The Judge RANTS!
Date: 23/06/26
Hold Your Heads Up!
This will be my third attempt to write this piece.
I knew that I just had to pass comment on the events of the weekend before last whereby - after a long sequence of malfeasance by prosecutors and the police - a carefully appointed 'safe pair of hands' judge - completely beyond any verdict provided by the jury - passed sentences against four anti-genocide protestors (whilst also unilaterally designating them as 'terrorists') which were malign even by the standards of the English judiciary.
When it came to putting my thoughts into words, however, I found that I couldn't. It was three or four days after the event - and a couple of days after the Court of Appeal had deferred to the outrageous actions of Yvette Cooper in proscribing Palestine Action as if it were Al Qaeda or Russian fascists - before my anger subsided enough to enable me to type anything remotely coherent.
But even then, I found that I had to stop. Here's why:
I've remarked before about how one of the most marked signs that I am heading for a major bout of clinical depression is the appearance of what I have called the 'prisoner complex', whereby I start to identify with people of all sorts whom I believe to have been shafted by the judicial process. I imagine their fate, their feelings, their sense of despair at what has been done to them. This is particularly the case when four good and courageous young people (and it is courageous to take on the State on a point of principle knowing that the consequence may well be having the rest of your entire life terminally fucked by said State) are subjected to serious abuses of process and manifestly political sentences on orders from a government which has become a by-word for partisan authoritarianism.
Well, here it came again, to such a degree that all I wanted to do was to curl up on the sofa under my blankie and sleep. I had to pull away.
A couple of days later, I tried again. The same result, and but for the opportunity in this period of unaccustomed warm, dry weather to go out for a walk or to do some remedial gardening, I would have been on the sofa again.
This failure to proceed, of course, merely worsened my sense of having written myself out, as nothing seems worth the effort of composing any more. It won't change the world, or even my own tiny portion of it.
A day or two later, however, I found that I didn't need to put together anything of any length on the matter, because a proper journalist had done it for me.
Jonathan Cook is a former Guardian reporter (who walked out of that rag because of its cowardice on a number of issues, occupied Palestine - his beat - being just one of them) and became independent. From his one-time base in Nazareth, he reported the depravities of the Zionist state at first hand, and has carried on uncovering the crimes of that state - and its supporters in the 'civilised' west - having moved back to England.
Please read his piece on the corrupt conduct of the UKanian state in relation to anti-genocide activists.
(It is interesting to note that England's leading 'liberal' newspaper™ has not published an editorial on such an important matter affecting what so many self-identifying 'liberals' claim to care about; due process, judicial independence and all that malarkey. It wasn't until the Wednesday after these events that they permitted one of their columnists, George Monbiot, to write about it. It then followed this up with a piece by the noted barrister Geoffrey Robertson outlining the dangers to all of us inherent in allowing such aberrations to pass unchallenged.
For challenged they must be, both the sentences handed down by the vicious Jeremy Johnson and his designation of the defendants as 'terrorists'. For if these punishments are allowed to stand, no-one who wishes meaningfully to protest against any government's policy on any subject whatsoever is safe from similar retribution, especially bearing in mind Shabby Mahmoud's rushing through parliament of the National Security (State Threats) Bill, yet another deliberately broad piece of legislation which gives the Home Secretary of the day even more powers with even less scrutiny.
I would also recommend that you visit the website of Defend Our Juries, who are fighting to protect a fundamental right that the sociopaths and psychopaths in power wish to remove from us (because juries can often be inconveniently correct from the State's point of view).
I cannot, however, recommend you seek out the organisation calling itself the 'Free Speech Union'. The reason for my caution is that the FSU has demonstrated that they are concerned only with the free speech of certain categories of people; overwhelmingly middle-class, right-of-centre people, that is, and not people campaigning for social and economic justice, and most emphatically not people who are being arraigned as 'terrorists' for holding a piece of card with four standard non-obscene English words on it. If an organisation calling itself what it does cannot recognise that to defend your own freedom of speech and expression you have to stand up for everyone's freedoms, then it is not worthy of attention.
As I close this piece, there is something I most certainly wish to do...but a thought occurs to me:
Given that Samuel Corner, Fatema Rajwani, Charlotte Head and Leona Kamio are currently categorised by the State as 'terrorists', does this mean that if I express any solidarity with them (and the dozen or more other activists who have been imprisoned without trial for the greater part of two years awaiting their very own appointments with a bewigged kangaroo) and wish them the very best in any appeal against these outrages against justice, that I could face a similar fate? We need to know where the end of this overbearing state power (assuming it has any 'end' worth delineating) actually lies.
Actually, fuck 'em. Fuck Jeremy Johnson. Fuck the Court of Appeal, and fuck Shabby Mahmood. Fuck them all to Hades (and back). A stand - however ineffectual generally - has to be made.
(And the fact that I am putting my head in the State's noose just for making a valid - and accurate - political comment shows how we are being marched through the inner suburbs of that ugly city called 'Tyranny', heading for execution in the main square).
I therefore send my regards and admiration to the Filton Four, and I finish with this fine rock song from 1971 by Argent. Pay particular attention, please, to the lyrics:
And if it's bad
Don't let it get you down, you can take it
And if it hurts
Don't let them see you cry, you can make it.
And if they stare
Just let them burn their eyes on you moving
And if they shout
Don't let it change a thing that you're doing.
Hold your head up,
Hold your head high"
(© Chris White and Rod Argent)
