I was once investigated for terrorism by Special Branch in the UK in about 1996.
They came to my parent's house at a weekend to question me. I'd just happened to have gone home for the weekend to see my folks. I was running perhaps the largest warez site on the Internet at the time, so I thought I was super busted.
The detective sat me down and said to me, "What do you know about a plot to kill the President?" and I burst out laughing, mostly out of relief. He stares daggers at me and says "You're not taking me very seriously, are you Mr Charles?"
Luckily he did not detain me. We came to the conclusion that one of the hundreds of people I'd given an account to on one of my Linux servers had sent a death threat to president@whitehouse.gov. Apparently it contained information about the president's movements that was "not well known."
I never saw the email, but the detective called me on the day they were going out to pick Kushil up. I'd given him an account a few months previously so he could play MUDs and download porn. Seemed like a really nice guy. The detective read the end of the email to me over the phone, "Come get my ass you bastards," it said, and then had his address and map co-ordinates to his house.
Back then you could send an email “from” any address without verification, and I’d bet they weren’t sophisticated enough to detect that. There were many open and/or hacked SMTP gateways. I went to a federal military school and showed people how to do this on our own .mil servers. This would be deadly serious today, but email was 95% jokes and flame wars anyway, so it just made things more hilarious. Even Stanford CS’s SMTP in the 2010s allowed unauthenticated “from” addresses, and someone was using it to impersonate the Google founder emails for promoting and funding their startup.
Those wild times. I would often use a cia.gov FROM address on a lot of stuff. The crazy shit you could do. I ran one of the EFnet servers, so I just added HOSTS entries to the server so that I was on from cia.gov and whitehouse.gov all the time which confused a lot of people.
Arbitrary search and seizure at the border has been a steady feature in western countries for, like, the solid part of the past two decade. I have travelled to the USA three times during this period and during every single visit I had been pulled aside by the TSA for extra screening (SSSS). In the last 5 years or so when I return to my home country of New Zealand, I have been repeatedly searched by customs which has never happened before.
I would not be surprised at all if my name is on a list somewhere, despite me being very much inactive on social media and does not subscribe to any remotely radical ideology. Perhaps as a unmarried millennial male I just had that Unabomber vibe and must be stopped before I turn.
I do sympathize with Mr Murray , however there is really no need to act like it was a brand new development when similar stuff has been going on for pretty much my entire adult life and his recent career.
The reason for this is the expansion of the TSA (or airport security body). When you have a very small number of people/devices, you just let people in. When you have a large apparatus, you make use of it. And the large apparatus will try to find work for itself by stopping as many people as humanly possible. They'll also stop the most normal people out-there because they tend to make less of a fuss about it.
Recently, I flew SFO and they seemed to have a shortage of TSA officers or something (all security booths were empty). There were a couple old guys, they just randomly selected people for screening but everyone else were just let go without baggage screening.
While scanning your comment history looking for unusual interests, I found an intriguing comment that's unrelated to this topic: "Cash is already heavily monitored and most petty criminals have already moved on to Amazon gift cards."
Can you describe what you mean when you say cash is heavily monitored?
Before computerization of the finance industry, banks used to keep stashes of "ransom money" with all serial numbers already recorded so they could be tracked to some extent. This is no longer necessary as modern money handling equipment makes it trivial to keep a detailed log of every single bill they receive or give out.
And what if you forgo banks entirely? Well, governments have also been legislating to slowly stigmatize cash use. Google "civil forfeiture" and you will find countless examples of the police taking people's money away without due process, as if carrying large amounts of cash itself is a crime.
The possibility of no-trace hidden partitions I can’t disprove the existence of does not seem like it would serve me well in the backroom of some government facility where my rights have been revoked.
"Here's my unlocked phone, officer!" - "There are no calls, emails or any history in this phone. Are you claiming you have not used this phone to call anybody or interact with any social media?" - "Yes, officer, I never did!" - "Excellent, here are records from your phone company, showing this phone ID making $CRAPTON of calls, and here are records from social media companies showing the IP assigned to this phone accessing your accounts. You just lied to a government agent, and we have a proof of it right here with us, we don't even have to do any work for it. Welcome to hell!".
Or, if you get smart - "Oh yes, officer, I did, but I just reset this phone this morning, because I forgot the password!" - "Too bad, but then you won't object us seizing this phone for further investigation, given that there's nothing on it. There's nothing on it, right? No tricky OSes, no double partitions, no secret codes, nothing like that?" - "Oh yes, officer, absolutely nothing like that!" - "OK, our forensic team would be glad to hear that". In a week: "Our forensic team discovered the presence of Hide My Real Data Super Secure Double Password Toolkit on the phone. You have lied to a government agent and now are under indictment for it. Welcome to hell!".
You can get sort of a hidden volume by messing with the alignment of a LUKS partition as well.
However, it may not be very smart to do this. Law enforcement aren't dumb, they'll see the signs of your hidden partition, and you can end up in prison for up to two years for your little stunt.
Unless you're hiding something much more incriminating, cooperation is probably your best bet.
I think the most self-respectful and secure way is to have some encrypted cloud in a jurisdiction which doesn't cooperate with the country you afraid of. Wiping all data from the device and restoring it back after border control.
Hidden partition are definitely more dangerous. Also if these people took your device out of your view point, you need to sell the device and buy a new one before restoring anything.
but this still requires trusting a third party to not change their policies, or to not be hacked or coerced into releasing the data and a myriad other options that a state-backed actor has at their disposal
The modern government of the UK has, as far as I can tell, become a raging pseudo-fascist nanny state of grotesque proportions. It combines the worst aspects of old fashioned authoritarianism with smothering feel-good nannyism to repress individual freedoms in all sorts of creative ways that serve every side of the bureaucratic spectrum while persistently moving the ratchet forward on fundamental state power.
That a country which for centuries was considered a bastion of fundamental individual freedoms should pass hideous deformities of the rule of law like the Terrorism Act (among the other things they've been doing) is sad.
