Simon Elmer on the Betrayal by Freedom Movement Spokespersons in Response to the Gaza Genocide

On 20 November, Simon Elmer tweeted his thoughts on “why the so-called ‘Freedom Movement’ has been betrayed by some of its most prominent spokesmen in response to the genocide being committed in Gaza, and what this tells us about future forms of resistance to the Great Reset.”

His tweet, for the most part, articulates much of what I have been feeling since I saw the likes of Laura Dodsworth and Norman Fenton lining up to support Israel’s exploitation of the 7 October Hamas attack as a pretext for genocide. In their October Declaration, they intimate that Israel’s barbaric response is justifiable: “Hamas knew that there would be consequences to 7 October, but the consequences did not weigh with Hamas.”

And so far, what are the consequences that the October Declaration signatories are comfortable with? According to Euro-Med monitor to the UN: 15,482 dead civilian Palestinians, including 7,208 children, 56,450 houses completely destroyed, 45% of all housing units uninhabitable, and 1 million people displaced.

Here is the tweet in full:

“These are some initial thoughts on why the so-called ‘Freedom Movement’ has been betrayed by some of its most prominent spokesmen in response to the genocide being committed in Gaza, and what this tells us about future forms of resistance to the Great Reset.

Firstly, there is no such thing as Freedom, only the freedoms we defend; and the idea that the last 40 years of Neoliberalism under which we lived in the UK were ‘free’ shows the political naivety of those who have only recently woken up to the conditions of our freedoms.

What freedoms we enjoyed were bought at the cost of the lack of freedom of a far larger number of people, and in almost every form extended no further than the freedom to believe the lies we were told, to buy what we were sold, and to obey what we were compelled by law to do.

Nonetheless, lockdown and the mandates on masking and gene therapy represented a quantitative leap in the erasure of our freedoms that was genuinely unprecedented, and caused many public figures that were otherwise quite content in their capitalist paradise to rebel.

This rebellion, first and foremost, was against the restrictions on their freedom to continue to enjoy their status within UK capitalism. And since the unfailingly cretinous Left was busy complying, these unlikely figures emerged to fill the vacuum in leadership in resistance.

Having no interest in UK society, I hadn’t heard of most of these figures before, but you probably know who I mean: Andrew Bridgen, Claire Fox, Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Laura Dodsworth, Mark Dolan, Laurence Fox, Tom Slater, Konstantin Kisin, Julia Hartley-Brewer, etc.

These are all politicians and hacks, and therefore, as required by their trade, liars, careerists and opportunists. I, for one, wasn’t in the least surprised that, when Gaza offered them the opportunity, they returned to the embrace of the establishment that spawned them.

However, among those denouncing criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, swallowing everything the media says, calling for a ban on protests, and demanding new laws to silence dissent — and in every respect behaving as the COVID-faithful behaved towards them — are some good people.

Among these I include the barrister, Francis Hoar, and the pathologist, Dr. Clare Craig. I know these two to be intelligent and moral people, and yet the former helped draft and organise, and the latter is one of the signatories, of the October Declaration.

This was published by British Friends of Israel, a Zionist organisation that, like all the others given 24/7 coverage in the UK media, is drawing on every racist stereotype, every deep-seated hatred of Arabs and Islam bred into the British psyche, to justify the genocide in Gaza.

This disturbs, confuses and upsets me, and for the past month I’ve been trying to understand how intelligent and moral people, who for the past 4 years risked their careers to defend our freedoms, have so readily added their voices to the hatred and barbarity of Zionism.

Zionism is an ideology, and as such it is founded on sentimentality and hatred, not on rational argument or historical facts. I won’t repeat my line-by-line criticism of the October Declaration, but it repeats every emotive appeal and racist stereotype of Zionism.

My first question, therefore, is how intelligent people can put their names to the repetition of such a document, which would not look out of place among the lies published by the UK Govt, media, SAGE, MHRA, etc to justify lockdown, mask mandates and the gene therapy programme.

The second question is how, in the face of the documented genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza, moral people can both condone and deny its extent with the same justifications with which the COVID-compliant deny the ‘vaccine’ deaths and justify the terrible cost of lockdown.

The short answer to the first question is that, when intelligent people are ‘triggered’ by ideology, they respond just as stupidly, obediently and viciously as the mass of the British population did in the first months of lockdown, gene therapy or the proxy war in the Ukraine.

The bigger question, therefore, is what is it about this particular event that has brought so many people who for the past 4 years denounced everything the Govt and media told us as a lie into sudden and total compliance with everything the same institutions are telling us now.

There’s a longer answer to this, which includes the hatred of Islam inculcated by 20 years of the War on Terror, fear of the rising levels of immigration into the UK, and the equation of terrorists with Muslims that has returned after their recent equation with ‘anti-vaxxers’.

I think also that, among Christians, there is a sense of guilt and culpability for the Church’s complicity in what it has designated as the ‘Holocaust’: a Biblical term that turns the genocide of the Jews into a sacrifice, a crime expiated by the suffering of the Palestinians.

