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Right, so Britain has just spent almost three years and a mountain of public money trying to transform three tweets from Tony Greenstein, a 72-year-old Jewish anti-Zionist from Brighton, into the Philosopher’s Stone of terrorism convictions and all they produced for themselves was an even bigger mountain of embarrassment.
Greenstein’s supposed crime? He was accused of inviting support for Hamas, because of a few posts he made on 7 October 2023.
His defence? He supported Palestinian resistance, not Hamas itself, though it is hard to expect the CPS to see the difference after three years spent poring over his blog.
Apparently, national security in 2026 involves chasing after bloggers in their seventies while anyone truly dangerous is left to enjoy their scones and jam in peace. Especially those ones who don’t put the jam on first. Proper wrong’uns.
But it failed. Oh how did it fail! Not just failed, this was failed on a scale that would get you booed off Britain’s Got Talent, making a complete arse of itself in public, with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Tony Greenstein was facing the possibility of 14 years in prison over it though. The CPS spent years polishing this turd of a case, trying to make it shiny, presumably hoping to dazzle the jury into blindly coming up with that sought after guilty verdict. The jury however, left distinctly unimpressed, took two hours and eleven minutes to toss the whole thing into the nearest skip.
That is Tony Greenstein outside Kingston Crown Court after being unanimously found not guilty of inviting support for a proscribed organisation.
That organisation being Hamas of course. The case focused on three posts Greenstein published on 7 October 2023. The prosecution argued they crossed the line from political speech into inviting others to support Hamas.
Greenstein said they did not.
The jury agreed the CPS had not proved its charge.
Three years of investigation, prosecution, and legal theatrics, all for a verdict that landed faster than a Cabinet minister scrabbling around to avoid the truth on a Sunday-morning politics show.
Not exactly a sparkling return on investment for the British state either, unless, of course, you believe burning public money is a new national pastime, it certainly seems to be with Labour governments these days falling over themselves to prosecute pro-Palestinian sentiment.
Greenstein was not accused of joining Hamas. He was not accused of raising money for it, organising for it, or acting on its behalf. This case was purely about words: what those words meant, and what the CPS wanted a jury to believe Greenstein intended others to take from them.
One of the posts said: “Please share. Full support for the Gaza ghetto uprising.”
The posts linked to Greenstein’s blog, where he had written that whatever criticisms could be made of Hamas, it should be congratulated for what he described as a well-planned and audacious attack.
You do not have to like those words. You do not have to agree with them. You are entirely free to find them offensive, reckless, or even appalling.
I doubt Tony Greenstein made it to 72 by being universally liked.
But dislike is not a legal test either. Offence is not the legal test. Be offended by all means, nothing bloody changes because of it. The charge was that he had invited support for Hamas as an organisation, and the CPS had to prove that beyond reasonable doubt.
That difference might sound like splitting hairs.
It is not.
It is the entire case.
The prosecution argued that Greenstein did not need to type the words “I support Hamas” for the meaning to be clear. It said the date, the attack, his description of a Gaza uprising, and the passage on his blog could only be understood as support for Hamas.
Greenstein responded that he supported Palestinian resistance against occupation and siege, but did not support Hamas as a political or religious organisation.
The CPS said those two positions had become one.
Greenstein said they had not.
And think about that for a minute. By that logic, a Palestinian defending their home from being bulldozed, for example, becomes someone who supports Hamas simply because Hamas is part of the wider resistance.
So is Hamas support in that instance demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt?
Hardly. But that is the leap the CPS wanted the jury to make, isn’t it?
A jury then had to decide whether the state had proved it.
The courts are overwhelmed with delays. Victims are waiting years for cases to be heard. Defendants are stuck in legal limbo. Buildings are falling apart, barristers are overstretched, and ministers keep warning that the entire system is heading for some new and exciting stage of collapse. Yet, somehow, there is always enough time, money, and official energy to slap terrorism law on a pensioner with a blog and a Wi-Fi connection.
Priorities, clearly. Why bother fixing the courts when you can chase after bloggers for fun?
Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 makes it an offence to invite support for a proscribed organisation. Since changes made in 2019, it can also cover expressing a supportive opinion or belief while being reckless as to whether someone else may be encouraged to support that organisation.
In plain English: you cannot ask people to support a banned organisation.
And since 2019, it can also be an offence to publicly express support for one if you are reckless as to whether others might take that as encouragement to support it too.
So the legal question was not simply, “Did Tony Greenstein say something inflammatory about 7 October?” It was whether his posts amounted to encouraging support for Hamas as an organisation, or expressing support in a way that recklessly encouraged others to do so.
This is serious law. The maximum sentence is 14 years.
It is also law that reaches directly into speech, opinion, and political expression, which means the distinction between what someone actually supports and what the state infers they support matters a great deal.
