A SCOTTISH pro-Palestine activist is facing charges for “threatening and abusive behaviour” after reading a poem about children killed by Israel.
Bill Williamson, 74, who lives in Ardentinny, said he had been at a weekly Palestine vigil outside Dunoon Burgh Hall on July 4 when he was approached by a pair of police officers while he was reading out Don’t Mention The Children by the Jewish writer Michael Rosen through a megaphone.
He said: “I was midway reading the poem [which takes about 90 seconds], and I hear, ‘Excuse me, sir, excuse me, sir’, so I thought, well, I'm almost finished, so I'll just carry on – but then this police constable started trying to snatch the poem.
“It's a laminated sheet. He was trying to take it out of my hand, and fortunately I was a bit taller than him, so I was able to hold it up.”
Williamson said that after he finished, the police officers told him repeatedly that he had been “causing fear and alarm” by reading out the poem, something he said he had done twice at a vigil every Saturday for the past two-and-a-half years.
“He kept repeating that I was causing fear and alarm, people could be placed in a state of fear and alarm because I was reading out this poem about dead babies, dead children,” the activist went on.
“He said if you do that again, you'll be arrested. I said, well, hang about till 1.30 because it'll be getting read out again.”
Williamson and other activists then got into a back-and-forth with officers which led to his arrest.
“They slapped handcuffs on me and took me to a police van and put me in the back of it and demanded my details, and I said, well, you're not getting them, and I was there for an hour [before being ‘de-arrested’],” he said.
“The first thing I did was I went back up and I got the poem out.”
As he had been told he was being de-arrested, Williamson said he believed that was the end of the matter. However, three days later, on July 7, three officers turned up at his house and told his wife that he had been “reported to the courts”.
“Now, if they wanted my details, how did they know where I lived?” Williamson asked. “It was a game they were playing.”
He added: “Initially I thought, just let this die a death. But then I thought, people are not hearing about this gradual erosion of our civil liberties.
“I thought, this is intimidation. The more people that know about it, I think the better.”
A Police Scotland spokesperson said: “A man was arrested in the Argyll Street area of Dunoon on Saturday, 4 July, 2026, in connection with threatening and abusive behaviour and failing to provide his details when required by police.
“Due to an ongoing incident nearby, the man was de-arrested.
“A report has been submitted to the Procurator Fiscal in connection with these offences.”
Rosen’s poem was written in response to a 2014 decision by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority to ban a radio advert from human rights group B’Tselem which listed the names of children killed in Gaza.
Rosen’s poem ends: “The people would not be safe if they knew/ the names of the children./ Don’t name the dead children./ Don’t remember the dead children./ Don’t think of the dead children./ Don’t say: ‘dead children’.”
Last month, a UN inquiry concluded that Israel had deliberately targeted Palestinian children as part of a genocide, and that more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed and more than 44,000 injured since October 2023.
.png?w=600)
