More authoritarian Western crackdowns on speech critical of Israel

 

By Caitlin Johnstone

Oct 20, 2024

British “counterterrorism” police raided the home of Electronic Intifada editor Asa Winstanley on Thursday morning, seizing multiple electronic devices on suspicion that the journalist violated the UK’s 2006 Terrorism Act with his social media activity.

The Electronic Intifada is an independent outlet which focuses on Palestinian rights and the abuses of apartheid Israel. It has spent the last year publishing critical journalism that has later been vindicated by more mainstream outlets questioning empire propaganda on issues like the “mass rape” hoax and Israel’s implementation of the Hannibal Directive on October 7. Winstanley has been a major contributor to this journalism.

The Electronic Intifada reports:

“British counterterrorism police on Thursday raided the home and seized several electronic devices belonging to The Electronic Intifada’s associate editor Asa Winstanley.

“Approximately 10 officers arrived at Winstanley’s North London home before 6 am and served the journalist with warrants and other papers authorizing them to search his house and vehicle for devices and documents.

“A letter addressed to Winstanley from the ‘Counter Terrorism Command’ of the Metropolitan Police Service indicates that the authorities are ‘aware of your profession’ as a journalist but that ‘notwithstanding, police are investigating possible offenses’ under sections 1 and 2 of the Terrorism Act (2006). These provisions set out the purported offense of ‘encouragement of terrorism.’

“An officer conducting Thursday’s raid informed Winstanley that the investigation was connected with the journalist’s social media posts. Attempts to reach the Metropolitan Police Service for comment for this story have been unsuccessful.

“Although his devices were seized, Winstanley was not arrested and has not been charged with any offense.”

 

“The amount of authoritarianism and erosion of rights in the West to protect Israel — by censoring criticism of that foreign country and punishing its critics — is almost impossible to overstate,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted on the news of the police raid, adding, “Mass firings in the US and speech-restricting laws. The UK, as always, is worse.”

As soon as the British government gave itself the right to designate targets of British warmongering as “terrorists” and then made it a speech crime to support those “terrorists”, it became inevitable we’d start seeing British journalists persecuted for criticizing their government’s foreign policy.

Basically what we’re seeing with the police raid on Asa Winstanley is the west finally reconciling (A) its need to suppress speech that’s critical of western warmongering with (B) its stated support for free speech. All it has to do is outlaw speech that can be deemed supportive of “terrorism” while designating the targets of western warmongering like Hamas and Hezbollah as “terrorists”.

This maneuver allows the western empire to stomp out critical speech about western foreign policy in a way that can be framed as reasonable, because obviously we can’t have people encouraging terrorism! That would be tantamount to shouting “fire” in a crowded theater — which we seem to have arbitrarily decided is the line where free speech must end.

We’re seeing the UK spearhead this initiative over the past year, with “counterterrorism” police persecuting journalists like Winstanley and Richard Medhurst and activists like Mick Napier, Tony Greenstein, Richard Barnard and Sarah Wilkinson, but we’re seeing similar iterations sprout up throughout the western world. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been increasingly censoring speech that they deem supportive of “dangerous individuals and organisations” like Hamas and Hezbollah, and here in Australia police are investigating protesters for waving Hezbollah flags at a demonstration in Melbourne under a new law banning the public display of symbols of designated “terrorist” groups.

Ever since 2016 we’ve seen western empire managers publicly wringing their hands and fretting about the disadvantage the western world has in the information age because of its laws supporting free expression which allow the enemies of western governments to spread “propaganda” and “disinformation” to westerners. In its increasing criminalization of any speech which can be interpreted as supportive of designated terrorist organizations, they’ve found a major loophole which allows them to rein in the highly democratized freedoms of expression that westerners have been enjoying with widespread internet access and begin regaining their ability to control how westerners think, speak, act, and vote.

Earlier this year we saw Palantir CEO Alex Karp come right out and say that if western anti-genocide protesters are allowed to win the public debate, the west will lose the ability to wage wars.

“We kind of just think these things that are happening, across college campuses especially, are like a sideshow — no, they are the show,” Karp said during a conference in May. “Because if we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the west, ever.”

For those who don’t know, Palantir is a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with intimate ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling surveillance network and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. Karp is a billionaire who sits on the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group and regularly features at the World Economic Forum and other platforms of plutocratic empire management.

We saw this imperial hand-wringing illustrated again this past May in a conversation between Senator Mitt Romney and Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the McCain Institute, during which both acknowledged some facts that generally go unstated by such empire managers.

After bemoaning Israel’s lack of success at “PR” regarding its Gaza assault, Romney just came right out and said that this was “why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature” — with “us” meaning himself and his fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“How this narrative has evolved, yeah, it’s a great question,” Blinken responded, saying that at the beginning of his career in Washington everyone was getting their information from television and physical newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

“Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond,” Blinken continued. “And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t — we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

Notice how he said the word “narrative” three times? That’s how empire managers talk to each other, because that’s how they think about everything.

This is because empire managers are always acutely aware of something that normal human beings are not: that real power comes from manipulating the stories — narratives — that people tell themselves about their reality.

They understand that humans are storytelling animals whose inner lives are typically dominated by mental narratives about what’s happening, so if you can control those narratives, you can control the humans.

They understand that power is controlling what happens, but true power is controlling what people think about what happens.

They understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

That’s what’s going on with all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, plutocrat-funded think tanks, and mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood, and it’s what’s going on with the police crackdowns we are seeing on journalists and activists in the UK. A few clever manipulators understand that you can control a society by controlling its dominant narratives, and they are conducting themselves accordingly.

Our rulers don’t think about things like normal people think about them. They don’t think in terms of doing the right thing or acting in a way that benefits everyone. They don’t think in terms of truth and honesty or the lack thereof. They only think in terms of what stories people are telling each other, and how those stories can be changed in a way that advances the interests of the empire they manage.

Empire managers — and highly manipulative people in general — do not use language in the way that normal people use it. Normal human beings use language to connect and communicate, whereas manipulators use it only to extract things they want from people and exert control over them. They do this by working to control the narratives that people have about their material reality.

That’s why when guys like Romney and Blinken talk to each other about why people are so upset at Israel, it never even occurs to them to discuss how Israel’s public image is being hurt by its own actions, or to suggest that it could improve that image by simply ceasing to behave in a monstrous way. All they talk about is “the narrative” of what Israel is doing, and how people having the ability to share ideas and information with each other online makes that narrative harder to control.

So while normal people are looking at the bloodshed and horror in Gaza and Lebanon and screaming it needs to stop at the top of our lungs, our rulers are hearing us and thinking, “Oh no, we need to find a way to get them to stop believing that narrative and get them to believe another one.”

That’s what we’re seeing with all the attempts to stomp out free speech both at demonstrations and online. They understand that if they lose control of the narrative, they won’t be able to deploy their armies anymore.

So please don’t make the mistake of thinking your attempts to disrupt their narrative control aren’t working. Don’t let anyone tell you your protests don’t make a difference or your dissident speech poses no threat to the powerful. If what we’re doing wasn’t working, empire managers wouldn’t be going nuts trying to stop us.

https://johnmenadue.com/more-authoritarian-crackdowns-on-speech-thats-critical-of-israel/