do not support. The Julian Assange persecution is a great personal tragedy, a political travesty and a grave danger to basic civic freedoms. But it is also a bright and enduring monument to the fraud and deceit that lies at the heart of these two governments’ depictions of who and what they are.

Dissident Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone made a similar point, that Assange’s ‘refusal to bow down and submit’ has:

exposed the lie that the so-called free democracies of the western world support the free press and defend human rights. The US, UK and Australia are colluding to extradite a journalist for exposing the truth even as they claim to oppose tyranny and autocracy, even as they claim to support world press freedoms, and even as they loudly decry the dangers of government-sponsored disinformation.

Peter Oborne, an all-too-rare example of a journalist speaking out on behalf of Assange, called Patel’s decision a ‘catastrophic blow’ to press freedom. But, he said, it was a blow that had been carried out with:

the silent assent of much of the mainstream press. Too many British newspapers and broadcasters have treated the Assange case as a dirty family secret. They have failed to grasp that the Assange hearing leading up to the Patel decision is the most important case involving free speech this century.

Not only was there ‘silent assent’, but much of the media actually cheered and applauded Assange’s arrest in the Ecuadorian Embassy in April 2019 ‘with undisguised glee’, as Alan MacLeod wrote at the time:

The Daily Mail’s front-page headline (4/12/19) read, “That’ll Wipe the Smile Off His Face,” and devoted four pages to the “downfall of a narcissist” who was removed from “inside his fetid lair” to finally “face justice.” The Daily Mirror (4/11/19) described him as “an unwanted guest who abused his hospitality,” while the Times of London (4/12/19) claimed “no one should feel sorry” for the “overdue eviction.”

The Mirror (4/13/19) also published an opinion piece from Labour member of Parliament Jess Phillips that began by stating, “Finally Julian Assange, everyone’s least favourite squatter, has been kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy.” She described the 47-year-old Australian as a “grumpy, stroppy teenager.”

Oborne also noted that Patel’s decision:

turns investigative journalism into a criminal act, and licenses the United States to mercilessly hunt down offenders wherever they can be found, bring them to justice and punish them with maximum severity.

Andrew Neil, the right-wing journalist and broadcaster, reflexively listed Assange’s supposed faults (‘reckless’, ‘stupid’, ‘narcissist’) in a Daily Mail opinion piece. But he still made clear his opposition to Assange’s extradition:

It is thanks to Assange that we know many appalling things that America would prefer we didn’t know. He does not deserve to spend the rest of his life in some high-tech American hellhole for doing what should come naturally to all good journalists — exposing what powerful people don’t want to be exposed.

The BBC’s John Simpson and Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens have also been supportive of Assange.

But the few editorials that appeared in the British ‘mainstream’, while meekly and belatedly opposing extradition, were much less damning in their comments. According to our searches of the Lexis-Nexis newspaper database, the first edition of the Independent’s editorial was titled, ‘It’s time to release Assange – he has suffered enough’. By the time the editorial appeared online, the title had been watered down to:

Justice for Julian Assange should be tempered with mercy

And an extra line had been added:

The WikiLeaks founder is no hero but nor should he be a martyr

The paper’s praise for the vital work of Assange and Wikileaks was begrudging and limited, with the usual ‘mainstream’ caveats and distortions mixed in (see Johnstone’s powerful demolition of the multiple smears against Assange):

We were resolutely unsympathetic to Mr Assange’s claim to have been unfairly treated by the British and Swedish criminal justice systems. We urged him to face justice over the allegations of rape in Sweden, and considered his self-imprisonment in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to be a form of punishment for his refusal to do so.

The Guardian, which had benefited enormously from Assange’s ground-breaking work – with many of its journalists publishing numerous snide articles and disparaging remarks about him – described Patel’s decision, with pathetic understatement, as ‘a bad day for journalism’. Of course, there was no mention in the editorial of the Guardian’s own shameful role in helping to create the conditions for Assange’s persecution; not least their fake front-page ‘news’ story in November 2018 claiming that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, supposedly held secret talks with Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

‘How Far Have We Sunk?’

