Independent Journalists Are No Longer Safe

Ricky D. Hale writes:

There has been lots of fuss over recent censorship efforts in the UK, due to social media users, and other members of the public, being arrested for their words. Rowan Atkinson made a speech, pointing out some of the most egregious examples, such as the person who was arrested for calling the Church of Scientology a cult, and the teenager who called a police horse gay, and the café owner arrested for displaying Bible passages on a TV screen.

The UK has reached the point where anything that can be deemed offensive can be considered a crime, so why then have the police not arrested themselves? Because I find their actions offensive!

You see the problem with treating offensiveness as a crime yet? No? Okay, then I’m offended by you! That wouldn’t lead to your arrest, of course, because you can offend opponents of the establishment all you like. It’s only those who have offended the establishment who will be arrested.

As Atkinson points out, the solution to tackling speech you don’t like is not censorship, it’s more speech. If you find a particular idea wrong or offensive, you have the opportunity to persuade your audience in the “market place of ideas” (remember when liberals loved this argument?)

Government interference in speech should only ever be a last resort. In the US, it was decided the line would be fighting talk, i.e. talk that poses an immediate threat of violence.

If I said I was going to punch you in the face, that would be fighting talk. If someone else said I should punch you in the face, that would be fighting talk. If someone later said I was justified in punching you in the face, that would not be fighting talk, it would be their opinion. You see the difference? Opinions should be allowed, even if they’re wrong.

Someone calling a police horse gay or calling scientology a cult would not be fighting talk. Now you might be forgiven for thinking these are examples of overzealous officers misinterpreting the law, but something more sinister is at play.

One thing not enough people are picking up on is that anti-establishment, particularly anti-war, journalists are facing the wrath of the law. This is one of the main reasons there are so few journalists like this now. The only people allowed to cover war are client journalists who write what the government wants and comply with D-notices (instructions from the intelligence services).

D-notices have been issued to cover up the UK military’s role in the Gaza genocide and the reason we know is because of the good work of Declassified UK who must surely have their cards marked. Not only are we conducting surveillance flights from a base in Cyprus, but we have the SAS on standby to enter Gaza, and the government doesn’t want us to know. You understand how dangerous censorship is yet?

When a journalist is arrested in the UK, often it’s obvious they haven’t even broken our ridiculous censorship laws, but this does not stop the police. One workaround is to let anti-terror police at airports do the dirty work. This is because they can deny your rights: they can arrest you for any reason, deny you access to a lawyer, and electronically strip search you.

You do not have the right to refuse to answer their questions and you can be jailed if you do refuse. They can tell you they’re prosecuting you under some anti-terrorism law, give you a court date two or three years from now (because our court backlog is huge) and say you’re not allowed to write anything in the meantime, depriving you of an income.

From your devices, they can obtain every last bit of data about you, keep it on file and monitor you like a terrorist, even though you’ve potentially done nothing wrong. It’s abuse of the law and it’s the perfect way to not only censor journalists who are critical of the state, but to make others reluctant to do the same. It is designed to have a chilling effect.

The latest journalist to fall foul of this trap is Richard Medhurst who was coming home through Heathrow airport, only to be arrested and have his equipment confiscated. He was questioned under his alleged support for a proscribed terrorist organisation, presumably Hamas, but he was told very little about why he was detained! He was kept in uncomfortable conditions for 24 hours and not allowed to notify friends or family of his arrest. He is now unsure if police are going to allow him to work, meaning he could be left without an income.

The police officers who arrested Medhurst know there is zero chance that he is a terrorist. He has made his opposition to violence and terrorism loud and clear, but whereas terrorism used to mean you were planning to kill people, it now means you have expressed opinions the state has not authorised.

Medhurst is unquestionably pro-Palestinian and has posted tweets which could be interpreted as supportive of Hamas. For example, he has stated that Hamas “has a legal right to resist an invading, occupying force.” These words are perfectly true, of course. Any people have a right to resist invading forces, so long as they do so within the confines of international law.

