Protests, Political Art, Democracy, Social Change
View allAll Photos Tagged FreeSpeech
A day at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, London. A place for free speach and argumentation.
These two were very passionate about their religious arguments, but it was a much friendlier discussion than what it seems.
Lots of photos of that day at: aleadamphotos.wordpress.com/2016/09/10/a-day-at-speakers-...
The work of Martin Luther King Jr. and many many other dear souls and activists will never be fully realized until all humans are truly treated equal and have politicians who truly represent them. In his day, Martin Luther King Jr. was considered a radical but I will remind everyone until my dying breath that it should never be considered radical to fight for human rights.
It SHOULD be considered radical to believe in conspiracy theories, attempt hostage and assassination of voting representatives, plot to disrupt voting and inauguration, defend the murder of unarmed humans because they have a flimsy badge and/or perpetrate this murder, and participate in acts of macro and microaggressions every day that harm others.
Our fight for equality continues. It certainly won't be accomplished under Biden no matter how we push for it. That doesn't mean we can't continue to make a difference and leave this world a kinder place than how we entered it.
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The warm spring winds are howling out of the south, as a trio of Canadian Pacific SD40-2's rush a loaded Herzog GPS ballast train westbound into the Reeseville Marsh basin, just outside of Richwood.
CP Ballast Train
CP 6068,6043,5946
Richwood, WI.
Spring 2020
*Working Towards a Better World
In solidarity for France after the attack on the French satire magazine Charlie Head, I support free speech, journalism and democracy. Sending love, sympathy and condolences to our French friends who have suffered so much.
Libre expresión… (Free speech…)
Presione "L" para ampliar, o haz clic en la foto.
(Press “L” to enlarge, or clic on the photo)
Is there anything more beautiful than the passion of youthful people ready to fight to change the world? I saw this young woman and I was transfixed with her sense of beauty inside and out. She was one of those faces in the crowd that I felt I had to capture!
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In memory of those brave and creative employees whose lives were taken from us during the Charlie Hebdo massacre. May they along with others in France that were murdered at the hands of terrorists in January 2015 rest in peace and never be forgotten.
Remember when this song lyric used to mean something? Then, remember this-no woman or man can be free when others are not free.
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A peace rally in Farmington, Michigan got ugly when some KKK members butsted into the parade. The clan member is the one that is on the receiving end.
Toujours.
It's hard to imagine a world without free speech. At least that's true of the UK...for now. Some would take away that right/privilege at the point of an AK-47, while others would use more covert means. I bet George Orwell would scarcely believe how that process would be so far advanced already.
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This was a little girl watching the protest, wondering what it would be like to truly walk among us.
You can grow up as a product of your race, hating yourself and never doing any good. Or, you can grow up with an emphasis on kindness no matter what your race happens to be. Every day, I fight the former and strive for the latter.
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“The term (political correctness) first appeared in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time it was used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (that is, the party line).” – Encyclopedia Britannica
The communists killed millions and millions of their people in order to create a utopian society based on equality. In communism, one must be “politically correct.” If you say something wrong you might disappear in the night, never to be seen again. Of course, self-censorship and voluntary compliance are preferred by the regime. Indoctrination keeps an individual within the proper ideological bounds of the state.
“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.” – William Douglas
Many cannot recognize the threat of censorship, because they are ignorant of the crimes of communism. The public is more aware of the atrocities of the Nazis, as opposed to the atrocities of the communists. This is what happens when universities are bastions of Marxism, and professors are fond of Karl Marx. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto). My grandpa, who went through the Great Depression, used to say, “People go to university to become socialists.” So this stuff is nothing new! This is what leftists call the “long march through the institutions.” The plan was to infiltrate the institutions of the West in order to transform them from the inside out. The Long March of the 1960s sowed the doctrines of critical theory (neo-Marxism). (Critical theory came out of the Frankfurt School). These seeds produced various kinds of critical theory: critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial/decolonial theory, feminist theory, critical environmental theory, and critical pedagogy. Our children are being taught these subversive ideologies, even though they are rooted in evil. The fruits of these ideologies have produced mass death and misery. They gave us Stalin’s Great Purges and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Indeed, the communists regulated speech, and millions died.
“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” – Potter Stewart
Regulating hate speech is undemocratic; it is rooted in totalitarianism. Regulating hate speech is a way of enforcing the politically correct doctrine of the day. It suppresses free speech, and it suppresses open dialogue. It suppresses critical thinking, and it suppresses creativity. And it will eventually lead to the criminalization of ideological opposition.
“Misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and other risks to the information ecosystem are fueling conflict, threatening democracy and human rights, and undermining public health and climate action.” – United Nations
The West is losing its freedom of speech. People in England are being arrested for social media posts. In Germany, they are trying to ban a political party. We saw Western governments colluding with big tech to censor dissenting views during COVID-19. Various politicians want to fight misinformation and disinformation. The European Union also wants to crackdown on what it deems as misinformation and disinformation. What they are doing, however, is fighting against freedom of speech—against freedom.
“The proliferation of misinformation and disinformation threatens to erode the credibility of public institutions and limit their capacity to implement policies that enhance public well-being.” – World Bank
When central bank digital currencies and social credit scores are implemented, you better watch what you say or do. If you say or do the wrong thing, you will have your money frozen. You will be like the Canadian truckers, who had their bank accounts frozen during COVID-19. With quantum computing, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data-driven technologies, a surveillance apparatus is being built. This Beast system will be an authoritarian dystopia like the world has never known.
“In this case wisdom is needed: Let the person who has understanding calculate the total number of the beast, because it is a human total number, and the sum of the number is 666.” – Revelation 13:18
As I said before, I wanted to show a variety of different perspectives that I don't always show at a protest when I am just trying to capture the crowd overall and the mood/energy. Here is a good lookout for photographers at one of the El staircases to see at a better height. I have rarely used this myself because it separates you from the crowd of protestors, who I am yelling and marching with typically. Up here is in the center is also my friend Vern Hester, who shoots a lot of events and concerts for Chicago's Windy City Times. I like seeing him whenever I get a chance!
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(Part Two)
Seeing children every day and knowing what Trump is doing to this country and this world that they have to live in for much longer...well, can you imagine it? What a horror!
Part One here:
www.flickr.com/photos/kirstiecat/33286153594/in/photolist...
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Squirrel Alliance Discovers the Egg of Diplomacy? (German political carnival, called Aschermittwoch)
Art Week Gallery
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Ironic sign on a rare non-cult owned business in downtown Clearwater. The building it's in has to be heavily subsidized by the city to stay afloat.
For the seventh straight month of Anonymous global peaceful protests against the cult of scientology, each city chose it's own theme. Anonymous in Clearwater, the heart of the malicious cult, favored Operation Party Harder.
All faces of those unmasked are blurred to protect them from the cult's "Fair Game" policy of harassing it's critics. These are brave people of all ages and walks of life, standing shoulder to shoulder with ex-Scientologists to bring the truth TO YOU.
Educate yourself about what TIME Magazine called "The Cult of Greed and Power":
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I wanted to capture multiple aspects of the protest I went to Saturday afternoon..not just the sense of the crowd but a sense of the speakers, the individuals crying out with passion and the people passing by that wanted to join in and weren't sure what choice to make. This is a woman and her son...not sure what choice they did make but they were confronted with the police and the protestors. She could have decided to teach her child well, to question everything and fight for everything too...or she could have just been trying to cross the line to go into a building on our side. What do you think she decided to do? There's the essence of the human story here and it's one that has been told time and time again. We want to be indecisive sometimes but even no choice is a choice.
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This photo is from a recent trip up north.
It resonates with something I felt yesterday while listening to a heartbreaking interview between Patrick Bet-David* and a young courageous woman named Yeonmi Park. They were discussing her dangerous escape from North Korea with her mother in 2007 as outlined in her book “In Order to Live”.
Not only did she escape North Korea but was then trafficked into slavery in China. Living in trauma for years, she explains that she felt numb most of the time because when you are starving and have no freedom to think for yourself, you do not even know what range of emotions are possible. From the time she was a baby, everything from her favorite color to her style of dress to what she was allowed to think and say was dictated to her. Disobedience meant incarceration or death. She did not risk her life in order to be free but to avoid starvation and later she left China to escape her life of slavery.
What particularly struck me was her remarkable response when Patrick asked her about how it felt when she finally did have a taste of freedom, was she in shock and when did that moment of recognition happen for her? In China? In South Korea or America?
I wrote down her response because the words shook me right down to the core of my Being:
“…being free wasn’t easy at all. It was so painful. At one point I thought if someone is not going to kill me and give me enough food in North Korea… just giving me frozen potatoes and no one will hurt me, I would go back to a place where everything was decided for me…because you know understanding freedom was a responsibility, was scary right?! If I choose to become, let’s say a dancer, I have to be responsible for that choice for the rest of my life. That was an insanely scary idea. I had to choose. Being free is not easy.”
