UK Counter-Terror Laws Weaponized Against Palestine Solidarity: 94-Year-Old Quaker Elder Among Dozens Arrested
Original framing: “Margaret Owen, 94, arrested again during Palestine Action ban protest” — Middle East Eye
The trickster exposes the category's emptiness through absurdity: Eshu (Yoruba) places a red-black hat between two friends who then fight over its color — the state's 'terrorism' label functions identically, making enemies of conscience and law. Erasmus's Praise of Folly (1511) names what solemnity conceals: the 94-year-old 'terrorist' is the fool who speaks truth the wise cannot. Bakhtin's carnivalesque inverts hierarchy — the frail elder in handcuffs unmasks the sovereign's naked violence. Anansi (Akan) tricks the sky god into releasing stories by capturing the python, leopard, and hornets — Owen captures the state's legitimacy by refusing its script. The trickster does not mock; it clarifies. The arrest is not a tragedy but a revelation: the emperor's 'security' has no clothes.
Margaret Owen's arrest is not an anomaly but the latest iteration of a century-long British pattern: emergency legislation — from DORA 1914 to the Terrorism Act 2000 — repurposed to suppress dissent that threatens imperial and post-imperial interests.
The proscription of Palestine Action, the first non-violent group banned under counter-terror law, protects a UK-Israel arms trade worth hundreds of millions annually while criminalizing the Quaker tradition of 'bearing witness' that Owen embodies. The trickster reveals the category collapse: a 94-year-old 'terrorist' exposes the label's emptiness, just as Eshu's hat exposes the arbitrariness of power's categories. Historical precedent shows such overreach eventually triggers judicial and parliamentary pushback — the 1974 Act was not renewed, control orders replaced by TPIMs — but only when marginalized voices (Palestinian diaspora, Muslim communities targeted by Prevent, climate activists facing similar proscription) build coalitions across the artificial boundaries the state draws between 'legitimate' and 'extremist' protest. The systemic solution requires not merely legal reform but a reckoning with the UK's structural role in Palestinian dispossession that makes such protest morally necessary, transforming Owen's arrest from spectacle into catalyst for the democratic renewal the Terrorism Act was designed to prevent.