On Oct. 17, counterterrorism police raided the home of renowned journalist Asa Winstanley in England. Winstanley’s journalistic materials and electronic devices were seized during the raid. Winstanley said that he told the police who carried out the raid that what had happened was the Holocaust of our time, that in the years to come, they and their children would look back on these actions with regret, and that some of them seemed embarrassed by his words.
Winstanley has been fighting against the oppression, genocide and terrorism of Israel in the U.K. for years and is a voice for oppressed Palestinians. Anyone who does even a little research on publications about Israel in British sources will learn his name. He is a name that I follow, and I have benefited from his various publications.
It is a terrible disgrace for England that the house of a person whose sole purpose was to publicize a genocide was raided by counterterrorism teams. This situation leads us to some observations:
First and foremost, it has reinforced the image that Britain is a state that Israel completely enslaves. If Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the Prime Minister of the U.K., he would probably have ordered this raid himself with his counterterrorism police. Therefore, this is a humiliating image for the British government.
It has been seen once more that the British administrators are not sincere in their commitment to the concepts of freedom of expression and democracy they keep repeating. They use these concepts as weapons to legitimize their acts, while in contradiction, suppressing dissenting opinions.
It is an indescribable shame that this job is given to the counterterrorism police. What is even direr than the current situation of British politics is that genocide has been implemented by Israel, and they have been terrorizing people more cruelly than any terrorist has done.
It is a great contradiction and a manifestation of captivity. Israel is a state founded by terrorist organizations and has been led by terrorist leaders. These terrorists have also committed acts of terror against the British, as I mentioned in my previous article. Suppose the British government, which claims to oppose terrorism today, has a character and identity of its own. In that case, it should treat the Likud Party (the continuation of the terrorist organization Irgun), Netanyahu and the rest of the Israeli terrorist leaders as the real terrorists. Supporting them and sending counterterrorism police to a British journalist's home is a great contradiction and a clear manifestation of captivity to the Zionists.
Various leading media organizations in England remained silent about what was done to Winstanley. However, even the Jewish News, a Jewish news outlet based in England, mentioned the incident. This situation shows that some British media outlets serve Israel more than the Jews in England.
This is not the first time that counterterrorism police have been unleashed on protesters who stand with Palestine. The U.K. has been tarnished by this cruelty for years. One of the incidents worth remembering is what happened to Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard, founders of the Palestine Action Group.
Activists who opposed the 10 factories of Elbit, Israel’s most prominent private arms company, in the U.K. and protested in front of the factory in 2021 to “Shut down Elbit” were arrested by the police. Richard Barnard spoke to the Electronic Intifada at the time and said that he had been arrested more than 30 times. They detained the couple without charging them, held them for 17 hours and left the investigation open. It is said that this was a threat tactic.
With the draconian Terrorism Act passed in 2000 during Tony Blair’s time, police could then detain people for no reason and question them for hours, as in the examples above. Failure to answer questions can lead to criminal prosecution. Even the ordinary right to remain silent is not recognized. Detainees are not allowed to access a lawyer either. Detainees are also subjected to personal questions. Ammori described being subjected to many questions about his religious beliefs.
The then British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab met with Israeli ministers in Jerusalem in August 2021 and promised to crack down on Palestine Action’s campaign as if he were their colonial minister.
Among many others, Winstanley has been helping to awaken public opinion by conveying such information for years. Now, he suffered from the same law. With the law that passed during the Labour era, the Tories continued oppression and now Labour has taken over the banner of oppression from the Tories again.
What journalist Ben Norton wrote in his tweet after learning about what was done to Winstanley is very accurate: “Western fake ‘democracies’ are authoritarian colonial regimes that viciously repress citizens who oppose their genocide in Gaza.”
A poll published in early October shows that Israel's favourability in the U.K. has fallen to its lowest level on record, with only 17%. On the other hand, discontent about Israel rose to 66%. As another British journalist, Matt Kennard points out, this is why houses of journalists are raided and activists are imprisoned.
As a political scientist, I have been trying to introduce the term “dog state” into the literature for years because of such pictures. The term may be considered harsh for the academic style, but a doctor’s job is not to simplify the disease to appease the patient but to make an exact diagnosis. Treating your own citizens as terrorist suspects, oppressing and persecuting them, who are trying to prevent your country from committing genocide and for your government to act conscientiously, shows that you have ceased to be “yourself” and have become an aggressive entity under someone else’s control. When you look at the crimes in which the U.K. was involved in the genocide in Gaza, it is a requirement of justice and conscience to determine that it has become an entity that is on a Zionist leash and made to bark. The ones who are truly valuable to the country are those who struggle to remove that leash.
I extend my best wishes to Asa Winstanley.
