Remember Gaza

Worthing Anarchists are supporting the Smash Edo demonstration happening in Brighton on Monday.

The protest is called Remember Gaza, in January 2009 for three weeks the Israeli military dropped bombs on Gaza killing 1,400 Palestinians, 314 of whom were children.

This heinous and disproportionate crime did not go unopposed, all over the country, and the world, demonstrations took place. See this video of the protest in London

On January 18^th 2010 on the anniversary of the massacre, we will gather in Brighton to remember the people of Gaza.

As the smash edo website puts it;

“We will not allow those who supported their pain and profited from their suffering to go unchallenged. We will not let this genocide be forgotten. On the first anniversary after their deaths, we will rise up. We will take to the streets. We will remember...

Assemble at 1pm, wear black...”

Meeting Point for the Demo

The SmashEDO Remember Gaza Mass Demo will be meeting in front of the Wild Park Cafe at 1pm on Monday 18th January

How to get there...

By Bus
23, 25, 24, 28, 29(A+B) from St Peter's Church bus stops.

To get to St Peter's Church from Brighton Train Station; turn left through underpass in front of station onto Trafalgar Street. Walk to the end of Trafalgar Street. Turn left onto York Place, cross to traffic island for bus stops. Remain on the bus past Brighton University's Moulsecoomb campus. Get off the bus at the first stop after the viaduct, just past Home Farm Road. You will see the Wild Park Cafe on the left.

By Train
You can catch the train from Brighton Station to either Moulsecoomb or Falmer and walk along the Lewes Road.

From Moulsecoomb Station:
Walk down Queensdown School Road to Lewes Road, turn left. After about 500 metres
walk under the railway viaduct, go past Home Farm Road on your left and you will see
the Wild Park Cafe on the left.

From Falmer Station:
Walk under the underpass to the A27 and turn Left. Carry on on the Lewes Road and
you will see Wild Park Cafe on your right.

By Bike/On Foot
From Brighton Station; walk through underpass in front of station onto Trafalgar
Street. Walk to the end of Trafalgar Street. Turn left onto York Place, continue
straight and then turn right past the taxi rank. Keeping 'The Level' on your left,
keep going straight onto Lewes Road. From here, follow the Lewes Road out of
Brighton towards Falmer. Go under the railway viaduct, go past Home Farm Road on
your left and you will see the Wild Park Cafe on the left. There are cycle lanes and
pavements along the road from Brighton to Falmer.

For more info: Remember Gaza website

Gil - a true anarchist

IT IS with great sorrow that we record the death of our comrade Gil (Michael Gilbert).

An anarchist for some half a century, he was a stalwart of the Worthing anarchist scene for numerous years and a good friend of many of us.

Despite the restrictions of his failing health, he continued to take part in a range of political activities and managed to get up to the Anarchist Bookfair in London in October.

Although well versed in anarchist theory and history, it was not the writers and theoreticians whom Gil most admired - it was the men of action.

Men like Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian anarchist guerrilla and Buenaventura Durruti, the inspiring anarchist fighter in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939.

The attitude of all these heroes can be summed up in the anarchist slogan "It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!", which Gil heartily endorsed.

Gil certainly didn't live on his knees. As well as his political involvement, he was a relentless crusader against every aspect of petty repression, discrimination and exploitation that he encountered in his day-to-day life.

A thorn in the side of the uncaring authorities, he was also a guardian angel for many people who came to rely on his guidance and support.

It was this practical dedication to mutual aid, to human solidarity, that made Gil such a genuine and exemplary anarchist.

Even when he died, after a heart attack, it was while doing a favour for a friend - dying on his feet, helping other people.

He will be hugely missed.

Gil's funeral is at 2pm on Wednesday January 13 at Worthing Crematorium, Findon (Buses 1 and 23 from Worthing town centre) and all friends and comrades are invited by his family.

Shameful history of Worthing police

A major case of injustice in Worthing has been publicised by our friends at the radical local newsletter the Porkbolter. We reproduce it here and give our support to its sentiments.

THE WORDS ‘police’ and ‘injustice’ seem to have a magnetic attraction for each other these days.

Whether it’s the shooting of an innocent Brazilian electrician for the heinous offence of looking vaguely (from half a mile away, with your brain disengaged) like a terrorist suspect or the fatal attack on a newspaper vendor who had the brazen audacity to want to walk home from work through the City of London, the Dixon of Dock Green image of the honest and fair-minded copper is looking further from reality every day.

But how many Worthing people remember that in 1975 this town was the scene of one of the most outrageous miscarriages of justice ever seen in this country, in which the role of leading local policemen was, to say the least, rather dubious?

Paddy Nicholls ended up serving an incredible 23 years in jail for a ‘murder’ that in the end was proved not to have even happened.

The Porkbolter reported back in July 1998 that Mr Nicholls had been released from prison after being cleared of the murder of neighbour Gladys Heath - new pathologist reports showed she had died from a heart attack, not at the hands of Mr Nicholls, who found her in a collapsed state.

Funnily enough, this was also the finding of the original pathologist’s initial report, but for unknown reasons he suddenly changed his mind and decided she had been murdered...

And we quoted former Detective Superintendent Laurie Finley - a police officer who stood up to his own force to expose the truth - as declaring: “This has discredited the police, the medical profession and the law. A lot of people must have got an awful lot on their conscience. This was a deadly serious miscarriage of justice.”

Mr Finley, who had always maintained Mr Nicholls was innocent, has disturbingly revealed that he took early retirement from the police in 1976 when he was told “people were out to get him”.

Mr Nicholls’ release made national TV and radio news and was the main front page story in The Guardian on June 13 1998, as well as page 3 in The Times. Funnily enough, though, it wasn’t important enough to make the front pages of our local rags, being relegated to pages 8 and 19 of the Worthing Herald and Worthing Guardian (which was then the rival town newspaper).

So what happened next? Well, we recently spoke to a member of Mr Nicholls’ family who explained that when he left prison after 23 years, at the age of 69, he was a broken man in poor health, as you might expect. He had been made to suffer more, getting no parole, just because he refused to admit to something he hadn’t done. There’s justice for you.

Like Mr Finley, Mr Nicholls knew certain persons would be ‘out to get him’ in Worthing and used his compensation money, when it came through, to move to Greece, where he died in 2005. The enormity of what happened to him is hard to grasp. As Mr Nicholls said just after winning his appeal in 1998: “They have taken a third of my life, haven’t they?”.

Nobody was ever brought to justice over what happened to this innocent man. As is usual with situations that embarrass the powers-that-be, it was pushed to one side with the hope that it would quickly fade from the public’s memory.

But we say that Paddy Nicholls, and the way he was treated by the police and the courts, must never be forgotten by the people of Worthing.