> these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action"
They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers. It is strange how much of this 'direction action' is harming Ukraine support and not Israel. If people wanted to support Palestine they can do it without attacking their own countries' military - which is not operating in Israel at all.
> "she was murdered by ICE"
They have a video of her being shot, pretty much needlessly. I'd say that should be manslaughter at a minimum.
"They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers"
Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'?
I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged.
Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of laws for that.
> Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'?
You should be less flippant.
The accused's name is Samuel Corner. He and his friends are still on trial for their actions.
Here's the bodycam footage where you see Samuel Corner attack police seargent Kate Evans with a sledgehammer while she was on the ground, fracturing her spine. Watch from 3m05s to 3m10s:
The group's stated aim is to stop the UK or any UK companies giving Israel any military support. They target companies who they think supply Israel. They break in and smash them, and as you've hopefully just seen with your own eyes, they are not afraid to attack people with sledgehammers. They use violence to achieve their political aim. They are terrorists and belong in prison.
> Samuel Corner, 23, [...] Oxford University graduate from Devon [...] when asked why he struck Sgt Evans with the sledgehammer, he replied: "It was me not really knowing what I was doing
Thanks Samuel. That Oxford degree really shows, doesn't it?
It feels to me like there's a distinction between "on one occasion, one person in group X did Y" and "group X does Y", and it's the second of those that (for some choices of Y, including "attacking police with sledgehammers") could justify calling group X a terrorist group.
Obviously "on one occasion, a person in group X did Y" is evidence for "group X does Y". If Samuel Corner attacked a police sergeant with a sledgehammer during one Palestine Action, er, action, then that's the sort of thing we expect to see more often if PA is generally in favour of attacking police with sledgehammers. (Either as a matter of explicit open policy, or as a nudge-nudge-wink-wink thing where everyone in PA knows that if they start smashing up police as well as property then their PA comrades will think better of them rather than worse.)
But it falls way short of proof. Maybe Samuel Corner sledgehammered a cop because Palestine Action is a terrorist organization after all; but maybe Samuel Corner sledgehammered a cop because Samuel Corner is a thug or an idiot or was drunk or whatever. Or maybe Samuel Corner sledgehammered a cop because the cops were already being violent with the Palestine Action folks and he was doing his (ill-advised) best to protect the others from the police. (This, as I understand it, is his account of things.)
(An Oxford University graduate attacked a police officer with a sledgehammer. I take it you would not say that that makes the University of Oxford a terrorist organization, and you wouldn't say that even if he'd done it while attending, say, a university social function rather than while smashing up alleged military hardware. It matters how typical the action is of the organization, what the group's leadership thinks of the action, etc.)
I took a look at the video. It's not easy to tell what's going on, but it looks to me as follows. One of the PA people is on the ground, being forcibly restrained and tasered by a police officer, complaining loudly about what the police officer is doing. (It isn't obvious to me whether or not her complaints are justified[1].) There is another police officer, whom I take to be Kate Evans, nearby, kneeling on the ground and helping to restrain this PA person. Samuel Corner approaches with his sledgehammer and attacks that second police officer. I can't tell from the video exactly what he's trying to do (e.g., whether he's being as violent as possible and hoping to kill or maim, or whether he's trying to get the police officer off the other person with minimal force but all he's got is a sledgehammer).
[1] I get the impression that she feels she has the right not to suffer any pain while being forcibly restrained by police, which seems like a rather naive view of things. But I also get the impression that the police were being pretty free with their tasering. But it's hard to tell exactly what's going on, and I imagine it was even harder in real time, and I am inclined to cut both her and the police some slack on those grounds.
It's highly misleading, even though not technically false, to say that Corner attacked Kate Evans "while she was on the ground"; she certainly was on the ground in the sense that she was supported by the floor, and even in the sense that she wasn't standing up -- I think she was crouching -- but it's not like she was lying on the ground injured or inactive; she was fighting one of the other PA people, and she was "on the ground" because that PA person was (in a stronger sense) "on the ground" too.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not approve of attacking police officers with sledgehammers just because they are restraining someone you would prefer them not to be restraining, even if you think they're doing it more violently than necessary. And I have a lot of sympathy with police officers not being super-gentle when the people they're dealing with are armed with sledgehammers.
