Kernow Damo

Starmer needed those Filton convictions to bury Palestine Action as a terror problem; instead the retrial has put state machinations in the dock. Right, so Keir Starmer’s Filton retrial has not given him the clean Palestine Action crushing he needed. It has given him four criminal damage convictions, two acquittals, a rejected GBH with intent charge, a defence barrister now facing contempt proceedings, defendants sent back to prison before sentencing, and a terrorism label still hovering over a case where nobody has been convicted of terrorism. That is a filthy little mess to carry out of court while pretending justice has been done. Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani have been found guilty of criminal damage over the action at Elbit Systems UK’s Filton site near Bristol. Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin have been acquitted, even though all of them admitted to causing criminal damage. Work that one out. Samuel Corner has also been convicted of inflicting grievous bodily harm, but he has been cleared of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, which is not a small distinction when the state has spent months trying to make this case smell as threatening as possible. Four people have been convicted of damaging property, not of terrorism, not of aggravated burglary, and not of intentionally causing serious injury. The state has convictions, but it does not have the tidy terror-shaped courtroom trophy it really wanted going into the sentencing hearing on 12 June and yet still we wonder whether terror level sentencing may yet still be handed down. Elbit Systems UK is the British arm of the now infamous Israeli arms company, and the Filton site has been described in court coverage as a key research and development facility.

Israel’s phone-spying scandal is no longer foreign policy - it’s a test of whether your government protects you, or protects Israel. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has a new scandal round his neck, and this one reaches into the phone network people carry in their pockets and not just in Israel or just the Middle East either. A major digital research group has exposed two covert telecom surveillance campaigns, with attack traffic linked to mobile operator signalling infrastructure and with Israeli-linked networks and surveillance firms very much implicated. Regional coverage has put it more bluntly: Israeli telecommunications infrastructure, from old signalling systems right up to modern 5G, has been used to help turn phones into tracking devices across more than ten countries. Now that is not a claim that every phone in Britain has been hacked, but the hidden machinery behind mobile roaming, texts, location updates and network trust has been abused so phones can be located without the user seeing anything happen. Netanyahu’s problem is that the word security that he constantly mouths off to justify everything, now comes back at him stinking of surveillance, and every government still claiming Israel as an ally and a trusted partner ought to have some explaining to do. The news was broken through investigation by Canadian outlet Citizen Lab and what they’ve pieced together and published is not a vague internet rumours or the contents of a reddit thread from someone whose cousin once rebooted a router. Its report found two phone-tracking operations built around the hidden systems mobile networks use to talk to each other. These are the background systems that let your phone roam abroad, receive texts, connect to the right tower and tell the network roughly where it is.

Trump’s Board of Peace was supposed to control Gaza’s ceasefire; Israel shifted the borders in another land grab, and left Trump holding the baby. Right, so Donald Trump’s Board of Peace had one job in Gaza, and Israel has just made that job look even more of a sick joke than it already was. The job was to make the Gaza ceasefire look like it meant something, allegedly to stop the fighting, to get aid in, to hold Israel to a line, and to make their post-war shenanigans look like more than just a brass plaque on a door and someone’s name on a desk. Well Israel has just set fire to that mindset wholesale. Israel has you see, whilst going completely unreported of course moved beyond the Yellow Line it had already imposed on Gaza, the land grab that that blatantly was, into a new Orange Line, meaning that Israel has now de facto taken military control of more than 60 per cent of the Gaza Strip now, with some estimates putting it around 64 per cent in fact, all while the remaining Palestinians there get squeezed into what is left. So Trump gets his Board of Peace, his Civil-Military Coordination Centre supposedly to run this project with international partners, his International Stabilisation Force language, his donor demands, his reconstruction pitch, all the reportage of global seriousness by the MSM, and Israel swaps it’s yellow marker for a fat orange one, I wonder if they called it Donnie? And scrawled across the map, now saying this is mine. Deal-maker Trump got outplayed and he can’t say he was dealt a bad hand, because he knew he was playing with a shark. he has been left holding the wreckage of a big fat Board of Peace mess as it was always going to become, because the deal did not control the actor with the army.

