The goal is to just keep adding more and more protest laws until nobody’s willing to attend a pro-Palestine demonstration without a lawyer present.
Laws targeting pro-Palestine protests should be understood as attempts to suppress criticism of Israel. This is exactly what’s unfolding in the UK, where the prime minister is pushing for legal action against anyone who utters the phrase “globalise the intifada.”
Keir Starmer declared during a Thursday press conference, “If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted. It is racism, extremely racism and it has left a minority community in this country scared, intimidated, wondering if they belong. So, I say again this government will do everything in our power to stamp this hatred out.”
The UK government has already prohibited any supportive expression of the activist group Palestine Action, recently enacted a law banning repeat demonstrations, and detained protesters on charges related to “racially aggravated public order offences” for using the word “intifada” during their activism. Now, the prime minister is demanding even harsher prosecutions.
This appears as a clear strategy aimed at intimidating the pro-Palestine protest movement. The plan is to enact a series of increasingly restrictive protest laws so that people feel unable to attend pro-Palestine rallies unless they have legal counsel guiding them on what can and cannot be said to avoid imprisonment.
Starmer’s remarks followed a non-fatal stabbing incident involving two Jewish men in Golders Green on Wednesday, which the prime minister immediately tagged an “antisemitic attack” and which police are classifying as a terrorist event.
Predictably, much of the western political and media establishments have seized this moment to loudly condemn antisemitism and call for tougher restrictions on anti-Israel rhetoric and pro-Palestine gatherings. In Australia, this incident has received intense coverage from mainstream media, despite being a non-lethal attack occurring far away on a continent with over 53,000 knife-related crimes last year.
However, at this stage there is no public proof linking the attack to a hateful ideology. Britain’s Channel 4 News reports that the suspect, Essa Suleiman, a Somali-born British citizen, had recently been discharged from a psychiatric hospital. He has a long history of mental health struggles and violent incidents. Back in 2008, he was reportedly imprisoned for assaulting a police officer and his dog, which, to clarify, was presumably not Jewish.
Further complicating the antisemitic terrorism narrative is that Suleiman’s victims were not exclusively Jewish. In addition to the Golders Green stabbing, he faces charges for trying to murder Ishmail Hussein earlier that day—a name that does not suggest Jewish heritage. If there had been a third Jewish victim, it likely would have been widely reported.
If someone went on a stabbing spree targeting both Jewish and non-Jewish individuals shortly after leaving psychiatric care, the immediate assumption would not be “this is a politically motivated antisemitic terror act.” A more reasonable conclusion would be that this was the result of a mentally ill individual experiencing a psychotic episode and failed by healthcare systems.
In 2020, Suleiman was apparently referred to Prevent, a government early-intervention program aimed at steering vulnerable individuals away from extremism, but his case was dropped soon after. While speculative, this was perhaps because authorities viewed his behavior as stemming from mental illness rather than extremist views, leading them to disregard his file.
Given that the violence was not exclusively aimed at Jews and that Suleiman suffered from serious mental health problems, it would be challenging to prove a terrorist motive. This may explain why he has so far only been charged with attempted murder rather than terrorism.
Evidently, the claim that this event demands harsh authoritarian reactions as an antisemitic hate crime is weak at best. Nevertheless, authorities are aggressively pursuing this agenda—not to defend Jewish communities, but to safeguard the interests of Israel, a close ally of the western powers.
I have emphasized this repeatedly: Israel and its advocates represent the single greatest threat to free speech in the West. It is imperative that society fights vigorously to preserve the right to criticize war, genocide, apartheid, and oppression.
Original article: caitlinjohnstone.com.au
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