As Nils Melzer packed up and moved on from his term as the UN Special Prosecutor on Torture, on the day that Patel announced Assange’s extradition, he said:

How far have we sunk if we prosecute people who expose war crimes for exposing war crimes?

How far have we sunk when we no longer prosecute our own war criminals because we identify more with them than we identify with the people that actually exposed these crimes?

What does that tell about us and about our governments?

How far have we sunk when telling the truth becomes a crime?

The questions were left hanging in the air. But anyone with basic standards of ethics and wisdom knows that a society which has sunk this low is being governed by so-called ‘leaders’ who:

• are lacking in ethics and wisdom;
• are driven by concerns shaped by power and profit;
• will attempt to crush anyone who dares to expose their crimes;
• spout deceptive rhetoric – faithfully amplified and propagated by state-corporate media – proclaiming the West’s supposed virtues and respect for ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’.

The persecution of Julian Assange has brought all this to the fore.

Yes, there are tiny windows in the ‘MSM’ for eloquent expressions of the truth; such as Peter Oborne’s Guardian opinion piece cited above. But the general drift of the ‘Overton Window’ – the ‘acceptable’, tightly limited range of news and debate – has shifted towards the hard right, with journalists and commentators squeezed out for being deemed ‘toxic’, ‘radioactive’ or otherwise ‘dangerous’.

Thus, in 2018, John Pilger, one of the finest journalists who has ever appeared in the British media, observed that:

My written journalism is no longer welcome in the Guardian which, three years ago, got rid of people like me in pretty much a purge of those who really were saying what the Guardian no longer says any more.’

The Guardian is a prime stoker of revitalised Cold War rhetoric about the ‘threat’ of Russia and China, mirroring what is prevalent across the whole ‘spectrum’ of ‘mainstream’ news. Indeed, as revealed by Declassified UK, an independent investigative news website, the UK’s leading liberal newspaper has essentially been ‘neutralised’ by the UK security services. Mark Curtis, editor and co-founder of Declassified UK, observed that the paper’s:

limited coverage of British foreign and security policies gives a misleading picture of what the UK does in the world. The paper is in reality a defender of Anglo-American power and a key ideological pillar of the British establishment.

Selective Moral Outrage

In a recent interview, David Barsamian asked Noam Chomsky:

In the media, and among the political class in the United States, and probably in Europe, there’s much moral outrage about Russian barbarity, war crimes, and atrocities. No doubt they are occurring as they do in every war. Don’t you find that moral outrage a bit selective though?

Chomsky responded:

The moral outrage is quite in place. There should be moral outrage. But you go to the Global South, they just can’t believe what they’re seeing. They condemn the war, of course. It’s a deplorable crime of aggression. Then they look at the West and say: What are you guys talking about? This is what you do to us all the time.’

So, when the long-suffering people of the Global South encounter western news reports about Putin being the worst war criminal since Hitler:

They don’t know whether to crack up in laughter or ridicule. We have war criminals walking all over Washington. Actually, we know how to deal with our war criminals. In fact, it happened on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Remember, this was an entirely unprovoked invasion, strongly opposed by world opinion. There was an interview with the perpetrator, George W. Bush, who then went on to invade Iraq, a major war criminal, in the style section of the Washington Post — an interview with, as they described it, this lovable goofy grandpa who was playing with his grandchildren, making jokes, showing off the portraits he painted of famous people he’d met. Just a beautiful, friendly environment.’

In the UK, the war criminal Tony Blair – another key player in the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ that led to at least 1.3 million deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – was recently “honoured’ by the Queen. He became ‘a member of the Order of the Garter, the most senior royal order of chivalry’. This archaic nonsense is yet another symptom of the deeply-embedded, medieval stratification of British society, and the baubles that are handed out to preserve ‘order’ and ‘tradition’. This is revealing of the sickness at the heart of our society.

Chomsky gave another example of how the West’s war criminals are lauded:

Take probably the major war criminal of the modern period, Henry Kissinger. We deal with him not only politely, but with great admiration. This is the man after all who transmitted the order to the Air Force, saying that there should be massive bombing of Cambodia — “anything that flies on anything that moves” was his phrase. I don’t know of a comparable example in the archival record of a call for mass genocide. And it was implemented with very intensive bombing of Cambodia.

