Met Police smash down door of Quaker meeting house to arrest activists

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/society/article/met-smash-down-door-of-quaker-meeting-house-to-arrest-activists-jhhchrtlt

by petethomas • 1 year ago

158 62 1 year ago

thetimes.com

jjani• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/Ndh1z

lisper3• 1 year ago

Kristallnacht writ small.

locopati2• 1 year ago

What hapoened is bad. Bad analogies are also bad. This is nothing akin to Kristallnacht.

lisper3• 1 year ago

It certainly doesn't compare to the scale of Kristallnacht (hence "writ small"). And Kristallnacht was just government-sponsored vandalism whereas in this case people were also arrested, so in that respect this was actually worse. But all that is neither here nor there. Kristallnacht was a harbinger of much worse to come, and that was what I intended to convey: I was making a prediction that this is a harbinger of much worse to come.

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

“The only resistance I could put up was to make tea and drink it in front of them without offering them any.”

The most British thing I’ve read this year

diggan• 1 year ago

To add additional context, Quakers are also famously non-violent, even when met with violence against themselves:

Quakers are one of the three historic peace churches and therefore have taken seriously the call to loving enemies and the practice of non-violence.

https://quaker.org/peace-and-nonviolence/

y33t2• 1 year ago

One notable exception to this was Jeremiah Dixon, of the Mason-Dixon line. From Wikipedia:

"Jeremiah Dixon, happening upon a slave driver mercilessly beating a poor black woman. 'Thou must not do that!' he shouted. 'You be damned! Mind your own business,' came the reply. 'If thou doesn't desist, I'll thrash thee!'
Tall and powerful, Jeremiah seized the slave-driver's whip and gave him a soun thrashing. When he returned to Cockfield, the whip came too, and was one of the Quaker family's treasured possessions."

sitkack2• 1 year ago

Except Nixon. http://www.oldchathamquakers.org/blog/was-nixon-really-a-qua...

ndsipa_pomu• 1 year ago

That's brutal

kazinator2• 1 year ago

I shall not say a word without the accompaniment of my barrister, unless you and I are properly introduced.

megous2• 1 year ago

Some more context https://x.com/youth_demand/status/1905635104057425922

readthenotes1• 1 year ago

",Only sustained mass resistance can put an end to genocide."

That doesn't sound very peaceful does it

augzodia• 1 year ago

Which part of this suggest violence to you?

b800h2• 1 year ago

The Quakers are fairly heavy politically invested, and most of them aren't even theists any more. There's no right of sanctuary in the UK, and if a group is sheltering criminals or providing them with premeses to plan criminal actions, it's damned right they should have their door busted in.

teraflop• 1 year ago

If you give police the right to invade and arrest any group that is "sheltering criminals", and you define "crime" broadly enough to include "suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance" i.e. encouraging protest, then you have given up on living in a free society.

blackguardx• 1 year ago

Why does it matter if they are theists or not? Would you afford more leniency to a catholic church?

b800h2• 1 year ago

I'm suggesting that the organisation is not the one that existed 100 years ago, even by a very large stretch of the imagination. The title is emotive largely because of the reputation of the organisation.

If the headline was "police raid house to arrest criminal activists", it wouldn't have made a blip.

michaelmrose• 1 year ago

Yes they absolutely would.

unsnap_biceps• 1 year ago

Yes. Hardened criminals being sheltered.

A Met spokesman said six women had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, amid fears of a sit-down protest in the capital. None have been charged.

teaearlgraycold• 1 year ago

Deport these radicals /s

flettcher• 1 year ago

"The women, aged between 18 and 38, were sitting in a circle eating hummus and bread sticks on Thursday evening as part of a “welcome meeting” for Youth Demand, which calls itself a non-violent protest group."

Eating hummus and bread sticks.

auselen• 1 year ago

You dip bread sticks to hummus, if anyone is having hard time to visualize this…

redwall_hp• 1 year ago

UK breadsticks are also not typically like the Olive Garden ones Americans probably imagine. They're pencil-thin and crispy.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

Well now it’s clear why they were arrested.

ben_w• 1 year ago

The most subversive of all the hors d'oeuvres.

/jk

jmyeet3• 1 year ago

Europeans like to look down on the rise of fascism in the US but even a superficial analysis shows that the US is simply Europe in 5-10 years.

For the UK in particular, people may point to how Labor swept the elections last year but they'd be wrong to say that there was left-wing momentum in the UK or even that it was another example of people voting against incumbent governments. Neither is true.

