Two men, one word. Next Monday, at Kingston Crown Court in London, a 72-year-old grandfather goes on trial for terrorism; the evidence is a tweet of seven words, and the maximum sentence is 14 years. Nine months ago, a man who founded al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch and carried a $10 million American bounty on his head became the first Syrian head of state ever received at the White House. Tony Greenstein and Ahmed al-Sharaa have never met. Between them they define what the word “terrorist” now means – and for American readers there is a further twist: the seven words that may cost the pensioner his freedom are fully protected speech in the United States, which is why Washington has developed other methods for its own dissidents.
Take the pensioner first, and take his record in full, because the prosecution will. Greenstein was expelled from the Labour Party in 2018; he lost a libel action against the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which had called him a “notorious antisemite,” the court finding the phrase protected as honest opinion; he accepted a suspended sentence over a Palestine Action attack on an Elbit arms factory. He is abrasive, litigious and unrepentant – a Jewish socialist from Brighton, a carer, the son of an Orthodox rabbi who marched against Mosley’s Blackshirts. None of that is the charge. The charge is that in November 2023, goaded by an anonymous account demanding he declare himself, he posted: “I support Hamas against the Israeli army.” Five weeks later, at 6:30 in the morning, counter-terrorism officers took his computers and phones, held him for nine hours, and released him under conditions that banned him from posting about the war at all. “This is Orwellian,” he told the arresting officers. He undersold it.
Now the other man, whose record requires no libel lawyer to establish, because the United States government wrote it down. Ahmed al-Sharaa – then Abu Mohammad al-Jolani – joined al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2003, was captured by American forces and imprisoned for five years, then crossed into Syria to found al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, pledging allegiance on video to Ayman al-Zawahiri. The State Department’s own wanted notice recorded that under his leadership the group “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians” – and itemized them: roughly 300 Kurdish civilians abducted from a checkpoint; 20 residents of the Druze village of Qalb Lawzeh massacred in Idlib; suicide bombings claimed in Damascus, Homs and Quneitra. In 2014 he called for retaliatory attacks on the American-led coalition itself. For this the UN froze his assets and banned his travel, and the $10 million bounty placed him among the five most wanted jihadist leaders on earth, on the same short list as Baghdadi and Zawahiri. That is the conduct the word “terrorist” was coined for: emptied villages, detonated city centers, a decade of American soldiers and Syrian civilians in the ground.
While the state prepared its case against the tweeter, it laid siege to the man. Eleven months to charge him; a trial date pushed back the better part of a year; thirty-two months, in the end, between the dawn raid and the jury. And one by one, his banks left him. In a statement published two weeks before trial, Greenstein described being cut off by five institutions since his arrest: Nationwide after a quarter-century, HSBC and First Direct – closing, among others, the account kept for the care of his autistic son – then Santander, which froze his personal accounts and those of a registered charity he serves as treasurer, then a savings bank that shut out his family entirely. None gave a reason; none has to, since banks warned about a customer are forbidden by law to tip him off. Nor is his suspicion of state involvement far-fetched: the government’s own Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation warned in 2023 that proscription enforcement would push banks toward jettisoning clients – “de-risking,” the trade calls it. When Coutts closed one account belonging to Nigel Farage, the affair drew condemnation from the prime minister and toppled a chief executive. A pensioner debanked six times en route to a terror trial has drawn silence. A defendant is presumed innocent; his accounts are not.
And while the pensioner’s accounts froze, the warlord’s thawed. Damascus fell on December 8, 2024; twelve days later an American delegation sat with al-Sharaa and announced the $10 million bounty was being dropped – the file unchanged, the graves at Qalb Lawzeh exactly where they had been. Britain’s prime minister said deproscription was “far too early” to consider; his government then spent 2025 considering it at speed. In March 2025, as government-aligned militias swept the Alawite coast, Amnesty documented the deliberate sectarian killing of civilians and demanded a war-crimes investigation; al-Sharaa’s own fact-finding committee would eventually confirm 1,426 dead, most of them civilians. Two months after those massacres, Trump received him in Riyadh and reviewed him for the cameras: “Young, attractive guy, tough guy, strong past.” In June came an executive order lifting sanctions to “give Syrians a chance at greatness”; in July, Washington revoked the terrorist designation of the organization he built. Britain’s Foreign Secretary flew to Damascus that same July to shake his hand – while HTS was still proscribed under the Terrorism Act as an alias of al-Qaeda, the identical legal status Hamas holds in Greenstein’s indictment. Only in October did Parliament tidy up, erasing the proscription on the stated ground that it “serves the national interest.” By November al-Sharaa was in the Oval Office, enrolling Syria in the anti-ISIS coalition while the Treasury halted most remaining sanctions. No jury weighed the graves. No dawn raid preceded the handshakes. The men who wrote the wanted poster simply took it down – and wrote into Hansard, in their own words, what proscription is: an instrument of the national interest, adjustable by ministerial order.
