LONDON — The British regime has escalated its draconian crackdown on solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, prompting fierce backlash from over 150 prominent writers, actors, and intellectuals who have denounced the outlawing of the direct-action group Palestine Action as a “repressive absurdity.”
In a blistering open letter published on Wednesday, a coalition of celebrated figures—including Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Susan Sarandon, Jonathan Glazer, Slavoj Žižek, and the Irish hip-hop group Kneecap—categorically rejected the UK government’s assault on freedom of thought and speech. They urged the state to “change course, amending the legislation which has led us to this point of repressive absurdity.”
Palestine Action has long been a thorn in the side of the British military-industrial complex, famously occupying and dismantling factories supplying weapons and drone components to the Zionist apartheid regime. Rather than halting the supply of arms fuelling the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the UK Home Office has chosen to proscribe the activists, weaponising anti-terror legislation to silence those who dare to disrupt the war machine.
The coalition’s statement specifically highlighted the chilling censorship of acclaimed Irish novelist Sally Rooney. Following her vocal support for Palestine Action, Rooney and her publisher, Faber, were forced to withdraw her books from sale in the UK.
“Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public,” the signatories declared, noting that the removal of her work under such “ill-conceived and draconian” laws is a severe “affront to basic principles of free speech.”
For observers of the British state’s rapid descent into authoritarianism, the willingness to brand peaceful solidarity with Gaza’s liberation struggle as “terrorism” lays bare the hollow nature of Western claims regarding human rights. As the UK government aligns itself completely with Tel Aviv, it reveals that in the modern imperial metropole, the ultimate crime is not violence, but the courage to stand against complicity in genocide.
Reference: PressTv