Via Socialist Unity comes the news that Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists arrested last year for disrupting a concert by the Jerusalem Quartet in Edinburgh will appear in court October 1 on charges of racially aggravated conduct.
For mysterious reasons, the prosecutors in the case dropped the perfectly appropriate charge of breaching the peace and substituted the current charge. This, of course, gives the SPSC the opportunity to turn the case into a political cause célèbre and themselves into martyrs for Palestine.
Of special interest is the list of witnesses “who have agreed to give expert evidence or personal testimonies for the defence.” They include onetime aircraft hijacker and anti-Zionist pinup Leila Khaled, as well as Tony Greenstein and several other “asa Jews” (i.e., “Asa Jew, I am shamed and appalled by everything Israel has done, is doing and ever will do– short of dissolving itself, of which I would be proud”).
What will Greenstein’s expert evidence or personal testimony comprise, I wonder? Whatever it is, I expect it will work wonders– for the prosecution.