Trump called it Project Freedom, but Iran has already made Hormuz look like the place his rescue mission goes to get mugged by reality. Right, so Donald Trump has now compared his own navy to pirates, launched a supposedly humanitarian ship-rescue mission into the most dangerous waterway on Earth, rejected Iran’s latest peace plan as again not good enough, is still maintaining a blockade on Iranian ports, which also happens to be hampering oil, gas and other exports to the rest of the world and threatened force against anyone who interferes with his new freedom plan; all now being justified with even stupider arguments about Iranian threat and aggression, the latest offering from the public excuse machine being a coughed up a claim about Iranian suicide dolphins. Seriously. Suicide dolphins. The war argument has got so stupid now that somebody has apparently looked at destroyers, drones, aircraft, sanctions, oil seizures, blockades and a failing ceasefire, and decided the missing ingredient was Flipper with a death wish.

Israel thought their flotilla grab was a done deal, but the trail now points back to which of their allies actually helped them do it. Right, so Israel has seized the Global Sumud Flotilla, taken 175 activists off 22 boats, moved most of them through Greece, but dragged two of them back to Israel, and now the bit Israel should really hate is not just the seizure at sea, but the bit that now points back at them having help to actually do it and that’s the bit we should all really hate, because we aren’t getting told this. The Israeli army acted against the flotilla through the US headquarters in Kiryat Gat, the Civil-Military Coordination Center, the CMCC, the very place dressed up as part of that whole sham of a Gaza aid and stabilisation plan. What we have therefore is the body supposedly there to coordinate aid into Gaza now having been tied to discussions about stopping people trying to bring aid towards Gaza. Israel had help, Israel’s helpers are now part of the story and we want to know who they are and every government sitting inside that plan has to now answer whether it was there to help Gaza or to help Israel protect it’s siege instead.

Ben-Gvir wanted the noose to frighten Palestinians; instead it has given campaigners a list of Israeli lawmakers to put in the sanctions frame. Right, so Israel’s horrific National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has I am sad to report, just turned 50, but as him reaching this milestone will hardly have you rushing to the card aisle of Tesco’s, it’s not necessarily been the best one for him and in fact it has somehow become a better exhibit against him and his beliefs than anything his opponents could have possibly designed. His wife Ayala there presenting him with a cake decorated with a hanging noose and the message, “Mazal tov to Minister Ben-Gvir, sometimes dreams come true,” because apparently the man who wants Palestinians facing the gallows also wanted his own birthday treat to look like a police evidence photo. The noose of course was not random decoration. It was a reference to the death penalty law Ben-Gvir and his Otzma Yehudit party have championed, a law Israel’s parliament has now passed, a law that is for Palestinians only, a death penalty only Palestinians face, an apartheid death penalty, as death penalties are not egregious in and of themselves, somehow Israel manages to make even that low bar even worse. Ben-Gvir wants that noose to look like strength, deterrence, vengeance and whatever other psychotically sanitised little label they want to stick on it after he’s blown his candles out.

Trump wanted Iran boxed in, but his fleet move now looks like failed intimidation turning into exposed escalation. Right, so the tangerine toddler Donald Trump has sent the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group into the Iran crisis now with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard, so are we looking at that land invasion of Iran happening yet after all? The stalemate of his blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is not seeking Iran budge, just price rises across the entire world, so has his desperation peaked or has he just forgotten to call them back again, frankly I could believe either. USS Boxer, USS Portland and USS Comstock are not just grey floating props for another White House muscle flex for Iran to laugh at. They are amphibious ships carrying Marines, aircraft, landing craft, command staff and the gear you move when you want the option of putting people ashore basically, so what would they be for really? The Boxer is currently in the Sulu Sea having left Guam in the last few days, so we haven’t got US Marines off the Iranian coast quite yet, but they are en route. Trump wanted Iran frightened from a distance, Iran has not given him the submission he wanted, so now the gears have been stepped up again all at US public expense of course, adding yet another expensive ways to make his Middle East mess even bigger, now with added landing ships. It’s not like the US hasn’t already been making a total pigs ear of their blockade enough already of course. The USS Spruance intercepted the Iranian-flagged cargo vessel M/V Touska in the north Arabian Sea while it was moving at 17 knots towards Bandar Abbas, issued repeated warnings, waited through a six-hour refusal, ordered the engine room cleared, then fired several rounds from a five-inch gun into the engine room to disable the ship.

