The Telegraph journalist behind a hit-piece into pro-Palestine, anti-genocide activists has been caught harassing and doorstepping them – seemingly at the request of the Zionist lobby. Specifically, it seems Patrick Sawer obtained the home addresses of the individuals concerned from Zionist lobby group Stop The Hate UK.
In his Telegraph article, Sawer asserts that “Jewish community groups” have:
compiled a dossier of allegedly anti-Semitic behaviour by pro-Palestine activists after studying hours of video footage on social media and observing many of the past two years’ anti-Israel protests.
In several cases, action by police and prosecutors has been dropped or fallen through at an early stage.
They have now called on the Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to come down harder on displays of anti-Semitism, which include the harassment of Jews, open death threats and vocal support for the Hamas terror group.
It goes without saying that:
- The dossier has not been compiled by Jewish community groups, but Zionist lobby groups.
- Statements presented as fact by Sawer in the article are in fact untrue.
- The article was not independently written – instead it is a piece of propaganda on behalf of the pro-Israel lobby.
The Telegraph and Patrick Sawer: doing the work of pro-Zionist lobby groups for them
The Telegraph article claims that some of the information came from Labour Against Antisemitism (not a community group, but a pressure group in Labour previously chaired by a non-Jewish person). However, we also know who at least one of the other groups is.
Sawer, like the incompetent right-wing Zionist hack that he is, gave the game away that it was Stop The Hate behind his article. This happened when he doorstepped independent journalist Ibrahim Abul-Essad:
Sawer also doorstepped activist and independent journalist Anika Zahir (Ani.Says), as well as several others – some of whom are now not mentioned in the final article.
This type of targeted harassment is nothing new from Stop The Hate UK. As the Canary previously reported, Stop The Hate took a central role in the proscription of Palestine Action. The group bill themselves as the “largest Jewish-led direct action campaign group in the UK.” However, that ‘direct action’ regularly involves doxxing activists to the police. It has specifically run a targeted campaign against Dr Rahmeh Aladwan – to the point where its racism was revealed as it made cops arrest another brown doctor, thinking it was Aladwan.
Meanwhile, Labour Against Antisemitism’s Alex Hearn has a history of weaponising antisemitism on behalf of Israeli politicians against anti-Zionist Jews.
Moreover, Labour Against Antisemitism has a history of targeting innocent people with accusations of antisemitism for its own political agenda. Or rather, it targeted people for the political agendas of Keir Starmer and his now-chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.
Labour Against Antisemitism
As author of The Fraud Paul Holden wrote in an extract for the Canary:
In 2022, Al Jazeera reported on documents leaked from the Labour Party which showed that LAAS’ spokesperson and one of its most well-known activists, Euan Philipps, had created a fake persona called ‘David Gordstein’, which many readers would take to be a Jewish name.
Philipps is not Jewish.
Philipps admitted to Al Jazeera that he was David Gordstein but insisted that “he never claimed to be Jewish when doing so”…
The Gordstein persona was used to make hundreds of complaints of antisemitism to the Labour Party between 2017 and 2021. The reports are detailed, but perhaps the most important feature was the number of times the persona was used to accuse left-wing Jews of antisemitism.
The outrageous story of Gordstein’s complaint about the elderly Jewish party member Riva Joffe, which led to the party investigating her on her death bed… [is one of the worst].
Holden also noted that Labour Against Antisemitism also went after actor Miriam Margolyes. As Holden pointedly noted:
An invented Jewish-sounding persona (Gordstein), created by a non-Jew, charged a Jewish actress with antisemitism, because she had shared an article by a left-wing Jewish academic, which argued that non-Jews telling scare stories about antisemitism was itself a form of antisemitism.
This same non-Jewish activist would play a key role in amplifying the astroturf Stop Funding Fake News campaign, also led by non-Jews, that would implicitly accuse media outlets of being antisemitic for interviewing and recording the views of Jewish people who questioned aspects of the ‘antisemitism crisis’. That astroturf campaign was run by an organisation established by the Labour Together Project.
Lying for the Zionists in the Telegraph
So, in his Telegraph article Sawer is relying on the evidence of a disgraced Labour-affiliated Zionist lobby group and a Zionist campaign group that gets innocent people arrested. Then, to make matters worse he gets multiple facts wrong – or, as it’s otherwise known, lies.
For example, Sawer claims “A Jewish lawyer was arrested after wearing a Star of David, with police alleging the symbol had “antagonised” pro-Palestine protesters”. This is not true. As the Canary previously reported, cops arrested the guy for repeatedly breaching Public Order Act conditions to try and get at anti-Zionist Jews.
