Mick Hartley

Dave Rich at Jewish News:

There is a growing campaign against the proscription of Palestine Action, the group that used organised criminality to pursue its anti-Israel politics until they were banned as a terrorist group by the Home Secretary last month.

The latest statement in their support is a letter to the Guardian (where else?) by a predictable list of academics and veteran activists. It includes this revealing sentence:

“We fully share the aim of ending the flow of weapons from Britain to Israel and the belief that all participants in the pro-Palestine movement should be free to make our own decisions about how best to achieve that goal.”

So, no restrictions. Anything goes. It's up to the activists themselves – whose noble motives rise above the law..  

Cutting through the high-blown political rhetoric, it is hard to avoid the view that the signatories of that Guardian letter support Palestine Action because they believe the Palestinian cause is just, and therefore the suffering in Gaza justifies any response. The same goes for the people getting themselves arrested in Palestine Action’s name every weekend. But this is not an example of cause-agnostic support for free expression or political protest. If a far right group used Palestine Action’s tactics to attack immigration centres, asylum hotels and the offices of law firms who work on immigration cases, using organised criminal damage and intimidation to try to bring about an end to immigration, similar support would not be forthcoming from the people now supporting Palestine Action. This is a case of the ends being seen to justify the means: which is, ironically, the logic that terrorists have used for decades.