By Michael Leonardi
A protest in solidarity with Palestine Action. (Photo: via social media)
The only answer equal to the insult is to resist anyway, and to say, with the Italian collective, that protest is not terrorism.
On August 26, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) placed three names on the sanctions list built after September 11th: Palestine Action in Britain, Autistici/Inventati in Italy, and Masar Badil across Europe. This terrorist designation also attempted to link Antifa Portland, Hamas, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran — with zero evidence — through the collectively run Italian web server provider. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent promised to cut their financial lifelines until they were eliminated. The State Department, under Marco Rubio, pushed the West to target the boogeyman of far-left terrorism, framing it as a profound threat to the United States and the broader West. Israel applauded. The European Union, which still cannot assemble the will to sanction the state carrying out a live-streamed genocide, treated the listing of a volunteer Italian server collective as a technical matter between allies.
This is not counterterrorism. It is the legal architecture of a system that has mistaken power for reason, and that has granted Zionism and the Israeli state a total and complete impunity no other government on earth enjoys. An unhinged imperialist administration in Washington now designates slogans, mail servers, and prisoner-solidarity networks as terrorist organizations with the same bureaucratic calm once reserved for Isis and al-Qaeda. The accusations themselves are lunacy—deliberate, calculated, and designed to invert reality. What we are witnessing is a general Western shift toward draconian, tyrannical fascism: lists instead of law, financial strangulation instead of argument, and the criminalization of solidarity as the new common sense. The UK government fills vans with people holding cardboard. Italy watches an American list reach into Tuscan infrastructure and calls it partnership. The genocide continues. The paint on the planes is the crime. The bombers remain partners, customers, and allies.
The domestic template was set in Minneapolis. On June 16, federal prosecutors unsealed an eight-count indictment against fifteen people tied to Direct Action Minnesota and the Black Cat Workers Collective. Twelve were arrested that morning. The lead charge was conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer; other counts included interstate stalking, interstate threats, solicitation of a crime of violence, assault on an officer, and destruction of government property. The ninety-four-page indictment rests on Signal chats, social media, blockades of bodies and cars, and rapid-response networks built to warn neighborhoods when ICE arrived. Prosecutors said the defendants had infiltrated lawful protests. They named Kyle Wagner as a leader who identifies himself as antifa and pointed to actions in January and March around the Whipple Federal Building during the administration’s immigration surge. Daniel Rosen announced a strike against Antifa. Todd Blanche called it an unrelenting campaign of harassment. Markwayne Mullin promised the fullest extent of the law.
What the government needed was not a hierarchical army. It needed a label. Trump’s September 2025 order had already designated “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization—a category that does not exist in statute, because Congress never created one. National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 then instructed agencies to treat anti-fascism and anti-capitalism as investigative predicates. Minnesota became the demonstration: community defense against raids recoded as conspiracy. Defense lawyer Bruce Nestor called it political oppression designed to punish and intimidate. The conspiracy count alone carries years. In Texas, related cases have already produced sentences measured in decades. The lesson is not about ice thrown at a van. It is about what happens if a city organizes against the raid.
In Italy, the same logic reached the mail. Since 2001, Autistici/Inventati has run independent email, lists, hosting, chat, and anonymity tools for movements—volunteers, no shareholders, a motto of socializing knowledge without founding powers. Washington’s account is that this infrastructure is the digital backbone of violent Antifa cells, and that providing privacy to the left is support for terrorism under Executive Order 13224. The State Department announced the listing. The collective learned it had become a global terrorist organization from the American feed.
Their reply, in Italian and English, is simple and exact. They reject every allegation and reaffirm the work: tools of digital self-defense so that activists, individuals, groups, and associations can communicate freely. They will not stop. The accusations, they wrote, were built by a politically desperate administration whose purpose is to pull eyes away from its own violence and its desire for war. Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism. Protest is not terrorism. Everyone has the right to speak and to struggle for humanity.
Then the machinery moved without a trial. PayPal closed its account and cited OFAC. The autistici.org domain disappeared. Banca Etica, their ethical bank since 2018, froze operations and warned that closure was likely, even as it publicly condemned the political abuse of terror lists. OFAC issued a wind-down license through September 25. A small collective that had kept mail running for twenty-five years was treated as a battlefield asset because it would not log its users for the empire. Italy did not defend them. The European Union, which lectures the world on digital rights, did not treat the listing of European civic infrastructure as extraterritorial coercion. Brussels finds language for disinformation when a student wears a keffiyeh. It cannot find language when Washington puts an Italian nonprofit on a list written for mass murderers—or when Zionism’s armed project erases a people in real time.