>This is an enormous abuse of human rights. The abuse of process in refusing both a lawyer and the right to remain silent, the inquiry into perfectly legal campaigning which is in no way terrorism-associated, the political questioning, the financial snooping and the seizure of material related to my private life, were all based on an utterly fake claim that I am associated with terrorism.
It's not explicitly stated anywhere, but when you enter the UK you give up your human rights. Easy mistake to make assuming you had those here.
It is a wholesale violator of human rights at massive scale and therefore the precedent for protection of rights under that state is simply non-existent. Magna Carta, Habeus Corpus - irrelevant given the massive, immense scale of the UK's wholesale abrogation of billions of human beings' rights.
I'd love to donate money to him and help but I live in the UK and don't want to be accused of supporting terrorism or some other nonsense. It's an idiotic situation to be in as a society.
He has a bitcoin and ethereum address. Unfortunately no monero, but you can swap in and out of monero without KYC or login using one of the services listed on kycnot.me. Alternatively, there are zero-knowledge mixers on ethereum such as tornado cash (still legal in the UK to the best of my knowledge).
I agree - I feel like voting for other parties will change the economic and social outcomes for this country, but overall the British society as a whole seems pretty content with a "strong" rule of the law where the authority is to be respected and anyone going against norms should be at minimum arrested. The recent changes that basically made protesting unlawful in this country are the best example - even though it would be chilling in many other places of the world, in UK the public seems to be either welcoming to these changes or is at least indifferent to them. Maybe we can blame the relentless campaigning by right wing media for making sure that the average British person thinks that few people sitting on the road and blocking traffic are #1 public enemy, but I don't know.....I feel like Britain always valued "order" above all else, so it's only natural that anyone braking said order has to be punished. Voting differently won't change that.
Supporting designated terrorist organizations is not cool. Also Hamas just committed a bunch of grizzly murders of innocent civilians, not exactly resistance fighters at the moment. I am all for root causes and opposing the seemingly never ending Israeli occupation, and the settlements which are forcibly displacing Palestinians from their homes, but aligning one’s self with Hamas, especially at this time, is both morally wrong and also going to get you on watch lists, and probably rightly so.
To make the situation better you should have compassion and also strive towards compromise and not just pick your side and root for them to dominate the other - it doesn’t have to be zero sum.
Judea and Samaria (aka west bank) were part of the land promised to the Jews by the league of nations in the San Remo convention, which is binding by international law and originally also included Jordan. Considering the Arabs have never agreed to the partition plan of 1948 it is well within Israel right to contest this area and the common definition of "occupied territories" is not that clear cut considering no country owned it before 1967.
The settlements themselves don't displace any Arabs from their home, they were built either on Jewish land (Jews lived in Judea and Samaria until 1948) or on a land which didn't have a specific ownership. Usually if an Arab can show that they have ownership for a parcel of land they will get it in court.
In any case, Gaza is not occupied and except from the hostages there are no Jews in Gaza. They could live peacefully side by side near Israel without any "siege" if only they accepted that Israel should have a right to exist.
People that argue that one side deserves the land because of x, y and z while the other side doesn’t are part of the problem. Your view of the world is a huge part of the problem. It is partisan and zero sum and justifies discrimination and ethnic cleansing using pseudointellectualism and cherry picked historical facts.
I would like to live in a world where my fellow adults have the liberty to make a complete and utter fool out of themselves.
At the same time, if hysteric antisemitism is spreading like wildfire, then I wonder what the right tool to address it is. I'm guessing it must be a surreal time to be a Jewish person on the left.
I get the impression that the way the law was being interpreted was that there is a window of one hour in which:
a) in which one does not have the right to remain silent
AND
b) one doesn't have the right to a lawyer.
I could imagine a potential world in which one or the other might briefly apply, but both together would be a complete license for abuse of course. So that can't be entirely right.
Reading the actual text of the law [1] I can't quite see how that would be the intended interpretation. I hope someone with more knowledge of British Law can clarify.
It could be interesting to simply waste time for that hour, while still being co-operative. Answer extraordinarily slowly, be as verbose as possible, go on as many tangents as possible and go into as much detail on your first answer as you possibly can imagine, so the first answer takes the entire hour.
You're still being co operative and answering questions, they just run out of time before you get a lawyer or they cut you loose.
As a sidenote has anyone else been surprised by the extreme political iron-fist and omnipresent media control to side with Israel?
When talking to colleagues, family, and even my Israeli friends there's a plurality of opinion, sadness, serious discussions, but when looking at mainstream media, even relatively moderate it seems like everyone and their grandma is screaming for bombs and are "tired of the stupid poor palestinians" like everyone forgot the enormous plights they have gone through, the hundreds of thousands dead over decades, the property stolen by settlers and that they were mostly moderate farmers before they were annexed and carpet bombed (There's countless of videos of this).
It's like living in a Black Mirror episode.
The worlds largest military carpet bombing a tiny strip of land and a downtrodden people, and i have never seen politicians this bloodthirsty.
At the same time i see very, very few public figures, colleagues included having the courage to call out the atrocities done by Israel continuously, for fear of "something" while there's never ending stories from the opposite side.
Can anyone tell me what that something is - and if this is some extreme geopolitical importance of Israel to the west that the idea of the western "free society" has finally come to some screeching halt?
How can there be such an enormous difference between "the man on the street" and the media landscape?
My grandparents fled war, and the way the west talking and behaving is so incredibly shameful to me, but i don't recognise this war hunger when i turn off the TV.
Are you in the USA? Apparently the american media is particularly pro-israel. I am in Australia and find the media is very pro-israel but is happy to also say that israel’s actions are unsavory. I understand that Europe is much more balanced than Australia on this one.
> I understand that Europe is much more balanced than Australia on this one.
