‘These people are not terrorists’: why the treatment of the Filton 25 is a disgrace

On January 11th, I was standing in the driveway to HMP New Hall with a small group of protesters who had walked up the drive half an hour earlier. A blue bib PLO arrived.

He ushered me over, secretively, trying to minimise the interaction. I walked over.

How did you even hear about this?

He asked me incredulously.

Barely a week prior, on the 3rd, I watched a woman with a baby stand metres away from people being pepper sprayed after more than 100 activists from across the country descended on the prison to demand the release of hunger striker Heba Muraisi and her transfer back to HMP Bronzefield.

Days later, on the 8th, when activists returned, a line of police stretched out across the bottom of the drive – no one made it any further that day; clearly, tactics would have to be re-evaluated.

For weeks prior to this, successful prison blockades had been launched in secret, catching guards, residents and staff unaware. It was quite a sight to behold – a small group of committed rabble rousers standing on the driveway while a half mile of parked cars snaked up the hill behind them, their headlights twinkling like Christmas lights through the trees, waiting for shift change. The governor thought he was in control, but suddenly it was the people who decided when their shifts started and ended. Whether people could come or go was no longer in their control. A poignant message to the government machine that was employed to stop just 24 people from being able to come and go as they pleased.

You still don’t understand this do you?

I replied…

this is just people; friends, family, colleagues – people talking round dinner tables. You can’t stand on this movement and if you try then they are just going to find new ways to do this. These people are going to keep coming back until that woman gets to walk out of those gates

Covering the hunger strike changed my life. Watching individuals be held on remand, having their rights abused in ways that I could not imagine being possible in a modern democracy in the West… I remember saying to people, I must have written it somewhere – if this was happening in any other country – imagine if this was happening in Russia…

David Lammy would have been standing on the news condemning it full-throatily, but instead, we had him running through corridors trying to pretend he didn’t know what the rest of us were standing outside shouting about. I grew up bathed in liberalism; the idea that the state, the police, the machinations of the society we lived in were made to help, guide and protect us.

It wasn’t just Gaza that got me to where I am now. It’s more complicated than that.

I care about the Palestinian cause because I remember growing up watching it. I remember adults I loved telling me that it was justified in all sorts of ways that never made sense to a child watching other children hide from tanks inside bombed-out buildings or under slabs of concrete. But I haven’t got skin in the game. I don’t have a connection to the land. Like so many people reading this, I am here because I cannot help but be. But I have the privilege of stepping back when this becomes too much. So many people are here precisely because they don’t have that privilege.

The anger that grew in me during the hunger strike wasn’t about Israel, it wasn’t about Palestine, and it wasn’t about Gaza or the West Bank for me directly. But it was about watching this country, my country, the country that told me my whole life it was something, turn around and show me that it was everything that it had ever told me that it wasn’t. The only people who had any hand whatsoever over the way this has totally transformed people politically, they are the people making these decisions in government. As Emma Kamio, mother of Ellie, said to me recently;

The government has radicalised me

I think a lot of people I have met this year feel the same way.

It’s nearly 6 months on now, and what HMP New Hall finally began to understand, the state still does not.

Of course, the hunger strike is over; they all eventually stopped – Kam, Qesser, T, Heba are on bail waiting for their trials, while Amu Gib, Lewie, Jon, and Umer Khalid remain on remand. But the government has not stopped.

Let’s seriously ask ourselves – what kind of country do we live in where a disabled man is being forced to drag himself across the floor to use a toilet? Let’s be crystal clear as well: Umer Khalid did not crawl into prison. He walked. The intentional neglect of the UK prison service has cost this man the use of his legs.

The state has refused Umer the medical care and attention that he has both desperately needed and that he has been legally entitled to receive. A wheelchair that won’t fit in the corridor or through the cell door. Unable to shower for 26 days due to no shower chair being provided. Umer has been abused by the state since the first moment he entered the prison system.

It’s not enough to beat him, to take away his Quran; no. Take away every vestige of dignity possible – it’s the only way to make him pay for having a conscience. It’s not enough to refuse urgent medical care until entire limbs are rendered useless. We must force him to drag himself with one good arm across his prison cell. And when he once again falls and injures his one good arm and shoulder – the only limb he has to navigate life with? He’s left in his cell, unable to use the toilet for over 24 hours. When a fire alarm goes off, we evacuate the entire building and leave him behind.

Now, finally in hospital, several reports state that doctors fear for his safety if he is forced to return to Wormwood Scrubs. The state treats literal paedophiles with more care and dignity than they have treated these humans.

Because showing these people humanity is beyond the state. In 2026, we can call someone a terrorist and watch their humanity wither and die in front of our eyes.

The entire saga of these prosecutions has been harrowing for those involved. Many defendants were whisked away in the middle of the night – one mother thought her child had been kidnapped by a squad of black bloc ballyed up psychopaths. They cut through the doors and they put her in an unmarked van and disappeared her. The police told the mother to ring round the hospitals and morgues.

It was two weeks before they let her know her daughter was alive and in police custody. This wasn’t an isolated case. Other defendants told of being arrested with multiple officers pointing guns at their heads. Twenty to thirty officers swarming into family homes at dawn with loaded weapons. Multiple defendants have told me how, after they were already handcuffed, officers continued to go round the house destroying possessions, smashing up homes.

How do we justify treating people this way?

There’s so much I could say or write about all this – but I know that no one individual in this case would want me to. It’s never been about them. I cannot count how many phone calls I have listened to outside prisons, how many statements I have read – how many times I have heard these voices I have come to recognise.

