Palestine Action is a threat to British democracy

Telegraph

23-06-2025

Charlie Falconer believes that the attack by kayiffeh-botherers Palestine Action on RAF Brize Norton last week does not, of itself, justify the reported decision by the Government to proscribe it as a terrorist organisation.
'I am not aware of what Palestine Action has done beyond the painting of things on the planes in Brize Norton. They may have done other things I didn't know,' he told Sky News yesterday morning.
It's as if the former Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary is deliberately minimising the behaviour of Palestine Action: 'the painting of things' sounds like nothing more serious than a nursery school activity, or at worst the kind of thing that bored teenage boys do when they find a can of spray paint in the street and decide to adorn a nearby wall with their 'tag'.
But Palestine Action are not bored teenage boys. They are political activists who are prepared to take whatever form of 'direct action' they believe is required in order to get their way.
It is difficult to believe that Lord Falconer is unaware of the millions of pounds of damage deliberately caused by the organisation to aircraft, or that he is incapable of using Google to discover what other activities of which the group might be accused. Later this year, for example, some of its members will go on trial for allegedly ram-raiding their way into the premises of a defence company in Bristol – the sort of tactics usually employed by violent bank robbers.
And the motivation of its founder is helpfully transparent. Huda Ammori has talked of her political awakening in 2015. 'The renewal of hope was alive, with Jeremy Corbyn, a committed anti-imperialist activist and politician, elected as leader of the Labour Party.' (Don't remind me.) Corbyn's Labour presented an opportunity as 'the most promising and frankly the only avenue of implementing an embargo [on Israel] through political parties'.
But, as with so many on the hard Left, optimism and hope rarely survive the inevitable collision with reality. When voters sent Corbyn and Labour packing at the 2019 general election, Ammori co-founded Palestine Action. 'From the black hole of politics, a new light through direct action and grassroots mobilisation took its place', she wrote. It was time to stop 'asking and begging' the Government, she said. Instead, they'd use 'our own bodies'. And other people's property, of course.
What Ammori calls 'asking and begging', most other people would call 'voting'. But for a certain kind of political activist, democracy is not fit for purpose if it doesn't deliver a tiny minority exactly what they want immediately, irrespective of the impact on other people, particularly, in this case, workers who earn an entirely respectable and legitimate living from the defence industry. It's hardly surprising that an organisation that lends so much moral support to the Islamist terrorists of Hamas shares that organisation's antipathy to the democratic process.
We've seen the pattern of behaviour before. Indulged children who have grown into indulged adults who cannot fathom why they should ever be denied anything that they want, who then take to the streets to demand it anyway because naturally their priorities should be everyone's priorities. And if the powers that be continue not to do as they're instructed by these indignant 20-somethings, then direct action is the only route left open to them.
But there's a big difference between gluing yourself to a busy road in order to cause as much distress and inconvenience to a public that you hold in utter contempt, and sabotaging RAF jet fighters, putting their pilots and other service personnel at personal risk. Such behaviour could hardly be further away from 'the painting of things'.
It's time we end the indulgence of those who have set themselves against democratic and social norms. It's time to stop turning a deaf ear to those who volubly and publicly call for support for proscribed terrorist groups and who celebrate the deaths of 'Zionists' at the hands of Islamist savages.
If naming Palestine Action a terrorist group empowers our police and security forces to deal with them more efficiently and ruthlessly, so much the better. Continued tolerance of pro-Hamas, pro-Islamist and anti-democratic individuals and organisation should have been recognised long before now as self-defeating and corrosive to British society.