16 ms·

British journalist held by police at Luton airport for five hours without arrest

291 points by mindracer 3y ago

pestatije 3y ago
the message and the messenger?
gottorf 3y ago
> where he was asked “do you consider your reporting objective” and his opinions of the British state. I don't imagine his opinions of the British state improved after this experience. Come to think of it, mine isn't, either...
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  Does anyone expect any different from the government who has participated in the active and ongoing political persecution of Julian Assange for now 11 years?
  - asdff 3y ago
    You don't even have to get geopolitical to rip on the UK nanny state. TV detector vans are straight up Orwellian to a point where one would consider it a parody from a comedy sketch if it weren't a real thing.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I keep forgetting that people still have TVs. I guess you can call the detector vans Orwellian? But only in so far as they were probably fictitious and strongly implied things that they couldn't do, which isn't the usual usage but kinda fits with the general category of propaganda about what the authorities can do — it was technically possible but unlikely to be affordable when they were making the biggest deal out of it, much easier to take the list of addresses which don't have a licence and look through the windows or knock on the doors and pretend that the van driving the inspectors had the electronics for what would later be called Van Eck phreaking. What is much closer to "so Orwellian you'd expect it in a comedy sketch parodying UK politics" are the pro-CCTV posters around London in the early 2000s, one of which I managed to spot in real life when passing through the city: https://www.wired.com/2002/11/londons-privacy-falling-down/ https://www.wired.com/2002/11/londons-privacy-falling-down/ That and the way the heavy-handed Met police response to the vigil held by women protesting misbehaviour by the Met police.
jarym 3y ago
> Why do you care about human rights? I dunno, perhaps the same reason Winston Churchill cared about them.
- arethuza 3y ago
  Which is presumably a reference to: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/what-european-convention-human-rights https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/what-european-convent...
- corobo 3y ago
  Not sure India and Ireland would agree with the idea Churchill cared about human rights :x https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29701767 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29701767 "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes" - Winston Churchill
  - SpaceManNabs 3y ago
    > Not sure India and Ireland India in the Modi era is pretty inspired by Churchill.
  - skippyboxedhero 3y ago
    He was referring to the use of tear gas in order to disperse crowds (rather than using violence)...that section of the memorandum tends not to be quoted (and Britain only used gases in warfare after Germany began using it indiscriminately in WW1). It is quite bizarre to imply that pre-colonial India was a haven for human rights but that Britain, the country with the most advanced legal system and which had recognised the notion of human rights nearly 900 years earlier, did not.
    - corobo 3y ago
      I made no comment about Britain. I was talking about Winston Churchill, the singular person. That is your infer, not my imply.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Broomfield said: “It seems clear the Schengen ban and my harassment by the UK police are driven by direct or indirect pressure from Turkey, on the basis of my work and reporting in Rojava and around the Kurdish issue.” This sort of crap is nothing new unfortunately. Erdogan's Turkey has been abusing international cooperation agreements at scale [1], not to mention holding up Sweden's entry to NATO, purely to fight against legitimate domestic resistance against his quasi-dictatorship/sultanate/caliphate (depending on whom you ask, but Turkey is certainly no democracy anymore). And that repression includes journalists such as Deniz Yücel [2], even foreign TV shows [3] and comedians [4] - everyone who criticises Erdogan or recognizes the Armenian genocide becomes a target. And where legal avenues fail, there is always the Grey Wolves, nominally a terrorist group, and closely linked to the Turkish government, to do Erdogan's bidding [5]. As for why no one does anything to hold Erdogan accountable... the answer to that is simple, he threatens to unleash refugees like he did in the past [6], and Turkey's cooperation regarding the Bosporus is vital in the Ukraine war. [1] https://www.justsecurity.org/87260/after-spotlight-on-red-notices-turkey-is-abusing-another-interpol-mechanism/ https://www.justsecurity.org/87260/after-spotlight-on-red-no... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniz_Y%C3%BCcel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniz_Y%C3%BCcel [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdowie,_Erdowo,_Erdogan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdowie,_Erdowo,_Erdogan [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Wolves_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Wolves_(organization) [6] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-strongly-rejects-turkeys-use-of-migrants-at-border/a-52640976 https://www.dw.com/en/eu-strongly-rejects-turkeys-use-of-mig...
