The following is a statement from Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC). The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has allowed the Met Police to charge him with public order offences after the pro-Palestine rally on Saturday 18 January.
As the Canary has been documenting, cops have been fabricating events that day – accusing people of pushing through the police line onto Trafalgar Square. Prominent politicians, including Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, and Zack Polanski – along with countless members of the public – dispute the Met’s claims, saying police gave them permission to pass.
Predictably, the Zionist lobby seems to have been involved – with notorious pro-Israel group Campaign Against Antisemitism already in contact with the Met:
During and after Saturday’s disorder in central London, a significant number of arrests have been made by @MetPoliceUK.
Charges have been brought against various individuals, including the Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Ben Jamal, shown here leading chanting in… pic.twitter.com/z3RWFQVVz2
— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) January 20, 2025
The Canary stands in solidarity with Jamal and all those arrested and charged – and against the lying, genocide-apologists at the Met Police.
Jamal’s statement reads as follows:
Yesterday I voluntarily attended an interview with the Metropolitan Police, to address allegations that I led, and incited others to join, a procession which forced its way through a Police line at the top of Whitehall, thereby breaching conditions imposed upon our protest.
Within two hours of the interview concluding, Police officers turned up at my front door to inform me that charges were being brought against me.
I am due in Court to face these charges on February 21st 2025, and will of course vigorously contest them.
What we saw on Saturday was a huge assault on the right to freedom of assembly and to protest. The anti-protest laws introduced under the last Conservative government are an affront to democracy and Saturday provided the clearest examples of the willingness of Keir Starmer’s Government to use them to suppress the Palestine solidarity movement, and the core freedoms of all of us.
The facts of what happened on Saturday are laid out clearly in the statement made by the Palestine Coalition, backed by the wide body of video evidence PSC has posted online.
It seems clear that the political intention was to create scenes of mass disorder which could be used to justify the Home Secretary intervening to ban all future marches. Despite this attempt, there were not scenes of mass disorder. This was due to the extraordinary and determined discipline of those who came to protest, even in the face of such provocation.
I thank everyone who attended and send solidarity to all those unjustly arrested, some of whom, including my comrade Chris Nineham of the Stop the War Coalition, are now also facing charges.
Ben Jamal and the Met Police
What the political establishment also seeks is to distract attention from their complicity in the genocide that they have green-lighted for the last 15 months. Those of us who have protested peacefully, in unprecedented numbers, against genocide and for a ceasefire, came on Saturday to mark that ceasefire and to share with the Palestinian people their feelings of relief that it has finally arrived, their trepidation regarding the likelihood of Israel renewing its brutal assault upon them, their grief for the family members slaughtered in the last 15 months, and their celebration, even as they return to their destroyed homes that, as they have done for generations, they have prevailed.
The state wishes to silence our movement. It will not succeed. We will not stop protesting and campaigning until every brick in the wall of apartheid that imprisons and oppresses the Palestinian people is torn down, until Palestinians in exile are free to return to their homes and on every inch of their historic homeland, from the river to the sea, are finally able to live in freedom with justice.
Onwards together.
Featured image via the Canary
