“No One Can Say We Didn’t Know”: Greta Thunberg, Others Speak After Israeli Detention
It starts with Palestine protests. But where will the crackdown on Britain’s democratic freedoms end?
dizzy: This is a small excerpt (the closing paragraphs) of a long Guardian article by journalist Owen Jones. The whole article is recommended. Will these new laws lead to widespread challenges just as the proscription of Palestine Action has done? Is it too much to expect the arrogant Zionist Labour government to learn from it’s mistakes?
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On the same day as the synagogue attack, the Israeli army killed at least 57 Palestinians in Gaza – another hideous tally in two years of daily atrocities that have left tens of thousands dead. British politicians and media outlets have barely concealed the lack of value they attach to Palestinian life. It is among the most brazen expressions of racism of our time. One wonders how history will judge this moment: politicians are accusing people who are protesting against genocide of inciting hatred, while they are supporting those who are committing genocide.
Our government has already crossed a dangerous threshold by proscribing Palestine Action, a non-violent, anti-genocide direct action group. More than 2,000 British protesters have been arrested, mostly for holding placards opposing genocide and supporting the banned organisation. Many of them are pensioners; one is a retired priest, another the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. When the state begins calling movements “terrorism” when they are nothing of the sort, it is attacking democracy itself.
It’s not hard to see where this all leads. In the US, Democrats helped to demonise pro-Palestinian protests: the former house speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that some were “connected to Russia”, while Joe Biden called such protests antisemitic. In doing so, they only helped to legitimise the authoritarian crackdown on such protests – and on freedom of expression in general – under Donald Trump. If Nigel Farage becomes prime minister, a hard-right government would be granted sweeping powers to control dissent. What do you think a Reform government would do with this repressive toolkit? Our ancestors struggled, suffered and died to secure our freedoms. We will come to rue how casually we let them go.
Original article at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/06/palestine-protests-labour-democratic-freedoms-nigel-farage
The right to protest is fundamental in any democratic society and must be defended
Statement by Stop the War Coalition on the right to protest
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Prime Minister Keir Starmer are seeking to weaponise the situation to ramp up the attack on the Palestine movement, with talk of “repeated protests” being a drain on police resources, the Stop the War Coalition has said.
In response to the home secretary’s announcement of plans to crack down on pro-Palestine protests, Stop the War convenor Lindsey German said:
“Stop the War is alarmed that the UK government intends to introduce greater restrictions on the right to protest in the wake of the appalling attack at the Manchester synagogue.
“It defies logic for the Home Secretary to suggest that there should be limits placed on how often people can protest against a genocide that has been waged on the people of Gaza for two years.
“Marches organised by the Palestine coalition, which Stop the War is a part of, have been attended by hundreds of thousands of people, and we believe they are representative of majority public opinion in this country which wants to see an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people.
“We condemn the attack on the Manchester synagogue, just as we condemn recent attacks on mosques and hotels accommodating asylum seekers.
“We wholeheartedly reject the implication that our peaceful marches are in any way responsible for the attack.
“Stop the War has never conflated Israel’s illegal actions with the British Jewish community and will continue to vociferously oppose any attempt to do so.
“Our movement is multi-ethnic, peaceful and opposed to all forms of racism, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.
“Thousands of Jewish people have taken part in our demonstrations, many as part of an organised block, and will continue to do so.
“The Palestine coalition has already faced more severe restrictions on our right to assemble and protest than any other protest group, and we oppose any attempts by the government to intensify this.
“The right to protest is fundamental in any democratic society and must be defended – we will be working with others to do this in the coming months.
“We call on all our supporters to join the Palestine coalition on the streets of London next Saturday (11 October) for what will be the thirty-second national demonstration for Palestine.
“This will be another massive mobilisation of support for the Palestinians, but also an expression of our absolute commitment to defend the right to protest.”
2 years of genocide: Gaza aid workers face hunger, death alongside those they help
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A “perfect humanitarian storm” – that is how the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) describes Gaza, where aid workers endure the same hunger and fear as those they try to help, Anadolu reports.