The ‘justification’ for the extreme violence meted out by the West towards the Middle East and the Global South is always couched in propaganda terms proclaiming the protection of ‘human rights’, ‘democracy’ and ‘global security’. But, noted Chomsky:

The security of the population is simply not a concern for policymakers. Security for the privileged, the rich, the corporate sector, arms manufacturers, yes, but not the rest of us. This doublethink is constant, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. It’s just what Orwell described, hyper-totalitarianism in a free society.

Chomsky concluded:

Meanwhile, we pour taxpayer funds into the pockets of the fossil-fuel producers so that they can continue to destroy the world as quickly as possible. That’s what we’re witnessing with the vast expansion of both fossil-fuel production and military expenditures. There are people who are happy about this. Go to the executive offices of Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, they’re ecstatic. It’s a bonanza for them. They’re even being given credit for it. Now, they’re being lauded for saving civilization by destroying the possibility for life on Earth. Forget the Global South. If you imagine some extraterrestrials, if they existed, they’d think we were all totally insane. And they’d be right.

The appalling treatment of Julian Assange, especially set beside the ‘honouring’ and eulogising of the West’s war criminals, is symptomatic of this insanity.

In a brave and eloquent interview, Stella Assange, Julian’s wife and mother of their two young children, declared that:

We’re going to fight.

An appeal to Britain’s High Court will be lodged within 14 days of Patel’s decision by Assange’s lawyers. As Stella Assange noted, one of the many unjust aspects of the US case against her husband is that, under the Trump administration, the CIA had plotted to assassinate Assange:

Extradition to the country that has plotted his assassination is just – I have no words. Obviously, this shouldn’t be happening. It can never happen.

She continued:

That is just the tip of the iceberg of the criminal activity that has gone on, on behalf of those putting Julian in prison. For example, inside the [Ecuadorian] Embassy his legal meetings – his confidential privileged legal conversations with his lawyers – were being recorded and shipped to the United States.

All these elements have come out since Julian’s arrest and incarceration. And we now know so much about the abuse and outright criminality that has been going on against Julian. There’s no chance of a fair trial.

She added:

‘And then you have the actual case. He’s charged under the Espionage Act. He faces 175 years. There is no public interest defence under the Espionage Act. It’s the first time it’s being repurposed; it’s being used against a publisher. It’s an Act that’s been repurposed in order to criminalise journalism, basically. And, of course, if you say that publishing information is a crime, then Julian’s guilty. He published information and he faces a lifetime in prison for it.

In conclusion, she said:

The case is a complete aberration. That’s why you have all these major press freedom organisations and human rights organisations saying that this has to be dropped.

We can take a significant step towards a saner society by shouting loudly for Julian Assange to be freed immediately. A good start would be to share widely this video from Double Down News in which Stella Assange describes the importance of the case and how we can all help.

Please also visit the Don’t Extradite Assange website to see what actions you can take now.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

The post Predictable Monstrosities: Priti Patel Approves Assange’s Extradition appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Patel, for her part, was never exercised by the more sordid details of the case.  Her approach to matters of justice is one of premature adjudication: the guilty are everywhere, and only multiply.  When it came to WikiLeaks, such fine points of law and fact as a shaky indictment based on fabricated evidence, meditations on assassination, and a genuine, diagnosed risk of self-harm, were piffling distractions.  The US Department of Justice would not be denied.

“Under the Extradition Act 2003,” a nameless spokesman for the Home Office stated, “the Secretary of State must sign an extradition order if there are no grounds to prohibit the order being made.  Extradition requests are only sent to the Home Secretary once a judge decides it can proceed after considering various aspects of the case.”

Evidently, overt politicisation, bad faith, and flimsy reassurances from the US Department of Justice on how Assange will be detained, do not constitute sufficient grounds.  But the cue came from the courts themselves, which have done a fabulous job of covering the US justice system with tinsel in actually believing assurances that Assange would not be facing special administrative detention measures (SAMs) or permanent captivity in the ADX Florence supermax in Colorado.  “In this case, the UK courts have not found that it would be oppressive, unjust or an abuse of process to extradite Mr Assange.”