I sat dumbfounded when I heard her words. Wow! I saw Patrick’s eyes open wide as he was deeply struck by how profound her words were. He had lived in a refugee camp in Germany for a few years after his family fled from Iran when he was a teenager. Even he seemed deeply moved and immediately acknowledged the depth of this insight and paused to really take it in.
Her words jarred me back to something I had heard before. Many prisoners, who were liberated from the Bastille during the French Revolution, came back within a few days. Why did they return? Did they feel the same way? Were they completely overwhelmed by freedom and consequence of choices? Why is this affecting me so deeply right now?
Today this powerful young woman’s pain has challenged me to celebrate my relentless journey of seeking value and meaning through art, poetry, singing and photography. That to live beyond the numbness of a mind on auto-pilot, to be open to feel a broad range of profound human emotions navigating the abundance of life is a noble pursuit in a society where we are able to express freely from the heart. I feel a sudden wave of gratitude pass through me.
I go back to the photograph. I stand again on that dock facing the opposite shore. It represents the next moment . The ladder welcomes me to enter the water. I carry all of my thoughts, habits, emotions and memories with me. Will this be enough to embrace the other side with courageous possibility thinking? Do I know enough about myself, my strengths and vulnerabilities to forge ahead and create something better than ever was before? Will I carry the weight of my freedom with responsibility? Will I exercise the enormous priviledge of shaping my limitless imagination to design the world I really want to live in or will a part of me simply seek refuge in old patterns of thinking and recreate the comfort of the familiar even if it feels empty or painful?
This question pulsates through the whole world right now.
*If you would like to see the whole interview with Yeonmi, Patrick’s show is called “Valuetainment”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=za34H-dT8I0
…or if you would just like to listen for context to the quote …41:59 to 44:14 is such a powerful bit to watch.
** The image quote is from Toni Morrison from the book "Beloved"
In the words of organizers, “The Women’s March on Washington is a woman-led movement bringing together people of all genders, ages, races, cultures, political affiliations and background in our nation’s capital…to affirm our shared humanity and pronounce our bold message of resistance and self-determination.” The March seemed to be more of a pro-choice and Anti-President Trump March. Women supporting a Pro-Life stance were not allowed to support their stance.
This Neo-Nazi group stood in protest of the annual Gay Pride event in Springfield, Missouri.
This is the first time since I have been going (at least 8yrs); that any group has actively stood in protest of our local Pride event.
The man on the left was espousing a very fundamentalist, fire and brimstone set of ideas, while the man on the right was simultaneously setting forth a message that was clearly the opposite. Talking over each other and heckling each other, they provided free entertainment for several minutes for those who chose to stop, listen, and watch. This is what makes America great. Hopefully the incoming kakistocracy will not try to impinge on the First Amendment rights of us all.
Santa Monica, California
File: 2022002-0036
Cathedral Plaza, at the south end of High Street, Worcester, Worcestershire, England, United Kingdom. Sunday 6th March 2022, at around 2pm to 4pm.
About the photograph.
Those shots were in colour, I converted those two into black and white.
This photograph shows a man taking his turn to speak of his option on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He is seen standing next to the Edward Elgar statue, at the Cathedral Plaza, the direction of the photograph is facing north.
The last time I attended a protest to try to do some photojournalism kind of photography, was back in 1987-89 during my college days.
Since then, been trying to get a job in photography or graphic design. Got married, started having kids, then got a divorce and became a very busy single parent and full-time carer. Now that my kids are older and left home, I’m free and independent, so I decided to try to get back into doing photography. I need to refresh my skills anyway.
In the first week of March, 2022, I heard that there was a planned protest in Worcester which is the nearest city, so the night before, I charged up my Nikon’s batteries, formatted the memory cards to make sure I have plenty of storage space left for more photos, and made sure my photography kit bag is ready.
On the afternoon of Sunday, I drove to Worcester, parked my car at the car park, and walked over to the Cathedral Plaza, which is where the protests were due to start. At that time (March 2022), the Knife Angel, a 27 feet tall sculpture made out of knives seized by the police, was on display.
As the 2pm start was approaching, more and more people arrived there, I would say there was around about between 50 to 75 people, or something like that. The protest was really more like a Speaker’s Corner kind of protest, with many people just standing around, rather than a march. At least 4 or 5 different guys took turns to speak out their statements, while some people held up their placards. There wasn’t much of a protest, but then again, it is because Worcester is a small city compared to other major cities where protests were taking part on massive scale.