The Government’s own explanatory notes make clear that the original invitation offence aimed to prevent inviting third parties to support the organisation. It did not simply prohibit holding an opinion supportive of one.
That does not mean anything goes. It does not mean every statement about a proscribed organisation is protected. The law now extends beyond the original offence anyway.
But the CPS still has to prove the actual charge. It cannot just point at Palestine, lower its voice to a spooky whisper, hiss ‘terrorism’, and hope twelve jurors will obediently connect the dots.
The prosecution itself accepted that opposing Israel was not a crime. Believing the occupation of Palestine is unlawful was not a crime. Supporting Palestinian liberation was not a crime. Condemning what has happened in Gaza was not a crime.
All perfectly lawful political positions. But there is always a ‘however’ waiting when the state has spent years building a case and finally reaches the point where everything falls apart.
However, the prosecution said, Greenstein’s particular words, on that particular date, linked to that particular blog post, had gone further. They amounted to an invitation of moral or intellectual support for Hamas.
That was the line it wanted the jury to draw.
The jury did not draw it where the CPS wanted.
And this is the part that gets lost when an acquittal is reduced to a triumphant photo outside court and everyone moves on to the next story.
Greenstein’s home was raided in December 2023. His phone and laptop were seized. CAGE International says he remained without those devices while the case dragged on.
For a writer and campaigner, losing your phone and laptop is not a minor inconvenience; it is like having your hands cut off. And spending years with a terrorism prosecution and a possible 14-year sentence hanging over your head is not exactly a holiday either.
So by the time the jury acquitted him, the process had already consumed a significant part of his life. So when people start saying that the system worked because he was eventually found not guilty, keep the bunting in the attic. The system raided a 69-year-old and finally acquitted a 72-year-old. Not exactly a reason to celebrate.
That is not a three-year success story. That is the state marching itself off a cliff for years, then applauding itself because twelve jurors grabbed the wheel before it went full Thelma and Louise.
The raid happened in December 2023 under the previous Conservative government. The charging and prosecution continued into the Labour period. No evidence shows a Labour minister personally ordered this case, but equally it was allowed to proceed, the uniparty doing what it always does. When it comes it one of those all too common areas of common ground.
Governments create the laws. Ministers and the client media set the political climate. Police and prosecutors decide how far those powers can be pushed in individual cases.
Around Palestine, Britain has spent years normalising the language of terrorism against protesters, campaigners, and direct-action groups. Labour has widened that crackdown through the proscription of Palestine Action and the mass use of counter-terror powers against people displaying support for it.
Then, eventually, these cases limp into court, where the state discovers, shock, horror, that chanting ‘terrorism’ on repeat is not the same as actually proving it. We’ve seen that with another bunch of Filton protesters this week, the Barclays Five this week, now Tony Greenstein as well. Fail after fail after fail.
But here is where the case becomes more troubling, because the prosecution’s argument relied heavily on context.
These were not just words floating in a vacuum, they said. They were posted on 7 October. They linked to a longer article. They referred to Hamas. Put all of that together, the Crown argued. Well, fine. If context is your game, let’s play.
Except, according to The Canary’s reporting from inside the court, that became much harder whenever the context helped the defence.
Greenstein has written thousands of articles over decades. He is an atheist, a Marxist, and a long-time opponent of religious fundamentalism. His website contains repeated criticism of Hamas, including articles with such blunt titles as “The lousy Hamas government” and “Hamas does its best to make Palestinian lives a misery”.
Some of that material reached the jury. Much more apparently did not.
The Canary reported that dozens of historical articles attacking Hamas were ruled inadmissible, along with substantial sections of Greenstein’s police interviews and more than half of the blog post from which the prosecution had built its case.
So the practical problem is pretty obvious and extremely damning.
The prosecution could invite the jury to interpret three posts as evidence that Greenstein supported Hamas. Yet much of the material showing what he had said about Hamas over many years was kept out of the jury’s view.
Apparently, context is crucial, right up until there is too much of it and it starts making the prosecution job a tad tricky. I mean you’re only trying to send a pensioner down for up to 14 years right?
The tension became public when Greenstein took the stand. Judge Sarah Plaschkes repeatedly stopped him as he tried to discuss Gaza, the history of the occupation, and why he understood the words “resistance” and “uprising” as he did.
The judge told him the court was not a political forum and that the jury was not concerned with events in the Middle East.
But how exactly do you decide what someone meant by political statements about the Middle East while treating the Middle East itself as irrelevant? That is like prosecuting someone for a football chant and then banning any mention of the football.
The Canary also reported repeated occasions when the jury was sent out while the defence boundaries of evidence were being argued. Before police witnesses were questioned, defence barrister Lawrence McNulty reportedly asked whether the judge intended to micromanage his cross-examination after she sought advance notice of where his questions were going.
