A young man protested about Israel's actions in Gaza during the Labour Party conference yesterday and was brutally manhandled as a result, and was then charged with a breach of the peace.
He was right to protest. Labour is clearly deliberately dithering on this issue. That is unforgivable when war crimes are happening daily in Gaza.
And this morning the Guardian reports that:
At least 492 people have been killed and 1,645 injured, Lebanon's health ministry has said, after a wave of Israeli airstrikes on alleged Hezbollah targes that left the country with its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.
These latest actions by Israel against Lebanon look to be more yet more war crimes by Israel's neo-fascist government but still David Lammy offers easel words to the world as Labour fence sits, watching these crimes be committed for all to see.
One day Labour's leadership might be required to act. If they do not I hope they will be held accountable internationally for their inaction. It is criminal that they are not actively seeking to stop these crimes of aggression by Israel.
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“Everyone has the right to protest and to organise protests. This right is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights (the ECHR).
Your right to freedom of expression is protected under Article 10 of the ECHR. Your right to freedom of assembly is protected under Article 11.”
Source: “Your right to protest” – Liberty. https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/advice_information/right-to-protest/
His treatment was appalling given how vulnerable the neck area is and how many people have died in situations of ‘arrest’ over the years from having their airway obstructed. The bloke who grabbed should be trained properly.
Reeve’s response was Tory in the extreme. The least she could have done is recognised the sentiment.
And Israel………….what to say?
Hezbollah though should not be hanging out in Lebanon. Unless that is a confection created by Israel? Hezbollah needs to get out of that area quick. Israel is now set upon a period of real estate expansion and will grab at any excuse to do so, because they conflate God with property.
And their methods will be based on what the Christians have taught them over the years – especially those good Catholics who had ‘Gott Mit Uns’ inscribed on their belts as they went about their ‘work’.
This is what Steve Bannon and Alt Right is really thinking of when it speaks of the great ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition. Well here it is – again, written in the blood of innocents.
Sickening.
The West continues to dig its own grave as the world is made more and more unsafe.
Where do you suggest Hezbollah should go?
Thank you and well said, Cyndy.
@ PSR: Hezbollah was founded after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the US, France and UK taking the side of Israel and its Christian Phalangist allies, especially against Shiites.
Last week, a Lebanese Christian, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, reminded the world that there are 37 crusader fortresses around the Levant and the crusader occupation did not long and implied that the zionist presence would not either. I’m inclined to agree, especially as the little reported collapse of Israel’s economy and migration of colonists proceed.
A friend / former colleague and former Labour Party constituency branch secretary returned to Chicago in the spring. She reports that the biggest contingent of new pupils at her son’s junior school are Israelis.
Hezbollah need to go back home to Southern Lebanon.
Perhaps they might even manage to live under the Israeli yoke.
This is a planned, yet still opportunitistic, Zionist expansion, only possible with a corrupt Israeli leader, struggling for personal survival, and unstable American regime.
Given that Greater Israel stretches from the Euphrates to the Nile in the minds and hopes of some Zionists, (eg Daniella Weiss), then obviously the current far right Israeli government is going to take and occupy or annex as much territory as it can, before setting up its … pluralistic / segregationist / fascistic / democratic / apartheid / permanent refugee / regime (delete as applicable) in its new expanded occupied area.
The USA will do nothing, probably not even handwringing. Nor will the UK.
Colonel
Thank you for that – I’d forgotten how Hezbollah had come about.
But I still feel strongly for the innocents who will get caught in the crossfire and just how easily Israel can be provoked into action with terrible consequences that I see in my living room, daily.
the West is less united than one may think. In the last UN vote last week on the ICJ judgement that Israel is in an illegal occupation, no major country voted against it apart from the USA. Half of the 11 nations who did so were small Pacific Island states. The only European state in favour was Hungary.
No major ally of the US stood with them. They abstained.
Sixteen European countries by my count and Australia voted for the resolution. They included France, Spain, Sweden, Belgium and Portugal.
Now I am not pretending it is all about to shift dramatically. Israel continues to flout international law. And the dissenting countries need to be more resolute. The British Establishment is resolutely pro-Israel. But there has been a shift and in this country public opinion has shifted over the last year. A majority of Labour and younger voters are not sympathetic to Israel’s actions. Israel will not pick up support. There is growing pressure from developing countries.
The future is unpredictable.
I’m afraid I see a UN abstention as a passive endorsement.
So do I
@ Tony
It might well be passive endorsement. My point is they have, in a number of cases, moved from voting with the US to abstention. The US is not getting full support from its closest allies.