I tried my best to do a photo-journalism kind of photography, I went around the crowd and took as many photos as I could. Those are just the few good photos I could find out of the approximately 400 photos I managed to take.
About the overall subject.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine started on the 24th of February 2022, and in a short space of time, many Europeans, Americans, mostly and mainly anyone of “Western” lifestyle, people living in free countries, with freedom of speech, of choice, of votes, many of them started taking to streets to protest against the Russian invasion.
There were so many signs in various languages, often advising that Russia should leave Ukraine, stop the war, Putin being a war criminal, and so on.
This protest that I attended to take the photos, was organised by the Worcester Trades Union Council, and was listed on the Stop the War Coalition website, under the No to War in Ukraine protests section. This was just one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of protests happening all around the world on Sunday 6th March, in respond to President Putin‘s decision to attack Ukraine.
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Shocked and saddened by events in Paris. In support of free speech and creative expression.
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SooC + watermark, not that it really matters in this context.
Standing to the left of the frame was one of over a thousand protesters who were participating in a peaceful assembly in Parliament Square on 6 September 2025 against the proscription of Palestine Action, many of whom deliberately chose to break the law, challenging the state’s power to criminalise expressions of conscience and solidarity.
The man's expression seems to reflect deep and weary but determined resolve, demonstrating deep contemplation of both the horrific situation in Gaza and the immense personal risk of being arrested under arbitrary terror laws.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Protest and the Price of Dissent: Palestine Action and the Criminalisation of Conscience
Parliament Square on Saturday, 6 September 2025 was a scene of quiet, almost solemn defiance. The air, usually thick with the noise of London traffic and crowds of tourists, was instead filled with a palpable tension, a shared gravity that emanated from the quiet determination of hundreds of protesters, many of them over 60 years old, some sitting on steps or stools and others lying on the grass.
They held not professionally printed banners, but handwritten cardboard signs, their messages stark against the historic grandeur of their surroundings. This was not a march of chants and slogans, but a silent vigil of civil disobedience, a deliberate and calculated act of defiance against the state.
On that day, my task was to photograph the protest against the proscription of the direct-action group Palestine Action. While not always agreeing entirely with the group’s methods, I could not help but be struck by the profound dedication etched on the faces of the individual protesters.
As they sat in silence, contemplating both the horrific gravity of the situation in Gaza and the enormity of the personal risk they were taking — courting arrest under terror laws for holding a simple placard — their expressions took on a quality not dissimilar to what war photographers once called the “thousand-yard stare.” It was a look of weary but deep and determined resolve, a silent testament to their readiness to face life-changing prosecution in the name of a principle.
This scene poses a profound and unsettling question for modern Britain. How did the United Kingdom, a nation that prides itself on its democratic traditions and the right to protest, arrive at a point where hundreds of its citizens — clergy, doctors, veterans, and the elderly — could be arrested under counter-terrorism legislation for an act of silent, peaceful protest?
The events of that September afternoon were the culmination of a complex and contentious series of developments, but their significance extends far beyond a single organisation or demonstration. The proscription of Palestine Action has become a critical juncture in the nation’s relationship with dissent, a test of the elasticity of free expression, and a stark examination of its obligations under international law in the face of Israel deliberately engineering a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
To understand what is at stake, one must unravel the threads that led to that moment: the identity of the movement, the state’s legal machinery of proscription, the confrontation in Parliament Square, and the political context that compelled so many to risk their liberty.
Direct Action and the State’s Response
Palestine Action, established in 2020, has never hidden its approach. Unlike traditional lobbying groups, it rejected appeals to political elites in favour of disrupting the physical infrastructure of complicity: factories producing parts for Israeli weapons systems, offices of arms manufacturers, and — eventually — military installations themselves.
Its tactics, while non-violent, were disruptive and confrontational. Red paint sprayed across buildings to symbolise blood, occupations that halted production, chains and locks on factory gates. For supporters, these were acts of conscience against a system enabling atrocities in Gaza. For the state, they were criminal disruptions of commerce.
That clash escalated steadily. In Oldham, a persistent campaign against Elbit Systems, a key manufacturer in the Israeli arms supply chain, culminated in the company abandoning its Ferranti site. Later actions targeted suppliers for F-35 fighter jets and other arms manufacturers. These were no random acts of mindless vandalism but part of a deliberate strategy: to impose costs high enough that complicity in Israel’s war effort would become unsustainable.