I'm in the UK. It depends what you mean by "balanced". What I'm seeing on TV news has been changing. At first, they didn't try to link Hamas to terrorism. They've been berated by Israelis for that; so now every time they mention Hamas, they add a clause like "Hamas, an organisation that is proscribed in the UK and many other countries for terrorism".
Apart from that, the "balance" I'm seeing is a kind of passive-aggressive pseudo-balance. For example, they do report statements from Israeli leaders calling for the expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza; in some cases, favourably (as if moving two million people from Gaza into refugee camps in the Sinai desert is a sensible compromise). So, they express hope that Egypt will open the border at Rafah, which is exactly what these Israeli extremists want.
There's no serious questioning or investigation of the claims from the IDF or Israeli government. You just see lots of wailing grandmas (in Israel and in Gaza), which seems to be the MSM's standard way of reporting conflicts these days. So it's war-porn.
I think there's a big difference between "Israeli leaders call for expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza" (presenting it as if it were an official governmental policy, which it never was), and a single paper by a think tank - no idea which "former PM" you are referring to, none of the people affiliated with Misgav[1] seem to fit this description. In any case, there's some number of people thinking evacuating Gaza is desireable, in Israel - and much larger number of people thinking getting rid of Jews in Palestine (you do realize that's what "Free Palestine" and "from the river to the sea" means, do you), both in Middle East and in Europe and on any college campus in the US. Neither is likely to happen, but the latter is the official political position of the government of Gaza (Hamas) and the former is no more than a single paper by a single think tank.
Great question, i'm in a scandinavian country that is what is so surprising to me.
I have family both here in the US and the UK, and everywhere seems to be the same. It's almost like there's been some secret doctrine implemented.
As an example the "relatively" moderate labour parties of both Denmark and the UK as come out as pretty extreme militaristic hardliner supporters of Israel doubting the effectiveness of ceasefires, using vulgar language about the Palestinians and refusing to acknowledge any crimes committed by "their side".
This is very surprising to me as i have family who fled the London bombings in WW2 and have always talked about the extreme importance of thinking clearly in conflicts, being merciful, never being going "hardliner" and most importantly being sceptical of military industrial complexes.
Can confirm it's the same Black Mirror level here, another European country. This is the third time I see this worrisome pattern in the last few years. I don't exactly understand what's going on.
What do you think Jeffrey Epstein's island was being used for? Do you think he was filming rich and influential people sleeping with underage girls purely for his own amusement, with no intention to generate blackmail material on anyone? If not, who do you think inherited that blackmail material when he passed away under suspicious circumstances?
> It's almost like there's been some secret doctrine implemented.
At least during Cold War, people were aware that there's a Cold War going on. Now everything is supposed to be fine and dandy, yet it feels we're constantly subjected to psy-ops even from "our side".
I don't think that the rise of conspiracy theories in recent years is a coincidence: Something is in play, some people can "sense it" but there's just not enough information to pin it down. Moreover, existing preoccupations are exploited to push these people to fringe theories and make them a laughing stock.
There is no conspiracy theory needed; people are generally bigoted and biased, and the fact that the latest escalation was set off by a very brutal terrorist attack (or series thereof) by Hamas, a terrorist organization that doesn't really give off "freedom fighter" vibes, and which has a religious extremism component than titillates and scares people, only exacerbates the issue.
This is just the past few decades of Western coverage of this conflict on steroids, or exaggerated so much that the bias is becoming obvious to people who never paid much attention before.
> Apparently the american media is particularly pro-israel.
Is it the same media that reprinted without any checking Hamas claim that Israel bombed Al-Ahli hospital and 500 people were dead and over 600 wounded (the real situation was an Islamic Jihad rocket fell in the parking lot near the hospital, and likely about 10 to 50 people were hurt by it), and run with it for days trying to present it as if it was reliable information? Or there's some other US press which I'm not aware of? Some of this "particularly pro-Israel" press even refuses to name Hamas a terrorist organization. I don't know how much pro-Israel one can be than that.
It's weird because with so many Palestinians in the media, the state department, etc. you would think there would be overwhelming support for Palestine.
Quit using the antisemitic victim card for people that dare criticize the State of Israel.
It is frankly disgusting how any discussion about the Middle East gets shut down by dishonest cries of "antisemitism". You know very well what you are trying to do here and you should be ashamed of it.
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a blatant conspiracy, otherwise Epstein would have done hard jail time in 2008 for soliciting a child prostitute, like anyone else would, rather than getting to walk free on a plea deal. And some of the people on his client list would have gone to jail too.
Being anti-Israel or anti-Zionism is not the same as being antisemitic.
Antisemitic = I have problems with jewish people
Anti-zionism = I have problems with the colonization of Israel and the displacement and murder of its Palestinian population
Anti-Israel = I have problems with the state of Israel's treatment of the Palestinian population and its policies when it comes to Palestinian territory.
Know the difference. It's OK to oppose morally indefensible actions and policies.
If you were taken a hostage by terrorists, the government is trying to free you, would you prefer them to:
- kill the terrorists and you OR
- stay with the terrorists until the government figures out a peaceful way to free you first before attempting to kill the terrorists?
Another Q:
If you were living in a certain city, they found out that there are terrorists around your house, maybe they dug a tunnel close to you, would you prefer:
- the army carpet bombing the area?
- the army attempty by other means to get rid of the terrorists?
* A hypothetical questions, not wishing you any harm
See this is exactly the extreme war hungry rhetoric i'm frightened by.
Looking at historical context, calling for thinking before acting, looking at both sides, is not being a "useful" idiot.
Especially when Israel has killed a hundredfold more palestinians over the span of decades and Israel itself helped create Hamas through these extremely violent hardliner measures:
I say we stop blood dripping revenge, we've already stuffed a million people into a concentration camp and effectively carpet bombed them for years, with lots of civilian casualties besides the Hamas that we can all agree to condemn.
