The UK Just Arrested Someone for Praying Silently

Russia is our enemy because they're anti-freedom and interfere in our elections, huh?

What about the UK?

She Was Arrested for Praying in Her Head

Citizens in the UK have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for silently praying outside abortion clinics. Even organizing pro-life meetings in your own home may be a criminal offense.

By Madeleine Kearns

October 24, 2024

Emma has strong feelings about abortion: She wears T-shirts that say things like "Pro-life and Proud." A devout Catholic, she is a trustee of a pro-life activism group and regularly holds planning meetings at her flat in Edinburgh, Scotland. On her way to work at an office in the center of town, the 24-year-old passes the abortion facility at nearby Chalmers Hospital. Sometimes, she prays with rosary beads as she walks by.

But now she's worried she could get arrested in her neighborhood--for wearing that T-shirt, for holding those meetings, or even for praying in her head.

On October 4, Emma, who asked not to be named, got a letter from the Scottish government. Addressed "Dear Resident," its purpose was to alert her that her home, due to its proximity to the hospital, is now in an abortion censorship zone.

This is due to the UK's brand-new "Safe Access" law, which came into effect September 24 and made it a criminal offense to do anything within 200 meters of an abortion facility that could "influence" someone's decision to access, provide, or facilitate an abortion. In the Scottish government's letter, Emma read that even "activities in a private place (such as a house) within the area could be an offence if they can be seen or heard within the Zone and are done intentionally or recklessly."

"You can report a group or an individual that you think is breaking the law," the letter added, before providing instructions on how to do so.

Emma couldn't believe her eyes. The law carries a maximum fine of £10,000 (over $13,000). In June, it passed in The Scottish Parliament by 118 votes to one, following in the footsteps of Northern Ireland, which became the first country in the UK to enforce abortion censorship legislation last year. The rest of the UK is doing the same: On October 31, a similar law will come into effect in England and Wales; it was passed by Parliament in 2023. In these countries, the fine will be unlimited.

All of this legislation codifies--on a national level--a trend that has been creeping across the UK for a decade. Ten years ago, in 2014, Parliament empowered local councils to create and police their own antisocial behavior laws. The intention was to enhance "the professional capabilities and integrity of the police." But since 2018, five UK districts have used these powers to aggressively limit what people can do, say, and even think, near abortion clinics. I spoke to four people who have fallen afoul of these restrictions, and a disturbing pattern emerged.

In November 2022, Adam Smith-Connor, now 51, a physiotherapist and veteran, was interrogated by local authorities in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, which had recently introduced an abortion censorship zone. His alleged crime was silently praying for three minutes while 50 meters from an abortion clinic. When council officers asked, "What is the nature of your prayer?" he replied: "I am praying for my son who is deceased," referring to his unborn child that he and his then-girlfriend decided to abort two decades ago.

Smith-Connor was charged with breaching the censorship zone. Earlier this month, on October 16, he was convicted and ordered to pay £9,000 (roughly $11,700) toward the prosecution's legal fees. He set up a page on a crowdfunding website, which raised the fee within hours. He and the lawyer supporting him are considering an appeal.

The same day, also in Bournemouth, the trial of Livia Tossici-Bolt was due to begin. The retired scientist, who's 64, faces the same charges as Smith-Connor, but her alleged offense is standing outside an abortion clinic in March 2023 with a sign that simply read: "Here to talk, if you want." (Her trial was postponed to March 2025, to give both legal teams time to consider the implications of Smith-Connor's verdict.)

Related: Kamala called for abortion to be mandated across the US, with no exemptions for people of faith.

In other words: Abortion is such a sacrament that nuns working in Catholic hospitals will be compelled to do Moloch's work.

Oh, and they also ran "black ops" (as they themselves called them) against RFKJr.

These are foreign nationals.

The leftwing globalist authoritarian Atlantic Council -- perfect!

Full thread here.

Here's the story from Unherd.

According to documents published in America by investigative reporters Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi, "British advisers to Kamala Harris hope to 'kill [Elon] Musk's Twitter'", demonstrating that "England, not Russia, is the culprit in a real foreign election interference story."

They aren't referring to the British Labour volunteers said to be assisting the Democratic candidate's presidential bid, but instead to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a pro-censorship charity and campaign group co-founded in 2018 by Keir Starmer's Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney. The political advisor is here ascribed quasi-magical powers, such that "no political operative in the Western hemisphere is more in demand than Starmer's 'Rasputin', regularly hailed as a genius."

To British eyes, that and other claims in the article -- including that Starmer's election victory "relied heavily" on the CCDH -- look overblown. The organisation played no discernible part in Labour's campaign, while McSweeney stepped down as a CCDH director on 6 April 2020, two days after Starmer became leader of the Labour Party.

But in a recent and thus far unpublished conversation with me, Imran Ahmed, a former Parliamentary aide who also co-founded the CCDH and serves as its chief executive, said a number of things that free speech advocates less radical than Elon Musk may find worrying.

He spoke of his "five-year plan" to make social media platforms "accountable" for their content, and to make it impossible for anyone to generate revenue from what the CCDH classes as "hate speech". By this term, Ahmed doesn't just mean overt expressions of racism or other prejudices, but rather what he calls "lies" and "disinformation". In his view, "lies and hate are inextricably linked."

What's more, a glance at the CCDH website will confirm that its definition of lies is unusually expansive. It includes, for example, "the new climate denial" -- not denial per se of the proposition that human beings and the greenhouse gases we emit cause global warming, but challenges to Government policies that are supposedly going to fix it.

According to Ahmed and the CCDH, these "lies" are "welcomed, enabled, and often funded by oil and gas tycoons", and thus undermine "the politicians doing the hard work to green our economic models and incentives".

...

Thacker and Taibbi's smoking gun was a set of leaked CCDH documents suggesting that "killing" Twitter/X really is high on its agenda, and has been for months. In April, a US federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Musk brought against the CCDH for supposedly costing it tens of millions of dollars in revenue after it exposed alleged "lies and misinformation" on X. This -- with no irony intended -- Ahmed portrayed as a famous victory for free speech.

When the CCDH was founded, Ahmed told me, few people took social media content seriously. Speaking of the spread of antisemitism, especially since the Hamas attack on Israel in October last year, he said it was now evident we had entered a "nuclear age of disinformation and hate".

....

More fundamental is his "five-year plan" to invigilate and regulate social media advertising. Ahmed cited channels that had made money from false claims about George Floyd's death, which he described as "racist disinformation merchants", as well as campaigns against Net Zero and "conspiracy theories" about Covid-19.

I have long been an Anglophile, but I ask the question again, seriously:

Why are we willing to risk a nuclear war with Russia for spending $150,000 on FaceBook ads, when a British intelligence front group is working to suppress Americans' most basic freedom?

Maybe we should start thinking about a new enemy. If the warmongers will always demand we declare some country an enemy and escalate against it, why not the UK?

Meanwhile, Microsoft has a new "expert" advising it on "disinformation:" The grifter and anti-speech zealot who branded, WITHOUT EVIDENCE, thousands of Americans a "Russian agents" and pressured Twitter and the other social media companies to ban them.

His claims were so extravagant and flimsy that even Twitter's old, leftwing "Safety" commissars branded them as specious and told people in the media (who were taking his claims and then pressuring Twitter to do his bidding) to stop listening to him.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:55 PM

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