The decisive rupture came in June 2025, when activists infiltrated RAF Brize Norton, Britain’s largest airbase, and sprayed red paint into the engines of refuelling aircraft linked to operations over Gaza. For the activists, it was a desperate attempt to interrupt a supply chain of surveillance and logistical support to a state commiting genocide. For the government, it crossed a line: military assets had been attacked. Within days, the Home Secretary announced Palestine Action would be proscribed as a terrorist organisation.
Proscription and the Expansion of “Terrorism”
Here lies the heart of the controversy. The Terrorism Act 2000 defines terrorism with unusual breadth, encompassing not only threats to life but also “serious damage to property” carried out for political or ideological aims. In this capacious definition, breaking a factory window or disabling a machine can be legally assimilated to mass murder.
By invoking this law, the government placed Palestine Action on the same legal footing as al-Qaeda or ISIS. Supporting it — even symbolically — became a serious offence.
Since July 2025, merely expressing support for the organization can carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
This is based on Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The specific offence is "recklessly expressing support for a proscribed organisation". However, according to Section 13 of the Act, a lower-level offence for actions like displaying hand held placards in support of a proscribed group carries a maximum sentence of six months imprisonment or a fine of five thousand pounds or both.
Civil liberties groups and human rights bodies have denounced the proscription move as disproportionate. Their concern was not primarily whether Palestine Action’s tactics might violate existing criminal law. One might reasonably argue that they did unless they might sometimes be justified in the name of preventing a greater crime.
But reframing those actions as “terrorism” represented a dangerous category error. As many pointed out, terrorism has historically referred to violence against civilians. Expanding it to cover property damage risks draining the term of meaning. Worse, it arms the state with a stigma so powerful that it can delegitimise entire political positions without debate.
The implications go further. Proscription does not simply criminalise acts. It criminalises expressions of allegiance, conscience and even speech. To say “I support Palestine Action” is no longer an opinion but technically a serious crime. The state has moved from punishing deeds to punishing expressions of solidarity — a move with chilling consequences for democratic life.
Parliament Square: Civil Disobedience on Trial
It was this transformation that brought nearly 1,500 people into Parliament Square on 6 September. They knew what awaited them. Organisers announced in advance that protesters would hold signs reading: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” In doing so, they openly declared their intent to break the law.
The crowd was strikingly diverse. Retired doctors, clergy, war veterans, even an 83-year-old Anglican priest. Disabled activists came in wheelchairs; descendants of Holocaust survivors stood beside young students. This was not a hardened cadre of militants but a cross-section of society, many of whom had never before faced arrest.
At precisely 1 pm, the protesters all sat or lay down silently, cardboard signs raised. There was no chanting, no aggression — only a quiet insistence that they would not accept the criminalisation of conscience.
The police response was equally predictable. Hundreds of officers moved systematically through the crowd, arresting anyone displaying a sign. By the end of the day, nearly 900 people were detained under counter-terrorism law. It was one of the largest mass arrests in modern British history.
Official statements later alleged police were met with violence — officers punched, spat on, objects thrown. Yet independent observers, including Amnesty International, contradicted this. They reported a peaceful assembly disrupted by aggressive policing: batons drawn, protesters shoved, some bloodied.
www.amnesty.org/zh-hans/documents/eur45/0273/2025/en/
Video footage supported at least some of Amnesty's report.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZQGFrqCf5U&t=1283s
The two narratives were irreconcilable, but only one carried the weight and authority of the state.
The entire event unfolded as political theatre. The government proscribed a group, thereby creating a new crime. Protesters, convinced the law was unjust, announced their intent to commit that crime peacefully. The police, forewarned, staged a vast operation. Each side acted out its script. The spectacle allowed the state to present itself as defending order against extremism — while in reality silencing dissent.
The Humanitarian Context: Why Protesters Risked All
To see the Parliament Square protest as a parochial dispute over free speech is to miss its driving force. The demonstrators were not there merely to defend abstract principles. They were responding to what they, and a growing body of international experts, describe as a genocide in Gaza.
By September 2025, Gaza had descended into almost total collapse. Over 63,000 Palestinians had been killed, the majority of them women and children. More than 150,000 had been injured, many maimed for life. Entire neighbourhoods had been flattened. Famine was confirmed in August, with Israel continuing to impose and even tighten deliberate restrictions on food, water, and fuel, a strategy condemned by human rights groups as a major war crime. Hospitals lay in ruins. Ninety percent of the population had been displaced.
It is in this context that the term genocide has been applied. Legal scholars point not only to mass killings but also to the deliberate infliction of life-destroying conditions, accompanied by rhetoric from Israeli officials dehumanising Palestinians as “human animals.” In September 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars declared that Israel’s actions met the legal definition of genocide.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o
Major NGOs, UN experts, and even Israeli human rights groups such as B’Tselem echoed that conclusion.