In such a scatterbrained, and amoral cosmos that marks decision making in the Home Office, no mention has been made of the surveillance operation against the publisher in the Ecuadorian embassy, orchestrated at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency.  None, either, of contemplated abduction or assassination, or the frail mental health Assange finds himself.

As late as June 10, a letter from the group Doctors for Assange, comprising 300 doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists, noted that the Home Secretary’s “denial of the cruel, inhuman treatment inflicted by upon Assange was then, and is even more so now, irreconcilable with the reality of the situation”.

In April, an umbrella grouping of nineteen organisations dedicated to press freedom and free speech urged Patel, in reviewing the case, to appreciate that Assange would “highly likely” face isolation or solitary confinement US conditions “despite the US government’s assurances, which would severely exacerbate the risk of suicide”.

The co-chairs of the Courage Foundation’s Assange Defense Committee, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg and Alice Walker, reflected on the depravity of the order in a statement.  “It is a sad day for western democracy.  The UK’s decision to extradite Julian Assange to the nation that plotted to assassinate him – the nation that wants to imprison him for 175 years for publishing truthful information in the public interest – is an abomination.”  As for the UK, it had “shown its complicity in this farce, by agreeing to extradite a foreigner based on politically motivated charges that collapse under the slightest scrutiny.”

Similar views were expressed by Amnesty International (“a chilling message to journalists the world over”) and Reporters Without Borders (“another failure by the UK to protect journalism and press freedom”).  There was even concern from Conservative MP David Davis, who expressed his belief that Assange would not “get a fair trial.”  The extradition law was, as matters stood, lopsided in favour of US citizens.

All this is consistent with Patel, who seems to relish the prospect of sending individuals to a place where human rights are marginal jottings on a policy paper.  The UK-Rwanda Migration and Economic Partnership, as it is euphemistically termed, is her pride and joy, albeit one currently facing strenuous legal opposition.

Under the arrangement, individuals crossing the channel will receive one-way tickets to Rwanda to have their claims processed without a prospect of settling in the UK.  The Rwandan government, hostile to contrarians, the rule of law and refugees, will be subsidised for their pain and labours.

To this sadistic streak can be added her admiration for the Espionage Act being used to prosecute Assange.  This fact should have disqualified her in any country operating under the rule of law.  Even as Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced a Conservative no-confidence vote this month, Patel’s National Security Bill passed its second reading in Parliament.  The bill articulates an offence of “obtaining or disclosing protected information” that includes “any information… which either is, or could reasonably be expected to be, subject to any type of restrictions of access for protecting the safety and interests of the UK.”

In a polite nod of deference to US law, the proposed law states that an offence is committed when a person “obtains, copies, records or retains protected information, or discloses or provides access to protected information” for a purpose “that they know, or ought reasonably to know, is prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom” and if “the foreign power condition is met”.  The requirement there is that the act is “carried out for or on behalf of a foreign power”, including instances where “an indirect relationship” exists.

Assange has 14 days to appeal this insidious rubber stamping of judicially sanctioned brutality.  His legal team are hoping to use the High Court as the route to highlight the political dimension of the case and draw attention back to the way the extradition law was read.

If the defence fail, Assange will be sent across the Atlantic, entrusted to officials, some of whom considered murdering him, to be made an example of.  It will be the clarion call to regimes across the world that punishing a publisher is something supposed liberal democracies can do as well, and as deviously, as anybody else.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Anita Mureithi.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Bychawski.

The post Tapping Fortress Australia: Priti Patel’s Border Force Review appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

During the Howard years, Downer served in the role of a position that has become all but irrelevant, outsourced as it is to the US State Department and the fossil fuel lobby.  It was during that time that Australia supercharged its draconian approach to refugees and border security, repelling naval arrivals and creating a network of concentration camps that has since been marketed to the world.  The UK Home Affairs Minister Priti Patel is positively potty for it but has only managed to adopt aspects of the “Australian model”, including the relocation of arrivals to offshore facilities and co-opting the Royal Navy in an intercepting role.

