Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! Supporters, Palestine Solidarity activists, families and friends of two of the imprisoned Thales 5 gathered outside and inside of Scotland’s High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh on 5 November. The mobilisation was there to protest and witness the appeal hearings of Stuart Bretherton and Calum Lacy.
These bold comrades were challenging the unjust sentences of 12 months imposed in August of that year for actions arising out of a rooftop occupation of the now infamous Thales arms factory in Govan, Glasgow. The activists from the direct action group Palestine Action stood up against Thales’ deadly supply of weaponry to the Israeli regime in 2022.
Now they were appealing their brutal sentencing, imposed by a Scottish court in the middle of a genocide where thousands of Palestinian civilians had been slaughtered and maimed by arms produced in such death factories. The Thales 5 had set out to forestall that massacre. The nobility and self-sacrifice of their actions was sullied by the vacuous calculations of the two lackeys sitting in judgement.
Crimes had been committed aye, but the criminals were not in the dock. The pretence of justice seen in court meant that the bewigged servants of a morally corrupt system deigned magisterially to reduce the originally imposed sentences from 12 to 10 months. Guidelines directing non – custodial sentencing were ignored so that such factories could continue to produce death and destruction in Gaza, the Occupied West Bank and Lebanon at Israel’s hands.
No doubt, Stu and Calum breathed more easily at the minimally shortened length of incarceration they were now to suffer but for all of us it was a lesson in the pathetic but deliberate operation of British justice in protecting the interests of arms multinationals and their blood soaked trade with the terrorist state of Israel. As millions continue to rise globally for Palestine and Lebanon, as the resistance hammers the murderous Zionist occupiers we say:
FREE THE THALES 5!
VICTORY TO PALESTINE!
ISOLATE THE ZIONIST STATE!
Join our next Public Meeting: ‘Break the chains: defence campaigning and prison struggles’
Wednesday 20 November
7 – 9pm
The Ark
Govanhill , Glasgow
G42 7JG
Organised by Glasgow Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
Follow us @glasgowfrfi_2