For the protesters, then, the question was not abstract but immediate: faced with what they saw as a genocide, could they in good conscience remain silent while their own government criminalised resistance to it? Their answer was to risk arrest, their placards making the moral connection explicit: opposing genocide meant supporting those who sought to stop it.
The Price of Dissent
The mass arrests in Parliament Square were not an isolated incident of law enforcement. They were the product of a broader trajectory: escalating tactics by a direct-action movement, a humanitarian catastrophe abroad, and a government determined to suppress dissent at home through the bluntest of instruments.
The official line insists that Palestine Action’s campaign constituted terrorism and thus warranted proscription. On this view, the arrests were simple enforcement of the law. Yet this account obscures the deeper reality: a precedent in which the state redefined non-lethal protest as terrorism, shifting from punishing actions to criminalising expressions of solidarity.
The cost is profound. Once speech and conscience themselves become suspect, dissent is no longer tolerated but pathologised. The chilling effect is already evident: individuals weigh not just whether to join a protest, but whether uttering support might expose them to years in prison. Terror laws, originally justified as a shield against mass violence, are recast as tools of political management.
The protesters understood this. That “thousand-yard stare” captured in their faces was not only the weight of potential arrest, but the knowledge of Gaza’s devastation, the famine and rubble, the deaths mounting daily. It was also the recognition that their own government had chosen to silence them rather than address its complicity.
In a functioning democracy, the question is not why citizens risk arrest for holding a handwritten cardboard sign. It is why a state finds it necessary to treat that act as a terror offence. The answer reveals a narrowing of democratic space, where conscience itself is deemed subversive. And that narrowing, history teaches, carries consequences not just for those arrested, but for the society that allows it.
Athens, GA (Clarke County) Copyright 2008 D. Nelson
Just one block from where the funeral for murdered Athenian Eve Carson was held yesterday, a religious hate group exercises their right of free speech. Usually, they like to be AT the funeral rather than away from it, but Athens police kept them at bay out of sight of the funeral attendees.
22-year old Eve Carson, a UNC student from Athens, GA, was shot last week in Chapel Hill. She was well liked - 5,000 people showed up at a candlelight vigil held at UNC. So these jerks show up with signs that say "God sent the shooter". Appalling.
Invisible Children presents The Rescue in Atlanta, GA to set free Joseph Kony's child soldiers. therescue.invisiblechildren.com/
On 6 September 2025, Parliament Square was transformed into a stage for a rare act of mass civil defiance. Beneath the gaze of Gandhi’s statue, an iconic symbol of non-violent resistance, hundreds gathered in silent protest against the British government’s decision to outlaw Palestine Action.
في يوم 6 سبتمبر 2025، تحوّل ميدان البرلمان إلى مسرح لفعل نادر من العصيان المدني الجماعي. وتحت تمثال غاندي، الرمز الأيقوني للمقاومة السلمية، اجتمع المئات في احتجاج صامت ضد قرار الحكومة البريطانية بحظر حركة "بالستين أكشن
("Palestine Action")
They stood with cardboard signs, each one hand-lettered with the same simple message: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Every participant knew the risk. Under Britain’s terrorism laws, even this quiet declaration could mean arrest, prosecution, and a lengthy prison sentence, as the state now brands peaceful dissent and protest as terrorism.
One man quietly handed out information leaflets to onlookers which cut through the mainstream media narrative: Israel has killed over 63,000 Palestinians in Gaza, driven 90% from their homes, and deliberately starved children by cutting off food and medicine.
International genocide scholars, the United Nations, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and even Israel's human rights group B'Tselem all agree: this is genocide, not “conflict.” Britain, by arming Israel and silencing its critics, is complicit in genocide.
These protesters acted with selfless courage to protest that. They acted because silence would mean complicity and because a crime of this scale cannot be ignored.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Protest and the Price of Dissent: Palestine Action and the Criminalisation of Conscience
Parliament Square on Saturday, 6 September 2025 was a scene of quiet, almost solemn defiance. The air, usually thick with the noise of London traffic and crowds of tourists, was instead filled with a palpable tension, a shared gravity that emanated from the quiet determination of hundreds of protesters, many of them over 60 years old, some sitting on steps or stools and others lying on the grass.