So a bunch of journalists from pro-Israel publications claim to have seen videos of what the Israel Defense Force claim were atrocities committed by Hamas that day, yet no videos of these atrocities are available publicly. Surprising given how many people have phones capable of recording video, and how many videos there are of gruesome scenes from the bombings on the Palestinian side.
I hope that stories like this make people realise the rights that they have given up and start campaigning and voting to get them back again.
Terrorism laws are so obviously hugely disproportionate to what they allegedly protect against at this point.
Governments should balance two kinds of freedom. "freedom to (do as we please)" and "freedom from (others harming us)".
If these terrorism laws were really about protecting "freedom from" then they would also have a blanket ban on cars, guns, knives, alcohol and tobacco, all of which cause orders of magnitude more harm. Of course bans like that have been historically attempted and populations very clearly told Governments attempting to enforce them in which direction to fuck off to.
But these kind of abuses are a lot easier for people to ignore when they always happen to "someone else" but "probably will never happen to me".
Maybe some lawyer can explain to some complete noobie. I thought you always have the right to not answer any questions until you have your lawyer present, and that you have the right to that one phone call to a lawyer. My knowledge comes entirely from movies and novels. I understand that there could be exceptions, but what is the basic rationale of the exception here? The UK is a country of laws, and generally the laws are not absurd. What is the extend of this exception? Can the information they get from you be used in a court of law to incriminate you?
The "UK constitution" is a wide set of documents, both laws (some really old) and legal precedent that determine how the country's supposed to operate.
The main concept is "parliamentary supremacy", which means that the parliament (house of commons/lords) can pass any law except one that would bind their action in future. Basically, they can pass whatever law they want, and pass a law repealing it later. The expectation is that they wouldn't do anything too heinous because reasons. The idea that the monarch can forcibly disband parliament doesn't really exist anymore. (although, some laws occasionally do get blocked by that apparatus)
I learned way too much about this while their high court was deciding on the constitutionality of the process of leaving the EU. I wonder how much of it is baby-duck syndrome, but I love living in a republic.
The exception is that the airport is not a part of the UK sovereign territory, but is rather considered an extra-territorial possession of the UK, akin to a colony, which can be governed separately.
Thank you. I guess that could be the explanation. Still, it's strange that you could be "detained" and interrogated and not be allowed to see your lawyer, and not have the right to remain silent. In the US I would expect to retain all my rights even if I travel to the US Virgin Islands, for example, even if these islands are not part of any state.
AFAIK, the same is true of the USA: its international airports are extra-territorial possessions in which the USA is not obligated to enforce its human rights agreements ...
> I had to give up any passwords to my devices. It was a criminal offence not to do this.
Veracrypt hidden partition, plausible deniability, use it.
> They asked how considered my tweets were
That’s exactly the reason why, he definitely made a tweet that put him in some arbitrary list that feeds into an official “anti-terrorism” list, believe it or not, there’s a whole business and scheme on adding people on these lists and cancel them just because they tweet something, and sometimes, even taking an out-of-context and make an article about it somewhere, and use that as a “reference” to cancel you and put you in many hidden lists. Besides what some are mentioning here about privacy act and what not, I would go in a different approach, these lists should be searchable online just like any public records, and you have the right to challenge it in court if someone put your name in there and sue for it, but keeping it secret meaning there’s a hidden entity actively blackmailing individuals for their thoughts, the “CI/CD” for these lists goes like this: article about you (fake or real won’t matter) => some unknown list maintained by shady organization => feeding into an official country anti-terrorism list => feeding into a regional one like EU or similar, leading to travel ban, banks ban, etc. and none of them will question the source of such list.
What did they say was the crime? They had to suspect you did something. A probable cause. In the United States if you are suspected of cyber-terrorism they will just breach your WiFi/router and take the information without your knowledge. They will create zero days and exploit your devices. All under the terrorism statute. That’s why it’s best to never attach you iPhone to your home WiFi networks.
I hope some of you realize that this is not normal, and not common in all the western world as some of you suggest. There are several countries where the right of any individual is valued much higher than whatever that terror bullshit is. Any EU citizen has more personality rights.
This is really disturbing and would this be my government I would try to change whatever I can or flee.
Yeah the guy is complaining about being investigated for terrorism when he clearly and openly supports terrorist organizations including Hamas, according to his blog. Get a grip, HN.
While I'm overall feeling very sorry for the author, I can't help but note the color of the article text which I'm really struggling to see. My vision is not the best, and my display is just terrible, but I don't think it's so bad for just me. So if, after this terrible problem is hopefully resolved, I would humbly suggest fixing this issue.
Every one in the uk is a Terrorist according to the Terrorism Act. We really do live in a police state here. This isn't anything new ither this has been going on for nearly 20 years now since they first implemented it with the promise they wouldn't use it to harrass protestors it was the first thing they did.
You can start a campaign. They can bring about change, in the long run. If a think tank was campaigning for something you didn't like, I bet you'd be first to complain about it...
Of course, for all of that you need money, and quite a lot of money, and where are you going to get it in such large amounts? Eh, I dunno, I am not a politician myself and lobbying and corporate donations probably have nothing to do with that.
From others who support your campaign.
Yeah, it does suck that money == power.
IMO representative democracy isn't a problem, but corporate lobbying is.
anytime gov'ts are "legally" given special powers under the purpose of eliminating some evil and aspects of said implementation are allowed to be secret, this power WILL be abused. Look at FISA courts for an example (Patriot Act) in the US. No secrets, FIOA requests should allow all to be viewed unredacted etc....
While I think this could be an overstep, I think the author is quite obviously withholding some important context here. Why would they not show the tweet referenced here?
“I volunteered that I thought I understood the tweet that worried them and agreed it could have been more nuanced. This was the limitation of twitter. It was intended to refer only to the current situation within Gaza and the Palestinian people’s right of self-defence from genocide.”
