{"id":6389,"date":"2025-12-04T16:45:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T14:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=6389"},"modified":"2025-12-04T16:45:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T14:45:13","slug":"hunger-strike-not-televised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2025-12-04\/hunger-strike-not-televised\/","title":{"rendered":"The hunger strike is not being televised \u2013 nor will the last gasps of our dying freedoms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"subtitle subtitle-HEEcLo\" dir=\"auto\"><em><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-6390\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Hunger-strike-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"520\" height=\"347\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Hunger-strike-copy.jpg 520w, https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Hunger-strike-copy-300x200.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 520px) 100vw, 520px\" \/>Six political prisoners who targeted factories arming Israel&#8217;s genocide are weeks into a hunger strike. But in contrast to the IRA&#8217;s 1980s hunger strike, this one is being blanked by the media<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>If we truly had a free media in the UK, rather than one serving the interests only of the state and billionaire class, this would be a front-page news story:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Six political prisoners \u2013 held unlawfully for a year or more on remand, and retroactively deemed to be \u201cterrorists\u201d for trying to stop the Gaza genocide \u2013 have been on hunger strike for many weeks in prison. At least one is already seriously ill.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There has been blanket silence from the media on these developments, and barely any coverage of the appalling conditions these political prisoners are being subjected to since Palestine Action was reclassified by Sir Keir Starmer\u2019s government as a terrorist organisation \u2013 <em>after<\/em> their arrests.<\/p>\n<p>Notably, it is the first time a direct-action group, one that directs its violence against property \u2013 that is, factories making weapons to kill civilians in Gaza \u2013 rather than people, has been declared a terrorist organisation and put on the same footing as al-Qaeda and Islamic State.<\/p>\n<p>Under Britain\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/jonathancook.substack.com\/p\/why-i-wrote-an-expert-report-against\" rel=\"\">draconian Terrorism Act<\/a>, anyone expressing an opinion, even inadvertently, that might \u201cencourage support\u201d for a proscribed organisation \u2013 now including Palestine Action \u2013 can be arrested for supporting terrorism and faces a terrorism conviction.<\/p>\n<p>With at least 2,500 people arrested for holding placards stating \u201cI oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action\u201d, Britain\u2019s jails could soon be flooded with many more such political prisoners.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Ousting the review judge in the appeal against Palestine Action&#8217;s proscription, and replacing him with three new judges, is a desperate attempt to create a veneer of judicial authority in support of the actions of Starmer&#8217;s outlaw government.<\/p>\n<p>My latest: <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/r84WPOfAT4\">https:\/\/t.co\/r84WPOfAT4<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/ace8CbDIZv\">pic.twitter.com\/ace8CbDIZv<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Jonathan_K_Cook\/status\/1993632270658285827?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 26, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.middleeasteye.net\/news\/uk-government-lawyers-use-secret-evidence-justify-ban-palestine-action\" rel=\"\">judicial review<\/a> of the government\u2019s decision was heard in the past few days at the High Court, though again you are unlikely to know this, given the lack of interest from the British media. The judges\u2019 ruling on the lawfulness of the government\u2019s decision is expected in mid-January.<\/p>\n<p>But a related ruling this week from a judge in Jersey, hearing a terrorism case against peace activist Natalie Strecker, opens the door even more widely to political prosecutions. Despite freeing Strecker, Judge Saunders appeared to accept the British <a href=\"https:\/\/www.craigmurray.org.uk\/archives\/2025\/12\/the-terrifying-case-of-natalie-strecker\/\" rel=\"\">government\u2019s argument<\/a> that it is unlawful to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/ckgk5kd5nvwo\" rel=\"\">advocate for international law<\/a>, which expressly states that occupied peoples such as the Palestinians have a right to resist their illegal occupation.<\/p>\n<p>For anyone with a long memory, the current silence from our media should be shocking. The last major hunger strike by political prisoners in the UK occurred in the early 1980s. It was then that the Provisional IRA \u2013 an organisation that expressly claimed responsibility for bombing pubs, hotels, and public parks, in acts that killed many hundreds of civilians \u2013 organised a hunger strike in the Maze Prison, near Belfast, demanding improved prison conditions.<\/p>\n<p>One of the hunger strikers, Bobby Sands, became a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/stories-56937259\" rel=\"\">household name<\/a> in Britain. His story dominated headlines for weeks, and led to a major confrontation, through the media, with the Thatcher government. His death reverberated long afterwards, and ultimately ushered in the Northern Ireland peace process.