A soap-making TikToker has been charged in the United Kingdom under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act (2000) for praising Hamas online, the legal group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
Fiona Ryan, who runs Salisbury Soaps, was arrested on December 11 following a report to Swindon Police by UKLFI on November 1, the lawyers' group said while showing the Post police documents and social media posts, now deleted by Ryan.
In one of the posts Ryan posted on X on October 28, she wrote, “Many of us DON’T condemn Hamas. These are men who have grown up in a concentration camp and found a way to bust out. They are hero’s [sic].”
On the same day, she also wrote: “Gaza had the right to defend themselves. All the “poor innocent Israelis” harmed by Hamas were on illegally occupied land. Hamas did nothing wrong, and the death toll has been grossly exaggerated.”
The death toll of October 7 was lowered from 1,400 to 1,200 as Israeli officials were able to locate the remains and identify more of those who were presumed dead but later discovered to have been kidnapped. Emily Hand, for example, is an Irish-Israeli child who was presumed dead but later discovered to have been taken hostage. Hand has since been released as part of the weeklong hostages-for-prisoners ceasefire agreement that began at the end of November.
In addition to the above posts, Ryan wrote again on that day: “All the people who were allegedly killed (coz there’s very limited evidence many were killed at all, plus eye witness [sic] says they were killed by Israel) were on illegally occupied territory. Hamas had every right to remove them, anyway, it saw fit.”
Ryan, in a later video, said that she deleted her X account (formerly Twitter) after “Elon Musk’s little genocide tour of Israel.” The social media giant's new owner visited Israel last month, where he was shown some of the sites of Hamas’s October 7 massacre and spoke to the families of Israelis held captive in Gaza by Hamas.
In addition to praising the terrorist group, Ryan called Israelis "Satanists" and said that "we need to wipe them [Israel] off the map physically.”
Another unsubstantiated claim made by the soap-making influencer said that IDF soldiers had been sending Palestinians into tunnels with explosives tied around them. Ryan described this as a "humiliation tactic," claiming that she had spoken to a Palestinian man who witnessed these actions. She also claimed that Israel is committing war crimes and salting the earth of Gaza, which were supposedly actions funded by the UK government.
UKLFI told the Post that the three posts expressed the opinion or belief that she was supportive of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization. Caroline Turner, director of the lawyers' group, commented: “If people espouse views which are supportive of terrorism and therefore break the law, it is right that they should be punished.
"We are grateful to the people who assist us by reporting such activities to us and to our volunteer lawyers who assist us in reporting this behavior to the police."
Detailing the arrest
Ryan detailed her arrest in a now-deleted video while using someone else's TikTok account.
The TikTok star insisted that the arrest had been the result of content she had reshared, not produced herself, in one of two videos shown to the Post. She added that it was made clear to her that if she denounced Hamas, she would not be charged, but that she was unwilling to do this.
In another video, Ryan speaks about being arrested by the police. She said that her kids witnessed her home being raided, as they had missed school in protest of the ongoing war in “Palestine.” She claimed that the police watched her use the bathroom and get dressed and that she was transported to the police station in a “metal box” because she was unable to sit on the seats due to her disability. She also said that she had been denied water and was held in a cell for seven hours.
Ryan alleged that the police dropped one of the charges when she arrived at the police station, which was allegedly the charge that had allowed the officers to enter her home, and instead added a charge under the Malicious Communications Act.
As part of the police proceedings, Ryan said that electronics belonging to all members of the household were taken, as were some chilies and melons that she had been growing in pots.