The guy also seems to be industrial-grade nutcase:
> Murray questioned the official UK government account of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, March 2018, writing on his blog that Israeli security services were more likely to be behind the poisoning than Russia and that, while Russia lacked a motive, "Israel has a clear motivation for damaging the Russian reputation".
He also served 8 months in jail for disclosing the identities of women testifying in sexual harassment and rape case, which the court explicitly prohibited to disclose. All-around nice person, as it seems.
> people forget (or likely don’t even know) that, when Israel was not yet in a position of asymmetric power and secure statehood, Israeli paramilitaries often committed terror attacks which are indistinguishable from what we have seen Hamas do in recent decades. Deir Yassin, the King David Hotel Bombing, al-Husayniyya Safad, and so on.
Now they do not have the need for such acts, when high tech bombing and artillery barrages, international legal sanction, highly trained police, are available. Beheading children and setting off car bombs at shopping centers looks bad internationally, and there’s little reason for it when you are the one with a “legitimate” state. But Israel got to that position in part by using methods indistinguishable from Hamas.
Granted, one will say— that wasn’t Israel, it was the Irgun, or the Palmach, or some particular militia: more extremist factions of the Zionist movement. But it’s the same for Palestine. What is the great difference between the Irgun and Hamas, except in terms of success?
Israel still engages in extreme brutality, and have even abetted on the ground massacres since the 1970s, but usually in ways that extricate themselves from the same level of responsibility (whether by setting up Lebanese militias to do their dirty work, or by allowing massive Palestinian casualties to be categorized as collateral damage). I can recognize that civilians being killed by artillery in a war zone is categorically different than civilians being assaulted, tortured, raped and executed by ground forces. But the crazy thing that’s forgotten is that Israeli forces did use those same tactics, when it’s situation and power position was more desperate, and it’s reputation not yet based on maintaining the appearance of civility.
That's whataboutism; although it's true that there are no "good" sides in this conflict, the issue here is that supporting Israel is fine, but supporting Hamas is not because they have been declared a terrorist organization.
Nobody's going to get in trouble for opposing the conflict, or pointing out civilian casualties, displacement, war crimes, etc. But you WILL get on a List if you support Hamas in any way shape or form. Pick your battles, know the risk. Yeah it's not fair, just or morally correct, but this is the reality of things.
>Well, if you support Hamas after they butchered civilians
Numerically speaking the IDF have killed a lot more civilians than Hamas. As have the US for that matter, literally hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq.
And pointing out the dire straights of Palestinians is different from supporting Hamas. The same way critizing Israel as a nation not the same thing as being anti-semitic.
The whole Western media and political landscape somewhat fails to appreciate that small, but incredibly important difference lately. Heck, I am even getting Youtube propagan... I mean ads from the Israeli ministry of defence. But as the saying goes "One death is a tragedy, thousands are a statistic".
IMO, in light of that comment, this is a non-story. Though what they did was stupid: acting like a fascist towards someone like this tends to undermine whatever position you're trying to establish simply by making you look like the bad/worse guys.
Any action obviously goes to far. The situation is already bad enough as it is, a ground assault cpuld easily turn very, very ugly. And blow up thie whole powder cake that is the middle east. I just hope cooler heads prevail, but given the rather fragile political landscape in Israel, well we will see.
The numbers we have for IDF civilian deaths in Gaza come from the governmental authority in Gaza. That government authority happens to be Hamas.
- Hamas falsely attributes civilian deaths to Israel (as you can see from the "hospital strike")
- Hamas vastly inflates civilian casualty counts, somewhere between 2-5x as you can also see from the "hospital strike" which was immediately claimed by Hamas to have killed more than 500. US estimates have it between 100-300, and I think the photos of the damaged parking lot are extremely damning for Hamas's claims - yes, an explosion and fire in a crowded refugee camp could kill lots of people, but 500 is absurd.
- Hamas tells civilians in Gaza to ignore text messages from the IDF telling them to evacuate because their residence may be bombed.
- Hamas sets up road blocks to prevent civilians in Gaza from evacuating.
- Hamas sets up military installations and ammunition caches next to or in civilian installations, including kindergartens and mosques. (You can find videos of bombings resulting in massive secondary explosions as ammunition caches pop off.) They hide in refugee camps (https://thehill.com/policy/international/4260111-israel-hama...).
I think it's worth asking whether there is any way to wage a just war against a government like this, that is literally trying to maximize the number of its own civilians killed. And if not, what kinds of behavior does that incentivize?
I'm not saying that Gazan civilians deserve to suffer because they voted for Hamas. I am saying that Hamas tries to inflate the death toll for Gazan civilians (both by lying about that toll, and by taking actions with the express purpose of increasing that toll).
If you refuse to go to war with Hamas because of this fact, you incentivize that behavior.
I can't really think of a more just case for war than "the government of a neighbor just brutally, intentionally slaughtered civilians in a surprise attack in our country." It doesn't matter whether the neighboring country is a dictatorship or a democracy.
It very much sucks for the people of Palestine that Hamas chose to start a war with Israel and is using tactics that purposefully result in the death of Palestinians. I hope that they stop putting rocket launchers in and next to schools. I hope that they start allowing people to evacuate. I hope that they stop lying to their people about "psychological warfare" in an effort to get more of them killed. I wish that neighboring countries would allow Palestinians to escape the carnage, and adopt strategies that actually support the Palestinian people rather than the Palestinian cause.
But the IDF and Israel do not control that. And I'm honestly not sure what people expect from them. If you can't fight an enemy that hides behind civilians, then hiding behind civilians is an obvious winning strategy. And personally, I don't want to live in a world where the government most willing to sacrifice their own people automatically wins any conflict.
They could just give back all the stolen land and homes and stop oppressing the Palestinians. If there weren't so many people living in such a tiny strip of land, the number of Palestinian children who become collateral damage would be greatly reduced, and people would be a lot less likely to join a terrorist organization if they can lead normal lives and don't have an oppressor throwing bombs on their friends and family.
