Police detain Cambridge academic who criticised Israel's genocide

It seems criticism of Israel is considered terrorism now

The suppression of pro-Palestinian voices continues.

A British-Palestinian professor called Dr Makram Khoury-Machool was detained at Heathrow airport for over four hours, under Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Regulations 2019. The Christian academic was interrogated on Good Friday in front of his 8-year-old son. His phone, laptop, and identification were seized under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act. He was released without charge but will have to present himself to police within seven days if required.

Professor Khoury-Machool runs the Cambridge Centre for Palestine Studies. As former Bristol University professor David Miller would testify, the world of academia is a hostile place for pro-Palestinian voices, and the hostility is being driven by people who claim to oppose cancel culture. Their goal is a rightward, pro-Israel shift in all of our institutions.

Professor Khoury-Machool was arrested under suspicion of “preparing terrorism”, but if police had a shred of evidence, he would be in prison awaiting trial. Police are basically rummaging through his devices to find an excuse to charge him with something. Even if they don’t, the harassment still serves its other purpose of intimidation.

This is all intended to have a chilling effect on criticism of Israel. What I find chilling is that our police force, and even our academic spaces, have been captured by Zionism.

Professor Khoury-Machool is the latest in a list of influential figures who have been treated as terrorists by the state; a list that includes Richard Medhurst, Kit Klarenberg, and Sarah Wilkinson. None of these so-called terrorists have gone to prison for terrorism.

There is now a petition to repeal the Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006, and to stop politicising the law to silence dissent and protect Israel, something which has been called out by the United Nations.

You can be sure that part of the reason for Professor Khoury-Machool’s detention was that he spoke out when police detained journalist Richard Medhurst. They are sending out a message that if you call them out on their authoritarianism, you might be next.

Professor Khoury-Machool was not charged with any crime, meaning his detention was baseless, but under the Terrorism Act, you can be detained without suspicion. Read that again. You can be detained even if you have done nothing wrong and are not suspected of doing anything wrong. This means if police don’t like your social media posts or disapprove of a protest you’ve attended, they can treat you like a terrorist and electronically strip search you to see if they can find anything incriminating. They’re looking for any excuse to intimidate, silence and jail people. This is the opposite of natural justice.

You need to understand that if police don’t need suspicion, any of us can be detained and treated like a terrorist. This means you had better hope they don’t disapprove of your political views.

It’s worth noting that if you don’t comply with police while you’re in detention, you can be sent to prison for five years. What is particularly absurd is detention means you have not been arrested, yet you have fewer rights than if you were arrested.

Airports are particularly dangerous because you don’t have the same legal protections that you would elsewhere. For example, you have no right to a lawyer. The problem is so bad that I dare not go through an airport. I certainly dare not try to enter the US because I’d be off to a gulag quicker than you can say “El Salvador”. This is the risk you take by calling for justice for Palestine.

You can’t have missed that in the US, critics of Israel are getting even worse treatment than over here in the UK. Netanyahu has been bragging about how Israel pressured US states to introduce anti-BDS laws, so you can be sure Israel is behind these arrests and deportations.

The latest victim of this cruelty is an Indonesian man who is married to an American citizen and has a baby with special needs. He is a supply chain manager at a hospital with a valid visa, but he is facing deportation because of a minor offence that he paid a $100 fine for two years ago. You will be unsurprised to hear he has spoken out for Gaza on social media.

Aditya Wahyu Harsono had his request for the case to be dropped on humanitarian grounds rejected by a judge and is currently in detention. As a father of a child with special needs, I can’t comprehend the cruelty and callousness required to tear apart a family like this.

Across the West, the lives of good people are being ruined for the sake of genocidal Israel. It’s sickening and what’s worse is people don’t call it out for fear of being branded antisemitic. This fear gives Zionists the cover they need to continue attacking our rights. We have no choice but to stand up to them, otherwise we might be next.

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