On 20 August 2025 several hundred protestors, clad in Irish and Palestinian colours, gathered to voice support for a most curious matter – the right of an Irish musician to display a Palestinian organisation’s flag at his gig in London.
The fact that Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh was brought in under terrorism charges for such an act seems even stranger.
Of course, those familiar with the now two-year-long genocide in Palestine won’t find this very surprising at all.
Neither is it surprising that Liam, a member of Irish republican rap group Kneecap, would take a principled stand on the question of Palestinian liberation. Ireland was brutally oppressed by the British ruling class for hundreds of years and Kneecap’s lyrics are fiercely opposed to British imperialism’s historic crimes against the Irish people. Crimes that persist while six of Ireland’s 32 counties remain occupied.
But it was never really just about raising a flag. In Liam’s view, the farcical attempt by the British government to level charges against him was “always about Gaza”. The hundreds of thousands of us still attending anti-genocide protests across the country, and especially the national demonstrations in London, are increasingly aware of the government’s growing repression of any support for the people and resistance forces of Gaza.
Comrades of the CPGB-ML attended and leafleted a protest that was held outside the Westminster magistrates court in London when Liam, whose stage name is Mo Chara, was attending his first court hearing. (Read our leaflet to find out more about the case here: Resistance is not a crime. Support Mo Chara! Support Palestine!)
The night before the protest the Met police tweeted details of the ‘officially designated area’ in which the gathering would be allowed to occur. The frightfully small space was clearly not big enough to contain the hundreds who turned up on the day.
The first few hours saw a very cramped crowd constantly pestered by the police to move this or that way to match up with their imagined cordon. Protestors had to walk into oncoming traffic just to get from one side of the court to another.
Eventually, even the police had to recognise the unnecessary danger they had created and widen their arbitrary perimeter by a single lane of traffic, only for the space to be almost immediately filled in again by the burgeoning crowd of protestors.
The cordon was so tight that our comrades were only able to give out their leaflets to the outer rings of the crowd. Seemingly the only ones written specifically for the occasion, they were gleefully snatched out of our hands by fellow protestors, eager for a working-class analysis of the government’s mad attempt to criminalise every show of support for Palestine.
Attempts to criminalise anti-imperialist and anti-genocide activity
Kneecap are amongst the now thousands of political activists caught up in the British government’s attempts to punish dissent on the question of Palestine. Comrades of the CPGB-ML have been arrested under the very same law, the infamous Terrorism Act. More recently, hundreds have been arrested for opposing the proscription of Palestine Action, a British group whose aim has been to close down the British-based wing of the Israeli genocide machine by non-violent but direct-action means.
Hezbollah, the anti-zionist resistance movement of southern Lebanon, is the organisation whose flag is in question in Liam Óg’s case. It, too, is on the government’s list of proscribed organisations, meaning that any show of support for it is officially classified as a serious offence under ‘anti-terror’ legislation. This makes for wonderfully misleading news reports that can faithfully report that ‘x number of protestors were arrested under the Terrorism Act at the latest Palestine protest’ without ever making it clear that those in question were simply holding a flag or wearing a t-shirt.
What those news agencies also neglect to inform their readers is that these ‘criminals’ were later let go without charges, having been found to have not actually broken the law but simply displayed support for the Palestinian movement as a whole – an act which the state, still caught up in its pretence of upholding the ‘rule of law’ and ‘freedom of speech’, is as yet unwilling to criminalise outright.
Any thinking person can tell you that expressing sympathy towards the views of a British group of peaceful activists is not a crime. Any thinking person can tell you that expressing sympathy for the cause of a Palestinian/Lebanese resistance group, which is not even active on British soil, is also not a crime.
But the government’s lazy ‘solution’ of adding more and more names to the list of proscribed terrorist organisations not only impinges on freedom of speech but also distracts attention away from actual terrorists.
This isn’t the first time the government has expressed dislike for Kneecap. The group’s strong anti-establishment views have been publicly condemned by several British politicians, including former Tory business secretary Kemi Badenoch.
The group had applied for a grant under the Music Export Growth Scheme, an application which was initially accepted. This makes a lot of sense – Kneecap have toured across Europe, North America and Australia, and even have a gig lined up in Japan in 2026. This is despite the fact that the group raps almost exclusively in Irish, peppered with a few well-placed English-language insults hurled at the British ruling class.
But their anti-establishment views were seen as politically unacceptable by Badenoch, who stepped in and vetoed their application. Kneecap took the government to court and were subsequently awarded the full grant in a discrimination case.
“For us, this action was never about £14,250; it could have been 50p,” one member stated.
“This was an attack on artistic culture, an attack on the Good Friday Agreement itself, and an attack on Kneecap and our way of expressing ourselves.”
The group went on to donate their winnings to two youth groups in Belfast – one in a republican area and one in a unionist area. (Irish band Kneecap win discrimination case against UK government, Sky News, 29 November 2024)
Criminalisation campaign backfiring
The Labour party, so desperate to present itself as ‘pragmatic’ and as ‘electable’ as the Tories, has gone even further with its absurd application of the Terrorism Act against activists like the members of Kneecap.
On 26 September, at a second hearing (moved at the last minute to Woolwich crown court in an attempt to bring down the number of protestors attending), the case against Liam Óg was thrown out to the cheers of protestors outside the hearing. Mo Chara had this to say to the bourgeois press waiting outside the court:
“This entire process was never about me. It was never about any threat to the public, it was never about terrorism – a word used by your government to discredit people you oppress.
“It was always about Gaza, about what happens if you dare to speak up. Your attempts to silence us have failed because we’re right and you’re wrong.” (Kneecap rapper’s terror case thrown out by Kelly Bonner and Barry O’Connor, BBC News, 26 September 2025)
It should have been clear that the government had lost this battle, having exposed its own complicity and double standards to the public and inadvertently further publicised the horrific genocide ongoing right now in Palestine.
But in yet another blunder, the Labour government is appealing the decision, failing to see that Kneecap are bound to use the case once more to expose government criminality and raise the issue of Palestine in the corporate media.
Although the two-year anniversary of the genocide has just passed, we all know the reality: that the last two years have marked only the most recent surge in political violence by Israel; that it has really been nearly 80 years since Israel first began invading and casting Palestinian people out from their rightful land.
The issue of Palestine has woken millions of people up to the crimes of British and American imperialism, and their puppets in Israel. Read our pamphlet to learn about the history of zionism.
Join us in opposing genocide and in our fight for a campaign of mass non-cooperation!
