View allAll Photos Tagged FreedomOfExpression
© Daniela Hartmann, flickr.com
Liberté - Freiheit - Liberty
Je suis contre la discrimination et la violence.
Je suis pour la liberté et la diversité des opinions.
Je suis pour la démocratie.
„Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je me battrai jusqu'au bout pour que vous puissiez le dire“.
(Evelyn Beatrice Hall)
___________
Against discrimination and violence.
For freedom of expression and diversity of opinion.
For democracy.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it“.
(Evelyn Beatrice Hall)
___________
Gegen Diskriminierung und Gewalt.
Für Freiheit und Vielfalt.
Für Demokratie.
„Ich mag verdammen, was du sagst, aber würde bis auf den Tod dein Recht verteidigen, es zu sagen“.
(Evelyn Beatrice Hall)
___________
All my images are copyrighted.
If you intend to use any of my pictures for non-commercial usage, you have to sign them with © Daniela Hartmann, flickr.com. Please write a comment if you have used it and for what purpose. I would be very happy about it. I am curious about the context in which the image is used.
If you have any commercial usage, you need to contact me always first. USE WITHOUT PERMISSION IS ILLEGAL.
You find some of my photos on Getty Images.
My name there is "alles-schlumpf".
**************** Freedom of Expression for all ****************
******************************************************************
( Previous subtitle: How do you finish an addiction? )
Three groups have been Banning Pro Photographers without letting them know why. I already seen this for no good reason. None of my photos are offensive nor copied from another artist. I do find them quite distasteful just by Banning a person with no communication. I think it is about time to create a photo group that allows both digital and film photographers become part of the group. The only requirement is being original and creative.
83-year-old Anglican priest Reverend Sue Parfitt sits in Parliament Square on 6 September 2025 shortly before her second arrest while protesting the proscription of Palestine Action.
Her presence highlights the remarkable diversity of the protest, which drew clergy, doctors, veterans, and many other ordinary citizens who felt compelled to act. This was not a crowd of militants but a cross-section of society prepared to risk their liberty to challenge what they saw as an unjust law criminalising solidarity with those trying to stop a genocide in Gaza.
How many times we have been asked not to take pictures in the public places?
I do believe the golden age of street photography for masters like Cartier Bresson are gone forever.
The people nowadays and the laws in modern societies and big cities are less tolerant of candid shots and street photography.
I like candid shots. Once you communicate with the persons by anyway, you won't get the same expression or moment again.
HALO warrior figure seen in the Best Buy store on Cambie Street Vancouver. Taken with my point & shoot compact camera.
"Thousands of anti-government protesters marched in Malaysia’s capital on Saturday demanding the resignation of the prime minister, Najib Razak, over his alleged involvement in a multibillion-dollar misappropriation scandal.
Clad in yellow shirts and unfazed by arrests of activists and opposition leaders just hours before the rally, protesters marched from various spots towards the heart of Kuala Lumpur amid tight security."
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/19/thousands-call-for-...
www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/world/asia/tens-of-thousands-o...
'The cry of the imprisoned'. A protest against the journalists, writers, poets, cartoonists and other artists, imprisoned under the draconian Digital Security Act was organised by Baki Billah, Sarwar Tushar and Shaikat Amin. The event featured songs, poetry, drama, illustrations and film at Shahbag Square in Dhaka, the equivalent of Tahrir Square in Bangladesh. A record number of arrests have been made during the COVID-19 period.
Artists (left to right), Sohan Mahmud, Humaira Fehrooz and Khuddho Ganguly perform at the event.
القاتل فى لندن - مظاهرة ضد زيارة سيسي
An English woman was one of several British citizens who joined hundreds of Egyptian protesters angry at Britain's David Cameron rolling out the red carpet for Egypt's dictator Abdel Fatah el-Sisi.
And why did she depict Sisi as "Mickey Mouse" ? Because just the previous month an Egyptian Facebook user had been sentenced to three years in prison for photoshopping a picture of Sisi and adding the mickey mouse ears. But unfortunately repression in Egypt is much much wider than arrests for trying to poke fun at your president.