Labour’s anti-racism talk looks very thin when black women councillors are pushed out and Starmer’s family ends up on the safe-seat slate. Right, so here we are with another set of local elections coming up and as sure as night follows day, we have a classic Starmerroid candidate rigging story, only this one is a biggie, which is probably why all the mainstream media are too busy slapping Zack Polanski over a retweet to notice. Two sitting black women councillors in Bensham Manor ward, Croydon, Eunice O’Dame and Enid Mollyneux, have been blocked from standing again, local members are saying the selection was not properly conducted, and the new Labour slate includes a young lady called Ellie Sandover, who just happens to be Keir Starmer’s niece. Labour’s hierarchy of racism meets nepotism now it seems as Labour’s selection process has now produced an outcome where black women are out, Starmer’s family is in, and the party that never stops talking about standards, anti-racism and clean politics now really needs to answer some questions about all of this, though obviously they’ll just say everything was conducted properly, even though ordinary members have said otherwise. Very normal. Very democratic. Absolutely nothing to see, provided you have recently misplaced your eyesight and all sense of political smell. Bensham Manor is not some hopeless paper candidacy where Labour just throws anyone on the ballot for the sake of it either, this is considered one of the safest Labour wards in all of Croydon.

Mark Rowley tried to put Polanski in the dock over a retweet — and ended up putting the Met’s politics, tactics and neutrality on trial instead. Right, so Sir Mark Rowley has put himself in the dock by trying to put Zack Polanski there instead. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has taken a retweet by the Green Party leader – nothing he’s actually said himself, just a retweet of someone else’s comment - written a formal public letter rebuking him in his capacity as Met Police Chief, gone onto national broadcast studios on top of that to defend it in uniform, and done all of that in the final week before local elections. Polanski did not direct an arrest, did not interfere with officers at the scene, did not stand in Golders Green giving tactical advice from a Green Party soapbox, and did not defend the man charged over the attack. He reposted this: criticism of police force after footage circulated of officers kicking a man repeatedly in the head during his arrest. Rowley then took the authority of Britain’s biggest police force and aimed it straight at a named party leader, while telling everyone this was not politics, absolutely not politics, perish the thought, it’s just the most senior police officer in the country publicly disciplining the leader of a political party days before voters go to the polls, when he is supposed to maintain a position of absolute impartiality.

Zionism claims to protect Jews, but Golders Green shows how Jewish fear gets seized, spent and turned into danger for everyone else. Right, so two Jewish men have been stabbed in Golders Green, a Jewish area of north London, and before the blood had even dried politically, the backers of Zionism were already trying to capitalise on it. Police say the attack happened on Highfield Avenue at 11.16 yesterday morning, with two men aged 76 and 34 treated for stab wounds and taken to hospital in a stable condition. Counter Terrorism Policing has declared it a terrorist incident, and one line of enquiry is whether London’s Jewish community was deliberately targeted. The arrested man is 45, a British national born in Somalia, and the Met says he has a history of serious violence and mental health issues. None of that softens the attack, none of that makes a knife less dangerous, and nobody with a functioning moral compass needs a focus group before condemning two Jewish people being stabbed in the street. But the second part of this story is what happened when the political class, the Israel lobby crowd, the racism merchants and the police back slapping brigade all arrived at once, because Jewish fear was not just being protected, it was also being weaponised at that police cordon. Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, stood in Barnet and gave the public the official version of the arrest. He said officers believed the suspect was a terrorist, said he refused to show his hands, said he was violent, said he continued to pose a clear threat, and said the officers feared he might be concealing an explosive device. As a suspected terror attack, they have grounds for that, the same was seen in other terror examples, such the 2017 London Bridge, or Fishmonger’s Hall in 2019 or Streatham in 2020.