Try this: Ask a few ordinary people what they know about hunger strikes in prison. Assuming you pick indigenous Brits, I guarantee that virtually every Boomer you speak to will immediately recall Bobby Sands and the other IRA hunger strikers. The more politically aware of them will even hazard a guess somewhere pretty close to the exact date: 1981.
Now go on to tell them that four hunger strikers are, right now, close to death in English prisons. Ask what they know about this and it’s quite likely that only Guardian readers – assuming you have encountered such rare and exotic creatures – would have heard about them.
This would certainly have been the case up until about a week ago, but with three of the hunger strikers now having gone without food for over six weeks, BBC and Sky News and even the Daily Mail have felt obliged to cover the story once, lest their deaths expose the fact that our supposedly ‘free press’ have failed totally to report on the most dramatic prison protest in the UK in more than forty years. But if you blinked, you’d have missed it.
I expect, of course, that my hyper-political audience here on Substack will have a very much higher level of current affairs awareness than the average Brit. In all probability you knew immediately that I was talking about the Palestinian Action protesters.
I wouldn’t expect you to know their names, not least because Ahmad, Muraisi, Hoxha and Chiaramello are very much less memorable, or even pronounceable, than Sands, Hughes, O’Hara or Lynch.
So why am I writing about them? Not to urge you to support them nor to tell you that I do. Both those things are illegal, deemed desperately dangerous acts of “terrorism” by the Starmer regime – a government which has allowed more potential terrorists into our country than anyone since the previous Tory administration.
Two Hunger Strikes
Put aside for a moment any question of right or wrong; think of this instead just in terms of a news story. Heba Muraisi has gone without food for over 50 days, and Kamran Ahmad and Teuta Hoxha have not eaten for more than 45 days. This puts them at the point at which the 1981 hunger strikers started to die, with Martin Hurson - convicted of IRA membership and attempted murder – dying on Day 46, and the majority at about Day 61.
To add to the simple newsworthiness of the current drama, all the Irish Republican hunger strikers had been tried and convicted of very real terrorist offences. The Palestinian Action protesters are all merely on remand. They may or may not be guilty in fact, but in law they remain innocent until that is proven.
They have been on remand for more than a year, despite the fact that, under English law, it is not permitted for the state to hold prisoners on remand for more than six months. This is a point at which one’s sympathy, or lack of it, for the detainees in question should be irrelevant. Our legal system works on precedent, so if Starmer & Co. can lock up Muslims without trial for more than the permitted six months, they can lock up me and you as well.
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The Palestinian Action hunger strikers are facing charges related to actions targeting Elbit Systems, a company involved in producing weapons used in Gaza, and RAF Brize Norton, from which weapons sold by the self-confessed Zionist Starmer to the genocidal Netanyahu regime are often shipped.
No one was hurt in these actions. The charges are related to property damage, with one incident causing over £1 million in damage to Elbit’s research centre. The IRA and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) men were in the Maze prison having been convicted of offences including murder, attempted murder and the possession of weapons or explosives.
Teuta Hoxha - close to death in HMP Peterborough
The Irish hunger strikers were all men; Hoxha seems to be the first woman hunger striker in Britain for more than a century, since several suffragettes starved themselves as part of the campaign for votes for middle-class women (votes for working-class men and women were not on their agenda).
The final key difference is that the Irishmen were protesting for political recognition for themselves and their imprisoned comrades-in-arms. Their five demands were: not having to wear prison uniforms, not doing prison work, being able to associate freely, organise educational and recreational activities, and have one visit, one letter and one parcel per week.
Demand Four, if granted, would have allowed them to increase still further the effectiveness of the Northern Ireland prison system as the “university of terror”. Even their ‘harmless’ demands were purely selfish.
The same could be said of the PA hunger strikers’ demand for protesters on remand to be released on bail, although whether calling on the government to abide by the law can really be called ‘selfish’ is a moot point.
For the Children
There is also some self-interest in today’s hunger strikers for the ending of the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Their other demand, that the UK government stops hosting weapons factories supplying arms to Israel, may – in the eyes of some – be wrong, but there is no denying that it makes the motive of the protesters at least in part altruistic: They are starving themselves to death out of concern for children in Gaza.
The IRA blew children to pieces; these protesters want to stop the IDF blowing children to pieces with British missiles.
As I wrote earlier, I am not writing this to persuade people of the rights or wrongs of this affair. If by chance you think that the IDF should be free to murder and starve Muslim and Christian children in the giant death camp that is Gaza, that’s entirely up to you – although I do request that you refrain from complaining when another seven million Palestinian refugees end up heading for Europe and some of them end up living in your street. Actions – and lack of action – have consequences.
The purpose of this essay is quite different, although only readers old enough to remember the Maze protest of 1981 will know just how right I am. Those who were around back then will recall the vast amount of media coverage which the Irish hunger strikes, and the Dirty Protests which preceded them, secured.
TV news broadcasts not only covered the deaths and huge funerals of the convicted Republicans, they also gave the nation daily updates on the deteriorating condition of men who, with their fellow terrorists, had killed and maimed British soldiers and police officers, and detonated devastating bombs against civilian targets, killing men, women, children and unborn babies.