Sisi's regime has been responsible for the death of hundreds of protesters on the streets, hundreds of disappearances and death sentences, a clampdown on the press and media, trade unions and universities and allowing key Mubarak figures to return to politics and big business.
After disbanding parliament, Sisi's regime decreed that the government could delegate business and construction projects to the military without any tender process and subsequently the Egyptian army has been awarded contracts worth billions of dollars.
Meanwhile anyone who speaks out, whether Islamist or secular, is at risk of arrest or being "disappeared" and currently it is estimated that the country has approximately 40,000 political prisoners.
This is what Human RIghts Watch conclude in their latest country report -
"Egypt’s human rights crisis, the most serious in the country’s modern history, continued unabated throughout 2014. The government consolidated control through constriction of basic freedoms and a stifling campaign of arrests targeting political opponents. Former Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who took office in June, has overseen a reversal of the human rights gains that followed the 2011 uprising. Security forces and an increasingly politicized judiciary—apparently unnerved by rising armed group attacks—invoked national security to muzzle nearly all dissent."
Find out more
About Amr Nohan and his 3 year sentence for attaching "Mickey Mouse" ears to a Sisi photo -
advox.globalvoices.org/2015/10/14/egyptian-facebook-user-...
About Human Rights in Egypt .
www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa...
www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/egypt
freedomhouse.org/blog/stopping-egypt-s-downward-spiral-re...
( Freedom House uses one of my photos in its report. )
How to help/Join a campaign -
egyptsolidarityinitiative.org/
To email me for any reason
alisdare@gmail.com
EDIT:
As Safron Blaze pointed out in the comments, this is a quote from Evelyn Beatrice Hall who wrote a biography on Voltaire. I am sorry for the mistake.
"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." - attributed to Voltaire but actually from Evelyn Beatrice Hall
#Freedom_of_Speech
"Thousands of anti-government protesters marched in Malaysia’s capital on Saturday demanding the resignation of the prime minister, Najib Razak, over his alleged involvement in a multibillion-dollar misappropriation scandal.
Clad in yellow shirts and unfazed by arrests of activists and opposition leaders just hours before the rally, protesters marched from various spots towards the heart of Kuala Lumpur amid tight security."
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/19/thousands-call-for-...
www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/world/asia/tens-of-thousands-o...
It's very rarely I do selfies, but I made an exception when modelling my new T-shirt, which manages to combine a pun ("hey, I'm with the band!") with a serious point about the rise in self-important numpties who think they should be allowed to tell everyone else what they are allowed to read by trying to ban (or worse, burn) books.
I'm not a cartoonist (obviously), but I wanted to express solidarity with those who are, and with all people who value freedom of expression and abhor violence.
#HongKong #Protest #AnitELAB #HKPoliceBrutality #FreedomOfExpression #StandWithHongKong
Bell Chan | BGfotologue
follow me on :
Outside Wood Green Central Library, 187-197A High Road, Wood Green, London N22 6XD.
On 10 November 2015 in Haringey Civic Centre, ten minutes walk from the library, Gideon Bull an elected local councillor exercised his right to freedom of speech. What happened next tells you how sick democracy has become in Haringey Council.
At a meeting of the Council's so-called "cabinet", Cllr Bull made a principled stand and challenged the rationale for savage cuts and closures to services for elderly and disabled residents.
After the cabinet meeting, the regime now running Haringey Council quickly moved into action against Cllr Bull. It displayed its usual insensitive, closed-minded and increasingly authoritarian character. Cllr Liz McShane Chief whip of the ruling Labour Group of councillors, summoned Gideon Bull to a meeting, accusing him of "uncomradely" behaviour by speaking his mind.
After an "investigation" Cllr McShane recommended to the Labour Group that Cllr Bull should be "disciplined" for thinking and speaking for himself and publicly challenging and disagreeing with the Party Line. The punishment proposed was losing the Labour Whip for three months.
