The raid on investigative journalist Asa Winstanley isn’t about terrorism, writes Jonathan Cook – except that of the U.K. government. It is about scaring us into staying silent on Britain’s collusion in Israel’s genocide.
Nov. 5, 2017: Solidarity with Palestine protesters versus British law enforcement in London. (Alisdare Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
The U.K. government and police — the British state — made clear Thursday they are waging a war of intimidation against the country’s independent journalists in a desperate attempt to silence them.
Ten Metropolitan police officers made a dawn raid on the home of investigative journalist Asa Winstanley and seized his electronic devices under the U.K.’s draconian Terrorism Act. A letter from the Met indicates that the associate editor of The Electronic Intifada is being investigated by the force for “encouraging terrorism.”
Asa Winstanley, associate editor of The Electronic Intifada, had multiple electronic devices confiscated by British counterterrorism police during their raid on his residence on Thursday.
Before six in the morning, about ten police officers showed up at Winstanley's residence in… pic.twitter.com/EoKUDYWy9b
— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) October 17, 2024
Winstanley is the latest — and most high profile – independent journalist to be targeted by counter-terrorism police in recent weeks. Earlier, Richard Medhurst was arrested at Heathrow airport on returning to the U.K. Then Sarah Wilkinson was arrested and her home ransacked.
[Related: Craig Murray: The Twilight of Freedom]
Winstanley has repeatedly embarrassed the British establishment by exposing its covert and deep ties to Israel and its collusion with the Israeli lobby.
In his book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, Winstanley exposed in shocking detail how anti-Semitism was weaponised against the former Labour leader.
The book would have made uncomfortable reading for his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, now Britain’s prime minister, because it documents his role in the smear campaign.
While in opposition, Starmer’s Labour Party threatened to expel Winstanley as a member – he resigned in protest instead – and have made legal threats against him.
Starmer addressing the press in Washington on Sept. 13 during a visit to the White House. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0)
As The Electronic Intifada website notes: “Now that Labour is the UK’s ruling party, it has the potential to use the apparatus of the state against those it views as its own – or Israel’s – political enemies.”
[Related: Patrick Lawrence: The Sound of Enforced Silence]
There is precisely no reason for police to raid Winstanley’s home or seize his electronic devices. The preposterous accusation of “encouraging terrorism” clearly relates to his online work, which is fully in the public domain.
The British state wants to insinuate through the dawn raid and confiscation of his devices that he is somehow harbouring secret or classified information, or in illicit contact with terror groups, and that incriminating evidence will be forthcoming from searches of those devices.
It won’t. If there were any real suspicion that Winstanley had such information, the police would have arrested him rather making a public show of a 6 a.m. raid and search they knew beforehand would turn up nothing.
[Related Scott Ritter: The FBI’s Raid on Peace]
This isn’t about terrorism at all. It is about frightening those opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the West’s collusion in it, into silence. If the British state is going after someone like Winstanley, you are supposed to conclude, they will surely soon come for me too.
Even the name of the “counter-terrorism” raid is performative: “Operation Incessantness.” The message the state wants to send is that it will not rest till it has us all behind bars.
Don’t believe this nonsense. The police have nothing on Winstanley. Exposing information about Israel and its genocide, and the British government’s culpability, is not a crime. At least not yet.
They want you to think it is, of course. They want you scared and mute. Because every time you go out and protest, you remind the world that the British government, and their bully-boys in blue, are the real criminals – for enabling genocide.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
It isn’t about terror but draconian method of silencing dissent against genocide!
While experts attempt to downplay the atrocities, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for anyone with an objective perspective to deny the alarming reality. The notion that criticizing Israel’s actions is ‘antisemitic’ has lost all credibility in the face of live-streamed evidence of the systematic erasure and brutalization of Palestinians. It’s unacceptable that those responsible are celebrating their actions with gleeful disregard for human decency and international law.
US/UK = ASSES OF EVIL…No wonder they get along so well.
EU now the new…old East Germany
“I don’t oppose the butchery in Gaza because I love Hamas or hate Jews or love Islam or hate America.
I don’t oppose the butchery in Gaza because I’m a lefty or a commie or an anarchist or an anti-imperialist.
I oppose the butchery in Gaza because I’m not a fucking psychopath.
Opposing Israel’s butchery in Gaza is so obvious, so common sense, such a bare-minimum, fundamental-level, Being Human 101 position that if it isn’t immediately self-evident to you after learning the basic facts, your problem is much, much deeper than whatever ideology or bias or prejudice you might happen to have. There’s something wrong with you as a person.”
-Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter May 05, 2024
Caitlin’s writing is clear and precise and exposes the sheer evil of the undeclared western empire headed and controlled by the US which evil entity is itself controlled by the Zionists. Which is why it is evil of course. We have finally reached. the stage when branding Zionists as evil cannot be effectively dismissed as anti semitism. It was a long slow painful road.
These may be authoritarian establishment figures but they have become involved with war crimes. Even though they’ve not been tried they know we know they are war criminals. That’s not just something contrary to a nation’s laws, otherwise being the establishment they could just ignore it as they always do. This time they have involved themselves in crimes that can be prosecuted around the world and they are afraid for their future. This is something the establishments within western countries do not have the power to dismiss, but they still have the power to suppress any talk of it. I don’t think that will last much longer.
If Israel [and Ukraine] had won their wars, neither of which seems likely, these politicians could have continued as though they’d done something good. But like the Nazis they lost. Forget The Hague, we should reconvene Nuremburg to deal with these mass killers.
It’s more and more obvious that the British “establishment” is controlled by Zionist criminals.