I think abstention is also likely to be US State Dept or internal lobbying. We know there has been unprecedented dissent from US ( and EU & UK officials ) . See reports of Mark Smith’s resignation statement in August. We also see a shift in public opinion.
Being old I remember the surprise in the Pentagon papers ( a secret record of the Vietnam War) that there was opposition from within the CIA and military against the war.
This is not to say the dissenters will win out but we can’t just dismiss it.
I’ve watched the video clip. No way was that young man breaching the peace. If anyone was, it was the security staff. If it goes to court, I hope the case is thrown out.
Reeves said yesterday that Labour is “a party that represents working people, not a party of protest”! Actually Labour is a democratic socialist party (that’s what was written on her membership card when she joined) that represents all working class people, wether employed, disabled, sick or pensioners, and it was born out of protest.
Agreed
Front benchers that trot out the ‘Labour is no longer a party of protest line’ are trying to distance what the Party is now to what the Party was under Jeremy Corbyn.
The inference being that Corbyn, his supporters (myself included) and the socialism and social justice they stood for is/was a bad thing.
Apparently 25000 marched to the conference on Friday, calling for a ceasefier and an end to selling arms to Israel- without a peep on the ‘public service broadcaster’ @BBC.
Only if there had been trouble would it have got a mention – as a ‘hate march’.
The single protester at least succeeded in getting the crime mentioned.
Reeves scripted response that ‘are no longer a party of protest, but a party of ‘ – a governemtn that wont debate whether they should be enabling warcrimes – and the killing of 40,000.
Agreed
A couple of weeks ago well over 100 thousand of people of all demographics marched through the west end to knightsbridge – not a single tv report before during bt or after. The only reason it got any coverage was because the daily Mail staff had to get past to get to work and couldn’t ignore it.
I was there and many tourists were taking photos of the massive turnout. Many Union banners were there. Many Jewish people and a total multiracial turnout. Including black British from Tottenham- Lammys constituency. He will not be popular with the locals anymore especially as him and Starmer and this overtly Zionist supporting and financially backed cabinet take the country into a more direct war in Lebanon and Ukraine.
There has been a massive censorship blackout and many independent journalists have been arrested on spurious kafkaesque charges without right to silence or legal representation. Craig Murray and Richard Medhurst have made representations to the UN in Geneva.
Yet we are subject to propaganda spree, we are still repeated the lies of the fake murdered and burnt babies. We are denied the truth of the Hannibal directive. The recent terrorism against civilian populations targeting hospital workers -mostly- doctors and nurses pagers- which are long planned and linked to western skullduggery. The American Hospital was told a week before to change their pagers!
That this Labour government is the worst ever was easy to see. It is full of the ziofascists , they got rid of all antiwar, pro Palestine ordinary supporters and MPs through the fake AS charges against JC. Because this was a long planned extension to take over the whole of the Levant.
This plan goes back at least a century , the occupation of the Levant by the US and Anglo European imperilists as the last colony established post WW2 – an illegal Apartheid Entity which has run amok ever since expanding well beyond its original remit granted in WW1 by a British Empire that had NO RIGHT to promise it in a short ‘legal contract’ to Baron Rothschild as the Balfour Declaration.
All of which has to do with control of the ME and the crossroads between EurAsia and Africa and the resources below the ground there.
It is beyond crazy that we in the U.K. and the rest of the worlds population least of all the Real Semetic Peoples of The Levant, have to abide by that false declaration and now further expansion of the illegal Entity.
It is clear as daylight that just as the imperial apartheid colony Rhodesia could not continue; neither could South Africa later or the Subcontinent and other imperial colonisations at the end of WW2 – that neither can this final iteration of a supremacist settler colony continue.
It too must be vacated and the lands returned to the original native populations.
Well said, to which I would add that the then newly established United Nations are also culpable. Having been created when members voted in favour of the U.N. Charter, at the core of which were the fundamental principles of human rights and the right to self determination, in almost their first act they then agreed to a resolution on the partition of Palestine, thus completely ignoring the human rights of the Palestinian population and undermining their own core purpose. In summary sentiment trumped judgement and thus holed the UN below the waterline right from the outset.
Thank you.
Former UK diplomat Aurelien has read the mid 19th century archives that detail a Jewish colony to guard the passage to India. This was seen by Victorian imperialists and / or evangelicals as a win win, set up a British colony in a strategic area and rid the kingdom of Jews.
Then and in 1917, there was Jewish opposition to such a homeland as some Jews, like Montagu, were alert to the danger of cleansing.