Shamefully, at a subsequent meeting of Haringey Labour councillors a majority of these poor excuses for elected citizens agreed with the sanction proposed by Liz McShane.
Maybe Cllr Bull should have asked his questions and made his appeal to the pigeons in Haringey's Free Speech Area? Pigeons are renowned for their sense of direction and being able to cover long distances to find their way home.
It appears to me that many of Haringey's supposedly Labour elected councillors may have lost not just their sense of direction but a moral compass. But whether they believe Gideon Bull is wrong or right, doesn't a healthy democracy include the responsibility and right to challenge and critique the powerful?
It is outrageous that Cllr Bull should be disciplined for standing up and speaking out on an issue of principle and conscience.
Elected local councillors should all be community leaders. Whether they are "The Leader", a "cabinet" member, or not. They should value and respect people who are prepared to tell them things and produce evidence which disputes their views and plans. When the "leading" group on a local council believe they must silence and punish all and any dissent, their regimes have become truly rotten.
____________________________________
§ 28 January 2016. Matthew Smith reporter with The Tottenham Independent Newspaper reported on : "Tottenham Labour members attack party for withdrawing whip from Cllr Gideon Bull".
§ Harringay Online local website discussed the events.
§ I tweeted Haringey councillor Liz McShane a quote by Nelson Mandela. "I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles". That "critical friend" role is what Gideon was doing. It seems neither Cllr Claire Kober the Council Leader, nor Cllr Liz McShane understand or value friends with independent minds.
§ 25 January 2016 was Burns Night. I tweeted Liz McShane a few lines from Robert Burns' poem "Here's a Health to Them That's Awa".
"Here's freedom to them that wad read,
Here's freedom to them that wad write,
There's nane ever fear'd
that the truth should be heard,
But they whom the truth would indite."
§ More wise words: "If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." - George Orwell.
§ A petition was posted by a Tottenham resident, Frances Donnelly asking Cllr Liz McShane to reinstate Gideon Bull. By 1 March 2016 it had more than 77,000 signatures from across the UK and many other countries. Please read the petition and consider signing it.
§ My own Declaration of Interest.
§ In his samizdat essay: The Power of the Powerless. Václav Havel described how most citizens living under the communist regime in former Czechoslovakia "were living a lie". They kept quiet and hid what they thought and believed, so the State would leave them alone. Havel contrasted this with "a life lived in truth".
11 Nobel Laureates and 17 Eminent Citizens call for the Unconditional Release of Dr Shahidul Alam of Bangladesh. To read the full statement please visit: www.nobelforpeace.org/
but it was necessary to resolve a block on my gallery. I’ll continue sharing what’s possible, but Flickr is no longer part of this chapter of my journey.
"Thousands of anti-government protesters marched in Malaysia’s capital on Saturday demanding the resignation of the prime minister, Najib Razak, over his alleged involvement in a multibillion-dollar misappropriation scandal.
Clad in yellow shirts and unfazed by arrests of activists and opposition leaders just hours before the rally, protesters marched from various spots towards the heart of Kuala Lumpur amid tight security."
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/19/thousands-call-for-...
www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/world/asia/tens-of-thousands-o...
"Thousands of anti-government protesters marched in Malaysia’s capital on Saturday demanding the resignation of the prime minister, Najib Razak, over his alleged involvement in a multibillion-dollar misappropriation scandal.
Clad in yellow shirts and unfazed by arrests of activists and opposition leaders just hours before the rally, protesters marched from various spots towards the heart of Kuala Lumpur amid tight security."
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/19/thousands-call-for-...
www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/world/asia/tens-of-thousands-o...
Flickr has been blocked in UAE one more time and now we, the users from UAE, are really upset & we want Flickr Administration to contact Etisalat
& convince them to NOT consider Flickr as a pornographic site.
Read more at flickr.com/forums/help/14764/
It's the 6th September 2025 and Parliament Square becomes the stage for a mass act of peaceful civil disobedience against the proscription of Palestine Action.
Beneath a statue honouring the fight for civil liberties, the British state performs its pre-scripted political theatre. Here, one of 890 arrests made that day, is transformed from a police action into a public spectacle.