- orochimaaru 3y ago
  Why complain if you need him? Not being snarky - but when it comes to things like these either you need some entity or you don’t. Sometimes they are needed bad enough that we excuse horrible behavior (US black sites, Saudi’s and Yemen, etc.). I think if you look you can put forth a rather long list. Point is unless you have the power to remove turkey from nato the complaining is pointless.
  - f6v 3y ago
hackideiomat 3y ago
Yet another case to note down in my "Anti Terror Laws Used Against Journalists" list.
perihelions 3y ago
- "Official figures show 2,498 people were stopped under schedule 7 powers in the year to 30 June, down 6% from a year before." They must employ an entire shift of airport workers dedicated to harassing journalists. Also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwald-guardian-partner-detained-heathrow https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwal... ("Glenn Greenwald's partner detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233646
- isk517 3y ago
  My question is out of those 2,498 people stopped how many of them actually had links to terrorisms? I will be extremely generous and say if the number is less than 2000 than sounds like you just have a system in place to harass random people.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Western government have had high-profile negative media coverage in the past because they weren’t keeping track of returnees from Syria, my guess is they are being more diligent in response to that. Regardless of the morality it is unusual and you aren’t really supposed to go to Rojava.
    - jmopp 3y ago
      Considering they asked him questions like "do you consider your reporting objective" and didn't return his phone and laptop, it's gone a bit beyond counter-terrorism. I would be less heavy-handed towards a journalist, due to the importance of a free media
  - ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
    Oh, there's nothing random about them.
  - EvgeniyZh 3y ago
    For imbalanced data, even accurate system will give tons of false positives. Unless you are willing to tolerate false negatives, having large false positive rate is almost inevitable. Rare disease testing is a popular example, but this one is a good instance to I think. Let's say there are 10 million people linked to terrorism in the world and the system is correct 95% of times. Then out of 20000 people, 20 are positives, and 19 will be stopped; out of 19980 negatives, 999 will be stopped. Compared to disease testing you may argue that FP is more harmful, but that's a different question. The point is that even very non-random system will be dominated by FP. Edit: in particular, if they stop truly random people and 500 of them are linked to terrorism that implies that 20% of all people passing there are terrorists.
dewclin 3y ago
Interestingly (?) earlier this year Kit Klarenberg was also held at Luton after getting of a plane from Belgrade ... https://thegrayzone.com/2023/05/30/journalist-kit-klarenberg-british-police-interrogated-grayzone/ https://thegrayzone.com/2023/05/30/journalist-kit-klarenberg...
- Synaesthesia 3y ago
  Yeah this hardly got reported on. We are seeing a wave of censorship, suppression and thought control in journalism.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    What do you mean? The media reports about important issues, such as boats, on a daily basis! /s
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Yeah we should arrest journalists when they don't agree with national policy. I'm glad you agree with Russia's government policy towards journalism by the way.
chias 3y ago
> "they asked why I was interested in human rights" presumably because he is, you know, human.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  Human Rights is a specific ideological framework. It's not a universal viewpoint, even though the framework itself might claim that it is.
pphysch 3y ago
British national and journalist Kit Klarenberg was detained in a similar manner earlier this year [1]. It is striking that this Guardian article doesn't mention that key fact. They didn't even report on it, even though it's virtually the same story. My guess is this story is "fit to print" because it pins the blatant authoritarianism on Erdoğan (acceptable target) rather than the British government (unacceptable target). There was no such scapegoat available in the Klarenberg detainment. [1] - https://jacobin.com/2023/06/us-uk-germany-attacks-on-press-journalists https://jacobin.com/2023/06/us-uk-germany-attacks-on-press-j...
- mnw21cam 3y ago
  The Guardian typically doesn't restrict its criticism of the British government. On the contrary, it appears to be one of its favourite sports.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    So why do you think they covered this story, but not the arguably higher-profile Klarenberg case? Slip under their radar?
    - Swenrekcah 3y ago
      It’s impossible to know if it applies to this case, but the UK has laws that can forbid media to report on a story and also to forbid them to mention anything about being forbidden to report it.
  - hackandthink 3y ago
    My perception: The Guardian deteriorated substantially around 2015. They became an establishment paper. The Guardian is mostly predictable, boring and neocon nowadays. https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of-julian-assanges-interview-went-viral-and-was-completely-false/ https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of...
