Liberty (advocacy group) activist group, and Paedophile Action for Liberation became affiliated to the pressure group. Shami Chakrabarti, the former director of Liberty, issued an apology about the links between the NCCL and the PIE. In December 2013, she said: "It is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983 after infiltration at some point in the 70s." Gay rights and censorship NCCL acted for the owners of "Gay's the Word" bookshop, whose stock was confiscated by Customs officers in 1984. All charges were dropped in 1986. Miners' strike During the
Yitzhaq Shami number of essays. Shami's birth name was Yitzhaq Sarwi. He was born in Hebron (al-Khalil) in 1888, eldest of three sons. His father, Eliyahu, was a textile merchant of Syrian Jewish origin, who relocated from Damascus to Hebron in 1885. The father was therefore known as "a-Shami" (the Damascene), and that was the origin of the pen-name later adopted by the writer. Eventually, it became his legal name as well. His mother, Rivka Castel, was a Hebronite from the illustrious Castel family, a traditional Sephardic family which had lived in Hebron for generations. Growing up, Shami spoke Arabic with his