The state’s official narrative, which later claimed officers were punched and kicked, is met by a wall of citizen journalism. Every phone captures evidence for a counter-narrative—one backed by Amnesty International, who witnessed police aggression and shoving.
ttps://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/EUR4502732025ENGLISH.pdf
The juxtaposition, captured from a lucky vantage point, is stark: the brute force of the state below, the power of public witness before it, and overseeing it all, the suffragist’s silent, damning message: 'Courage calls to courage everywhere'.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
Journalist Ahmet Şιk launches Journalism Under Siege, a report on press freedom in Turkey, at the Free Word Centre, London, 23 March 2016.
The launch event was chaired by David Diaz-Jogeix, the Director of Programmes at ARTICLE 19 (left) and interpreted by Milena Buyum.
The report is a project of the Free Word writers in residence programme, jointly administered by ARTICLE 19, English PEN and Free Word, in partnership with the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Se poser, et dessiner comme on en a envie, le monde qui nous entoure, sans aucune crainte
"C'était un professeur, un simple professeur
Qui pensait que savoir était un grand trésor
Que tous les moins que rien n'avaient pour s'en sortir
Que l'école et le droit qu'a chacun de s'instruire"
Jean-Jacques Goldman - "Il changeait la vie"
support freedom of speech
support freedom of expression
support peaceful protest
support equality for all
- Proud - to be an - American -
removing it hurts the eyeball lol
Referring to my other photo "Censorship"
off camera flash fired from lower left.
As dusk settled, the state’s security apparatus continued its work. This was not a fleeting confrontation but a prolonged siege of Parliament Square, a massive operation lasting hours to process the 890 arrests made that day. The tense atmosphere seen here was the direct result of deploying a major counter-terrorism operation against a silent vigil of civil disobedience.
The methodical, large-scale police action created a significant logistical challenge. The state's law had turned the heart of British democracy into a sprawling crime scene, where the designated offence was not violence, but the quiet, determined act of holding a sign to protest an ongoing genocide in which the British government remains complicit.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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 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.
I highly recommend this opinion piece by Judith Shulevitz in THE NEW YORK TIMES related to free expression, creative work, and the punitive actions of philistines and money changers:
www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/opinion/sunday/metoo-new-yorke...
If I leave all the tension
There inside of me
My body will burst
Into a million pieces
Deaf and dumb
Blind and frustrated
Life waits to express
An outpouring
Not from flesh and blood
But from beyond
Where grander Life is realized
Time dissolves
Through desperate tears
Joy continues
To experience the Truth:
We are the deliverers
Of beauty in art and song
Immersed in the knowing
These lead us back
To who we are…
Where we come from
© Ganga Fondan, 2012
Every time I really make the effort to express from the heart, a feeling lifts me into a state of such Joy, it makes me want to connect again and again. The challenges of digesting the outer world fade away and I feel the enormity of all that is possible. I keep the outpouring close to my heart because they are reminders of my Oneness with the Creator.
Dedicated to the people of the UAE who are not able to access flickr because the phone company blocked it FOR NO GOOD REASON.
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DEAR FLICKR USERS
SIGN THE ONLINE PETITION PLEASE!
SPREAD THIS TEXT TO EVERYBODY
THANK YOU.
www.petitiononline.com/flickr/petition.html
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Dedicated to the people of the UAE who are not able to access flickr because the phone company blocked it FOR NO GOOD REASON.
Walking a thin line on freedom of expression..
Cyber-Extortion Results in Prison Sentence
R.H. Alexander figured that he would never be caught. He didn't use his real name, or his real email address. He logged in at computers at public libraries to send hateful emails to his targets in which he threatened to destroy their reputations with online postings, he even taunted his victims that the police would never be able to find him.
But he didn't count on the international authorities and their increasing attention to real terrorism and to the people who use the anonymity of the Internet to stalk, harass, and threaten others. Alexander was arrested at a computer terminal in a public library. When presented with the evidence collected, he pleaded guilty to six counts of extortion and admitted that his dastard online aliases were spawned to upset, to create fear, frustration and ultimately to ruin reputations online.