    - 3y ago
sneak 3y ago
I've had the same thing happen to me re-entering the US on multiple occasions. Once I was kicked out of a border patrol point in northern Vermont in a snowstorm in February after they had sent my bus on without me hours before. I had to hitchhike to not freeze. Border cops are the worst.
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  > Border cops are the worst. They are just a symptom of what happens when you give people power and no accountability.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Well, Frontex, the EU border patrol agency, was imvolved in illegal pushbacks (you cannot deny entry to asylum seekers, not speak of the duty to help people in dostres at sea) multiple times. Even resulting in the death of people. Nothing happened, besides having the head of Frontex being removed. Go figure.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - hef19898 3y ago
        That is certainly a.... take on Frontex job. But by that take, tze job of border police is to shoot at people. Well, at least in East Germany that was part of the job description, they aimed at people tryingbto leave so. And invaders require an invasion. That means war, and then it woupd be the various NATO navies and airforces doing the shooting. What Frontex does is just simply illegal and inhumane in some cases.
        eastbound 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jeffrallen 3y ago
The only reason we are reading about this is he's a journalist. You have no rights at borders, especially in police states like the UK.
woodpanel 3y ago
Rest assure Britons, Germany is doing the same - even without the request of the Turkish head of state: https://reitschuster.de/post/neuer-psychoterror-wieder-die-polizei-wieder-die-banken-1/ https://reitschuster.de/post/neuer-psychoterror-wieder-die-p...
- hackandthink 3y ago
  This guy seems to be crank but anyway he should not be harrassed by the police.
  - woodpanel 3y ago
    He appears crank, but he is a seasoned journalist who started running his own blog fulltime, so parts of the appearance might be rooted in that. I can only speculate that we have to account for age, funding and personality. However what is less speculation is that he (and other critics of the German government) are receiving the full „Zersetzung“ Stasi-tactic treatment: Unwarranted unfounded police stops, especially at airports with well meaning officers even admitting there‘s some sort entry in the database, multiple banks cancelling his accounts, as well as all kinds of internet service providers kindly asking him to set up some shell entity to relief them from government pressure. All of this not only limited to him bit to family members as well (his 8-year old‘s daughter bank account „had to be“ suspended according to the bank) He has to run his website from _uckin Montenegro.
    - hackandthink 3y ago
      An authoritarian mindset is still common in Germany. And they adore their Staatssicherheit institutions, this is german at its best: „Verfassungsschutzrelevante Delegitimierung des Staates“ „Demokratiefeindliche und/oder sicherheitsgefährdende Delegitimierung des Staates“ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesamt_f%C3%BCr_Verfassungsschutz https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesamt_f%C3%BCr_Verfassungs...
- moritzruth 3y ago
  FYI > The Bayerische Staatszeitung described Reitschuster's website as "a controversial, right-wing online Platform". "Depending on one's point of view, it gave "COVID belittlers a podium o took a critical look at" the federal government's corona policy. The Handelsblatt and the Stuttgarter Zeitung called Reitschuster's Blog "right wing-conservative". journalist and lawyer Liane Bednarz described Reitschuster on Spiegel Online as the operator of a "blog with right-wing populist bias". According to NewsGuard, Reitschuster.de is a news blog "that reports on German politics from an undisclosed politically right-wing perspective." According to a September 2021 study by the British non-governmental organization Hope not Hate, Reitschuster's page was "among the most shared [on Facebook] by AfD profiles, alongside that of the German offshoot of the Russian state broadcaster RT." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Reitschuster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Reitschuster
FpUser 3y ago
>"...and his opinions of the British state" It had definitely turn south after what happened. Why the fuck do they care anyways?
3seashells 3y ago
[flagged]
tim333 3y ago
Aside from the general principles of free speech I'm a bit shocked they are going after supporters of the Kurds who as the article says fought on the British side against ISIS. Erdogan on the other hand who is probably behind this was trading oil with ISIS and letting them go on beach holidays in Turkey. It was ISIS who blew up busses in London not Kurds. Honesty the state should have some loyalty to our allies rather than our enemies even if the latter probably have more power and money.
mrlonglong 3y ago
oh joy, looks like our great UK govt has nothing better to do than kowtow to foreign powers and do their bidding. The Tories in power are becoming more and more fascist by the day. And Labour aren't so hot either.

