I awoke this morning to find that Peter North, the political commentator and Manifesto Project lead (https://x.com/FUDdaily) has been arrested by North Yorkshire Police. He has apparently been arrested for some ‘hurty words’ bollocks namely putting out a meme that said ‘Fuck Hamas’ and ‘Fuck Palestine’. The North Yorkshire officers burst into his house yesterday evening (25th September) and arrested him in front of his wife. The police carted him off to Harrogate Police Station for questioning.
Here’s the link to the video of the arrest.
https://x.com/i/status/1971396341994791315
Upon arrest the police officers refused to tell Mr North exactly what he was being arrested for but in a long form article that Mr North has published, which I would recommend that you read and which is linked below, he states that during questioning he was asked about a well known meme that has been doing the rounds for ages. The meme in question contained the words ‘Fuck Hamas, Fuck Palestine, Fuck Islam. Want to protest? Fuck off to a Muslim country and protest’. This meme has been shared thousands upon thousands of times by Britons over a period of months. This meme is especially being shared by those who are not Jew hating nutjobs or those growing number of Britons who are pissed off with places like Central London being stuffed full every week with radical Muslims and idiot leftists calling for the murder of Israel’s Jewish population.
Here’s the meme in question.
It should not be a crime to criticise a terrorist group that is proscribed by the UK government neither should it be against the law to say ‘fuck Palestine’ and no ideology whether secular or religious should be shielded from criticism. This arrest is going to be seen by many as yet another bit of evidence of Britain’s two tier policing system because a person like Mr North can be arrested for a meme that contains the words ‘fuck Islam’ but those attending the pro-Hamas hate marches have their incitement to violence against Jews completely ignored by various police forces.
In his piece written about his arrest Mr North said of his police interview:
*I was asked whether I intended to incite racial hatred by posting the meme. I replied that Islam is not a race. I had not intended to stir up racial hatred. I simply agree with the premise of the meme. I am entitled to dislike a religion.
This was very much a politically motivated line of questioning. The intent was to establish if in some way I had sympathies with Tommy Robinson. I have mixed and nuanced views about him, but that is neither here nor there. I now recall that Tommy Robinson had faced police inquiries over that very same meme, and it is likely that I posted it in solidarity - because nobody should face police questioning over a meme.
Here’s a link to the entirety of Mr North’s piece about his arrest.
https://www.northernvariant.co.uk/p/last-night-i-was-arrested-for-a-tweet
It does seem to be the case that the police are going after Mr North not just because some overly sensitive Islamic headcase or some leftist idiot has got upset, but because this meme is linked in some way to Mr Robinson, even though there’s no evidence as far as I can see that Mr Robinson originated this meme. This arrest, as Mr North himself put it, is ‘outrageous and absurd’ and in my view is yet more evidence that Britain’s policing is both overly politicised and severely out of control.
This arrest, along with all the other thousands upon thousands of arrests for ‘speech crimes’ that are happening in the UK shows that US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance are absolutely correct when they said that free speech is in a terrible state in Britain. I may not agree with Mr North on every political utterance he makes but he should be free to make them even if such utterances do upset some people.
Today it is a political commentator like Mr North being arrested for what is basically a bullshit ‘crime’ but tomorrow it could be you.