> Numerically speaking the IDF have killed a lot more civilians than Hamas. As have the US for that matter, literally hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq.
I don't know why "numerically" matters. There is a big difference morally between someone accidentally killed while persuing a legal military target, and intentionally gunning down a rave or children at a day care.
Civilian infrastructure and housing are decidedly no legitimate milotary targets. Never have been, and this makes air power such a bad choice when fighting insurgencies, it is to indiscriminate.
Whether or not it is a legit legal military target depends on if it is being used for a military purposes and how "porportional" the military benefit of targeting it is relitive to the civilian damage targeting it would cause.
The idea that if someone converts a house into an ammunition store depot it can never be targeted ever under international law is just straight up wrong.
Of course how that translates to what is being done on the ground is very complex. Which is why numerically approaches are wrong - you have to put every incident in appropriate context to judge it
You make the point about fighting insurgencies and guerilla opponents being so damn hard very well, I think. Not the least beimg, that said insurgents do not really count as an armed opponent.
Regarding the house being an ammunition depot: Sure, legitimate target. Blowing up the whole highrise, debatable. Blowing up the neighbouring highrise, even more debatable. And airstrikes are nowhere precise enough for that kind of work.
> that said insurgents do not really count as an armed opponent
Insurgents are people who are fighting their own government (with guns) so they are armed, but they're not fighting Hamas, they're fighting Israel, so they're not insurgents.
Many of them don't even wear military uniforms in combat, that makes them unlawful combatants under the Geneva Conventions and don't have rights. They almost always attack civilians, so they're terrorists.
Yeah, isurgents, partisans and whatever you wanna call them are not regular combatants. You what that means? That the rule of land warefare don't apply to them. That makes fighting them a police action, one that has to follow basic human rights (detention, fair trials, the works). Unless you are fine being the baddy, in which case go full out Soviet Uniom in Afghanistan, USA in Vietnam or SS on the Eastern Front rear areas.
You know what that doesn't mean? That those people, and everyone in their vincinity, forfeit all, every and each right they ever had. Last time I checked, the IDF had pretty decent rules of engagement around that very question. On paper, and unfortunately rather loosly respected, but still.
> Yeah, isurgents, partisans and whatever you wanna call them are not regular combatants. You what that means? That the rule of land warefare don't apply to them
??? I don't think that follows. What is your basis for this.
(not my view) What OP means is you don't bring an airforce and a navy and an army to a gang fight, unless of course you're okay with destruction of urban areas.
> There is a big difference morally between someone accidentally killed while persuing a legal military target, and intentionally gunning down a rave or children at a day care.
Not all of us agree with this. The idea of “legal military target” grows out of the idea of “just war”, which many of us reject outright.
i would think it more grows out of the distinction between first degree murder and either self-defense or involuntary manslaughter we find in ordinary laws.
A six month old baby that burns to death is in just as much pay when it is because it was doused in gasoline by a terrorist as because it was set on fire by an Israeli airstrike.
You may care about the finer legal minutia, but I doubt it matters very much to the death people and their relatives.
Well, some lives matter more than the others. No one in the west cares about Palestinians. And the way people try to do blatant war crime apologia is by saying that Israel wasn't targeting civilians specifically (as if they would admit it lol) so that's fine! Even Russia pretends that it isn't openly targeting civilians but again, Palestinian lives are basically worthless so it's just different :)
> blatant war crime apologia is by saying that Israel wasn't targeting civilians specifically (as if they would admit it lol) so that's fine!
Umm, that's literally what distinguishes whether or not it is a war crime*?
Not saying you need to take israeli claims at face value - but if one side accuses the other side of a crime, and the other side says they didn't do it, generally the burden is on the first side to provide proof. Saying it doesn't matter whether or not they actually did it isn't the right response.
* technically its more complex than that. There are times where it could still be a war crime even if civilians weren't targeted specificly. What matters more is the balance between military benefit vs civilian damage.*
Yes, but cutting off water and supplies while explicitly declaring that they will turn the city to rubble... while at the same time claiming that the attacks are targeted and proportional is a thing that only a western ally could get away with.
Russia pays complete lip service to always trying to make it look like they don't attack civilians (they do) yet are unequivocally accused of war crimes (as they should be).
It got to a point where Israeli officials had no problem publically declaring thinly veiled threats of extermination like:
>On October 10th an Israeli official told a television station: “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.” Daniel Hagari, an idf spokesperson, boasted that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had been dropped on Gaza. Then, he added: “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
Again, only a western ally could get away with this with such a massive support at all level from all western countries after such statements.
If even Palestinians (Hamas) do not care about Palestinians and are holding them hostages or using Palestinian children as human shields, why would anybody expect from the West to?
No it doesn't justify war crimes from Israel. I'm just pointing out your delusion expecting anybody to care when they don't even care about themselves. You have to love yourself first, in order to be loved.
What? What are you even talking about? I'm not saying anything about loving them, there's an insanely wide margin between loving them and not turning a blind eye on war crimes because it's your ally that is doing it. What the hell?
Maybe if nations and groups of people would just stop trying to destroy Israel as a state and kill jewish people out of pure hatred, we wouldn't be in this situation.
Has the author done that? Hamas may be the ruling party, but there aren’t elections, so the people don’t have a choice. It’s further confused by the fact that Hamas is the government, so they also provide aid, run schools and hospitals, etc.
Point being, there’s far more nuance to the whole situation than “Palestine bad.”
Hamas was elected by the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, in Palestine-wide elections. Fatah immediately launched a coup attempt. That failed in Gaza, but succeeded in the West Bank. It's Fatah (Israel's preferred "negotiating" partner) that won't allow elections; Hamas could only hold an election in Gaza, not in the West Bank. Hamas has no desire to validate the claim tht Gaza and the West Bank are distinct territories, which is the effect that holding an election in Gaza only would have.