Protests on their behalf on the streets of London, Birmingham and Glasgow, as well as in Belfast, were attended by Labour MPs and covered with breathless respect by media outlets.
Throughout the IRA’s 30-year war, leftists in the UK were free to support the Fenian armed struggle against the British state and the loyalist community.
In the depths of the Cold War, Communist paper-sellers stood on street corners with publications repeating the party line that “we must support the IRA, no matter how difficult it becomes”. Troops Out marches and fund-raising stalls were vigorously protected from British nationalist counter-protesters by baton-wielding police officers.
The contrast with the virtual news blackout today could not be more striking. Yes, I appreciate that large numbers of ordinary Brits have zero sympathy for the Palestinians, and are deeply hostile to anything and everything perceived as ‘Muslim’. But the same was true – even more so in fact – of the IRA and INLA, yet their prison protests seemed to be in the news on a daily basis.
I have set out the differences between the Fenian and pro-Palestinian hunger strikes to highlight the particular perversity of the contrast. Some readers may object to Palestinian Action, but it is simply impossible to put them in the same bracket as IRA murderers. The actual strikers are – allegedly – direct action vandals. Nothing less, but also nothing more.
Expressing support for their cause now classes as ‘terrorism’, but to accept that this is the case is monstrous disrespect to the thousands of innocent soldiers, police officers and civilians – including many Catholics – murdered in cold blood by the IRA and INLA.
The propaganda parallels drawn by the Westminster elite (which, needless to say, includes Reform) and perpetuated by their media allies are as grotesque as their refusal to inform the British people about what is going on. This refusal is all the more dangerous given the potential for these grievances, unaddressed, to radicalise individuals to the point when they decide to become real terrorists.
But the biggest point of all is what the wall-to-wall virtual silence over the Palestinian Action hunger strike tells us about the power of the Israel lobby over the entire mass media of the United Kingdom.
Media outlets are ever ready to decry the idea of Zionist domination of the TV and the press as “a baseless far-right conspiracy theory”. In-depth hostile accounts of my political career may even inform readers that, way back in the mid-1990s, I produced a publication called The Mind-Benders, which set out the extent of the problem.
But however much they sneer and deny the plainly observable truth, it is confirmed by the fact that millions of Brits right now have no idea that a group of men and women – innocent until proven guilty of non-violent crimes - lie near death in English prison hospitals on account of their political opinions.
You may not like Palestinian Action, but you should at least acknowledge that their almost unknown prisoners give you the opportunity to understand just how much power over your news is wielded by an unelected lobby group, working on behalf of a foreign regime with a long history of antipathy to Britain.
Nearly twenty years ago, as I waited for the verdict in one of my two court cases arising from my and the BNP’s efforts to expose and oppose the grooming gangs scandal, I wrote a press statement for Simon Darby to read out to the assembled media in the event that I was found guilty and sentenced to prison.
Since we were near the start of Lent, I declared in the statement that, if jailed, I would go on hunger strike until Easter Sunday. Since that was some fifty days in the future, that gave the British state a fair chance that I could die while refusing food.
I made only one demand: For the government to announce a full Public Inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, and the terrible failure of the police, local authorities and political class to address the issue.
Message Nick Griffin
If they did that, I would end my protest. If they did not, they would risk turning me into a martyr and, quite possibly, unleash serious riots in many parts of the country, because the trial was attracting huge publicity, the BNP had a serious capacity to set the news agenda, and the whole thing could not possibly have been swept under the carpet.
Of course, I do not know if I would have been able to go through with my threat right to the end. Can anyone really say for sure, in advance, that they would be able to endure starving themselves to death?
Those who knew me well did remark with grim humour that, in any case, it would take quite some time for me to starve to death. But I was determined to try if I ended up in prison, not least because I thought it entirely possible that the government would surrender and grant the inquiry, or that I would survive until the end of Lent in any case. Having talked with the parents of too many grooming victims, I considered it a calculated gamble worth taking.
Even having only researched just what being on hunger strike really entails, and seriously considered it nonetheless, I have a special respect for anyone who goes on hunger strike. That does not mean that I automatically support their cause. While I was in the European Parliament, there was at one stage a Kurdish militant on hunger strike in a tent outside the EP’s Tower of Babel building in Strasbourg, and I spoke several times with his supporters to tell them that, while the creation of Kurdistan was of no concern of mine, I admired his courage.
George Seawright, murdered in 1987 by an INLA offshoot
The IRA and its offshoots killed men – John McMichael and George Seawright - I regarded as friends as well as sincere and good politicians. But that doesn’t mean I would deny that Sands and his nine dead Fenian comrades were extremely brave men, who willingly sacrificed themselves for their cause and their people.
Why, then, should we not be permitted to say the same of the Palestinian Action hunger strikers? Why should I not be able to say that, while the demands of Sands & Co. were wrong and dangerous, the demands of Heba Muraisi and the others are justified and legitimate?
And why should we not be free to point out that the enormous difference between the coverage of the two protests is a clear indication of the extent to which ‘our’ media, as well as Palestine, are under Zionist domination?
If this makes me guilty of ‘terrorism’, so be it. Although, I can tell you right now, if I get locked up for it, I will not be refusing my morning porridge!
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