A play in three acts:
On August 6, 2024, a group of Palestine Action activists broke into an Israeli defense contractor’s factory in Bristol, England, smashing equipment and injuring police with sledgehammers.
During the trial, five of the six defendants, according to the Guardian, “[told] jurors they had entered the factory without permission and damaged Elbit’s equipment including computers and drones.”
Today, the defendants were found not guilty of aggravated burglary.
Palestine Action is one of the more extreme pro-Hamas groups in the Western constellation. It has been outlawed in the UK as a terrorist organization. During the break-in, one of them smashed a police officer from behind with a sledgehammer, breaking her spine and leaving her unable to bathe or get into bed by herself for three months. She is still on restricted duty due to the injuries. Her assailant was found not guilty.
You might be wondering: What was the defendants’ actual defense, since they admitted to breaking in and damaging property? Here is a description of the argument made by the attorney for one of the alleged perpetrators, Charlotte Head:
“Rajiv Menon KC, representing Head, said any violence by the defendants was clearly unplanned, that the defendants had not expected security guards to enter the factory and were ‘completely out of their depth’.
“He compared Head to the suffragettes, while describing Elbit Systems, of which Elbit Systems UK is a subsidiary, as a ‘dreadful company [that] has played a critical role in the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians’.”
The violence was unplanned, you see. They came with sledgehammers and they used the sledgehammers, but they didn’t expect to have to use the sledgehammers; they were just surprised by the appearance of the police.
Not guilty.
Because this was a jury trial, there really is no disputing the implications: Britain is cooked.
For those seeking at least a hint as to why the court ruled that smashing in the spines of police officers is officially approved behavior in the United Kingdom, one clue comes to us from the Jewish Chronicle:
“While the jury was in retirement, the court heard posters had been put up on bus stops and lampposts near the building which said: ‘The jury decide not the judge,’ ‘Jury equity is when a jury acquits someone on moral grounds,’ and: ‘Jurors can give a not guilty verdict even when they believe a defendant has broken the law.’
“The prosecution said it was aware of the signs being put up in public places during the trial, which set out the principle of ‘jury equity’ — the capacity of a jury to return a verdict according to conscience — and that police had been taking the posters down.”
Translation: You may find the defendants not guilty if you sympathize with the psychotic “anti-Zionism” that motivated their violence.
Again: the British legal system is a joke.
To be fair to the UK, it is not the first state in Europe to enshrine “the Jewish exception” into law. In 2021 in France, Kobili Traoré was deemed not responsible for his actions by the courts, ostensibly because he had smoked marijuana. What were his actions? He beat 65-year-old Sarah Halimi and then threw her out her window to her death. According to his psychiatric evaluation, he was sent into a violent rage by the sight of Halimi’s mezuzah.
Again, to translate: He realized she was a Jew, so he killed her. This was deemed a psychiatric episode not murder. In France, if you hate Jews so much that it makes you act crazy, you are permitted to murder random Jews. In the UK, if your hatred of Jews compels you to go on a violent rampage, you can count on “jury equity” to find you not guilty of the crimes you admitted to in court.
The sick man of Europe is Europe.