But the story here looks to me more like "there were a bunch of PA people, who had sledgehammers because they were planning to smash up military hardware; the cops arrived and wrestled and tasered them, and one of the PA people lost his temper and went for one of the cops to try to defend his friend whom he thought was being mistreated, and unfortunately he was wielding a sledgehammer at the time" than like "PA is in the business of attacking cops with sledgehammers".
None of that makes Kate Evans any less injured. But I think those two possibilities say very different things about Palestine Action. Carrying sledgehammers because you want to smash equipment is different from carrying sledgehammers because you want to smash people. Attacking police because they are a symbol of the state is different from attacking police because they are attacking your friend. One person doing something bad in the heat of the moment because he thinks his friend is being mistreated is different from an organization setting out to do that bad thing.
There are plenty of documented cases of police being violent (sometimes with deadly effect) with members of the public. Sometimes they have good justification for it, sometimes not so much. Most of us don't on those grounds call the police a terrorist organization. Those who do say things along those lines do so because they think that actually the police are systematically violent and brutal.
I think the same applies to organizations like Palestine Action. So far as I can tell, they aren't systematically violent and brutal. Mostly they smash up hardware that they think would otherwise be used to oppress Palestinians. (I am making no judgement as to whether they're right about that, which is relevant to whether they're a Good Thing or a Bad Thing but not to whether they're terrorists.) Sometimes that leads to skirmishes with the police. On one occasion so far, one of them badly injured a police officer. It's very bad that that happened, but this all seems well short of what it would take to justify calling the organization a terrorist one.
> The group's stated aim is to stop the UK or any UK companies giving Israel any military support. They target companies who they think supply Israel. They break in and smash them, and as you've hopefully just seen with your own eyes, they are not afraid to attack people with sledgehammers. They use violence to achieve their political aim. They are terrorists and belong in prison.
Yet none of them are being prosecuted under the terrorism act, or on any charge related to terrorism.
I think they meet the definition of "terrorists" by their stated goals and acts. But it seems there's reticence by the CPS to break out the Terrorism Act.
Palestine Action is already a proscribed group because of spraypainting RAF planes. I would say this raid seems more terroristic than base invasion, but what do I know? I'm not the Home Secretary.
It raises questions, because while the Terrorism Act is heavily criticised for being overbroad and making a number of otherwise innocuous things crimes, the CPS haven't used it against this group of people, who'd face prison just for being a member, or claiming to be a member of Palestine Action. Maybe the CPS can't reliably prove they are?
> "My friends were in danger and they [the police] were getting quite hands-on.
They were petulantly resisting arrest (it looks on camera to scream instead of just complying calmly) while committing destructive/violent crimes. The police were very restrained here. There was no danger from the police, at all.
Now a police officer doing their job has a spinal injury. Palestine Action says they will not stop doing 'direct action' (sabotage, property destruction, violence). They deserve the proscription.
> The quote from the article continues. You cut it off.
I quoted three separate snippets from the article that I wanted to draw attention to, and gave you the URL to read the rest yourself.
I'm of the opinion that, someone who sledgehammers an unaware opponent and claims in their defense "I was just trying to help", they are being disingenuous. Especially as one of Britain's most elite and privileged youngsters.
If you'd like to quote more of the article:
> When asked by his barrister Tom Wainwright whether he was willing to injure a person or use violence during the break-in, he replied: "No, not at all".
Read that back to yourself while watching the attack footage again. Is this credible testimony?
Wow, thanks. It was really shameful for amiga386 to intentionally hide that critical context. They even omitted the comma showing that there was additional context (and replaced it with inappropriate snark).
I find it horrifying (though not surprising) how many people can assume that just because you express some level of support for a group, you are complicit in all actions taken by that group.
