Did British police raid me for this?
This video about how Israel killed its own people on October 7th was shot the night before the "counter-terror" raid on my home and seizure of my devices.
Exactly two weeks ago today, Britain’s “counter-terror” police squad raided my home and took away all the main devices I use for my journalism — despite the fact that I was not charged with, or even arrested for, any crime.
You can read more on that in my Substack post about it from last week.
My legal team are making serious moves to stop the authorities from accessing my devices — and thus from endangering my sources in any way.
We will talk more about that process in the future.
For now, as I’ve said all along, I can tell you that the protection of my sources is our number one priority.
Meanwhile, why did the police raid my home and steal my devices in the first place? A lot of people commenting online are asking this question.
Are we any closer to finding out the truth?
The senior police officer on the morning of the raid itself told me that it related to social media posts I had made, and that the investigation had been a year in the making.
He would not reveal which social media posts they were concerned about.
If the raid really was triggered by posts I made in October 2023, then why the year-long delay?
One clue may be seen the fact that the Crown Prosecution Service has now been severely infiltrated by Zionists.
When Labour came to power after the election in July, they appointed new MP Sarah Sackman as the solicitor general. That’s the deputy to the attorney general, Richard Hermer, the man who runs the Crown Prosecution Service (as Prime Minister Keir Starmer himself also once did).
The office of the CPS must have played some sort of role in the decision to raid my home, confiscate my devices and thus impede my journalism.
If, in the future, we discover that Sackman herself did indeed play any role in this, it would be a direct conflict of interest.
Before she became an MP, Sackman played a leading role in the Jewish Labour Movement, an organisation which is an important part of the UK’s pro-Israel lobby. This is a group whose activities I’ve been exposing in my reporting for a decade now, including in several articles critical of Sackman herself.
The JLM and its proximity to the Israeli embassy in London was also heavily exposed in my book last year, Weaponising Anti-Semitism.
Israel killed its own people
But after news of the police raid broke, one of the most common comments I got went along the lines of this: the British state is repressing Asa Winstanley’s journalism because he exposed the role that Israel played in killing its own people on October 7th 2023.
This is because the last article I published before the raid was my major investigative feature for The Electronic Intifada titled “How Israel killed hundreds of its own people on 7 October.”
The full article explains in some detail a story I’ve been covering for the last year. How Israel’s deadly “Hannibal Directive” led them to kill many of the Israeli captives on October 7th 2023 rather than allowing them to fall into the hands of Palestinian fighters in Gaza.
Until we find out more about the internal processes that led to the police raid on my home on 17 October, we can’t say for sure exactly what caused it.
But I have been reporting on this important story for more than a year now: exactly the same time period that the senior police officer that morning stated that the investigation into me had begun.
It’s therefore interesting to note that the YouTube video at the top of this post was filmed the very night before the police raid on my home. It is a segment edited from The Electronic Intifada livestream of 16 October.
Of course, the final decision to raid my home was in all likelihood made before the video was filmed.
Nonetheless, the article that the video is based on was published only ten days before the raid. So it’s certainly possible that it was — at least — a factor in that decision.
Read the article in full and watch the video discussion between myself and my colleagues Ali Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman in the video at the top of this post.
The article is a long read but the video is a relatively concise distillation of the report.