Seven charged over Arabic placards in Starmer crackdown

Seven charged for an Arabic word

Tony Greenstein was holding a placard at the Nakba Day demonstration on May 16 when police arrested him. The sign read “Globalise the Intifada.” Three weeks later, Greenstein and six others became the first cluster of people charged under a political directive issued by the Prime Minister himself, not because they broke a specific law, but because Keir Starmer decided their words were unacceptable.

“I hope that the Crown Prosecution Service prosecute this absurdity,” Greenstein said from the dock. “Let us test Rowley’s Law in court, and when I’m acquitted, that the racist bastard resigns.”

Greenstein is Jewish. He has spent decades campaigning for Palestinian rights. His identity is not incidental to the charge. It is the charge’s refutation. The state has accused supporters of Palestinian liberation of antisemitism, and a Jewish man who has dedicated his life to this cause is now facing prosecution for holding a sign in Arabic.

The Prime Minister’s edict

In December 2025, Keir Starmer described “Globalise the Intifada” as an example of “extreme racism.” He called for people to be prosecuted for using the phrase. No new legislation was passed. No legal threshold was defined. No court had ruled on whether the phrase constituted an offence. The Prime Minister simply declared it so, and police obeyed.

Within days of Starmer’s statement, the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police announced that chanting the phrase could lead to arrest. They did not cite a statute. They did not point to a specific legal test. They relied, as The Canary reported, on “vibes and fear.” The collective anxiety generated by events overseas, translated into domestic police action against a phrase most British people cannot even translate.

The linguistic case for the defence

This is not a case of police applying law to ambiguous facts. It is a case of police inventing law to suppress a phrase they do not understand.

Dr Abdul Bashid Shaikh, a lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Leeds, and Prof Mustapha Sheikh, Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies at the same institution, have published a peer-reviewed paper, endorsed by over two dozen scholars, making a simple argument: there is no evidential basis for treating references to intifada in these contexts as encouragement of terrorism or violence.

“Intifada” in Arabic means “to shake off,” specifically to shake off military occupation. It is a word of liberation. The Palestinian intifadas of 1987 and 2000 were mass political movements against Israeli military domination. When protesters chant “Globalise the Intifada,” they are expressing solidarity with a people seeking to shake off occupation. The academics state plainly: “attempts to conflate the term with jihadist violence represent a category error.” Their conclusion is unambiguous: the phrase “falls within the domain of lawful political expression that democratic societies have traditionally sought to protect.”

This is not a minority opinion within academia. It is the consensus of Arabists, Islamic Studies scholars, and linguists who understand the language being suppressed. The state has no corresponding expertise to cite. It has only the Prime Minister’s declaration.

The Bondi Beach justification

The crackdown accelerated after the Bondi Beach attack in early 2025, in which an assailant killed several people in Sydney. Police and ministers pointed to that incident as justification for treating “intifada” as a coded call to violence. But the Bondi attacker was not a Palestinian solidarity campaigner. He was not chanting “Globalise the Intifada” at a protest. The connection is a category error, the same error the Leeds academics identify.

Using an attack carried out by an individual with no connection to British protest movements as a pretext to criminalise Arabic political vocabulary is not law enforcement. It is associative repression: the state searching for any pretext to suppress a phrase it finds politically inconvenient.

The counter-argument, and why it fails

The strongest defence the Crown Prosecution Service can offer is that the phrase, as now understood in UK public discourse, constitutes harassment or intentional alarm under existing public order law, not because of its linguistic meaning, but because of its contextual associations. Some Jewish communities report genuine distress at hearing the phrase used in protest.

This must be taken seriously. But context matters. Many Jewish individuals and organisations participate in demonstrations using the term and explicitly reject the state’s framing. Greenstein himself is one of them. The phrase is not being used to threaten anyone. It is being used to express political solidarity with an occupied people. The academics note that conflating a word of liberation with terrorism “represents a category error.” When the Prime Minister orders prosecutions for an Arabic word meaning “shake off occupation,” the state is not protecting Jewish communities from harm. It is criminalising the political vocabulary of Palestinian solidarity.

If the CPS proceeds against Greenstein and the six co-accused, the cases will be decided in open court. That is precisely what Greenstein wants. He is not hiding behind procedural technicalities. He is daring the state to defend its position before a judge.

The principle at stake

Seven people have been charged for holding a sign with an Arabic word. The word means liberation from military occupation. The Prime Minister ordered their prosecution without legislation, without a defined legal threshold, and without any supporting academic evidence. Scholars at a British university have demonstrated, with peer-reviewed evidence, that the phrase is lawful political expression.

This is not about hate speech. This is about which words a government can ban without passing parliament, without defining a crime, and without admitting it is silencing a political movement. When the state suppresses the language of an occupied people, an Arabic word for liberation, the principle at stake is not whether the phrase is offensive. It is whether the state can criminalise political speech on the basis of ministerial decree alone.

Greenstein will face his accusers in court. He has asked them to prosecute him. He wants the world to see what “Rowley’s Law” actually means: a Prime Minister who personally dictates which phrases are criminal, and police who enforce the decree without قانون.