291 points by mindracer 3y ago

the message and the messenger?

> where he was asked “do you consider your reporting objective” and his opinions of the British state. I don't imagine his opinions of the British state improved after this experience. Come to think of it, mine isn't, either...

ZoomerCretin 3y ago
Does anyone expect any different from the government who has participated in the active and ongoing political persecution of Julian Assange for now 11 years?
- asdff 3y ago
  You don't even have to get geopolitical to rip on the UK nanny state. TV detector vans are straight up Orwellian to a point where one would consider it a parody from a comedy sketch if it weren't a real thing.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I keep forgetting that people still have TVs. I guess you can call the detector vans Orwellian? But only in so far as they were probably fictitious and strongly implied things that they couldn't do, which isn't the usual usage but kinda fits with the general category of propaganda about what the authorities can do — it was technically possible but unlikely to be affordable when they were making the biggest deal out of it, much easier to take the list of addresses which don't have a licence and look through the windows or knock on the doors and pretend that the van driving the inspectors had the electronics for what would later be called Van Eck phreaking. What is much closer to "so Orwellian you'd expect it in a comedy sketch parodying UK politics" are the pro-CCTV posters around London in the early 2000s, one of which I managed to spot in real life when passing through the city: https://www.wired.com/2002/11/londons-privacy-falling-down/ https://www.wired.com/2002/11/londons-privacy-falling-down/ That and the way the heavy-handed Met police response to the vigil held by women protesting misbehaviour by the Met police.

jarym 3y ago

> Why do you care about human rights? I dunno, perhaps the same reason Winston Churchill cared about them.

arethuza 3y ago
Which is presumably a reference to: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/what-european-convention-human-rights https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/what-european-convent...
corobo 3y ago
Not sure India and Ireland would agree with the idea Churchill cared about human rights :x https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29701767 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29701767 "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes" - Winston Churchill
- SpaceManNabs 3y ago
  > Not sure India and Ireland India in the Modi era is pretty inspired by Churchill.
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  He was referring to the use of tear gas in order to disperse crowds (rather than using violence)...that section of the memorandum tends not to be quoted (and Britain only used gases in warfare after Germany began using it indiscriminately in WW1). It is quite bizarre to imply that pre-colonial India was a haven for human rights but that Britain, the country with the most advanced legal system and which had recognised the notion of human rights nearly 900 years earlier, did not.
  - corobo 3y ago
    I made no comment about Britain. I was talking about Winston Churchill, the singular person. That is your infer, not my imply.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Broomfield said: “It seems clear the Schengen ban and my harassment by the UK police are driven by direct or indirect pressure from Turkey, on the basis of my work and reporting in Rojava and around the Kurdish issue.” This sort of crap is nothing new unfortunately. Erdogan's Turkey has been abusing international cooperation agreements at scale [1], not to mention holding up Sweden's entry to NATO, purely to fight against legitimate domestic resistance against his quasi-dictatorship/sultanate/caliphate (depending on whom you ask, but Turkey is certainly no democracy anymore). And that repression includes journalists such as Deniz Yücel [2], even foreign TV shows [3] and comedians [4] - everyone who criticises Erdogan or recognizes the Armenian genocide becomes a target. And where legal avenues fail, there is always the Grey Wolves, nominally a terrorist group, and closely linked to the Turkish government, to do Erdogan's bidding [5]. As for why no one does anything to hold Erdogan accountable... the answer to that is simple, he threatens to unleash refugees like he did in the past [6], and Turkey's cooperation regarding the Bosporus is vital in the Ukraine war. [1] https://www.justsecurity.org/87260/after-spotlight-on-red-notices-turkey-is-abusing-another-interpol-mechanism/ https://www.justsecurity.org/87260/after-spotlight-on-red-no... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniz_Y%C3%BCcel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniz_Y%C3%BCcel [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdowie,_Erdowo,_Erdogan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdowie,_Erdowo,_Erdogan [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Wolves_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Wolves_(organization) [6] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-strongly-rejects-turkeys-use-of-migrants-at-border/a-52640976 https://www.dw.com/en/eu-strongly-rejects-turkeys-use-of-mig...