Then, Sawer claims that “Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were also banned from Aston Villa’s Europa League match in Birmingham… with critics saying it exposes Britain’s inability to protect Jews”. Again, authorities in Birmingham did not ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans because they were Jewish (it’s an Israeli team, anyway). They banned them because they are known to be far-right, racist football hooligans.
Also, Sawer claims that:
In one particularly disturbing incident, a Jewish community centre in north London was targeted in October last year.
Pro-Palestine activists were filmed screaming “murderers” at elderly Jewish visitors as they tried to enter, reducing several to tears, including one 80-year-old woman.
Yet even the pro-Zionist Jewish News reported a bit of the truth on this one. It wrote of the JW3 protest:
150 protesters stood directly outside the Jewish community centre as Sunday’s Israel After October 7th conference, hosted by the respected Israeli media outlet Haaretz, begun on Sunday morning.
Ticket holders for Sunday’s sold-out event were forced to endure the hate-filled chants as they filled past police and security guards to make their way into the venue for a conference, which included speeches from Lord Michael Levy, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert; Haaretz Editor in Chief Aluf Benn, MK’s Naama Lazimi and Ayman Odeh, and a video address from Sir Tony Blair.
Debasing even himself
So, pro-Palestine protesters didn’t target a Jewish community centre. They targeted a pro-Israel conference (nothing to do with Judaism) that was being held there. And activists claim that regardless, the accusation around ‘reducing several to tears’ had nothing to do with them.
Sawer’s rap-sheet of lies in his Telegraph article almost makes it worthless. But then he debases even himself (yes, that is possible) by going after veteran women’s rights activist Cristel Amiss. He repeats the accusation that when she said “Now these people are terminally deranged and the sickness is Zionism and it is incurable so they just need to be put down perhaps” she was referring to Jewish people.
Amiss was blatantly referring to Zionists. She said that outside the residence of far-right Zionist and racist Israeli ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely – where anti-Zionist Jews staged weekly protests.
This is, of course, the point of the Stop the Hate UK-backed article by Sawer: to smear pro-Palestine protesters as somehow antisemitic when they’re actually anti-Zionists who aren’t huge fans of genocide and war crimes.
Exactly the same thing happened last year in the Times. It seems Sawer either seemingly lifted a lot of his information from, or read the same press release that Stop The Hate UK probably sent out. Concerningly though, it was off the back of this article that cops arrested multiple protesters. Yet they took no further action against them.
Sawer: “horrible and violating”
Anika Zahir (Ani.Says) (not a “mortgage advisor”) told the Canary:
First of all, in regards to Patrick Sawer, I feel a lot of alarm and distress because after I saw the evidence of him doorstepping other people, I made two separate videos where I told him that I did not feel comfortable with him coming to my home, that it would make me feel alarm and distress, and that I’m a woman that lives alone.
And yet he still came to my home, and that made me feel extremely violated and extremely unsafe.
In regards to Stop the Hate UK, this is an ongoing campaign that has been launched against activists, and if I talk about myself, not only have they launched an online campaign, I have dealt with verbal abuse from some of their members, like Niaq Ghorbani, they’re always encroaching in our spaces, they’re always turning up where we are, they never stay in their section, the police allow them to intermingle amongst us.
So now they’ve become so emboldened that they are now going ahead and targeting us, and I think it’s absolutely disgusting, especially if you look at Stop the Hate UK, a lot of its members aren’t even Jewish, they’re just Christian British pro-Israelis.
It’s very intimidating for me as a woman that lives on her own, a disabled woman, to be constantly targeted by a group that’s consisting of a lot of members, especially when I have been physically assaulted before in front of their members, I have been verbally assaulted before in front of them, for them now to possibly have my address makes me feel really unsafe.
It just feels horrible, it feels violating, it feels anti-Muslim, it feels racist, it feels like a witch hunt, like a McCarthy witch hunt, like they can just point their fingers and then the police come after us.
No shame
Sawer should be ashamed of himself. Not least should he be ashamed for lying. But he should also be ashamed of doorstepping and harassing innocent people. But this is a hack who works for the Telegraph. So, it’s unlikely that he does.
Evidently, Zionists feel further emboldened to weaponise Jewish identity in blanket support of Israel. To do so is a disgrace that sidelines the lived experiences of Jewish people who do not ally themselves with the genocidal state. Corporate media journalists like Sawer are able to handily dismiss any objections from Jewish people, whilst conveniently platforming only Zionists.
Ultimately, these pro-Zionist lobby groups and their supporters feel emboldened enough by the British state – in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – to go after activists exercising their right to protest on behalf of the Palestinian people. And the fact that it’s happening at one of the most well-known media outlets in the country shows how far the rot goes.
Featured image via the Canary
