Professor David Miller, the noted anti-Zionist academic – whose landmark employment tribunal case, after he was dismissed by Bristol University despite its lawyers finding he has said nothing antisemitic, set UK legal precedent that anti-Zionism is a protected philosophical belief – was detained by British counter-terrorism police under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 as he returned to Heathrow Airport from Beirut earlier this week.
Miller had been reporting on the funeral of Syed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah Secretary-General who was assassinated last year by Israel in a bombing raid that flattened six Beirut residential blocks and killed hundreds of others. Miller was held for three and a half hours under Section 7, which deprives detained people of their right to silence and privacy despite carrying no assumed suspicion, and questioned about his trip to Lebanon. He was subsequently released without charge.
The detention, which came after pressure from pro-Israel groups and pro-Israel former Tory government minister Robert Jenrick, is the latest episode of Keir Starmer’s war on pro-Palestine speech in which UK police have abused anti-terror laws to raid, harass, intimidate and criminalise activists and journalists who expose and resist Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, which has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians. The victims of this campaign to suppress free speech face as long as fourteen years in prison if found guilty of supporting a proscribed organisation. At least two, Tony Greenstein and Natalie Strecker, have been charged – and in other cases, terror laws have been used to keep activists in prison for more than a year awaiting trial even when they are not charged under it, making ‘the process the punishment’ even if they are ultimately acquitted.
This campaign of intimidation has seen several journalists and authors detained at airports, others have had their homes raided, with electronic devices usually seized in both cases. Under the supposed anti-terror legislation, individuals detained at ports of entry into the UK do not have the right to silence or legal representation and must disclose passwords if demanded by police – a clear attack on the right and duty of journalists to protect the confidentiality of sources – or face prosecution. UK ‘mainstream’ media have completely ignored this state assault on journalism and free speech.
Miller, who said he had been escorted by eight police officers, said of the incident:
They asked for my passport and whether I had just come from Istanbul. I said, ‘No, I’ve come from Beirut, where I have been covering the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah’, because I knew they already knew…
…It was a sign of the way policing operates under immense pressure from Zionist groups.
He was also asked whether he had met with members of ‘proscribed’ groups and whether he ‘supported terrorism’.
United Nations experts have condemned the Starmer government’s anti-democratic misuse of terror laws against critics of Israeli genocide and other crimes. UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, international law expert Francesca Albanese, recently described Israel and its lobby groups as a ‘mafia’ killing forty children a day, and condemned political and media collusion in covering for its crimes and lies as ‘racist’.
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Attacking people of the left or ones who stand up for the truth is the only capability Starmer has. What a disgusting spectacle it was to watch him crawling to Trump with his letter from Brian. Truly vomit-inducing, and the mugs in the media saying “Didn’t he do well!” Well we saw the kind of person with whom he is in his comfort zone with yesterday. Someone, who, like Starmer and his Chancellor is more than happy to screw the poor for their own financial and power benefit.
You wouldn’t really expect our media, so compromised as it is, to say anything else. That notion can be seen for the fantasy that it is in light of the inevitable hanging-out-to-dry in the Oval Office yesterday of the arrogant, crooked war puppet deep in the grip of cocaine psychosis.
Watching Starmer trying to mediate the up-coming meeting of European leaders should be a treat. Another popcorn order on the way…
A compromised media which had its nose in the trough of USAID controlled by the CIA
https://sonar21.com/usaid-and-the-cia/
Journalists, ex-diplomat, now an academic – our Zionist state certainly wants to “Deter”, to use their psyops buzzword. Then terrorism laws being misapplied to detain people who have not been charged with any terrorism offences – is that even lawful?
Why has the ICC not come after these ****ers, because, just like the BBC / Guardian / Sky News / GB News, it is blindingly obvious which side they support.
‘Only obeying orders’ is no defence – we know that from Nuremburg. Ignorance of the law is no defence either.
On the plus side, Britain, America, Australia, and possibly other countries, are all having difficulties recruiting people into their armed forces. Our young people are offered little hope and are not willing to die for our ‘leaders’.
And fellow so called ‘journalists’, ‘diplomats’ and ‘academics’ will throw them under a bus having already sold themselves as hired prostitutes to The Official Narrative (TON).
As detailed in this series by the late Gonzalo Lira (tortured and murdered in the jail of a fascist regime supported by our taxes/debt commitments):