orochimaaru 3y ago
Why complain if you need him? Not being snarky - but when it comes to things like these either you need some entity or you don’t. Sometimes they are needed bad enough that we excuse horrible behavior (US black sites, Saudi’s and Yemen, etc.). I think if you look you can put forth a rather long list. Point is unless you have the power to remove turkey from nato the complaining is pointless.
- f6v 3y ago

hackideiomat 3y ago

Yet another case to note down in my "Anti Terror Laws Used Against Journalists" list.

perihelions 3y ago

- "Official figures show 2,498 people were stopped under schedule 7 powers in the year to 30 June, down 6% from a year before." They must employ an entire shift of airport workers dedicated to harassing journalists. Also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwald-guardian-partner-detained-heathrow https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwal... ("Glenn Greenwald's partner detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233646

isk517 3y ago
My question is out of those 2,498 people stopped how many of them actually had links to terrorisms? I will be extremely generous and say if the number is less than 2000 than sounds like you just have a system in place to harass random people.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Western government have had high-profile negative media coverage in the past because they weren’t keeping track of returnees from Syria, my guess is they are being more diligent in response to that. Regardless of the morality it is unusual and you aren’t really supposed to go to Rojava.
  - jmopp 3y ago
    Considering they asked him questions like "do you consider your reporting objective" and didn't return his phone and laptop, it's gone a bit beyond counter-terrorism. I would be less heavy-handed towards a journalist, due to the importance of a free media
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
  Oh, there's nothing random about them.
- EvgeniyZh 3y ago
  For imbalanced data, even accurate system will give tons of false positives. Unless you are willing to tolerate false negatives, having large false positive rate is almost inevitable. Rare disease testing is a popular example, but this one is a good instance to I think. Let's say there are 10 million people linked to terrorism in the world and the system is correct 95% of times. Then out of 20000 people, 20 are positives, and 19 will be stopped; out of 19980 negatives, 999 will be stopped. Compared to disease testing you may argue that FP is more harmful, but that's a different question. The point is that even very non-random system will be dominated by FP. Edit: in particular, if they stop truly random people and 500 of them are linked to terrorism that implies that 20% of all people passing there are terrorists.

dewclin 3y ago

Interestingly (?) earlier this year Kit Klarenberg was also held at Luton after getting of a plane from Belgrade ... https://thegrayzone.com/2023/05/30/journalist-kit-klarenberg-british-police-interrogated-grayzone/ https://thegrayzone.com/2023/05/30/journalist-kit-klarenberg...

Synaesthesia 3y ago
Yeah this hardly got reported on. We are seeing a wave of censorship, suppression and thought control in journalism.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  What do you mean? The media reports about important issues, such as boats, on a daily basis! /s
0xDEF 3y ago
[flagged]
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Yeah we should arrest journalists when they don't agree with national policy. I'm glad you agree with Russia's government policy towards journalism by the way.

chias 3y ago

> "they asked why I was interested in human rights" presumably because he is, you know, human.

avgcorrection 3y ago
Human Rights is a specific ideological framework. It's not a universal viewpoint, even though the framework itself might claim that it is.

pphysch 3y ago

British national and journalist Kit Klarenberg was detained in a similar manner earlier this year [1]. It is striking that this Guardian article doesn't mention that key fact. They didn't even report on it, even though it's virtually the same story. My guess is this story is "fit to print" because it pins the blatant authoritarianism on Erdoğan (acceptable target) rather than the British government (unacceptable target). There was no such scapegoat available in the Klarenberg detainment. [1] - https://jacobin.com/2023/06/us-uk-germany-attacks-on-press-journalists https://jacobin.com/2023/06/us-uk-germany-attacks-on-press-j...

mnw21cam 3y ago
The Guardian typically doesn't restrict its criticism of the British government. On the contrary, it appears to be one of its favourite sports.
- pphysch 3y ago
  So why do you think they covered this story, but not the arguably higher-profile Klarenberg case? Slip under their radar?
  - Swenrekcah 3y ago
    It’s impossible to know if it applies to this case, but the UK has laws that can forbid media to report on a story and also to forbid them to mention anything about being forbidden to report it.
- hackandthink 3y ago
  My perception: The Guardian deteriorated substantially around 2015. They became an establishment paper. The Guardian is mostly predictable, boring and neocon nowadays. https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of-julian-assanges-interview-went-viral-and-was-completely-false/ https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of...
  - 3y ago

sneak 3y ago

I've had the same thing happen to me re-entering the US on multiple occasions. Once I was kicked out of a border patrol point in northern Vermont in a snowstorm in February after they had sent my bus on without me hours before. I had to hitchhike to not freeze. Border cops are the worst.