In the extreme, that sort of view makes it impossible to have criminal lawyers.
(And not far below that extreme, we have people using all their power to go after independent judges and lawyers with every extrajudicial tool at their disposal, legal system be damned.)
The nuance between speech and action was one of the many casualties of social media. I wonder if, back in the 90's, people would get arrested for holding "FREE KEVIN MITNICK" posters, if we'd had two decades of social media before it.
UK military is operating in Palestine (very frequent military flights from their post-colonial base in Cyprus), and is operating in Israel (when they were shooting down drones, etc.), and is supplying Israel with weapons (directly by soldier training and indirectly by allowing to use their military bases), and joined in international coverup (they have detailed intelligence on what Israel was doing in Gaza, which they never released publicly any part of).
Pretty solid basis for direct action.
If they provided this level of support for Russia, they'd be a new Belarus.
Equating surveillance flights off the coast with "operating in the country" is tenuous at best. If that's the threshold, Russian military is already operating in Britain (see Yantar's adventures).
The mental effort a lot of people has made to pretend they aren't entirely powerless and irrelevant for stopping Israel's crimes is deeply impressive. The reality is that there's nothing the UK can do to stop Israel as long as the US is supporting them (short of going to war with both the US and Israel), but this reality is at odds with the desire to do something, so people invent and inflate leverage where there isn't any. Moreover, most of the time the very same people oppose creating more leverage for the future, as your added qualifier of "post-colonial" implies. It's depressing.
It's not off the coast, they're circling directly over the territory of Palestine, without invitation from Palestinian state, and against interests of Palestinians.
Post-colonial only implies that Cyprus was a UK colony, and now is not, but still retains some bases in there.
Not direct intervention; but we fly sorties, provide intelligence, ship military equipment, build systems for... None of which we provide Israel for their current war.
It's just odd to me that Israel draws so much Ire when the UK deals with all sorts. There are many worse things happening that doesn't get a second of airtime.
Not that your comment is relevant, but why is there a narrative of obstruction when you can visibly see Renee Good wave another truck by moments before she was killed?
The newly released footage is truly a political Rorschach test. It is unbelievable to me that anyone without diminished mental capabilities could believe that exonerates the camera man.
If I recall correctly this was in direct response to British citizens being kidnapped and held hostage inside Gaza. These were intelligence sorties with the express aim to help locate UK citizens.
So UK citizens were not kidnapped? Or are you implying the UK were not doing intelligence flights, but were attacking Gaza directly, or had boots on the ground directly? Because I have seen absolutely zero reporting to infer that.
Like all defenders of the indefensible, you will shift the goalposts incessantly to suit the narrative you wish to defend.
First it was, "The British military isn't doing anything in Gaza, anyone who says otherwise is lying."
Now it is, "The British military might be doing something in Gaza, but they're justified in doing so, and it's limited to protecting British citizens anyways."
What will it be now?
"While the Ministry of Defence (MoD) claims these flights are solely for locating Israeli hostages held by Hamas, AOAV found that the RAF conducted 24 flights in the two weeks leading up to and including the day of Israel’s deadly attack on the Nuseirat Refugee Camp on 8 June 2024, which killed 274 Palestinians and injured over 700."
"On October 19, 2024, four days after it had been at RAF Brize Norton, the “Re’em” aircraft with registration 272 appeared directly over Gaza at 7:32 p.m. local time, less than 5km away from Beit Lahiya, a city in north Gaza. Three hours later, at 11:20 p.m., the IAF bombed a residential complex in Beit Lahiya killing at least 73 people.
On October 24, 2024, nine days after traveling to the UK, the same 272 aircraft was located at 9:30 p.m. less than 5 miles from Jabalia camp. An hour later, at 10:40 p.m., airstrikes were recorded destroying apartment blocks in Jabalia. The aircraft remained airborne patrolling the airspace near Gaza until it was recorded at 10:36 p.m. near Ashdod, a coastal city near Tel Aviv, flying towards Hatzor Airbase."