Although lawsuits are more common in these circumstances, the 21-month sentence handed down was more than double the 10 months recommended by the sentencing guidelines and has since set a new cybercrime standard.
flickr today
My new artwork: "That Was Covid-19"
Prints and NFT on demand
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Ma nouvelle création: "C'était le Covid-19"
Impressions et NFT sur demande
Old sketch
Yes, why not? Muntadar Al-Zaidi ("Shoe Man") Should have
been Awarded the US Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama... :)
De la Serie Voces Contra el Silencio /From the Voices Against Silence Serie
Una solitaria bandera de Venezuela ondea en el techo de un edificio durante protestas en contra de la polémica decisión del presidente venezolano Hugo Chávez de cerrar el canal de televisión privado más antiguo e importante del país...
A lonely Venezuela flag waves in a building rooftop during protests against venezuelan president Hugo Chavez polemical decision of closing the oldest and most important private TV channel of the country...
"Thousands of anti-government protesters marched in Malaysia’s capital on Saturday demanding the resignation of the prime minister, Najib Razak, over his alleged involvement in a multibillion-dollar misappropriation scandal.
Clad in yellow shirts and unfazed by arrests of activists and opposition leaders just hours before the rally, protesters marched from various spots towards the heart of Kuala Lumpur amid tight security."
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/19/thousands-call-for-...
www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/world/asia/tens-of-thousands-o...
... from me to you.
This photo has lots behind it, so prepare yourselves!
For my Flickr friends: It's that time of year, I guess. The time where advertisements and the media tell us to be full of joy and happiness, but most people just feel crappy. It's not as easy as everyone thinks it should be, and we're all just trying to stay afloat. So I'm sending some love your way! So click that link up there and know that I'm here if you need someone to vent to, a figurative shoulder to cry on, all that stuff. Yeah I've got my struggles at the moment too, and I really have nothing material to give this holiday season, but I have time, and I'm willing to give that to anyone who needs it.
For FGR - Know Your Rights: Freedom of speech and expression - as a former newspaper reporter, I find this to be one of the most important rights we have as US citizens. I could go into so much more, but no one wants to hear a rant (if you do, just Flickrmail me and you'll get an earful!). And, I have more important things to get on to at the moment.
For my overwhelming feeling of gratitude: This weekend, as many of you know, the charity I work with put on its annual event. We had 600 wonderful volunteers assemble just over 2,000 bikes for local kids to receive during the holidays. This is our third large build event (there were a couple smaller ones before that) and it was just as amazing as the past ones. Watching so many people come together for such a wonderful cause is really a breathtaking sight. Joey and I were fortunate enough to play Santa for a bit, as one charity had some of their kids come to the build to pick out their bikes. I met one special little girl who gave me a hug and thanked me for her bike, and it really just made all the work we put into this event worth it. It was amazing. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to make a difference in children's lives, but also to witness such good things happening in the world. I'm young, and I'm cynical (comes with the Journalism thing), but this event restores my faith in humanity annually.
And last, to Abe. When I came back to Flickr, I had a lovely message telling me to check my testimonials. I was so shocked and honored, I was almost speechless. So thank you again, Abe, for your kind gesture. This love goes out to you too! :)
This also reminded me of all the wonderful contacts I have on this lovely Flickrverse, and how I really need to take the time to share with other Flickrites how awesome they are. So be on the lookout, people! Testimonials may be coming your way. You deserve it.
Whew! And with that, I'm ending this novel of love and appreciation. *hugs* to you all! :)
Over in We're Here! today, we are celebrating Freedom. As I live in the US (as you can see in the photo- specifically, Wisconsin), I have the freedom of speech. So, while I was at the VA hospital today, I exercised my freedom and got a little political. I also made sure that I pulled up my sleeve so there would be sharks in the photo (because we all know how a certain manchild feels about sharks).
Don't worry- I blurred out the most offensive parts of the photo.