polygamous_bat 3y ago
> Border cops are the worst. They are just a symptom of what happens when you give people power and no accountability.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Well, Frontex, the EU border patrol agency, was imvolved in illegal pushbacks (you cannot deny entry to asylum seekers, not speak of the duty to help people in dostres at sea) multiple times. Even resulting in the death of people. Nothing happened, besides having the head of Frontex being removed. Go figure.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - hef19898 3y ago
      That is certainly a.... take on Frontex job. But by that take, tze job of border police is to shoot at people. Well, at least in East Germany that was part of the job description, they aimed at people tryingbto leave so. And invaders require an invasion. That means war, and then it woupd be the various NATO navies and airforces doing the shooting. What Frontex does is just simply illegal and inhumane in some cases.
      - eastbound 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jeffrallen 3y ago

The only reason we are reading about this is he's a journalist. You have no rights at borders, especially in police states like the UK.

woodpanel 3y ago

Rest assure Britons, Germany is doing the same - even without the request of the Turkish head of state: https://reitschuster.de/post/neuer-psychoterror-wieder-die-polizei-wieder-die-banken-1/ https://reitschuster.de/post/neuer-psychoterror-wieder-die-p...

hackandthink 3y ago
This guy seems to be crank but anyway he should not be harrassed by the police.
- woodpanel 3y ago
  He appears crank, but he is a seasoned journalist who started running his own blog fulltime, so parts of the appearance might be rooted in that. I can only speculate that we have to account for age, funding and personality. However what is less speculation is that he (and other critics of the German government) are receiving the full „Zersetzung“ Stasi-tactic treatment: Unwarranted unfounded police stops, especially at airports with well meaning officers even admitting there‘s some sort entry in the database, multiple banks cancelling his accounts, as well as all kinds of internet service providers kindly asking him to set up some shell entity to relief them from government pressure. All of this not only limited to him bit to family members as well (his 8-year old‘s daughter bank account „had to be“ suspended according to the bank) He has to run his website from _uckin Montenegro.
  - hackandthink 3y ago
    An authoritarian mindset is still common in Germany. And they adore their Staatssicherheit institutions, this is german at its best: „Verfassungsschutzrelevante Delegitimierung des Staates“ „Demokratiefeindliche und/oder sicherheitsgefährdende Delegitimierung des Staates“ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesamt_f%C3%BCr_Verfassungsschutz https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesamt_f%C3%BCr_Verfassungs...
moritzruth 3y ago
FYI > The Bayerische Staatszeitung described Reitschuster's website as "a controversial, right-wing online Platform". "Depending on one's point of view, it gave "COVID belittlers a podium o took a critical look at" the federal government's corona policy. The Handelsblatt and the Stuttgarter Zeitung called Reitschuster's Blog "right wing-conservative". journalist and lawyer Liane Bednarz described Reitschuster on Spiegel Online as the operator of a "blog with right-wing populist bias". According to NewsGuard, Reitschuster.de is a news blog "that reports on German politics from an undisclosed politically right-wing perspective." According to a September 2021 study by the British non-governmental organization Hope not Hate, Reitschuster's page was "among the most shared [on Facebook] by AfD profiles, alongside that of the German offshoot of the Russian state broadcaster RT." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Reitschuster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Reitschuster

FpUser 3y ago

>"...and his opinions of the British state" It had definitely turn south after what happened. Why the fuck do they care anyways?

3seashells 3y ago

[flagged]

tim333 3y ago

Aside from the general principles of free speech I'm a bit shocked they are going after supporters of the Kurds who as the article says fought on the British side against ISIS. Erdogan on the other hand who is probably behind this was trading oil with ISIS and letting them go on beach holidays in Turkey. It was ISIS who blew up busses in London not Kurds. Honesty the state should have some loyalty to our allies rather than our enemies even if the latter probably have more power and money.

mrlonglong 3y ago

oh joy, looks like our great UK govt has nothing better to do than kowtow to foreign powers and do their bidding. The Tories in power are becoming more and more fascist by the day. And Labour aren't so hot either.