October 22, 2023 - 11:15am
There has been an “an awful lot of nonsense” spoken about whether pro-Palestine supporters should be allowed to protest in the UK, former Justice of the Supreme Court Jonathan Sumption has warned. In his first public comments on the conflict, the former Supreme Court justice argued that it was “not illegal at all” to march in favour of Palestine, and that “people who should know better” had made “rather silly and ill-considered statements”.
In remarks made exclusively to UnHerd, Lord Sumption singled out Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who told senior police officers that waving a Palestinian flag or singing a chant advocating freedom for Arabs may be a criminal offence. “A great many of the slogans, the demonstrations, and the flags that we’ve seen in the streets are not illegal at all,” Sumption said. “It is not illegal to say that Palestinians have a legitimate grievance.”
The former judge noted that these were “not necessarily his views”, but added that it was not illegal to “lawfully and non-violently” support the cause which Hamas “supports violently”. “The mere fact that most Palestinians live in an area, Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, does not mean to say that everything that you say in favour of the Palestinians is necessarily to be treated as equivalent to supporting Hamas,” he stated.
Asked whether he feared that free speech was imperilled, Sumption responded that he wouldn’t go “that far”. He did, however, notice that support for Israel had become more tempered — even among the Jewish state’s most ardent backers. “My impression is that we are tending slightly to recede from the initial feeling that all good men must necessarily support Israel,” he said. “A realisation of the humanitarian consequences of the threatened Israeli invasion of Gaza has caused quite a lot of people — not everybody, but a lot of people — to pause.” Lord Sumption went on to warn that a ground invasion of Gaza could also contain some of the same “indiscriminate qualities that people quite rightly objected to when practised by Hamas”.
The former Supreme Court Justice argued, when questioned as to whether Israel is breaking international law, that “I certainly believe that it has done and that what it threatens to do now would do.” Sumption added, “It’s contrary to international law to forcibly displace people from their homes, to blockade them in the way that Israel has been doing, certainly since 2007.” Echoing these concerns, Israel’s allies were quick to caution the Jewish state about failing to uphold international law. Over the past week, both the US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warned Israel to “respect international law” and ensure a proportionate response to Hamas’s attack on 7 October.
Lord Sumption added that the modern interpretation of just war was largely based on the Hague and Geneva conventions, which risk becoming outdated. “These are quite difficult concepts to apply to a fighting force, which is not a disciplined army, of the sort that people had in mind in 1908,” the Supreme Court justice said, “but which is a semi-organised group or — for want of a better word — thugs, like Hamas”.
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SubscribeI may not like what you say but I will fight like hell for your right to say it.
I’m a conservative who believes strongly in the principles of free speech.
My issue? My issue is that the left does not adhere to the same principles. They are happy to seek the protection of these principles when it suits them but they will not defend them when those who disagree with them need their protection.
That said, there is a difference between calling for support of one group and calling for the destruction of another. Calling for the destruction of Israel, for the killing of Israelis, is calling for violence against Jews and THAT crosses a line. It crosses a line when it urges others or makes others feel righteous in engaging in assault or murder.
A Jew that calls for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza or celebrates the killing of Palestinian civilians is not better than Hamas. But that is not what is happening.
To understand the value sets of each of these participants we need only look at the reactions of the populations. No Israeli or Jew that I have met or seen has in anyway celebrated the deaths of Palestinian civilians. I have seen Palestinians celebrate the gruesome deaths of Israeli children and the rape and murder of Israeli women.
Just because I support the right of pro-Palestinian groups to speek and to march, does not mean I support their position.
And as the fiance of a Jew who also happens to be Palestinian (I’m Catholic) I distinguish between Hamas and the general Palestinian population. But Hamas must be eradicated and the price of that may well be the collateral damage of the deaths of Palestinian innocents.
I prefer to have these animals protest out in the open and show themselves for what they are and how big the enemy among us has become.
Hopefully more of the British public and Europeans will start waking up to where this country and Europe will end up if we don’t make radical changes to our immigration laws and reassert our cultures.
Hamas has been a total disaster for people living in Gaza.
Even their attack into Israel was a total failure, achieving nothing.
Free Palestine from Hamas control.
I believe their attack was done in order to provoke war, that was why they were as barbaric and evil as they could possibly be.
That is exactly what pro-Palestine protestors should address first. But I suspect these protestors have another agenda! Pro-Palestine protests are just a cover for anti-Israel protests.
What protest marches, I wonder, will be illegal if Sir Keir’s Popular Front gets the expected landslide victory next year? A committee for public safety will likely decide which demands for social justice are in the public interest.
We have already witnessed different approaches to policing protests. The Anti-Lockdown marches – some in London were incredibly well attended – were policed very differently from the BLM protest for example. As was the Clapham Common vigil for a murdered woman around the same time.
I’m disappointed the support for Israel has been so tepid, but Palestinians supporters should have the right to protest.
Palestinians should also have the right to vote.
But Hamas kill Gazans who ask for elections.
