7 October conspiracy theory event cancelled after local council intervention
Waltham Forest Palestine Solidarity Campaign was due to hold an event titled 'What really happened on October 7' on council property
The London Borough of Waltham Forest has moved to help cancel an event due to be held on council-owned property by the local branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, featuring a notorious anti-Israel blogger on the subject of “what really happened on October 7”.
The Waltham Forest PSC had been due to hold the event on Friday 9 January at the council-owned William Morris community centre in Walthamstow. The group’s advertising described it as an event “to learn about and discuss the highly controversial narratives surrounding the events of 7 October 2023 used to justify Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza and atrocities across historic Palestine.”
The speaker at the event was Asa Winstanley, a longtime writer for the Electronic Intifada blog. Winstanley’s narrative around 7 October, as promoted via published articles, is to downplay Hamas’s actions on 7 October and instead suggest that Israel killed “many, if not most” of its own people on October 7, via use of the “Hannibal Directive”, a live-fire order intended to prevent Hamas taking prisoners back to Gaza.
In the chaos which followed the mass attack on Israel, a version of the Directive was enforced at some locations, and there were individual cases where IDF troops opened fire on locations believed to hold Hamas terrorists despite the possibility that Israeli civilians were being held captive in the vicinity. However, the idea that Israel murdered hundreds of its own people via this Directive is based on mis-contextualised conflict footage and misrepresented findings from Israeli media investigations. By contrast, bodycam videos taken from Hamas fighters, for example, are described by Winstanley as having been “released by the Israeli occupation authorities and highly likely to have been subjected to selective editing” – with no evidence given for the latter claim.
Responding to news of the cancellation, Amanda Bowman, co-chair of the London Jewish Forum, said: “Freedom of speech matters, and this is not about shutting down debate at one particular event. Concerns were raised with the council because it is the leaseholder. The council then contacted the venue, and the venue took its own decision to cancel. This should be a reminder to venues to carry out proper due diligence on the events they host, especially at a time when the way an event is framed can have a real impact on how safe local Jewish residents feel”.
Cllr Grace Williams, Leader of Waltham Forest Council, said: “The William Morris Community Centre is a much-valued local community centre. I am pleased that they have confirmed to me that they have taken the decision to cancel this event, given the concerns that have been expressed since it was advertised.”
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