Quote Originally Posted by cyril evans awaydays View Post
As I recall your "gold standard" for consistency is that for some types of protest people need to understand the "underlying causes" and for others they need to be condemned unreservedly because of the damage and disruption they cause, regardless of merit.
Not sure what you are implying now, but there is an accusatory tone with you today. I'll clarify:

Understanding underlying causes for issues is always good. Even if something is wholly bad, evil, whatever. Understanding why it happened is critical to making it less likely to happen again. Understanding why some people are opposed to Israel at the moment (and Hamas) is not hard in this instance.

Protest is critical and a key part of any democracy. I've been on perhaps a dozen matches on topics as diverse as the war in Iraq to the colour of our clubs shirts myself. We don't have to agree with the cause but the right to do it is important.

Stepping over into violence, criminal damage etc cannot be acceptable, not when we have democratic processes in place and a right to protest (it is inevitably different where these outlets don't exist). These would be dealt with in the overwhelming majority of cases by criminal (not terrorist) laws.

When that violence / criminal damage is orchestrated against the states armed forces and is done so to try and alter government policy to that groups thinking, it's not hard to see how this can lead to the group being proscribed. This is irrespective of whether you believe in the groups core message or understand the underlying causes.

The threshold is clearly when something steps into being violent or criminal then it is no longer peaceful. And when it steps into an orchestrated and planned series of violent actions against the state it could be, and seemingly is in this case, crossing a line leading to the group being proscribed.

Do you disagree with much of that?