And in Israel, Palestinians can be elected to the Knesset.
The reason support for Israel has become “tempered” is fear. Fear of violent reprisals from the same “legal” demonstrators. What starts with the Jews, never ends with the Jews. One day these same people will turn on you Brits and murder your children.
You have a point. Since the Hamas attack, many synagogues and Jewish schools around the world have been vandalised, but not a single mosque or madrasa has been attacked.
It’s so funny that a week or so ago I was arguing that absolute free speech was a nonsense, and as a consequence getting lots of down ticks on here. (Absolute Free being a right wing article of faith.) Now if I argued it’s OK for Muslim Demonstrators to shout ‘gas all jews’ I would also get lots of down ticks – but this time they’d be completely right. So let’s get clear then absolute free speech really is a nonsense.
Inciting violence (“gas all Jews”) is not free speech
I don’t think anyone advocates absolute free speech. The “shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded cinema” exception appears to be universally accepted.
‘We’ have NEVER had “absolute free speech”.
What do you think our Libel Laws are for? And what does “ slander” mean pray?
I don’t know the context of your argument there, but in On Liberty, Mill limits free speech by ‘the harm principle’. Until critical social justice came along, that harm was seen as physical, not psychological.
Last week Bari Weiss gave a very powerful interview with the Triggernometry guys; there was no doubting the strength of her views. However, her publication, The Free Press, put out an article defending the free speech of anti-Semites.
Over the last couple of weeks, Spiked have put out articles and videos almost daily, defending Israel and attacking left-wing protestors. However, they still published an article by Spiked veteran (and author of two books on free speech) Mick Hume defending free speech up to the point of inciting physical harm.
If your notion of ‘absolute’ includes inciting physical harm, then yes, but free speech advocates are fine with anything short of that.
Very very few people support absolute free speech. It’s kind of a silly position really. However, the exceptions should be very narrow – inciting violence against other people. Chanting gas the Jews is inciting violence.
At a demonstration against the genocide of Gaza, nothing could be more appropriate than the Flag of Saint George. There is a legend about Saint George, but he himself is not a purely legendary figure. His tomb at his birthplace, which is now known as Lod, was once a major focus of unity between Christians and Muslims in devotion to the Patron Saint of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt before, and as much as, the Patron Saint of England. But three quarters of those who practised that devotion were violently expelled in 1948.
In similar vein, it is proposed to expand Jerusalem Walls National Park to include the Mount of Olives, under the control of Elad, a militant Israeli settler organisation. Even before the Government of National Unity, Benjamin Netanyahu depended for his parliamentary majority on people who spat on passing in the street those who shared in the Ministerial Priesthood of the Lord Jesus Christ, and who actively believed that there was a religious obligation to burn down churches, since they held the Divinity of Christ to be an idolatrous assertion.
They recently desecrated the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion, where it is maintained by the local Anglican diocese on behalf of a British owner. They obviously bombed that diocese’s previously Baptist hospital in Gaza, and they have erected as a loyalty test the willingness to parrot their ever more ludicrous accounts of what the whole world can see and most of the world has no compunction about saying.
While fourth generation Israelis could not possibly be told to “go home”, the State of Israel’s having been founded in the same year that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, it is clear from the Bible that the pre-Israelite population, the founders of Jerusalem, never went away. They never have. They became Christian when or before the Roman Empire did, and they adopted the use of Arabic at the time of a Muslim Conquest contemporaneous with the Saxon Conquest of what is now England. Those ancient indigenous Christians are still there. The founders of modern Palestinian identity, they are the people of Shireen Abu Akleh, the people of Saint George.
But parties that spit on their priests and burn down their churches are now in government in Israel, they are about to take control of the Mount of Olives, and they do not even bother to deny that they have bombed the Church of Saint Porphyrius, which has never been noted as a stronghold of Hamas or of Islamic Jihad. The lowest number of fatalities being cited so far is 18, almost all women and children. Although the present building dates from the twelfth century, a church on that site was first mentioned in 425, only five years after the death of Saint Porphyrius, who as Bishop of Gaza had Christianised what had been a recalcitrantly Pagan city because of course it was in old Philistia, meaning that its synagogue had never paid tribute directly to the Temple at Jerusalem, since it was not in the Land of Israel. Think on.
Hamas(Sunni), are funded by Iran(Shia).
Iran (Shia) and China (peace-seeking Buddhist-communists who are persecuting the Uygur Muslim minority in China), along with Russia (Eastern Orthodox Christians) are fighting a proxy war versus the decadence of ‘The West’, of which Israel and it’s allies are a part of, in their eyes. Yet anti-nationalist homosexual soy-boys (or bien-pensant trans-girls) fill their diapers in Manhattan and Trafalgar Square at the prospect of Israel responding proportionately to a low-fi genocide. Do they realise that they are cheerleading those who’d throw them off a Gaza roof given the chance?