The warning comes as Israel’s war nears its third year, following what aid agencies describe as the deadliest year on record for humanitarian workers – and 2025 is already following the same trajectory.
“Last year was the deadliest year on record for colleagues killed from different organizations – we’re talking about hundreds,” IFRC spokesperson Tommaso Della Longa told Anadolu. “The vast majority, sadly, are from Gaza, the West Bank and Sudan. And 2025 is already following the same trend.”
At least 265 aid workers had been killed worldwide as of Aug. 14, 2025, approaching the previous year’s toll of 383, according to the Aid Worker Security Database.
Latest figures from the UN show Israeli forces have killed at least 562 humanitarian workers in Gaza over the past two years, including 376 UN staff members and 54 staff and volunteers of the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
As violence against humanitarian workers reaches record levels, the IFRC warns that Gaza is at the heart of a trend threatening to make attacks on aid workers a new feature of war. “The risk here is to normalize something that should never be normalized,” said Della Longa, lamenting that people who devote their lives to saving others are instead “attacked, killed, wounded, detained.”
– Living with hunger and famine
Inside Gaza, where the UN officially declared famine in late August, the hardship is staggering. Aid workers describe colleagues telling children to go to bed early so they do not feel the hunger or holding on to a single piece of bread until the end of the day to give to their children.
“One colleague told me what it means to live with famine and hunger: you dream of food you cannot have, and when you finally get even a piece of bread, you must keep it for your child,” said Della Longa. “Then, after giving it to them, you have to say sorry and ask them to wait for more because you will not be able to provide. As a father myself, I found this absolutely shocking.”
Doctors and nurses in Gaza have been working frantically, often without rest and basic needs, enduring unimaginable personal loss and suffering while trying to save others falling prey to endless Israeli attacks.
Greta Thunberg ‘forced to hold’ Israeli flags while in custody: Report
“There was never anyone to replace them … even for a couple of days. They were killed, they were not protected, and now even they don’t know how to have meals during the day,” he said. “Weakening doctors and nurses means weakening entire communities.”
Carla Drysdale, a World Health Organization spokesperson, echoed the concern and drew attention to the attacks that not only destroyed the functionality of hospitals and ambulances, but also injured and killed thousands of health workers.
Both organizations say that without protection and access, humanitarian action in Gaza will remain paralyzed.
– ‘Impunity once risks impunity everywhere’
Over the past two years, Israel has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, and wounded nearly 170,000, according to figures from Palestinian authorities confirmed by the UN and other international organizations.
A UN independent international commission of inquiry concluded last month that Israel is committing genocide in the enclave, where its siege and blockade on all essentials has also triggered a famine that has killed more than 450 Palestinians, including over 150 children.
Earlier in August, UN experts warned that Israel’s targeted destruction of Gaza’s health system amounts to “medicide.”
In a statement, UN special rapporteurs Tlaleng Mofokeng and Francesca Albanese said Israel was “deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics and hospitals to wipe out medical care in the besieged enclave.”
“In addition to bearing witness to an ongoing genocide we are also bearing witness to a ‘medicide,’ a sinister component of the intentional creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza which constitutes an act of genocide,” the experts said.
Della Longa warned that the erosion of respect for aid workers is no longer confined to war zones.
“If you think about 10 years ago, talking about the protection of humanitarians in this way would have been not understandable, because you don’t attack humanitarians. This trend is so widely spread that it is really deeply concerning and shocking.”
He called for enforcement of respect for existing laws and stressed the need for mechanisms to end impunity.
“If there is impunity once, it means there would be impunity everywhere. This is a precedent that we cannot accept,” he said.
“The issue is the political will. Humanitarians must do the humanitarian work and call on governments to take their own responsibility,” he said.
He concluded with one plea: “Don’t shoot the Red Cross. Don’t shoot humanitarians. Don’t shoot the people who are saving lives and alleviating suffering.”
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Media Faces Reckoning After Helping Trump Downplay Project 2025 on Campaign Trail
Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“A Trump denial is not a fact,” said one media critic.