While you could certainly argue that Hamas does not respect international law, neither does Israel, and Israel is the invading force, plus it has killed 33 times more civilians than Hamas (and that is probably a significant underestimate).

Medhurst has criticised Hamas for violating international law, for example, stating it was wrong for a Hamas guard to execute an Israeli hostage. Medhurst’s position seems to be that Palestinians have a right to resist invasion and occupation, so long as they respect international law, and when they fail to do so, that is wrong.

The prime minister of the UK, on the other hand, has argued Israel has a right to invade, occupy and starve Palestine, as long as it does so within the confines of international law (which is basically what Medhurst said about Hamas!) The problem is Israel cannot do those things within the confines of the law as the International Court of Justice has made clear. Surely, from a legal perspective Starmer’s position is more problematic than Medhurst’s. He is ignoring the ICJ’s ruling that arms sales and other support for Israel must stop immediately, yet he has not been arrested.

If Medhurst can be arrested for tweets that could be seen as supportive of Hamas, why are people not being arrested for supporting the IDF? Why are Zionists allowed to express support for clearly genocidal actions? We’ve seen the horrific mass rapes at the Sde Teiman concentration camp. If a Twitter user expresses their sympathies for the accused IDF soldiers, will they be arrested?

Many journalists support Israel’s illegal actions, so now would be a good time to remind everyone that supporting war crimes and genocide is a violation of international law. If you see war crimes taking place on camera, you cannot defend the war criminals and later plead ignorance. Journalists were arrested and prosecuted for supporting the Rwanda genocide, for example, so why is the law not being applied fairly and consistently?

We live in a country where a teenage girl can lose her citizenship for being groomed online and flying to Syria to marry an ISIS member when she was a minor, but a British citizen can fly to Israel, participate in the destruction of 80% of the homes in Gaza, the killing of tens of thousands (perhaps 200,000) civilians, and even run a rape centre where prisoners are sodomised with electrified metal poles, and then they can return home and get on with their life as though nothing happened. If you object to this, there is every chance you will be arrested for a hate crime!

British citizens are allowed to participate in terrorism and genocide for the Israeli state, our politicians are allowed to supply the weapons that blow Palestinian children to pieces, but if someone criticises the Israeli state, they are the ones who are treated as terrorists!

It’s not just Richard Medhurst who has fallen foul of our censorship laws, it’s Vanessa Beeley, Craig Murray, Kit Klarenberg, and most noteworthy of all Julian Assange. When people are not arrested for wrong think, they are sacked, and it’s not just the journalists like Sangita Myska, it’s the academics like David Miller and Amira Abdelhamid.

But it’s not just high profile cases of people being silenced, ordinary people are being arrested for wrong think at an increasing rate. Yet the government wants to introduce more censorship laws that would, among other things, treat misogyny like terrorism and crack down on any ideology seen as radicalising young people. Given that we’ve heard accusations of TikTok turning young people into Hamas, you can see where this is going.

This is why it’s so stupid when people cheer on the British government’s war against Elon Musk. I’m certainly no fan of Musk, but you don’t have to be to understand it’s not the government’s role to decide which opinions should and should not be expressed on social media. Governments will always go after their critics.

There is a clear effort by the UK, Europe, and the US to destroy social media platforms (just look at the proposed US TikTok ban) or turn them into overly-policed hellholes like Facebook. They’re trying to create a reality where alternative media doesn’t exist and political voices are not heard, unless they align with the establishment. In other words, they are trying to make dissent go away. And in a world in which the US and Europe are actively participating in a genocide, this would be insanely dangerous.

I don’t think people appreciate the risk independent writers take by standing up for what’s right. We can have our livelihood threatened at any moment and be taken away from our families. I’m genuinely worried about going through an airport in case someone has objected to one of my articles. I’m left wondering if my door will be broken down for a tweet, even though I oppose violence and terrorism in the strongest possible terms. I’ve already made the decision that if the state ever tried to censor me, I would defy them, even if that meant going to jail, but it’s crazy I have to think like that in a so-called free society. The UK is becoming everything it accuses China of being.