All that happened in the UK is the right-wing vote got split between the Conservatives and the even more right-wing Reform party. That's it. Come next election, that won't be the case. At the current rate, Conservative/Reform will merge or ally and sweep in a landslide. Starmer actually got fewer votes than Corbyn did in his previous two elections by a substantial margin.

The UK Labor party is playing the same role as the US Democratic Party. That is, they make occasional meek noises about institutional norms but they really don't oppose fascism at all. In fact, both parties are way more concerned with the rise of leftism than they are with fascism.

We've seen this exact same scenario play out in France. You have grooming victim [1] Macron who has tried to occupy some mythical "center" with Le Pen's National Front, the brainchild of leaders of Vichy France, playing the role of fascist party. But in France there's actually some leftist opposition. And what does Macron do? Routinely side with the fascists to keep the leftists out of power.

In the US, the role of Gestapo is being played by ICE. They take their marching orders from the Canary Mission to black-bag people who simply opposed Israel's genocide. This is quite literally picking up political dissidents and putting them into concentration camps.

The UK, France and Germany are well on their way to the same fate.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/06/politics/emmanuel-macron-wife...

cedws• 1 year ago

Social media is probably a major catalyst for hatred. Hatred is driving people to vote against their own interests.

onemoresoop• 1 year ago

Oh, absoltuley. And basically inviting any external propaganda machine direct access to people attention

jmyeet3• 1 year ago

I really dislike this idea that social media is somehow to blame. It's too superficial.

Right-wing hate speech dominates social media because it's the normative position of our society. All of that existed long before social media. The only reason people think otherwise is probably because they were too young to observe it.

Segregation only officially ended ~60 years ago. Even after that we have had, and even continue to have, economic segregation.

Slavery might've been officially abolished ~160 years ago but it exists to this day in the form of convict leasing.

Queer people were criminalized and persecuted up until the late 20th century.

Women only really gained bodily autonomy in the 1960s and 1970s (and lost some of it in 2022).

Social media simply reflects how popular all of these ideas still are.

AtlasBarfed• 1 year ago

Social media is a tool of corporations.

All Russia needs to do is bribe corporations.

It is that easy.

staticautomatic• 1 year ago

No. These people aren't "voting against their own interests." They're prioritizing their non-economic interests over their economic ones.

crimsoneer• 1 year ago

I mean, worth pointing out this group is pretty explicitly focused on conducting unlawful civil disobedience, and plenty of the members have previous convictions for doing just that. This is hardly the police just rounding up your local reading group.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/met-police-arrest-act...

DanAtC• 1 year ago

So? Were they conducting "unlawful" civil disobedience when raided?

more_corn2• 1 year ago

Planning one, hence the conspiracy charges. Seems pretty Orwellian to me though.

ImJamal• 1 year ago

Are police only allowed to arrest a rapist when he is raping? Are they only allowed to arrest a murderer in the middle of a murder?

nitwit005• 1 year ago

You're saying the prior arrests failed to be a deterent, so presumably these arrests won't work either.

Given that the goal of the group is to draw attention to their causes, and police action caused them to recieve a huge amount of attention, the whole thing seems rather self defeating.

dtj1123• 1 year ago

Some context:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummus

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadstick

penguin_booze2• 1 year ago

I don't see how that information can be complete without https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating.

tremon• 1 year ago

How to radicalize a generation, in just a few easy steps.

WarOnPrivacy• 1 year ago

    More than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with Tasers, 
    forced their way into the Westminster meeting house [of worship]
    and arrested six people at the meeting

    on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. 

    [police] arrested five other people for the same offence on Friday

Based on the given charge, Police had a feeling that some Quakers might be talking about being a public nuisance.

If we assume the best of the Met police, they first considered sending an officer over to talk to the Quakers and maybe offer some counsel.

And being the Met police and being faced with the potential of a non-violent resolution to a non-violent issue, the police instead opted for an approach that mirrors violent police raids.

That's if we assume the best of the Met police. They might not have ever considered a non-violent solution for Quakers.

arresin• 1 year ago

Dey didn’t have their noosence loicence.

nothercastle• 1 year ago

On the plus side their protest is already enormously successful and it hasn’t even happened yet.

kazinator2• 1 year ago

Why did this country bother issuing a travel advisory against going to the USA?

Met Police smash down door of Quaker meeting house to arrest activists

Related Stories