Masar Badil was listed in the same stroke. The administration claims the transnational network is a “front” for Samidoun and, through it, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two of its leaders—Zaid Abdulnasser in Germany and Rawa Alsagheer in Brazil—were named individually. The charge is the same circular lunacy: solidarity with Palestinian prisoners is now material support for terrorism because the United States has already decided that the organizations doing the solidarity work are terrorist. The evidence is overlapping personnel and shared fundraising. The punishment is financial strangulation across continents. Masar Badil’s response was straightforward: Washington will not criminalize the struggle of a people for return and resistance. The designation changes nothing about the facts on the ground in Gaza; it only reveals how far the imperial apparatus will stretch the word “terrorism” to protect the project it arms.
Palestine Action was built to interrupt the companies that arm Israel, Elbit first among them—paint, occupations, lock-ons. In June 2025, activists entered RAF Brize Norton and damaged two aircraft. The UK government answered with proscription under the Terrorism Act, the first time a domestic campaign against the arms trade was placed beside ISIS. Support became a terrorism offense. By mid-2026, some three thousand people had been arrested, many for holding a sign. The Court of Appeal upheld the ban in June and called the group no ordinary protest. The Supreme Court will hear the challenge in November. Co-founder Huda Ammori, facing a US listing that can mean a lifetime ban from the country that helped wreck Iraq and Palestine, said the hypocrisy was complete: the American administration is the antithesis of everything Palestine Action stands for.
This is the UK government’s slide—not a sudden coup, a procedure. It inherits the terror statute, uses it on the movement that names Gaza a genocide, and congratulates itself that people may still support Palestine so long as they do not touch the weapons factories or the word Action. The UN human rights office called both the British ban and the American designation a disproportionate restriction on expression and association. London and Washington filed the statement and continued. Israel, meanwhile, faces no such list. Its officials travel. Its weapons move. Its settlements advance. Its destruction of Gaza is financed, armed, and diplomatically sheltered by the same capitals now hunting a sign and a mail server. That is what total impunity looks like. Zionism is not asked to answer for the crime. The people who name the crime are asked to answer for the naming.
The same administration that lists mail servers and prisoner networks has already taken the unprecedented step of sanctioning Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. In July 2025, it placed her on the sanctions list for the crime of speech—specifically for urging the International Criminal Court to examine Israeli and American responsibility. No previous Special Rapporteur had been treated this way. A federal judge later found the move likely violated free-speech protections and ordered her temporary removal; an appeals court stay put her back on the list. The message is unambiguous: even a UN mandate-holder who documents the destruction of Gaza can be financially isolated if her conclusions inconvenience the empire.
Taken together, the picture is not confusion. It is alignment. An American president governs by grievance and lists. The State Department sells the boogeyman of far-left terror to the West while the bombs keep falling. The UK government arrests pensioners and students for a slogan. The EU signs association agreements with the killer and human-rights communiqués with itself. An Italian government lets a foreign treasury decide which of its citizens may keep a bank account. Across the West the same method advances: draconian, tyrannical, fascist in function if not yet in name. The genocide requires uninterrupted supply. Solidarity interrupts supply. Therefore solidarity must become terrorism, and Zionism must remain above the law.
Gaza’s water system is in ruins. Children study in tents, if they study. The West has infinite capacity to designate the people who object and no capacity to stop the crime. That inversion is the fascist turn of this period—not a costume, a method. Declare the opposition an enemy of civilization. Freeze the money. Seize the domain. Indict the chat. Arrest the sign. Sanction the rapporteur. Protect the state that commits genocide. Call it security.
The designations will be litigated. Minnesota defendants will sit in federal court. Autistici/Inventati will try to keep their servers alive on whatever machines remain. Palestine Action will go to the Supreme Court in London. Masar Badil will continue its work under new constraints. None of that restores a well in Gaza or the life of a child flying a kite, and none of it will touch Israel’s immunity. It does tell every movement from Minneapolis to Florence to Hackney to Berlin the price of resistance. The only answer equal to the insult is to resist anyway, and to say, with the Italian collective, that protest is not terrorism, and that the men making the lists—and the project they shield—are not the measure of the law. They are the emergency.
– Michael Leonardi is an Italy-based journalist. Leonardi is the vice president of the Treewater Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to building sustainability in a Free Palestine for over a decade. He contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
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