They held not professionally printed banners, but handwritten cardboard signs, their messages stark against the historic grandeur of their surroundings. This was not a march of chants and slogans, but a silent vigil of civil disobedience, a deliberate and calculated act of defiance against the state.
On that day, my task was to photograph the protest against the proscription of the direct-action group Palestine Action. While not always agreeing entirely with the group’s methods, I could not help but be struck by the profound dedication etched on the faces of the individual protesters.
As they sat in silence, contemplating both the horrific gravity of the situation in Gaza and the enormity of the personal risk they were taking — courting arrest under terror laws for holding a simple placard — their expressions took on a quality not dissimilar to what war photographers once called the “thousand-yard stare.” It was a look of weary but deep and determined resolve, a silent testament to their readiness to face life-changing prosecution in the name of a principle.
This scene poses a profound and unsettling question for modern Britain. How did the United Kingdom, a nation that prides itself on its democratic traditions and the right to protest, arrive at a point where hundreds of its citizens — clergy, doctors, veterans, and the elderly — could be arrested under counter-terrorism legislation for an act of silent, peaceful protest?
The events of that September afternoon were the culmination of a complex and contentious series of developments, but their significance extends far beyond a single organisation or demonstration. The proscription of Palestine Action has become a critical juncture in the nation’s relationship with dissent, a test of the elasticity of free expression, and a stark examination of its obligations under international law in the face of Israel deliberately engineering a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
To understand what is at stake, one must unravel the threads that led to that moment: the identity of the movement, the state’s legal machinery of proscription, the confrontation in Parliament Square, and the political context that compelled so many to risk their liberty.
Direct Action and the State’s Response
Palestine Action, established in 2020, has never hidden its approach. Unlike traditional lobbying groups, it rejected appeals to political elites in favour of disrupting the physical infrastructure of complicity: factories producing parts for Israeli weapons systems, offices of arms manufacturers, and — eventually — military installations themselves.
Its tactics, while non-violent, were disruptive and confrontational. Red paint sprayed across buildings to symbolise blood, occupations that halted production, chains and locks on factory gates. For supporters, these were acts of conscience against a system enabling atrocities in Gaza. For the state, they were criminal disruptions of commerce.
That clash escalated steadily. In Oldham, a persistent campaign against Elbit Systems, a key manufacturer in the Israeli arms supply chain, culminated in the company abandoning its Ferranti site. Later actions targeted suppliers for F-35 fighter jets and other arms manufacturers.
These were no random acts of mindless vandalism but part of a deliberate strategy: to impose costs high enough that complicity in Israel’s war effort would become unsustainable.
The decisive rupture came in June 2025, when activists infiltrated RAF Brize Norton, Britain’s largest airbase, and sprayed red paint into the engines of refuelling aircraft linked to operations over Gaza.
For the activists, it was a desperate attempt to interrupt a supply chain of surveillance and logistical support to a state commiting genocide. For the government, it crossed a line: military assets had been attacked. Within days, the Home Secretary announced Palestine Action would be proscribed as a terrorist organisation.
Proscription and the Expansion of “Terrorism”
Here lies the heart of the controversy. The Terrorism Act 2000 defines terrorism with unusual breadth, encompassing not only threats to life but also “serious damage to property” carried out for political or ideological aims. In this capacious definition, breaking a factory window or disabling a machine can be legally assimilated to mass murder.
By invoking this law, the government placed Palestine Action on the same legal footing as al-Qaeda or ISIS. Supporting it — even symbolically — became a serious offence.
Since July 2025, merely expressing support for the organization can carry a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
This is based on Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The specific offense is "recklessly expressing support for a proscribed organisation". However, according to Section 13 of the Act, a lower-level offence for actions like displaying hand held placards in support of a proscribed group carries a maximum sentence of six months imprisonment or a fine of five thousand pounds or both.
Civil liberties groups and human rights bodies have denounced the proscription move as disproportionate. Their concern was not primarily whether Palestine Action’s tactics might violate existing criminal law. One might reasonably argue that they did unless they might sometimes be justified in the name of preventing a greater crime.
But reframing those actions as “terrorism” represented a dangerous category error. As many pointed out, terrorism has historically referred to violence against civilians. Expanding it to cover property damage risks draining the term of meaning. Worse, it arms the state with a stigma so powerful that it can delegitimise entire political positions without debate.
The implications go further. Proscription does not simply criminalise acts. It criminalises expressions of allegiance, conscience and even speech. To say “I support Palestine Action” is no longer an opinion but technically a serious crime. The state has moved from punishing deeds to punishing expressions of solidarity — a move with chilling consequences for democratic life.