Regardless of who won't allow new elections, or why, the people don't have a say in their current government (short of internal revolution or similar).
So, like I said, there's a lot more nuance than many Americans recognize. That was my only point. And, based on the author's tweets (now shared in this thread), he actually does support Hamas, which based on British law (also shared in this thread) could actually be illegal.
> the people don't have a say in their current government
Sure, and I get a say in my government. Every five years. We've had three prime ministers since the last time I was allowed to vote in national elections, including two certifiable crazies.
Some people seem to think that a government isn't legitimate unless it's appointed the way we appoint our government (FSVO "we"). I happen to take the view that an election isn't legitimate, however well it's run, if it's conducted while under military siege.
> I have always viscerally opposed war. I have dedicated my life to conflict resolution and reconciliation.
> But in the coming Gaza genocide, every act of armed resistance by Hamas and Hezbollah will have my support.
> If that is a crime, send me back to jail.
I think this is pretty clearly supporting Hamas. The "in the coming" bit gives him a bit of leeway, of course, since he's not actually saying he supported the October 7 massacre itself (though presumably he is saying he would support another one, if it were it to occur now?), but he certainly doesn't seem to be making the sort of "I support Palestinians, not Hamas" argument that you assume.
Personally, as an American, I've been told by Europeans here that our attitudes towards free speech are bizarre, and that government has an important role to play in, ah, curating the information ecosystem. Despite that, I still believe that people like Murray should be perfectly free to argue for their views, however much I personally find them abhorrent.
Ah, well that's a bit more clear. I don't agree with what he said. But, it also doesn't strike me as terrorism itself or outside the bounds of free speech (at least as we know it in the US, which isn't quite the same as in the UK).
[I don't have a Twitter account, and try to avoid the site since access seems to be hit-or-miss since Musk took over]
> belong to or invite support for a proscribed organisation;
> arrange a meeting in support of a proscribed organisation; and.
> wear clothing or carry articles in public which arouse reasonable
suspicion that an individual is a member or supporter of the proscribed
organisation.
He didn't say that anyone else should support a proscribed organisation; he didn't even invite support for their actions. He just said that he intended to support them. And he's not a member of Hamas; so I don't see how you figure that he broke rule #1.
But the Home Secretary is now demanding that the police arrest and charge anyone carrying a Palestinian flag (note: not just a Hamas flag). In that context, the letter of the law seems a bit irrelevant.
> He didn't say that anyone else should support a proscribed organisation; he didn't even invite support for their actions. He just said that he intended to support them.
i think the problem here is the medium. he didn't say he supported the terrorists in private to a friend. he posted it on twitter for everyone to see. i guess one could make a case that it's an invitation for support?
Second, the Israeli military has killed much, much more people, including thousands of civilians, kids and mothers over a half a century.
There are countless of videos and reports of rich settlers, harassing, stealing property and straight up killing regular palestinian farmers and families just living in their houses.
And third. Israel has actively supported Hamas to destroy moderate opposition like the PLO - the good old divide and conquer strategy.
So unless you also want to detain supporters of Israel this doesn't really make sense.
And no, you shouldn't detain them either like this.
This is not support of Hamas though, it is an acknowledgement that there will understandable reactions to the ongoing carpet bombings and warcrimes done by Israel right now. I.e self defence from whatever group holds power there right now.
Man, Israel just not continuing this settlement policy would do so, so much to ease tension in the region. But taking real estate from other people by force became somewhat fashionable again.
True, let's call it Apartheid then, not much better unfortunately.
Also very important to highlight that most people living in Palestine were pretty provincial and moderate farmers before being carpet bombed by settlers which has unsurprisingly lead to extremism.
Does that justify Hamas atrocities? No, of course not. But desparate people do desparate things. And every bomb the Israelis drop is just creating more hate for the future. Anyway isn't the Hamas leadership mostly living in Qatar?
Of course leadership isn't living in the line of fire. They are not stupid, they don't blow up the place they live in. Or risk their own lives, now that they are leadership. Some things just never, ever change it seems.
Terror bombing never worked ever. What it does so, also confirmed hostorically by its biggest advocates like Sir Harris, is satisfying someones need for revenge.
Hell, this whole middle east conflict is so fucked up, I do not see any way how it will ever be resolved. And obviously, getting rid of either Israel or Palestine is absolutely no option. A shame, in a different world Israel could have become the Switzerland of the Middle East, instead religious hardliners, on both / all sides of this conflict did their utmost to prevent that.
That is exactly not how I understand OP, regardless of a harsh choice of words. I do not like Israels policy around settlements and the treatment of Palestinians, for me this is just unacceptable. The same goes for calling for the destruction of Israel as a nation. People can actually critizise both things.
And one thing should be clear: not all Palestinians are Hamas members, nor are all Israelians supporting the settlement policies or the Nethayahu government. Punishing everyone for actions of a few is not a thing I support.
What a bizarre thing to say. I wan't the jewish state destroyed? You are seeing ghosts my friend.
The fact that not carpet bombing and creating a huge concentration camp for millions that had their land annexed is now equal to wanting the Israel state destroyed is a testament to how one sided some of you people see thing conflict.
I'm pro peace, anti carpet bombing, and i see that Hamas has been supported by Israel to weaken PLO, and that settlers have stolen property and killed palestinians which has led to this extremism now, at the same time i understand the importance of an israeli state, and i understand the horrors of living in fear of rockets, though they kill a hundredfold less than the Israeli military.
Israel is an ethnostate[1], resolutions of Congress notwithstanding[2]. Imagine if Biden said "The US is a Nation-State Of The White People And Them Alone" the way a leading Israeli spoke about Israel[3].
But instead all major western governments are busy sucking up to Israel (this article is just one example) and declaring that Israel will always be our best ally.
