Seven Palestine Action protesters who have been charged with damaging Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf course face being sentenced as terrorists even though they have not been charged with any terror offences. The first hearing in the case will take place on Monday 31 August in the High Court in Glasgow.

The protest by Palestine Action took place on 8 March 2025, before the group was proscribed. It was a response to Trump’s plans to take over Gaza and ethnically cleanse the population. The action involved spraying the words “GAZA IS NOT 4 SALE” in large letters on the golf course, digging holes, spraying weedkiller across the lawn and spraying red paint across the club house.

The indictment reveals that the prosecution will seek to establish a ‘terror connection’, to enable terror sentences to be imposed on the defendants even though the prosecution has chosen not to charge them with any terror offences.

Questions have been raised over representations Trump made to the UK government and the Scottish government, including phone calls between Trump and Keir Starmer. Trump posted at the time on Truth Social:

I was just informed by Prime Minister Starmer of the United Kingdom, that they caught the terrorists who attacked the beautiful Turnberry, in Scotland. They did serious damage, and will hopefully be treated harshly. The three people who did this are in prison. You cannot let things like this attack happen, and I greatly appreciate the work of Prime Minister Starmer, and UK Law Enforcement.

It emerged during the judicial review proceedings in the High Court that Trump had two phone calls with Starmer after the Turnberry action, on 10 March and 30 March 2025. This sparked questions about whether Trump’s pressure led to the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

On 13 March 2025, Trump’s son Eric Trump also flew into Scotland to meet with John Swinney and, according to documents released under FOIA, the protest at the Trump Turnberry property was discussed during the meeting.

Is a golf course behind Trump’s Palestine Action ban?

This news that the defendants will face potential terror sentencing comes as Trump’s administration announces it is banning Palestine Action as a ‘terror’ group and imposing sanctions on Palestine Action, including freezing any assets belonging to the group that are either based in the US or in the control of US citizens.

In June 2026, four Palestine Action protesters who were convicted of criminal damage under ordinary criminal law were sentenced as terrorists. This was the first time in British history that protesters have been sentenced as terrorists without being convicted of any terror charges.

The jury was not aware that the defendants could be sentenced as terrorists if convicted of criminal damage. In addition to much longer prison sentences, terror sentencing means being subject to notification requirements for 15+ years upon release.

Those requirements include notifying police of any new address, bank account, phone number, email address and new relationship. Failing to do so, even by accident, can result in an additional five years in prison.

Palestine Action’s co-founder Huda Ammori has been granted permission to challenge the ban on Palestine Action in the UK in the Supreme Court, which will be heard in November 2026.

A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries said:

It’s now all too clear why the White House has designated Palestine Action as a global terror organisation, alongside Al Qaeda. It’s because members of Palestine Action upset the President in March 2025 by making a mess of his golf course.

This is the terrifying reality of the ‘leader of the free world’. While he wreaks havoc on the global population, backing genocide and launching deranged wars of choice, issuing threats to China, Canada and Greenland, sanctioning the judges of the International Criminal Court, and turning the military on his own population, his primary concerns are his ballroom, his interns and his golf course.

This presents the rest of the world with a stark choice. What’s more important? Obedience to the mad emperor or standing up for democracy and the rule of law?

Labour MP and former shadow chancellor, John McDonnell MP, said:

The government has serious questions to answer about the evidence that Donald Trump politically interfered in this matter and influenced the home secretary’s decision to ban a protest group under terrorism legislation for the first time in British history.

It would be utterly shameful if the British government launched an unprecedented attack on free speech in our country, resulting in more than 3,500 people being arrested under terrorism laws for peacefully holding seven word signs, because Donald Trump threw a tantrum over some red paint on his golf course.

The President of the United States performing one of his increasingly convincing Nero impressions cannot be the basis for British counter-terror legislation.

The news that the protesters who allegedly sprayed red paint on Trump’s golf course could face terrorist sentencing, coupled with Trump himself now announcing that he is following Britain’s lead by proscribing Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist’ group, is profoundly embarrassing for Britain.

Andy Burnham has inherited this mess from the previous government. This must be the wake up call to drop this absurdly authoritarian ban, before Starmer’s blueprint is adopted by repressive governments around the world to criminalise protest and suppress political dissent.

Palestine Action-co-founder Huda Ammori, who has been granted permission by the UK’s Supreme Court to challenge the ban on Palestine Action, said:

This lays bare what the ban on Palestine Action has always been about. We used direct action protests to save lives – the opposite of terrorism – by disrupting the flow of arms being used to murder Palestinians.

By hitting the profits of arms companies and by daring to spray paint on the golf course owned by the demagogue who has enabled Netanyahu’s crimes, we made powerful enemies. The British government chose to appease them by criminalising us as ‘terrorists’.

It has already been revealed that Trump and Keir Starmer discussed Palestine Action twice on calls before Starmer’s government announced that we would be proscribed under terrorism legislation.

Trump has been characteristically open about this, posting on Truth Social at the time to label the spray-painting of his golf course ‘terrorism’ and saying he greatly appreciated Keir Starmer’s swift and robust response.

As someone of Palestinian and Iraqi heritage, there is rank hypocrisy in the country that has helped destroy both my homelands working with the British government to criminalise me and the organisation I co-founded as ‘terrorists’.

The news that the defendants could face terror sentencing, and that Trump is now following Britain’s lead by banning Palestine Action in the US, should be the final nail in the coffin of this ban, which has become one of the most extreme attacks on free speech and the right to protest in modern British history.

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