On Monday, 5 January 2026, I will go on trial at Kingston Crown Court under s.12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. My crime? Planting a bomb? Planning a terror attack on civilians?
My crime was writing a blog supporting the Palestinian resistance attack on October 7. People may disagree with my views on the right, after over half a century of occupation, for the Palestinians to fight back, but that is my view. It is not terrorism.
Israel has tried to portray October 7 as a second holocaust. As someone who lost a large part of his family in the Nazi Holocaust, I reject that Zionist narrative. Jews were killed by the Nazis because they were Jews; Israelis were killed because they were occupiers.
The Israeli government has done its utmost to construct an atrocity propaganda narrative according to which there mass rapes, baked and beheaded babies and mass killings of civilians.
Consent to my prosecution, because it involves a foreign country, has to be given under s.117(2A) of the TA 2000 by the Attorney General Richard Hermer. Because some of his family served in the IDF, he passed the decision to the Solicitor General, an ardent Zionist and former Vice Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement Sarah Sackman.
Sackman, instead of refusing to make a decision, gave her permission for the prosecution to proceed despite having attacked me in the Jewish News of 26.3.16. as ‘anti-Semitic’. Since she was acting in a quasi judicial role her decision is corrupt and an abuse of process.
I have therefore called on her to resign from her present post. She is unfit for office.
David Anderson QC, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism concluded in his report in 2014 that
4.22(b) To render people subject to the terrorism laws whom no sensible person would think of as terrorists risks destroying the trust upon which these special powers depend for their acceptance by the public.
c) To bring activities such as journalism and blogging within the ambit of “terrorism” (even if only when they are practised irresponsibly) encourages the “chilling effect” that can deter even legitimate enquiry and expression in related fields.
Yet this what is now happening as we saw with the arrests for supporting Palestine Action over the summer. These laws are now also being used to bring people such as myself within the orbit of the terrorism laws.
That is why my case is important. This government supports a terrorist state, Israel, which is openly embarking on extermination and ethnic cleansing. Its leaders are quite open about their desire to ‘cleanse’ Gaza of its inhabitants, yet Starmer and Lammy see nothing, say nothing and hear nothing.
Instead, critics of the genocidal policy of this government, including Jewish critics, are now being subject to the tender mercies of the Anti-Terror Police, who are now Orwell’s Thought Police.
I shall be fighting the prosecution of this case at Kingston Crown Court on 5 January 2025. I hope you will publicise this further attempt by the British state to erode freedom of speech in this country.
Tony Greenstein