Efforts to use third countries to process asylum claims have been frustrated, though Patel has opted for a legislative route in stymieing the process and limiting the settlement rights of unwanted migrants.  While she has authorised the use of push backs on paper, these have yet to take place and are the subject of a legal challenge by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and charity, Care4Calais.

The government of Boris Johnson has made something of a habit in mining the old quarry of Australian conservative politics.  Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott was approved for a role as trade advisor for Global Britain, an appointment which did not sit well with critics worried that a reactionary dinosaur had been brought into the fold.  With Abbott offering advice, Global Britain risked becoming a Nostalgic Britannia of pink gins and wallahs, Union Jack flying high.

Downer, for his part, has settled into the soft furnishings of British public life, occupying the role of High Commissioner for some years, becoming a presence around Australia House and King’s College, London as founding chairman of the international school of government.  Evidently, he is regarded as very clubbable, a member of the Royal Over-Seas League and chairman of trustees at the right wing think tank, Policy Exchange.

Of late, he has been tapped to undertake a review of Britain’s border forces, a task he is likely to relish.  In this field, reform can only mean a few things: harsher policies, hardened feelings, and the tweaking, if not total circumvention, of international law.  The number of migrants attempting to make the crossing from France in 2021 was estimated to be 28,431.  In 2020, it was 8,417.  There are fears in the Home Office that the number could reach 65,000.  A siege mentality has well and truly seeded.

A statement from the Home Office noted Patel’s commissioning of “a wide-ranging, independent review of our Border Force to assess its structure, powers, funding and priorities to ensure it can keep pace with rapidly evolving threats and continue to protect the border, maintain security and prevent illegal migration.”

Patel doesn’t stoop to considering the right to asylum, or the safety and welfare of those making the crossing.  It’s all security and border protection.  “Since Border Force was set up in 2011, its remit has grown to meet the changing border threats we face, and in recent years has supported delivery of the government’s Brexit commitments and COVID-19 measures.”

According to statements from the UK government, Downer was “delighted” to be leading the review, one mislabelled as independent.  “As an independent reviewer, I plan to lead a review that is robust, evidence-based and outcome-orientated.”

Downer is unlikely to be troubled by the evidence.  For him, the outcomes are already determined and bound to offer Patel comfort.  The clue was in a piece written for the Daily Mail last September openly praising Patel’s efforts.  Despite the Home Secretary being “widely ridiculed on both sides of the Channel … I know that a ‘push-back’ policy can work.”  Never one for the finer details, the Australian suggested a sly approach verging on deception.  “My advice to Ms Patel would be to introduce a ‘push-back’ policy without fanfare, and to keep the French informed on a need-to-know basis only”.

The views of those at the Policy Exchange think tank are also shot through with such presumption. In a report released on February 16, the authors consider the need for a “Plan B” which would involve removing people attempting to enter the UK on small craft “to a location outside the UK – whether the Channel Islands, Sovereign Bases in Cyprus or Ascension Island – where their asylum claims would be considered.”  Ideally, “Plan A” would involve the French shouldering the responsibility of preventing the arrivals in the first place.

Downer’s anti-refugee resume is long, though he seems to have been overly credited with the copyright of the original Pacific Solution implemented by the Howard government from 2001.  The same goes for the general policy of turning vessels laden with asylum seekers and refugees back to Indonesia and potential watery graves.  That said, he was an important figure in leading negotiations with countries such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea, both becoming indispensably bribed in aiding Canberra’s sadistic solution.

This is enough to have the PCS worried.  One spokesperson noted Downer’s role as “a prime architect of Australia’s inhumane immigration policy” claiming that his recent support for the push back solution made “him a wholly inappropriate choice to lead this review”.  General Secretary Mark Serwotka has also expressed his opposition to any push back policy “on moral and humanitarian grounds, and we will not rule out industrial action to prevent it being carried out.”

The one saving grace in this needless review with pre-determined findings is the difficulty Britain faces in implementing any turn-back policy that does not violate international law.  French officials are incessant in reminding their British counterparts about that fact.  And without French cooperation in this endeavour, any proposed harshness will be mitigated.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.