Every time they chose to centre the Palestinian people and their cause. 2 months without food – so long that there was no hunger, only pain left, and all they could do was think of Palestine. It’s the thing that makes me love them all so much. One recently told me that;

If you make the action about yourself then it was destined to failure from the start.

These brave humans are willing to go to prison for what they believe, and even then, that’s still not enough for this corrupt government. They want more blood from the stone.

Tomorrow, on the 12th of June, the first 4 of the Filton 25 will be sentenced. A jury already refused to convict them on certain charges. So, the state wasn’t willing to let the people on the jury make that decision again. It had to bring them back, to rig the system further, to gag them and their lawyers. To force a jury to convict without ever implicitly stating it. And now that it has managed its most recent ghastly magic trick, we are sitting, all waiting with bated breath, to see what comes next.

At the sentencing, we will find out whether this so-called terrorism link will be applied to this case. The judge argued during the trial that by dismantling Elbit machinery in the UK, the group was aiming to influence the Israeli government.

By denying them access to weaponry. During a genocide.

They weren’t even trying to challenge or influence their own government. They had already tried that;

We tried every democratic means available to us, including demonstrations, fundraisers, encampments, petitions, writing to MPs, stickers leading to Amnesty International information about the apartheid, vigils, arms factory pickets, the list goes on… none of it worked.

From Zoe Rogers’ closing arguments

This wasn’t about influencing anyone – 800,000 people marching, 3000 plus arrests at Defend our Juries protests. That was an attempt to influence. None of that definitively worked. As the wonderful Lisa Luxx from the Free The Filton 25 Defence Committee pointed out in a speech outside The Old Bailey for the, then Brize Norton 5 bail hearings;

Civil disobedience and direct action are two different things… Civil disobedience is usually a large public disruption so you can engage with decision makers. Direct action believes you are the decision maker.

This was (and remains) about making it financially unviable for these factories to operate in this country. Colonialism doesn’t just happen in Kashmir or in Sudan or in the stacks of rubble heaped up in Gaza. Imperialism doesn’t just exist in the mind’s eye in far-flung places many of us will never see. It’s happening all around us, and we are all complicit.

Elbit didn’t have to come to court to defend itself against the accusations that it produces 85% of the drones and land-based weapons that have helped level Gaza. It can’t do that in court. It’s only in the Murdoch-owned media where you can still lie with impunity and without repercussions.

It didn’t need to come to court to provide a breakdown of the weapons that these people broke down. It could account for the weight of every sledgehammer used, to the individual gram, but it couldn’t justify a penny of the damage that it was claimed was caused. It can’t come to court to explain that this research and development lab was shipping out weapons not available for sale, for testing. It doesn’t want to have to explain that the testing site is the world’s largest store of rubble, where people are still shot for crossing invisible lines that exist in the head of a soldier with a sniper rifle half a mile away. The test subjects: women and children.

The legislation being used to apply this terrorism link is based upon the notion that extreme and serious property damage can constitute terrorism. It was introduced after the IRA bombed the Arndale Centre in Manchester in 1996. It caused hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage. This is abuse of power. Plain and simple. Counter-terror legislation should not be used to terrorise traumatised communities who have reacted in the only way that was left available to them after years of resistance to a genocide being played out on their phones in real time.

You might think that, reading this, I am clearly emotionally involved. And I am. There is no denying that. One of the things I often think about in this job is impartiality – what is it? Is it about remaining steadfast in the middle of the road? Should I pretend that the government has a valid point of view in all this? Should I say that, no, it’s okay that the judge didn’t tell the jury about the plans to target these individuals with a terrorist connection? If he told the court that two and two make five, should I be reporting that now? I have gone to protests where there were no other journalists, and then gone home and seen reports the next day from three different people telling three different stories, none of them reporting the facts of what actually went down. Impartiality doesn’t exist – it’s a thin veneer that people hide behind to tell the story they want to tell.

I am not impartial; I think what is happening is wrong. It is an abuse of power so gross and so egregious that it has robbed me of the faith I once had in the system.

What is happening to these individuals is everything that is wrong with this system, packaged up into a little box and neatly wrapped in a bow. It is demonstrably wrong and I will not stop saying that over and over again until someone finally stops to listen. It doesn’t end with this sentencing. The power to create and make change lies in the hands of elected politicians in Parliament. While we sat and listened to those politicians speak to a crowd that filled Pall Mall during the Nakba commemoration march this year, someone said to me;

Imagine if all these people kept walking, all the way to the gates of those factories… imagine what they could achieve

The power to influence and coerce these politicians remains, as always, in the streets. It is in our hands and we can all choose to leverage that power whenever we decide to realise that. When we decide to organise, to mobilise and to help create a real change in this country that we can all be proud of.

I look forward to seeing many of you at Woolwich tomorrow morning where crowds will be gathering from 10am to remind the powers that be of this fact.

No matter what happens tomorrow, these people will not be forgotten. This won’t stop anything. It won’t stop the marches; it won’t stop the protests. It won’t stop me from walking up another prison drive in the dark to document people banging on the gates. It’s only going to breathe fresh life into the movement.

This will not stop people from taking direct action against Elbit, against Rafael, Leonardo or any of these companies which prop up the Israeli government and which profit from genocide on the other side of the globe.

You cannot tread on this and expect it to stop. It doesn’t work like that. I urge the government to please think twice.

Charlotte Head. Sam Corner. Ellie Kamio. Fatema Zainab Rajwani. These people are not terrorists.

Featured image via the Canary

By Barold

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