Well the Russian drones are munitions, so that's not comparable. Is the UK dropping bombs on Gaza? I have seen zero reporting to say they have.
The UK might be flying spy planes outside it's airspace when it's citizens were kidnapped. That's not a "combatant". Was the UK a combatant when flying spy planes near the Ukraine border?
I think you are way off the mark based on reporting, I'm not even sure how you are coming to these stated opinions.
No, they're not dropping munitions, they're simply coordinating with the Israeli military to facilitate the dropping of munitions, doing everything possible save putting boots on the ground (that we know of). So you're right, in that case Britain is more like China in this situation, perfectly blameless.
> these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action"
You mean the group that sneaked in and damaged a bunch of UK Military’s planes on a military base? Was this the action that put them into the terrorist category?
Not quite in the same league as IS, Al-Qaeda etc etc. Used to be a organisation had to murder and terrorise an entire population, or fly planes into city centres.
Apparently our standards have dropped so low that spray painting a couple of planes and embarrassing the UK military now puts you on par with those other organisations.
Yes. They're a bunch of violent criminals. But that's not the point.
There are lots of violent criminals who harm businesses and injure, or even kill people. They should be prosecuted and imprisoned. It's not illegal to say "I support <name of criminal or criminal gang>", even if people strongly disagree with you.
However, by showing they could break into an RAF base and spraypaint the planes - that says to me that the RAF are completely shit at their job, how can they protect their base from Russians if they can't even keep out local criminals - embarrassed the Government, and the government retaliated by making it illegal to say you support them.
Say it out loud? Criminal. Wear a t-shirt? Criminal. Hold a placard? Criminal.
Might as well just hold up blank sheets of paper and wait for the police to arrest you because they know what you want to write on them, like they do in Russia.
To me, that's a free speech issue. What an affront to free speech it is. Saying you support criminal scumbags should not be a crime. You should be able to say you support a bunch of violent yahoos, to whoever will listen to you, and I should be able to laugh at you and call you a simpleton for your idiot beliefs.
I'm not sure they've been shown to be violent (unless you consider damage to property as violence- I know some do, but personally my "things are just things" stance limits violence to actions which impact people, who matter.
Broadly speaking though, I agree. What they did was criminal damage, undoubtedly, I have no problem arresting and prosecuting people for that. But I don't believe that it's terrorism, nor that it would have been so unpopular had it not been bloody embarrassing for the armed forces. Honestly, bolt cutters and some paint should not be grounding some of your air defence.
> Giving evidence earlier, he said the group's only intention was to "break in, cause as much damage to the factory as possible, destroy weapons and prevent the factory from reopening".
I count "causing as much damage as possible" to be violent.
While I think graffiti taggers "damage property" but are non-violent. But in many places, rival gangs blow up/set alight/demolish their rivals' homes/businesses/vehicles, etc. That counts as pretty strong violence to me, even if no people are injured.
Anyway, talking of people being injured, watch a member of Palestine Action (Samuel Corner, 23, Oxford University graduate) drive a sledgehammer into a police seargent while she's trying to arrest his comrade:
I'd designate them as a terrorist group for destroying factories, not so much for spraypainting planes. But I'd still support your right to say you support them, even though I'd disagree.
> I count "causing as much damage as possible" to be violent.
That is just not what the word violent means (unless used figuratively but I don't think that's what you mean). It means hurting, or attempting to hurt, a person (or maybe an animal). Setting fire or blowing up a home which might have people still in it is certainly violent, but destroying property for the sake or property destruction is not.
Of course, deliberately attacking someone with a sledgehammer certainly is.
There are a lot of definitions for violence, but most would include "destruction" along with "harm", "pain", "suffering" and so on.
If I intentionally wreck your home, like I properly ransack the place, smash it all up, I'd say I had been violent to you. Wouldn't you? You wouldn't walk in to find your home and your life ruined and say "oh it's just property damage", would you?
If my nation was at war with yours, and we dropped a bomb on your weapons factory, would you count that as violent, or non-violent?
