by Caitlin Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone:
They’ve arrested another pro-Palestinian journalist, this time in Switzerland.
The Electronic Intifada’s executive director Ali Abunimah has reportedly been detained by Swiss police in Zurich, after having been interrogated for an hour and released the previous day when entering the country. Abunimah, who is Palestinian-American, has played a leading role in exposing and critiquing the apartheid abuses of Israel for many years.
In October of last year, Electronic Intifada’s associate editor Asa Winstanley saw his home raided by British “counterterrorism” police in response to his social media posts about Israel’s western-backed abuses in the middle east. Multiple electronic devices were seized. No charges were ever filed.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
All solidarity with our colleague @AliAbunimah, who has today been detained by Swiss cops in Zurich.
German-speaking authorities still doing the most to protect Israel’s genocide: https://t.co/bXZCasi1Ty
— Asa Winstanley (@AsaWinstanley) January 25, 2025
In August of last year, journalist Richard Medhurst was arrested by British counterterrorism police and held for nearly 24 hours under section 12 of the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000. Later that month, a human rights activist named Sarah Wilkinson was detained by police and had her home raided for online speech crimes. Both cases appear to have been the result of expressions of opinion deemed too sympathetic to resistance groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been designated as “terrorist” organizations by the British government. Activists Mick Napier, Tony Greenstein, and Richard Barnard have been similarly persecuted in the UK.
In the United States speech rights have been getting stomped out in different ways since October 2023, ranging from violent police crackdowns on college campus demonstrations against Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza to banning TikTok in order to suppress pro-Palestinian speech. Silicon Valley tech platforms which are intimately intertwined with the US government have been censoring speech that is critical of Israel with increasing aggression, and President Trump has just signed an executive order which appears to be geared toward deporting visitors to the United States who participate in pro-Palestinian activism.
Here in Australia, government leaders from both parties pushed hard for a ban on people protesting this past October 7, and police investigated protesters for waving Hezbollah flags at a demonstration in Melbourne under a new law banning the public display of symbols of designated “terrorist” groups. Zionists have been using the Australian courts to bully prominent journalist Mary Kostakidis on accusations of unlawful hate speech for sharing video footage of the now-deceased Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
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