When the jury returned, McNulty got a police witness to confirm that the version of Greenstein’s second interview presented to them was much shorter than the original because it had been heavily redacted.
Again, that does not automatically prove misconduct. Courts exclude evidence every day. But it does show that the jury was not simply looking at an untouched record and reaching an obvious conclusion. It was looking at a record whose boundaries had been fought over throughout the trial.
Greenstein clearly believed those boundaries favoured the prosecution, from the reporting coming out from multiple sources, it’s very difficult to my mind, to argue otherwise too. At one point, he reportedly complained that it felt as if two people were working for the Crown, implying the Judge was biased given her interventions.
That was his accusation, not a judicial finding. But what happened after his closing address explains exactly why he felt that way.
Before the verdict, the judge said she had considered whether Greenstein should face contempt proceedings for what he said to the jury. The prosecution did not ask her to pursue it. She then decided that his address had merely been, in her words, “a rambling speech delivered by an old man”, and said it would not have affected the jury.
Greenstein had a rather different view. And if I was juror I’d have been pretty appalled to hear that from the bloody judge.
“Ramblings of an old man.”
That is quite a way to dismiss a defendant’s final attempt to explain himself when fourteen years in prison might be at stake.
And there is a simple way to test the judge’s confidence that his words made no difference, because then the jury went out to decide.
Now, the jury did not formally rule on whether the judge had underestimated Greenstein’s speech. It was not handing out marks for presentation. Nor did it endorse every argument he made about Israel, Hamas, or the Terrorism Act, it wasn’t their job to do so after all.
It answered one question.
Had the CPS proved that Tony Greenstein invited support for Hamas?
No.
Unanimously.
The CPS wanted a conviction it could point to, a boundary marker. A case showing that language framed as support for Palestinian resistance could, in these circumstances, be prosecuted successfully as support for Hamas.
Instead, it got an acquittal remembered through three numbers.
Three posts.
The CPS walked away with no conviction, no precedent, and a lesson in how to waste state machinery on policing political speech until a jury finally pulls the plug because they found it wanting. They showed it up for what it is, absolute overreach by a government prepared to go to bats**t lengths to shut down support for Palestine and when we have such groups amongst the Uniparty such as Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel and Reform Friends of Israel, it’s not hard to see why. Perhaps they should be on trial because of their support for a genocidal state, at least that I think would be value for money.
And this also comes at a particularly awkward moment for the Government, since ministers are busy planning to sideline juries as their solution for the Crown Court backlog.
Given the apparent conduct of the judge here, how do you fancy Tony would’ve fared without that jury?
But ministers say juries are too slow.
Well, this jury only took two hours and eleven minutes, in no small part in my opinion because the case was bull s**t. Perhaps don’t waste such valuable court time with your pro-Israel proclivities?
Three years the state took here let’s not forget, presumably with enough tea breaks, biscuit runs, and committee meetings to debate the shade of celebration bunting which now won’t see the light of day to last a lifetime.
The problem could not be twelve ordinary people taking too long to reach a verdict. Maybe, just maybe, the real issue is the people who think three social-media posts are worth years of police overtime, a courtroom spectacle, and enough paperwork to clear half of Surrey’s forests. Get rid of the people completely, that’s bound to improve judicial outcomes(!)
But heaven forbid anyone say such things. Greenstein’s case is not the only recent Palestine case where the state has gone into court using terrorism language and come out with less than it expected.
I have already covered the Filton case recently, so I won’t go back over that again. But the relevant point is this: after an eight-week Old Bailey trial and 37 hours of jury deliberations, the prosecution did not get verdicts against seven of those defendants over the Elbit factory action in Bristol, those who stood trial this time, didn’t even enter the factory though.
That was not an acquittal. Retrials may follow.
But it was still a very long, very costly prosecution that failed to deliver the sweeping result the state had hoped for.
In the Barclays Five case, the defendants were convicted of criminal damage, but the court rejected treating the offending as terrorism-related for sentencing.
Different cases. Different evidence. Different legal outcomes.
The common feature is the state stretching terrorism language around Palestine-related activism though, then finding that courts and juries do not always follow it to the conclusion it had in mind.
With Greenstein, though, the result is very clear.
He was charged.
He was tried.
He was acquitted.
Britain took three posts from a Jewish anti-Zionist pensioner, spent nearly three years trying to turn them into a terrorism conviction, and exposed him to a possible 14-year jail sentence. Twelve jurors needed just two hours and eleven minutes to hand the CPS it’s backside.
Britain threw years of state power at political speech about Palestine and still could not get a jury to agree. If the crackdown keeps striding into court dressed as authority and leaving empty-handed like this, it is not showing strength. It is exposing its own weakness and it’s own Zionist bias for all to see.
For more on that aforementioned Filton case, get all the details in my coverage of that story right here.
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