Palestine Action protests

And as for the idea of 'bad actors' using 'well-meaning', 'elderly' people, that seems pretty offensive. You don't suddenly become gullible when you hit your sixties.

I'm guessing that part of the reason there are a lot of older people willing to get arrested is that it is easier for older people to calculate whether a criminal record will have an unacceptably large cost to them in future. Eg, if you are retired, you don't have to worry about having to declare your criminal record to a future employer. To an extent you can say 'so fucking what' about any black marks on your name.

If the Government position is right then Greenham Common Women should have been a proscribed organisation.

But it is an important issue in its own right - the overreach of state power, using anti-terrorism laws to clamp down on non-terrorist direct-action protests.

And it is connected to the wider issue of the war in Palestine because time and again legitimate pro-Palestinian protests are misleadingly presented as antisemitic or in other ways somehow intrinsically wrongful.

There is a similarity with the way in which gender critical views have been misrepresented as hateful, anti-trans, etc. In both cases, legitimate parts of public discourse have been deliberately marginalised by people seeking to position them as outside the realms of acceptable political thought and action.

I think in fact it is quite clear these older people are more than able to understand the difference between supporting an organisation because they sympathise with its cause, and protesting a Government decision which they feel restricts free speech.

But do accept that some young people who like instance images etc., are cashing in on being able to share images of older people and people with disabilities being taken off by police.

There are no bad actors.

And to think that old people are gullible is just silly.

If you read anything about why people are protesting you will have understood that.

The only bad actors in most cases are media misrepresentation, which many of us on FWR will be familiar with.

The issue is about the Government decision to proscribe Palestine Action rather than as happens with many protest groups that destroy property etc, they are prosecuted for criminal damage. And / or breaking and entering.

Some might question the Government's intentions in doing that.

Or maybe there is a dividing line between defacing military equipment and throwing paint at a painting.

In this instance the Government has helped promote a group that 99.9% of us would never have heard of.

It’s a protest against the incorrect proscribing of an organisation as a terrorist one. Whatever your views on the behaviour of Israel to the Palestinians; you should be concerned about this. It is a flagrant disregard for free speech and a highly questionable decision.

Yes Palestine action have committed illegal acts; doesn’t make them a terrorist group though. I have issue with people being more horrified about paint on planes than the tens of thousands of innocent people, and children in particular being killed in Gaza, using weapons manufactured and sold here.