<\/p>\n<p>Contrast that with our current moment. Imprisoned members of Palestine Action, an organisation that expressly eschews violence against people, and which is trying to stop a slaughter in Gaza that major human groups and genocide scholars are agreed amounts to a genocide, are on hunger strike because their rights are being grossly and systematically violated \u2013 as political prisoners. And there\u2019s barely a peep from the media.<\/p>\n<p>Notably, there was similarly minimal media coverage of the prison conditions and legal abuses of another recent political prisoner. Journalist and publisher Julian Assange spent five years in London\u2019s high-security Belmarsh prison, on trumped-up charges to justify extradition to the US for publishing details of British and US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n<p>The media gave his case the most cursory coverage and avoided detailing what he was accused of \u2013 because those details would have painted a damning picture the British and US governments. Without a trace of irony, the press paid more attention to speeches from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gov.uk\/government\/speeches\/media-freedom-and-journalists-under-threat-foreign-secretarys-speech\" rel=\"\">very politicians<\/a> jailing Assange in which they condemned the suffering of political prisoners, including journalists, in Russia and China.<\/p>\n<p>None of this should be normal. The Palestine Action hunger strike is very obviously a major news story. The fact that it is getting almost no coverage is evidence of active government suppression, and active media collusion in that suppression.<\/p>\n<p>Even hunger strikes by Palestinian political prisoners held illegally in Israeli jails <a href=\"https:\/\/www.haaretz.com\/israel-news\/2022-09-24\/ty-article-magazine\/.highlight\/i-dont-see-a-hunger-strike-as-a-choice-the-occupation-forced-it-on-them\/00000183-6c1a-d4b1-a197-ef1ff8ee0000\" rel=\"\">receive more coverage<\/a> from the Israeli press than the British media are giving a hunger strike by the political prisoners of Palestine Action.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/oHZr9LeUaTc?si=3-VAlIlXhlBtPLk8\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Francesca Nadin, a former Palestine Action political prisoner, has <a href=\"https:\/\/electronicintifada.net\/blogs\/asa-winstanley\/british-hunger-strikers-learn-prison-lessons-palestine\" rel=\"\">told the Electronic Intifada<\/a> that \u201cmainstream\u201d journalists who show interest in the hunger strike cannot get their stories past editors. She observes that there has been \u201calmost a complete blackout in the mainstream media about this story\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Editors, it seems, are often using legal concerns as cover for refusing to report the strike. This is a pretext, not a reason.<\/p>\n<p>Britain has a voluntary system of military censorship, called the D-Notice Committee. By joining the committee, British editors effectively agree to avoid reporting on anything the government declares to be a \u201cnational security\u201d matter. In practice, that often concerns issues that might embarrass the government.<\/p>\n<p>For editors, the system offers plausible deniability as they collude in censorship. For readers, it makes the media more than useless on the most urgent and serious matters of our time.<\/p>\n<p>In contrast to the 1980s, when the British media was reporting \u2013 even if rarely sympathetically \u2013 IRA hunger strikes, the media is now even more under the thumb of the British state. As evidence, note the Guardian\u2019s U-turn on the D-Notice Committee in 2014, when it <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk-news\/2014\/jan\/31\/footage-released-guardian-editors-snowden-hard-drives-gchq\" rel=\"\">faced harsh pushback<\/a> from the security services over its Edward Snowden revelations into illegal mass surveillance by western states of their own populations.<\/p>\n<p>For the first time the paper <a href=\"https:\/\/www.declassifieduk.org\/how-the-uk-security-services-neutralised-the-countrys-leading-liberal-newspaper\/\" rel=\"\">agreed to join<\/a> the D-Notice Committee, becoming fully absorbed into the architecture of the national security state. It was rewarded with front-page \u201cexclusive\u201d interviews with the heads of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk-news\/2016\/nov\/01\/andrew-parker-mi5-director-general-there-will-be-terrorist-attacks-in-britain-exclusive\" rel=\"\">MI5<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk-news\/2017\/mar\/02\/mi6-returns-to-tapping-up-recruit-black-asian-officers-alex-younger-interview\" rel=\"\">MI6<\/a>. The Guardian revelled in what should have been the ultimate mark of shame for a newspaper that claimed to be a watchdog on power.<\/p>\n<p>The truth is the assault on basic freedoms in Britain is now well advanced. Political dissent is under siege. The hunger strikes are not being televised, nor will the last gasps of our dying freedoms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Six political prisoners who targeted factories arming Israel&#8217;s genocide are weeks into a hunger strike. But in contrast to the IRA&#8217;s 1980s hunger strike, this one is being blanked by the media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6390,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-6389","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-media-criticism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6391,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6389\/revisions\/6391"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}