Ostroeuropa wrote:MERIZoC wrote:https://theintercept.com/2017/07/10/josh-walker-isis-uk-terrorism-charge-ypg-syria/
Man you guys are doing a great job fighting terrorism
(Quotes from article.)— he collected information “of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.”
So he knew something that the police think it's illegal to know.- due to court-ordered reporting restrictions that have prevented news organizations in the U.K. from disclosing information
And we're not really supposed to talk about it, or weren't until recently.- Walker had read George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia,” which describes the author’s journey to fight in the Spanish Civil War ... He was inspired by these tales and saw parallels
Right, makes sense.- He also felt an affinity for the Kurdish people, who have faced repression across the Middle East for decades, particularly in Turkey, where even teaching children to speak Kurdish remains a hotly contested subject after being banned for the better part of a century. Walker, who was born in Wales, saw some similarities between the plight of the Kurds and that of the Welsh people, whose own language was suppressed in favor of English in some Welsh schools during the latter part of the 19th century.
Oh for fucks sake.- It’s about solidarity — real solidarity.”
Well, he did travel miles to shoot people in the desert without training or organizational help and stuff, so I don't know what I was expecting.- noted that he had read “Democratic Confederalism,” a pamphlet authored by Abdullah Öcalan, one of the founding members of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Öcalan’s 47-page text — heavily influenced by anarchist and libertarian theory — outlines his vision of a stateless, participatory democracy that is controlled and structured at a grassroots level through voluntary meetings and councils.
COMMUNISTS.
DEM REDS.
*hysteria intensifies*At first, Walker was concerned that the British government might try to prevent him from going to the war-torn region.
Probably not if you get the Kurds on their end to verify you're meeting them and such. Presumably, some of them can end up vouching for your correspondence and our government will know who they are.In a bid to avoid any potential online surveillance, he limited his contact with the Rojava Facebook group to only a few messages and restrained himself from performing even the most basic Google searches about, for example, learning to speak Kurdish.
Okay, so he thought he was doing something wrong and acted shady about it, but then, the case is about a bunch of authoritarian bullshit, not this.
Then a bunch of humanitarian stuff happens interspersed with the horrors of war, including a Welsh accent slowly sliding into a Kurdish hybrid accent.As soon as he got through the passport gate, Walker was approached by one of the suit-wearing men
Those ones, you know the ones.The female detective read him his rights and told him he was being arrested on suspicion of involvement in the “commission, preparation, or instigation of acts of terrorism.”
Right, because he hid a bunch of internet searches, acted shifty as fuck, then disappeared to the middle east combat zone without telling anybody why, and then the police raided his apartment, realized what type of person he was, and just waved around a certain cookbook and acted like it was what they were looking for the whole time.Robert Jenrick, a Conservative member of Parliament, said during the discussion that he had personally been in contact with the families of 20 British anti-Islamic State fighters. Two of the 20, he said, had been arrested under the Terrorism Act; four were questioned but not arrested; and 14 came and went at will, unquestioned. In several publicly reported cases in the U.K., returning fighters have been arrested or questioned but then not charged. That is what makes Walker’s case particularly unusual.
They could just make it a crime to intentionally travel overseas to fight in wars without asking first. Not like, terrorism level, but a crime.
I think this bit is the best part though.Walker says that he downloaded an extract of the “Cookbook” while at university, where much of his time was spent learning about the military, intelligence agencies, and counterterrorism. He participated in a role-playing group called the Crisis Games Society, which organized simulations of major political or security crises in an effort to educate students about decision-making in emergency situations. On one occasion, Walker took part in a game in which one team of students performed the role of the security services, and another team played the part of terrorists plotting an attack; the groups were separated in different rooms and had to try to outwit each other. They used the “Anarchist Cookbook” as part of their research for the terrorist aspect.
Lol. No, we should be stupid instead and ban ideas, so sayeth the government.
It happens. One of my lecturers told us about an old student of theirs who was arrested for downloading an excerpt from the book for a research assignment. They were released once they demonstrated that point.
