Holocaust survivor anticipates her fifth arrest since August

Elizabeth Morley, an eighty-year-old child of Holocaust survivors, has travelled almost five hours from before dawn this morning. She is fully anticipating that what will ensue will be her fifth arrest since August for protesting against the Starmer regime’s ‘proscription.’ The latter is a ban on supporting a designated-as-terrorist organisation, namely non-violent protest group Palestine Action (PA).

Hungarian-born Morley, who arrived in the UK as what she calls a “very shy, so shy” child with no English, worked for years for the BBC Monitoring Service. There she listened in on Soviet-bloc transmissions until she took early retirement thirty years ago and moved to Aberystwyth, where she still lives.

Her train set off just after five this morning for the long journey to London, where she will participate in a protest by anti-Zionist Jewish people and others against the PA ban and the state assault on freedom of speech that it represents. Well over two thousand people have been arrested simply for expressing opposition to Starmer’s decision to proscribe PA.

Holocaust survivor Elizabeth Morley takes a stand

Elizabeth, who provided a video showing police arresting her and others with a soundtrack of anti-genocide rapper Macklemore’s iconic and hard-hitting Hind’s Hall, says that she was “a very late bloomer, politically”, who first became politically aware because of Blair’s illegal Iraq war:

I arrived here not speaking any English and my parents were not well off or well educated, but it was Iraq that really made me aware of what the world is like and what some people do.

And she says that she keeps travelling and protesting because she is determined to show that Israel and its genocide-advocates do not speak for or act for her or many other Jews, contrary to the narrative of the UK government and media:

There are so many of us who oppose what Israel does and stands for. It is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazi’s did to us, but we’re airbrushed out because we’re inconvenient.

Condemnation

She says she has been arrested four times since August, three in London and one in Aberystwyth, all for protesting the PA ban and that she has been handled with kid gloves by police each time:

I look old and I suffer from osteo-arthritis, so I can’t move fast. I think because I look like I’m at death’s door they feel they have to be very careful, but I’m aware that many old and disabled people have been dragged or carried off, so I’ve been very lucky.

Keir Starmer’s mass arrests of mostly older and disabled people for protesting against the proscription of Palestine Action has been condemned by human rights groups and the United Nations. It forms part of his wider ‘lawfare’ war on pro-Palestine speech to protect Israel, in which protesters and even journalists have been arrested, with many prosecuted or waiting to find out whether they will be.

Twenty-four Palestine Action activists, who were arrested before the ‘terror’ ban, have been in prison for well over a year without trial and face waits of another 6 to 24 months before their trial dates arrive. That’s in spite of the fact that UK law mandates a maximum ‘remand’ of 180 days. Six of them have been on hunger strike for up to three weeks in protest at their unlawful treatment.

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