As President Donald Trump openly embraces Project 2025, mainstream media outlets are facing criticism for their role in helping him downplay his ties to the wildly unpopular far-right governing playbook in the lead-up to his reelection last year.
After she became the Democratic nominee in July, former Vice President Kamala Harris made the Heritage Foundation’s over 900-page manifesto for “the next conservative president” central to her case against Trump during the 2024 election, often referring to it as “Trump’s Project 2025.”
She and other Democrats warned that if he retook power, he would swiftly enact many of its most extreme and unpopular proposals and dramatically expand executive power while doing it.
Among those proposals were steep cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the “mass deportations” of millions of immigrants, the elimination of the Department of Education, new restrictions on abortions, the gutting of climate protections, and the replacement of career civil servants with political appointees, among many others.
Democrats amplified the plan’s danger at the Democratic National Convention and in campaign ads, and Trump began to distance himself from the platform. Despite the fact that as many as 140 people who’d worked in his first administration—including Paul Dans, Heritage’s director of Project 2025—had a hand in its creation, Trump said: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”
This was demonstrably untrue, even at the time. Media Matters for America dug up a clip from as far back as May 2023 of Dans stating that “President Trump’s very bought in with this,” speaking of the program.
Project 2025 was almost inconceivably unpopular. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that while 57% of registered voters viewed the plan negatively, just 4% viewed it positively.
But in the critical months leading up to the election, many media outlets took Trump’s denial at face value, publishing fact checks and other commentary that painted Democrats’ warnings about his connection to the plan as alarmist or misleading.
Responding to a social media post in July stating that “Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan,” a fact check by USA Today rated the statement “false,” because, as the headline said, “Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump.”
In September, after Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 at the first and only debate between the two, the paper published another fact-check with the headline: “Harris repeats claim that Project 2025 is Trump’s plan. That’s still not right.”
In response to Harris’ claim during the debate that Project 2025 was “a detailed and dangerous plan… that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected,” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, whose coverage received a fair bit of criticism during the 2024 cycle, reported in bold text that “Project 2025 is not an official campaign document.”
A CNN fact check of the Harris campaign’s social media in September remarked that one account “frequently invokes Project 2025,” before caveating that “Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative, and he has said he disagrees with some of its proposals.”
In an October interview on CBS‘s“Face the Nation,”anchor Norah O’Donnell, Harris attempted to warn about Project 2025, before O’Donnell responded: “You know that Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025. He says that is not his campaign plan.”
After nine months back in power, the website Project 2025 Tracker estimates that Trump has already implemented approximately 48% of the objectives outlined in the policy document.
In addition to his key campaign promises many of his second administration’s policies are highly specific to Project 2025, such as his pledge to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), his efforts to privatize the National Weather Service (NWS), his reconfiguration of Title X funding to promote pregnancy, and his elimination of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Trump is no longer hiding his connection to Project 2025, having brought in many of its hiring picks and authors to staff his administration almost immediately after his victory last November.
This week, he began to boast about it openly. As his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, Russ Vought, one of Project 2025’s architects, began using the current government shutdown to unilaterally cut off funding to infrastructure projects in blue states and cities, Trump lauded him as “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame.”
“This was always the plan,” Harris responded on social media.
While many commentators expressed outrage that Trump blatantly lied about his connections to Project 2025, others dredged up old clips of newspapers and anchors taking him at his word.
“All those 2024 media fact checks that said, ‘Donald Trump and the Trump campaign deny any connection to Project 2025’ look pretty ridiculous right now,” said MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski. “A Trump denial is not a fact. You just used his lies to ‘debunk’ a reality that was obvious to anyone paying attention.”
Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the independent media company Zeteo, highlighted the CBS interview, saying Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 was “embarrassing not just for Norah O’Donnell but a whole host of leading American anchors and reporters who echoed Trump’s false denials.”
“Nothing showed the difference between mainstream and independent media better than the response to Trump’s obvious lie about not knowing anything about Project 2025,” said David Pepper, author of the book Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual. “Most mainstream media started fact-checking those who claimed a connection to be somehow false. Others ‘both sides’ed’ it. Far more in independent media called it out as a whopping lie.”
Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