FWIW, if you did that to my house I'd be upset and angry and not much inclined to use the word "just" about it, but no, I wouldn't say you'd been violent to me.
(I would say you'd been violent to me if you'd slapped me in the face. I would rather be slapped in the face than have my house ransacked and smashed up. Some not-violent things are worse than some violent things.)
If you dropped a bomb on a weapons factory that had, or plausibly could have had, people in it then that would unquestionably be an act of violence. If you somehow knew that there was nothing there but hardware then I wouldn't call it an act of violence.
(In practice, I'm pretty sure that when you drop a bomb you scarcely ever know that you're not going to injure or kill anyone.)
I'm not claiming that this is the only way, or the only proper way, to use the word "violence". But, so far as I can tell from introspection, it is how I would use it.
There are contexts in which I would use the word "violence" to include destruction that only affects things and not people. But they'd be contexts that already make it clear that it's things and not people being affected. E.g., "We smashed up that misbehaving printer with great violence, and very satisfying it was too".
> If I intentionally wreck your home, like I properly ransack the place, smash it all up, I'd say I had been violent to you. Wouldn't you? You wouldn't walk in to find your home and your life ruined and say "oh it's just property damage", would you?
There's certainly implied violence. Like, if you done that once, maybe you'll be back tomorrow when I happen to be in, and actually be violent to me. And even if that weren't the case, I'd still obviously be very distressed about the situation.
But, having said all that, no I wouldn't say you had been violent, if you hadn't actually tried to hurt anyone.
If you dropped a bomb on an abandoned or fully automated factory, that you could be 100% sure doesn't have any people in it - then I still wouldn't count that as "violent" (except maybe figuratively), no matter how destructive.
One member did very violently attack a police officer:
> A police sergeant was left unable to drive, shower or dress herself after a Palestine Action activist allegedly hit her with a sledgehammer during a break-in at an Israeli defence firm's UK site, a trial has heard.
Of course, one violent member does not make an organisation into a terrorist organisation. But, just as a matter of fact, there has been some actual violence against a person.
Why are you surprised that people who sympathize with terrorists are called terrorists sympathizers?
Roughly 75% of Palestinians support terrorism (the number changes with every survey but it's consistently over 50%).
The lady in Minneapolis was using her car as a weapon to impede law enforcement operations. That's not really terrorism; insurrection would be a more accurate description. But she certainly wasn't a good person deserving of any sympathy.
> The lady in Minneapolis was using her car as a weapon to impede law enforcement operations.
A hysterical take like this isn't really credible. "Obstruction", sure, but calling a stopped vehicle a "weapon" because it's slightly in the way defies the English language to the point where you damage your own credibility.
It would be equivalent to call this comment a "weapon" I'm using to impede you announcing your opinion unopposed.
She's absolutely deserving of sympathy; she was killed unjustly. We don't have a law on the books allowing capital punishment for parking a vehicle somewhere law enforcement finds it inconvenient. Just because you happen not to agree with her actions at the time, illegal or no, doesn't imply "and therefore she deserved death". I suggest you consider the consequences to your own self of people applying your own logic to you, and how long you would last if this was the general state of affairs.
I'll do you one better: Palestine Action is bankrolled by notorious pro-Russia tankie Fergie Chambers, who supports Vladimir Putin's genocidal campaign in Ukraine. So please add genocide sympathizer to your list.
Spray painting a bunch of airplanes is terrorism. Got it.
Oh, and don’t come crying when the same authoritarian laws put in place for Palestine Action are used to label your cause as terrorism to quash dissent.
Even if I hadn’t, I surely would have by now given the amount of “gotchas” in this thread using this crime as some kind of smoking gun justification for proscription.
But it is good to know that criminal assault is now equivalent to terrorism.
1) Uh.. not terrorism? Hate crime perhaps, but that should be decided by a jury, not unilaterally determined by the gov.
2) So arms manufacturers participating in a war (at best!) are now equivalent to.. gay establishments? I suggest thinking through your examples before sharing them :)
