What would posing MPs say of the suffragettes?
The first movement, of course, was the suffragettes, and our MPs dressed themselves in the totemic purple, white and green sashes of this venerated struggle, smiling at the camera.
Everyone today, of course, would like to think they were on the side of the suffragettes. It is easy to be on the right side of history when that no longer entails sacrifices and the threat of persecution.
READ MORE: New direct action group 'Yvette Cooper' emerges following Palestine Action ban
In their day, the suffragettes were despised and treated as terrorists. 111 years ago, on that same Westminster estate where those MPs posed for a picture, Parliament debated the right of women to vote.
Lord Robert Cecil – later awarded a Nobel Peace Prize as one of the founding architects of the League of Nations – denounced 'suffragist outrages' as a 'very serious evil' with the aim of 'anarchy'.
In order to 'prevent them committing crimes', he demanded their mass deportation. Meanwhile, the Liberal home secretary Reginald McKenna announced that of the options available, letting suffragettes die 'is, I should say, at the present moment the most popular, judging by the number of letters I have received'.
More than 1000 suffragettes were imprisoned in Holloway Prison alone. Suffragettes were not just beaten by police officers, they were sexually assaulted. When suffragettes went on hunger strike, they were force fed – 'an extremely unpleasant and humiliating ordeal', as Parliament's own website today declares.
Imagine being an MP who celebrates a historic movement which deployed far more extreme methods to achieve their political goals than a contemporary movement they then vote to classify as dangerous terrorists? What goes through their heads, exactly? What extraordinary logical hoops must these politicians brazenly jump through to justify this cognitive dissonance?
Let me be direct. I doubt most of these slavishly loyal drones – scooped off a conveyor belt after being made to order by Labour HQ – know much about the suffragettes other than what they gleaned from Mary Poppins.
If asked about the suffragettes' tactics, I would imagine they would say: we don't condone what they did, but women being deprived of the right to vote was a far greater evil.
How, then, does this not apply to Palestine Action, which deploys much less extreme tactics in protest at the complicity of their own government in genocide? When the legislation is approved, anyone who expresses support for them faces a prison sentence of up to 14 years.
Are these MPs aware that Israel's right-wing former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, declared that his state is committing war crimes in Gaza, describing it as a 'a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians'?
Are they are aware that a consensus of genocide scholars have concluded this is genocide, including Israel scholars such as Omer Bartov, Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman and Dr Shmuel Lederman?
They are certainly aware that the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
(Image: Archive)
What worse crime can these MPs think of than genocide? Do they believe that citizens of a country helping to facilitate war crimes – let alone genocide – have a responsibility to stop that from happening?
If they state that the case for genocide hasn't been proven, they must surely concede that given so many genocide scholars have arrived at this conclusion, it must be accepted as a legitimate perspective, and at the very least means the most extreme imaginable war crimes are being perpetrated.
So given how history judges the suffragettes, how do they imagine Palestine Action will be remembered? More to the point, how do they expect the politicians who persecuted opponents of genocide will be remembered?
That this column could land me a prison sentence of up to 14 years if it was published at the wrong time, while our government continues to facilitate genocide, is beyond perverse.
Our ally has cooked babies alive, deliberately massacred unarmed Palestinians after starving them, systematically destroyed the health care system, reduced Gaza to apocalyptic rubble – we could go on.
It has done this as our government lauds an ally it continues to supply with crucial components for F-35 jets as they rain death and destruction on the traumatised survivors. Yet it is those who oppose genocide who have been systematically demonised, silenced, sacked, deplatformed, arrested – and who face lengthy prison sentences.
(Image: Carl Plaister)
In the here and now, the world has been turned on its head. But as the suffragettes underline, you can only do that for so long. Unless the future of our species is one of ever-escalating violent barbarism, history will praise those who did what they could to fight one of the great crimes of our age.
As for those who facilitated the crime – and monstered those who tried to stop it: well, deep down, we all know how this ends.
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