In other words, the emotions being triggered to create allegiance to the UK’s criminal and indefensible support for the apartheid State of Israel and its genocidal treatment of the Palestinian people are a product of decades of indoctrination preparing us for just such a moment.

Part of that indoctrination is the strategy of identity politics. Many Zionists have pointed to the fact that Israel shares Western policies on LGBT rights, as opposed to those of Hamas, which as a fundamentalist Islamic movement opposes those rights.

This is part of the facade that Israel presents to the world that it is a shining light of liberal democracy amid the growing darkness of the Islamic Caliphate, just as Ukraine presents itself as a bastion of democracy defending Europe against Russian aggression. Both are lies.

In fact, both Israel and the Ukraine are testing grounds, to which the West has given its approval, funding and military support, for the transformation of the space of the sovereign nation state into a digital camp monitored and controlled by Digital ID and CBDC.

It’s a testimony to how fully identity politics has substituted itself for the politics of emancipation that even those who continue to oppose the technologies and ideologies of the biosecurity state have been suborned into compliance with the wars on which it is being founded.

What does this mean for the ongoing resistance to the Great Reset and the possibility of a future Freedom Movement, whose death, foreshadowed by the proxy-war in the Ukraine, can very accurately be dated to 7 October, 2023?

I can’t answer this now; but any hopes we have of resistance to the Great Reset must be formed in the context of the failure of the Freedom Movement to form itself into a political force, and of the ease with which the dilettantes by which it was led have been brought to heel.

Finally, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports that, since 7 October, the IDF has killed 17,144 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including 7,208 children and 3,716 women, injured 33,830, partially destroyed 162,950 homes and 174 health facilities, and displaced 1.7 million people.”

Some reflections on this:

Simon Elmer raises an interesting point about the role identity politics and ideology may have played in fooling otherwise “intelligent and moral people” into marching to the drum-beat of wars that will advance the biosecurity state agenda to which these people claim to be opposed. It is indeed doubly ironic that vocal freedom advocates have not only proven themselves partial to genocide but have also fallen victim to the same identity politics at which they appear to have been spitting blood for the better part of the last two years.

I recently watched Andrew Doyle at the Backyard Comedy club foaming at the mouth over the failure of liberal MSM commentators to unequivocally condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation. And as a gay comedian, he thought it pertinent to remind his erstwhile liberal luvvies that Hamas is not exactly a gay-friendly organisation. Now, if you can survey a genocide of 2.3 million people and conclude that gay rights combined with the disciplined application of terrorist designations will be your key points of focus, you really ought to see if the NHS could fund the removal of the two remaining brain cells rattling around your head so as to prevent them from causing you any further aggravation.

I said “appear to have been spitting blood” at identity politics, because in reality, and with the benefit of hindsight, these fake freedom lovers were not opposed to identity politics per se. They were in opposition to identities they disapproved of. They couldn’t rise above identity politics because they themselves are mired in it.

The red line we are defending is free speech and freedom itself. Proof, if proof were needed, that the fake freedom warriors don’t give a flying fiddle about free speech was provided when no less than the founder of the free speech union, Toby Young, in his capacity as editor of The Daily Sceptic, endorsed a move to ban ‘pro-Palestinian’ protests. From a pro-freedom perspective, it doesn’t get any more depressing than that – the founder of the free speech union unceremoniously pulled his pants down and dropped a turd on free speech. For the record, I did raise serious questions about Toby Young’s commitment to free speech back in September 2022.

That said, I do not share Simon Elmer’s pessimism in pronouncing the death of the Freedom Movement, although there is an air of ambiguity in his pronouncement since he also refers to the possibility of its future. I have never believed that the success of a Freedom Movement depended on any form of ‘leadership’ from anyone. A true revolution is not a changing of the guard; it’s a change in mass consciousness. Insipid culture-war commentators like Laura Dodsworth or supporters of CBDCs and selective free speech proponents like Toby Young are, to put it mildly, no loss.

As for the potential of the Freedom Movement to “form itself into a political force”, I have vested some hope in the Independent Alliance. At this point, the Independent Alliance movement, should it take off as intended, seems to be the only hope we have right now of storming the barricades.

While there will certainly be no knights in shining armour coming to the rescue, it’s also not realistic to expect a dramatic storming of the barricades by popular will. Victory depends on a critical mass of silent non-compliance and we all have our part to play in that, so keep sharpening your non-compliance swords! 7 October has filtered out the “liars, careerists and opportunists”, of which admittedly there are many, but I have also been heartened by the many who have used their megaphones to keep shouting for basic decency and common sense.

The most interesting reply to Simon Elmer’s thread pointed out that we now know who the true radicals are, and that they are “the essential element for any revolution”. Sure, we’ve all had images of radicals presented to us in history books but I’ve not thought too deeply about what a radical for this age looks like. Perhaps it’s just someone who wants real freedom for everyone and doesn’t care about money, fame, identity politics or losing friends when defending their ideals. If a revolution is a change in mass consciousness, we’ll all need to learn how to be radical.