Parliament Square: Civil Disobedience on Trial
It was this transformation that brought nearly 1,500 people into Parliament Square on 6 September. They knew what awaited them. Organisers announced in advance that protesters would hold signs reading: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” In doing so, they openly declared their intent to break the law.
The crowd was strikingly diverse. Retired doctors, clergy, war veterans, even an 83-year-old Anglican priest. Disabled activists came in wheelchairs; descendants of Holocaust survivors stood beside young students. This was not a hardened cadre of militants but a cross-section of society, many of whom had never before faced arrest.
At precisely 1 pm, the protesters all sat or lay down silently, cardboard signs raised. There was no chanting, no aggression — only a quiet insistence that they would not accept the criminalisation of conscience.
The police response was equally predictable. Hundreds of officers moved systematically through the crowd, arresting anyone displaying a sign. By the end of the day, nearly 900 people were detained under counter-terrorism law. It was one of the largest mass arrests in modern British history.
Official statements later alleged police were met with violence — officers punched, spat on, objects thrown. Yet independent observers, including Amnesty International, contradicted this. They reported a peaceful assembly disrupted by aggressive policing: batons drawn, protesters shoved, some bloodied.
www.amnesty.org/zh-hans/documents/eur45/0273/2025/en/
Video footage supported at least some of Amnesty's report.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZQGFrqCf5U&t=1283s
The two narratives were irreconcilable, but only one carried the weight and authority of the state.
The entire event unfolded as political theatre. The government proscribed a group, thereby creating a new crime. Protesters, convinced the law was unjust, announced their intent to commit that crime peacefully. The police, forewarned, staged a vast operation. Each side acted out its script. The spectacle allowed the state to present itself as defending order against extremism — while in reality silencing dissent.
The Humanitarian Context: Why Protesters Risked All
To see the Parliament Square protest as a parochial dispute over free speech is to miss its driving force. The demonstrators were not there merely to defend abstract principles. They were responding to what they, and a growing body of international experts, describe as a genocide in Gaza.
By September 2025, Gaza had descended into almost total collapse. Over 63,000 Palestinians had been killed, the majority of them women and children. More than 150,000 had been injured, many maimed for life. Entire neighbourhoods had been flattened.
Famine was confirmed in August, with Israel continuing to impose and even tighten deliberate restrictions on food, water, and fuel, a strategy condemned by human rights groups as a major war crime. Hospitals lay in ruins. Ninety percent of the population had been displaced.
It is in this context that the term genocide has been applied. Legal scholars point not only to mass killings but also to the deliberate infliction of life-destroying conditions, accompanied by rhetoric from Israeli officials dehumanising Palestinians as “human animals.” In September 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars declared that Israel’s actions met the legal definition of genocide.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o
Major NGOs, UN experts, and even Israeli human rights groups such as B’Tselem echoed that conclusion.
For the protesters, then, the question was not abstract but immediate: faced with what they saw as a genocide, could they in good conscience remain silent while their own government criminalised resistance to it? Their answer was to risk arrest, their placards making the moral connection explicit: opposing genocide meant supporting those who sought to stop it.
The Price of Dissent
The mass arrests in Parliament Square were not an isolated incident of law enforcement. They were the product of a broader trajectory: escalating tactics by a direct-action movement, a humanitarian catastrophe abroad, and a government determined to suppress dissent at home through the bluntest of instruments.
The official line insists that Palestine Action’s campaign constituted terrorism and thus warranted proscription. On this view, the arrests were simple enforcement of the law. Yet this account obscures the deeper reality: a precedent in which the state redefined non-lethal protest as terrorism, shifting from punishing actions to criminalising expressions of solidarity.
The cost is profound. Once speech and conscience themselves become suspect, dissent is no longer tolerated but pathologised. The chilling effect is already evident: individuals weigh not just whether to join a protest, but whether uttering support might expose them to years in prison. Terror laws, originally justified as a shield against mass violence, are recast as tools of political management.
The protesters understood this. That “thousand-yard stare” captured in their faces was not only the weight of potential arrest, but the knowledge of Gaza’s devastation, the famine and rubble, the deaths mounting daily. It was also the recognition that their own government had chosen to silence them rather than address its complicity.
In a functioning democracy, the question is not why citizens risk arrest for holding a handwritten cardboard sign. It is why a state finds it necessary to treat that act as a terror offence. The answer reveals a narrowing of democratic space, where conscience itself is deemed subversive. And that narrowing, history teaches, carries consequences not just for those arrested, but for the society that allows it.