Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A Dutch 'activist' who climbed Winston Churchill's statue in Parliament Square, sprayed it with "Zionist war criminal," "Globalise the Intifada" and Hamas-style red triangles, then argued the graffiti didn't count because it could be washed off, has walked out of Southwark Crown Court a free man.

The bill for cleaning the monument ran into thousands. The man who did it has escaped criminal charges.

Olax Outis, also known as Caspar San Giorgi, 39, defaced Churchill earlier this year while wearing a red boiler suit reading "I support Palestine Action." Prosecutor Peter Ratliff told jurors he sprayed the words 'Free Palestine' and red triangles on the front, and 'Never Again Is Now' on the rear. On the plinth he scrawled 'Globalise the Intifada,' 'Stop the Genocide' and 'Zionist war criminal,' plus a Dutch line he later rendered as 'The Hague sends their regards.'

A Greater London Authority heritage warden saw him doing it and called the police. Officers were there within two minutes. Specialist cleaners were not far behind. Court figures put the damage at £11,970 when he was first charged. Later reporting on the restoration bill listed more than £7,000, including police barriers at £612 plus VAT and an emergency clean and restore at £6,504 plus VAT.

He denied criminal damage. The paint was washable, he said. He was "sending a message to parliament." He was "preventing a crime." The jury agreed he was not guilty.

In the dock he was unrepentant. "I'm proud to be a citizen of The Hague," he told them. "If I had a larger canvas and more time, I would have written if Keir Starmer doesn't come to The Hague, The Hague will come for him. My wish is to see him on trial in The Hague." On the verdict itself: "Whether you convict me or not is not too much of a concern for me. Whether I get acquitted, deported, imprisoned for years, I can be proud of having spoken about injustice and I have accounted for my actions. I will accept your judgement."

He had already claimed the stunt online. He had come to Britain, he said, to "deface a statue of one of history's most well-known war criminals, Winston Churchill." Churchill, in his telling, was "the Keir Starmer of his time."

Downing Street called the vandalism "completely abhorrent" in February and said Churchill was "a great Briton" who "must be held to account." The Home Office called the vandals "a disgrace." The Greater London Authority said it was "appalled." Six months later a jury decided the spray cans did not amount to a crime.

Heidi Bachram, whose husband's relatives were murdered and taken hostage by Hamas, blasted the decision, urging "This country's legal system is a nasty joke,"and adding "He should have been deported." A foreigner, she noted, can "paint a threat to Jews on the statue of our greatest leader with the added red triangle to make clear it isn't the 'peaceful' version of Intifada and GET AWAY WITH IT."

That is the two-tier point, and it is not a slogan. The Met and Greater Manchester Police spent last winter warning that "globalise the intifada" could get you arrested. The same words went up in red on Churchill's monument. The man who put them there told a jury the paint came off. The jury said not guilty.

None of this sits in a vacuum. Churchill is being taken apart in official rooms while activists take him apart in the square.

Last week it emerged the Bank of England had spent more than £85,000 researching how to get him off the £5 note. Consultants told officials that portraits of notable Britons were "elitist and divisive," a "backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy." Hedgehogs and puffins are waiting in the wings. Nigel Farage called the plan "absolutely crackers." Kemi Badenoch called it "erasing our history."

The same city that cannot convict a man for spraying "Zionist war criminal" across Churchill is being lectured by the UN's racial discrimination committee to put up statues of people of African descent as atonement for slavery - as if Britain had not banned the trade, spent blood and treasure suppressing it, and already spent years ripping down or boxing up its own monuments.

Sadiq Khan's Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm was built for that mood. Churchill's statue was boarded up in 2020. The lecture has not stopped.

They even installed the punchline. On Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth last week City Hall unveiled Tschabalala Self's five-metre Lady in Blue - sold as an "everywoman," a "symbol of confidence and purpose," and, in the CNN version, a win because it is "not another White man." It stands in the ceremonial heart of the capital, opposite Nelson, paid for out of the same public art machine that treats British victory as an embarrassment.

Picture the same red paint poured all over that figure. The press releases write themselves. The outrage would be industrial.