Staff Reports
They came for a British blogger in the dead of night and hauled him away for sharing a meme that said Fuck Hamas — an arrest that should alarm every supporter of free speech on both sides of the Atlantic. Pete North, a 47-year-old commentator from North Yorkshire, was confronted at his home by officers who told him the hate crime team had flagged a social media post for investigation.
The image in question bluntly read Fuck Hamas, Fuck Palestine, Fuck Islam, with a final line telling protesters to go to a Muslim country to protest — a crude political jab, yes, but plainly political speech, not a riotous call to violence. North says he posted the image in August and shared footage of the arrest, forcing the public to see the heavy-handed tactics used to silence dissenting commentary.
Video from the scene shows officers arriving around 9:30 p.m., placing North in a custody van and taking him to Harrogate for questioning, where he spent hours in custody before being released pending further inquiry. Whether the goal was to secure a prosecution or simply to intimidate a vocal critic, the message sent to ordinary citizens is chilling: post something the state hates, and you may find yourselves shackled and interrogated.
Even more shocking than the arrest was North’s claim that an interviewing officer appeared unfamiliar with who Hamas are and what happened on October 7, undercutting the supposed justification for treating the meme as dangerous. If police are to prosecute political speech because of alleged links to terror, they ought at least to know the basics of the threat they claim to be policing — yet this episode exposed a worrying mix of incompetence and overreach.
The legal fig leaf for the raid was Section 19 of the Public Order Act and a referral from a hate crime unit, showing how broad and elastic our public order laws have become in the hands of bureaucrats. When a police department can decide that an insult, however clumsy or offensive, amounts to criminal material intended to stir up hatred, the line between legitimate law enforcement and political censorship disappears.
This is not a parlor debate about taste; it is a test of whether free citizens can speak plainly about hostile ideologies without fear of midnight knockdowns. Conservatives should not mince words: a state that punishes political mockery while letting violent extremism fester is betraying its duty to protect liberty, and Britain’s descent into a policing-of-opinion model is a warning to democracies everywhere.
Americans and patriots of every nation should take note and push back — loudly, politically, and legally — against any authority that treats speech as a crime when it merely offends. Defend the right to be blunt, ugly, and wrong sometimes, because the alternative is a soft tyranny that starts with memes and ends with silence.