According to the International Lesbian Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) in 2020:
“Except for Israel, there are no constitutional, employment, or other protections for LGBT+ people”
People with a portfolio of correct-think causes have a duty to address their reasons for doing so. Using pronoun etiquette is mere subterfuge.
I have XY Chromosomes: consequently I am Male
This extended understanding of ‘free speech’ and ‘right to protest’ would have seemed very strange to our forbears. A right of free debate has been asserted by Parliament since at least the reign of Elizabeth I and, likewise, our own Bill of Rights only recognises the right of Parliament to unrestricted speech and debate, not the individual right.
I would be interested to learn where and when this understanding of an absolute right to free speech and assembly took root in our collective understanding.
The idea that the man on the street could and might gather semi-riotously and proclaim his political or religious faction is quite modern, indeed quite recent. Perhaps another American import.
Hear, hear!
If Israel starts giving credence to the world opinion, it would face the risk of total annihilation!
I find this article and its marginal readings disingenuous. It does quote the Guardian, after all. SB’s concern is that flags inciting hatred or worse, and the chanting of equivalent slogans and words, should not be allowed. And despite the Met Police’s attempts to obfuscate, it is clear that the calls for jihad in the recent London rally were calls for “war or struggle against unbelievers” (OED) – in this case Jews.
But may I add this: if you are going to allow such a rally to take place you must know that jihadist language will most certainly be used. So how genuine is the Government’s outrage?
I don’t feel inclined to kneel down at the feet of an enormously privileged person…house in France , public school education, a very comfortable high court judge’s ‘pension who rather grandly pontificates on issues that affect the daily lives of citizens who cope as best they can very much against the odds.
Brexit was a totally logical response to poor governance by law makers who we have never scrutinised and can not hold responsible. The fact that our representatives here have failed to respond in a hoped for way is a tragedy. But we are going to hold them to account at the next election. That’s the thing about a functioning democracy.
My opinion feels out of step with most of the other commentators at UnHerd but that is what comes with free speech….you have to lump it!
Immigration? “Multiculturalism”? Stretching deep into the nineteenth century, since my father was born in 1922, all 16 of my great-great-grandparents were born on what was then British territory, at least 15 were born on what is still British territory (even one Irishman can complicate matters), nine were born in the United Kingdom as then constituted, and at least eight were born within its present borders.
The figures for birth in what is still the Empire and for birth in what is still the Union are respectively eight and four for my great-grandparents, four and two for my grandparents, two and one for my parents, and four and two for the children of my parents’ marriage. We would have to go back to unnamed Huguenots, slaves, indentured labourers, and coolies, to find any ancestor who would even have been eligible for anything other than British nationality or that of one of the Three Kingdoms, much less have held it. Even my Saint Helenian mother’s maiden name was as Scots as her married name. Your move.
Keir Starmer has tried to change his tune, or at least his tone, on the cutting off of the food and water supplies to one million children while white phosphorus was dropped on them. He is trying to rescue a Muslim vote that has already sunk without trace. Victories at Tamworth and at Mid Bedfordshire need to be set against that among other wider realities. But Starmer did originally endorse those war crimes, thereby aiding and abetting them, and thus rendering himself a war criminal. Crispin Blunt’s notice to prosecute him, David Lammy and Emily Thornberry ought still to be acted upon. After this morning, the same should be served on Lisa Nandy.
He can say that but like the fools in the liberal media and most of out universities in the West, he knows that supporting Palestine nowadays simply means promoting global war against the Jews.
Am I alone in thinking that it is simply astonishing that one ‘Suella Braverman’, should hold one of highest offices of state in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, namely Home Secretary? Could we really NOT do any better?
What a pity LJS couldn’t find time to ‘squeeze’ in this role.
Oh come on you “thumbs down merchants”. She has done NOTHING of note about immigration legal/ and illegal. All bark and no bite, somewhat the reverse of my ferocious Spaniel.
Well, Charles, we have done better in the past – Howard, Blunkett, Reid – but we’ve also done a lot worse – Smith, May. Of course, if Home Office civil servants just got on with implementing government policy instead of obstructing it, the HS wouldn’t be reduced to making grandstanding public statements.
Agreed, and I concur that I have ignored the simply appalling behaviour of the Home Office civil servants.
They should remember that fist and foremost they are the SERVANTS of the Great British Public, and NOT the Commissars of Wokedom, to put it at is politely as possible!
“fist” a Freudian slip Chas? Better with butts and boots for that type of Uncivil Servant.Or perhaps not – too many of them might enjoy the experience.
Well spotted Sir! Guilty as charged!
B & B, the mind boggles but I get your drift! And yes far far to many of them, and ALL on ridiculously generous index linked pensions that we have to pay for!
Trouble ahead.
Braverman is simply pandering to the swivel eyed loons (TM pending) on the far right who make up the Tory party membership and will elect the new leader after next year’s evisceration.
Nuttier the better for that lot. Braverman will do well!
Yeah yeah, everyone else is literally Hitler and no returns. Bore off.