Hold the two files side by side and the statute confesses. Under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, as amended in 2019, a person commits an offense by expressing an opinion supportive of a proscribed organization, reckless as to whether anyone is encouraged – an offense Parliament created precisely because the courts had ruled the old law could not touch opinions. By its literal terms, a Foreign Secretary renewing relations with the commander of a then-proscribed organization sits closer to the offense than anything Greenstein typed; nobody suggests prosecuting him, and that is the point. In the United States such a statute could not exist at all: even Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court’s furthest reach into “material support,” held that “any independent advocacy in which plaintiffs wish to engage is not prohibited.”
Britain criminalized exactly what America’s highest court fenced off, and then demonstrated, through Damascus, that the criminal category is edited by hand. The Terrorism Act carries a clause no draftsman wrote: it binds the powerless and dissolves on contact with the useful.
The state’s own ledgers show which of the two uses is the real one. Across fourteen years to mid-2025, the Ministry of Justice records 55 people prosecuted under the Act’s membership and support sections – four a year, through the entire era of ISIS. Then the subject changed from bombs to opinions. In the twelve months to September 2025 the Home Office counted 1,886 terrorism arrests – up 660 percent – and 86 percent of them were for supporting Palestine Action, a group proscribed for spray-painting warplanes weeks after HTS’s rehabilitation began. The share of arrests producing a charge collapsed from 47 percent to 17: five of six people seized under terror law are never meant to face trial, because the arrest is the product. The UN human rights chief called the ban “disproportionate and unnecessary”; more than 2,700 arrests followed anyway, 522 in a single day, pensioners and priests led off over cardboard signs. When the High Court ruled the ban unlawful in February, police paused, then resumed – “We must enforce the law as it is at the time,” a commissioner explained, arresting 18 more on the steps of Scotland Yard – and the Supreme Court will rule in November on whether any of it was ever legal. The government’s own reviewer confirms that terror prosecutions now run at record levels, “dominated by documentary offences and proscription related charges.” An apparatus built against the authors of Qalb Lawzeh is processing placards – while the author of Qalb Lawzeh signs coalition documents in the Oval Office.
The American half of the mirror completes itself. The administration that lifted the bounty cannot, thanks to the First Amendment, prosecute its own citizens’ words – so it deports the speakers instead. Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder, was seized by plainclothes ICE agents over his campus advocacy, held 104 days in Louisiana, made to miss the birth of his first child, never charged with a crime – detained on the Secretary of State’s certification that his presence compromised American foreign policy. Rümeysa Öztürk was taken off a street by masked agents and jailed 45 days over an op-ed; a judge found the whole policy unconstitutional, her case was thrown out, and she left for Turkey anyway, while Khalil’s protections were stripped on appeal and his fate rides on the Supreme Court.
Hold that against Damascus: the same State Department that certified a student op-ed a threat to American foreign policy spent the year unwinding the terrorist status of a man it once ranked beside Baghdadi. The department’s terror lists and its visa lists are, it turns out, the same list, kept for the same purpose – sorting the useful from the inconvenient.
The inconvenient include the press. Richard Medhurst, an independent journalist covering Gaza, became the first reporter arrested under the statute now aimed at Greenstein – 14 months under investigation, no charge, his files handed to Austria so the ordeal could continue abroad. Ten officers raided the home of Asa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada over his posts; a court found the warrants improperly obtained and ordered his devices returned. No conviction anywhere; months of seized equipment and fear everywhere – a fair description of the function. Even in Kingston, the instinct holds: by Greenstein’s account, prosecutors have fought to keep his published writings out of the jury bundle, the judge citing an old rule that “courts are not sounding boards for anybody’s political views” – in a trial where the defendant’s political views are the offense.
So the ledger closes where it opened, with two men and one word. One commanded an organization that committed atrocities at scale, and the two governments that hunted him have concluded, in Hansard’s own language, that his rehabilitation serves the national interest. The other posted seven words, and those same two governments – one with its Terrorism Act, one with its immigration code – have spent three years demonstrating what happens to the powerless who say the wrong thing about the wrong war. Greenstein has argued that his verdict will set the price for everyone arrested behind him: acquittal imperils the campaign, conviction licenses it. Perhaps. But the deeper verdict is already in, delivered in Riyadh and sealed in the Oval Office: terrorism, as governed practice, is a description of usefulness. Al-Sharaa became useful, and the word released him. Greenstein and 2,700 placard-carriers remain inconvenient, and the word descends on them with dawn raids and frozen accounts. The trial at Kingston is listed for five days. The word on trial has already been acquitted of meaning anything at all.
Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.
