������Ƶ

LONDON: Palestine Action supporters say they will make the ban on the group “unenforceable” after it was proscribed as a terrorist organization by the UK government. 

On Thursday, the group’s founder Huda Ammori, 31, encouraged over 200 people in a Zoom meeting to protest the move this weekend in London and elsewhere, .

“My faith in people like you all is at an all-time high,” she said. “We’re a force to be reckoned with when we act together.

“The most effective route is through actions like the ones Defend Our Juries are leading the way on, in terms of making this ban unenforceable.”

Defend Our Juries is a group originally set up to convince juries not to convict climate activists engaged in disruptive behavior in the UK.

In the Zoom meeting attended by Ammori, a Defend Our Juries member encouraged people to be arrested, saying the police take “a soft approach” to conscientious protests.

“People will be thinking, ‘is that the end of it, has that repression worked to silence us?’ Imagine if it’s the opposite effect and there are double (the number) of us in Parliament Square on Saturday, and there are similar actions in Cardiff and Manchester,” the Defend Our Juries member said.

The call to protest comes a week after 29 demonstrators were arrested for supporting Palestine Action with placards in Westminster, including an elderly female Church of England priest.

“The Met (Police) commissioner has now got an excruciating dilemma. He was being hauled over the coals for wasting public money, for arresting an 83-year-old priest with a sign opposing genocide,” the Defend Our Juries member said.

“He’s either got to double down on that, leaving him looking like he’s not listening, or he’s got to leave it be, which is to admit the law is mad and unenforceable. He’s got no good option. As long as we turn up in numbers, we expose this.”

Palestine Action was outlawed on July 5 after members of the group broke into a Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton and vandalized military aircraft. Under the terms of the ban, support for the group could lead to a 14-year prison sentence. 

Protesters, though, are using encrypted messaging platforms such as Signal to plan further demonstrations in other UK cities, The Times reported. 

Ammori, of Palestinian-Iraqi heritage, has backed the protests to cause major disruption in the UK court system if hundreds of people are arrested under the Terrorism Act.

The first of these, in London, will be held in Parliament Square on Saturday at 1 p.m., and attendees were told via Zoom that they would be provided with placards, solicitors’ information and prepared statements to read to police if arrested.

A nine-page document was also issued with instructions to communicate via burner phones and on what to do when arrested, including to “go floppy” when manhandled by police to “add to the visual drama of the action” of “civil resistance.”

Another activist with over 100 arrests to their name told the Zoom call: “The worst thing we can do is to be scared. We have to become active … You will find it wonderful to do, important to do.

“If any of you have been getting depressed about issues recently, it’s a great antidote to depression.”

Ammori will appear before the High Court on July 21 after a judicial review of the ban on Palestine Action was called, with moves to prevent its proscription rejected by the Court of Appeal.

MANILA: President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will visit Washington this month, the Philippine Foreign Ministry said on Friday, making this the first trip of a Southeast Asian leader since Donald Trump took office.

The trip, which follows Trump’s tariffs announcement earlier this week, will take place from July 20 to 22, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement, adding that details of the visit are not yet finalized.

Philippine Ambassador to the US Jose Manuel Romualdez told reporters that Marcos is the “first ASEAN head of state invited by Trump,” referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Trade and security will likely be the focus of discussions, according to Prof. Ranjit Sing Rye, president of OCTA Research.

“I think it’s a very significant meeting of both leaders of the Philippines and the US, especially at this time when there’s so much dynamics in the … South China Sea,” Rye told Arab News.

“It signifies and symbolizes the broadening and deepening of US-Philippine relations under the Trump administration.”

Tensions have continued to run high between the Philippines and China over territorial disputes in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway through which billions of dollars of goods pass each year.

Manila and Beijing have been involved in frequent maritime confrontations in recent years, with China maintaining its expansive claims of the area, despite a 2016 international tribunal ruling the historical assertion to it had no basis.

The US has a seven-decade-old mutual defense treaty with the Philippines and Washington has repeatedly warned that a Chinese attack on Filipino ships could trigger a US military response.

Philippine and US forces have increasingly upped mutual defense engagements, including large-scale combat exercises in the Philippines.

Manila is also sending trade officials to the US next week to hold further negotiations on tariffs, after Trump raised a planned tariff on Philippine exports to the US to 20 percent from 17 percent.

It is not immediately clear if the Marcos visit will coincide with that of Manila’s tariff-negotiating team.

“Over the next three years, there will be, in my view, a broadening and deepening of US-Philippine relations on many levels, not just economic, not just socioeconomic, but also in trade, but also in security relations,” Rye said.

“And maybe some of these details will be threshed out during that meeting.”

This will be Marcos’ third visit to the US since he became president in 2022.

His last trip was in April 2024, when he met with then President Joe Biden and former Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in the first trilateral summit among the treaty allies.