Mick Hartley

Julie Burchill, in the Spectator – It’s hard to take the Palestine Action hunger strikers seriously:

For connoisseurs of silliness, the group’s website provides a smorgasbord of the stuff. Even overlooking their demands to be released on immediate bail, shut down a defence firm with links to Israel, achieve an end to the ban on Palestine Action and receive miniature unicorns in their Christmas stockings, they really do not appear to have one iota of common sense between them. For starters, they’re on what’s been called a ‘rolling’ hunger strike – taking it in turns, as though it was Secret Santa. One of them is on a ‘partial’ strike, refusing food every other day, otherwise known as dieting….

But wait, it’s not over yet – there’s more laughs to be had here than anywhere outside of the ‘Your Party’ Christmas party, as these overprivileged young people finally face the consequences of their actions. One of them has suffered the indignity of having ‘prison staff force her to remove her kuffiyah hijab, and confiscated all of her hijabs with the kuffiyah pattern from her cell. Her cell has also been searched without reason or respect for her privacy’ – that’ll be a sign you’re in prison, mate. One of her fellow jailbirds complains that his ‘calls, visits and access to post are also severely restricted and monitored’. It’s like they read rabble-rousing populists like me complaining that prison is basically a holiday camp now – and believed it. That’ll teach them to give credence to a paid puppet of the many-headed Zionist monster!

Educated beyond all common sense, is there a way back for these goons? Probably not. The dumbness goes all the way through with this type; ‘The abolition of prisons is predicated upon the liberation of Palestine’, their website solemnly informs us. So they’re not just nut jobs on their specialist subject; they’re general nut jobs, of that most extreme sort, the ‘anti-carceral’ kind, who want all houses of correction closed down and presumably all murderers and rapists running around free.…