What are you talking about? About 20% of Israel population are Arabs. Only 7% of them self-identify as "Palestinians". Regardless of that, they all enjoy same rights as every other citizen. Which is more rights for the vast majority of them than in any surrounding Arab country. Imagine if you declared "US is a single-race country", totally ignoring existence of non-white people in the US. I think some might have been upset at such declaration, and even more would consider a person proclaiming such thing to be extremely ignorant.
Lots of states are ethnostates to varying degrees. Japan and South Korea are arguably much more restrictive about who is considered a member than Israel. But there are many more; Finland, Iran, and Hungary come to mind. The New World has few ethnostates, but in Eurasia they are more the norm than the exception.
True, but I think that's more due to the age of the state than the geographic location. Israel is very young and was founded on land that already had a lot of people living there. Now they're mostly gone and Israel is declaring that it exists solely for the non-native inhabitants. Let's translate that into American terms so it's more understandable.
What if the entire history of US settlement and expansion, from 1600s to present, was compressed to 70 years, then our government declared that it existed solely for white people regardless of Democracy and laid siege to all remaining Indian reservations?
Yet the same major news organizations and politicians that supposedly stand against racism cannot find any backbone to stand up for their principles when it comes to Israel. We were supposed to be better than this.
Many of the people already living there were Jews. Many - about half IIRC - of the people who came there afterwards were refugees from surrounding Arab countries. What better demonstration could there have been that the Jewish people need a safe haven? Well, I can think of a better demonstration, because we saw it two weeks ago.
Nobody is (was?) objecting that the Jewish people needed a safe haven or a land of their own; the objection is that they took / colonised the Palestinian land, claimed nobody lived there anyway, and had the early UN and its member-states validate their claim, then committed acts of war and crimes against civilians to claim more of the land than the UN decided they should have.
> Many - about half IIRC - of the people who came there afterwards were refugees from surrounding Arab countries.
It's true that many Jews lived in harmony with Arab nations prior to the founding of Israel. Founding Israel is what made those relations go sour. That literally was where this whole conflict started for the aboriginal peoples of the Middle East.
> Well, I can think of a better demonstration, because we saw it two weeks ago.
The attacks wouldn't have happened if the founders of Israel (not all of whom were Jews, looking at you Britain) hadn't decided to interpret an ancient holy book in a genocidal way.
The Palestinians lived there. Israel has been in the process of kicking them out ever since its founding. It doesn't get to blame the victim here. Yes, I know about the holocaust etc. etc. but one genocide doesn't warrant another.
> The attacks wouldn't have happened if the founders of Israel (not all of whom were Jews, looking at you Britain) hadn't decided to interpret an ancient holy book in a genocidal way.
> The Palestinians lived there. Israel has been in the process of kicking them out ever since its founding.
You seem to interpret the history in really one way here...
That the West supports Israel has very deep, historical reasons. And I agree, jews (as an ethnicity / people) deserve and need an own state. Especially after the holocaust. The implementation could have been handled so much better, because the Palestinians also deserve a home. And having Israel and Palestinians sharing a home nation is no futher away than it was in decades. No easy solutions.
> I had no right to remain silent. I had to give full and accurate information in response to questions. It was a criminal offence to withhold any relevant information.
This is the one that bothers me the most to be honest, how is this possible ?
Couldn't one just claim they don't remember constantly, as it seems there is no 'probable cause' or even any traditional 'evidence'.
Like many other things in world - it's not a binary yes or no. It's about what the judge or jury will believe. If you say you don't remember your password but they pull up logs and show that you have just used that password 3 hours earlier, then jury will almost certainly find you guilty, even if yes, there is absolutely no way to prove what the objective "truth" is.
You could, but they can then choose to detain you further, do a full court case, and if they uncover evidence (or evidence that you did not, in fact, forget), you're screwed anyway.
The most logical way I an explain such events and the general decline of our societies is that a some people in power are criminals and in their paranoia are silencing all moral individuals who may pose a threat to them.
To find out who the criminals are in our system, we just need to identify those who are giving the commands. Unfortunately, a lot of people in high positions up the chain are likely compromised individuals (higher ups have dirt on them) so they will not reveal their source.
It seems like society is held up by a hierarchy of blackmail. We need to obtain info on compromised individuals and use them to spill the beans on their superiors via plea bargains.
What governments did to Julian Assange and what they're doing to Craig Murray is criminal. Those who are responsible should be prosecuted and the victims should be compensated.
Here’s Avner Cohen, Israel's former Religious Affairs Official:
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”
Here’s US Physician and Congressman Ron Paul:
"Hamas was encouraged and started by Israel, because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat"
Here’s Charles Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia:
"Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet [Israeli Intelligence Agency], which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO."
Here’s Robert Dreyfuss in his book, Devil's Game:
"And beginning in 1967 through the late 1980s, Israel helped the Muslim Brotherhood establish itself in the occupied territories. It assisted Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Brotherhood, in creating Hamas, betting that its Islamist character would weaken the PLO."
Plus, Suheib Yousef, son of Hamas co-founder, secretly worked as an Israeli spy under Shin Bet.
All of the above have reputable sources, let me know if I should link anything.
They came to my parent's house at a weekend to question me. I'd just happened to have gone home for the weekend to see my folks. I was running perhaps the largest warez site on the Internet at the time, so I thought I was super busted.
The detective sat me down and said to me, "What do you know about a plot to kill the President?" and I burst out laughing, mostly out of relief. He stares daggers at me and says "You're not taking me very seriously, are you Mr Charles?"
Luckily he did not detain me. We came to the conclusion that one of the hundreds of people I'd given an account to on one of my Linux servers had sent a death threat to president@whitehouse.gov. Apparently it contained information about the president's movements that was "not well known."
I never saw the email, but the detective called me on the day they were going out to pick Kushil up. I'd given him an account a few months previously so he could play MUDs and download porn. Seemed like a really nice guy. The detective read the end of the email to me over the phone, "Come get my ass you bastards," it said, and then had his address and map co-ordinates to his house.
Nobody ever saw Kushil again after that.