Did Gordon Brown and Jackie Smith Really Order the Police Not to Investigate the Pakistani Grooming Gangs?

One of the stories going around the right, and especially the Islamophobic right, is that Gordon Brown and the-then Home Secretary Jackie Smith not only knew about the Pakistani grooming gangs, but ordered the police not to investigate them. It’s alleged that in 2008 they sent out a circular to the police forces stating that the victims had made a lifestyle choice and that, in order to preserve the peace, they were not to investigate them. I tried to do a bit of investigation into this rumour just using Google yesterday. They allegation is supposed to have been made by Nafzir Ali, the heroic prosecutor, who was behind the campaign to get these gangs arrested for their heinous crimes and put away. Ali is supposed to have made the allegation during an interview on Radio 4, which was then edited out and never broadcast.

If this is true, this would be a damning indictment of Brown and Smith, and their critics and opponents would be entirely right in calling for them to be jailed for a very long time. I don’t find anything particularly incredible about the allegation. The governments can and do stop investigations that are felt not to be in the public interest. With a serious allegation like this, it may well be that the Beeb would edit it out of an interview fearing legal or political repercussions. Tory critics have claimed that there is a strong bias in the BBC against them. I don’t find this entirely credible, but they have been able to support it with evidence that some elements of the Beeb were connected to the Labour party at the time, whose reporting was unfairly biased towards Blair’s Labour party. But as Blair at the time was turning Labour into a neoliberal party of the right, this doesn’t mean that it was a socialist or pro-working class bias.

The problem with these allegations is that they were made by a woman at a Tommy Robinson rally. It’s possible that she was telling the truth, though I didn’t find out what her background was that allowed her to know about this supposed interview and its suppression. Not everything Robinson says is a lie, and he was interviewing the gangs’ victims and promoting their stories while the police were still trying to silence them. But Tommy ‘Ten Names’ Robinson, as one of the great commenters here has called him, does not inspire confidence. As I’ve said, he’s a violent thug, who was in the BNP before supposedly become non-racist and deciding instead to pick on Islam. He has convictions for assault and mortgage fraud, as well as contempt of court and attempting to sneak into America while banned. He lost a libel case against a Syrian lad, who he claimed was the real bully after the lad was the victim of a racist attack by other boys at school. He claims to be some kind of citizen journalist, but his reports made at the time of these gangs’ trial violated the rules of journalistic impartiality and threatened to cause a mistrial. In which case, the trial would have to have been abandoned and the gangs, if guilty, let off.

The fact is that unless there is a public inquiry, we don’t know if this really happened. 38 Degrees did post a petition calling for one, but it hasn’t happened yet and I doubt that it will.

Hope Not Hate Ask For Contributions in Legal Battle against Tommy Robinson – And Why I’m Not Contributing

I have had a couple of emails from the anti-racism/ anti-religious extremism organisation Hope Not Hate over the past few days asking if I would like to donate to their legal fund to fight Tommy Robinson, former head of the EDL, Pegida UK, jail bird, mortgage fraudster, and former member of the BNP. He’s a violent islamophobe with convictions for assault. His modus operandi in dealing with his online critics has been to dox them to his followers, leave the information up for a few hours, and then tell everyone he doesn’t want them touched or abused after this has no doubt happened. He also turns up to his critics’ homes, or those of their elderly parents in the middle night with a few of his thugs demanding to have a few words. One of his minions is the war criminal Avi Yemeni, an Australian-Israeli. Yemeni claims to have shot an unarmed Palestinian protester during his time in the IDF, and talks like he’s proud of it. Robinson also turned up at the home of Mike Stuchbery, a teacher, in the middle of the night, loudly insinuating that he was paedophile. This is pure invention, but nevertheless it led to Stuckbery leaving his job and moving to Germany.

A year or so ago Robinson was sued for libel for lawyers acting on a behalf of a Syrian refugee schoolboy, who had suffered a violent racial assault and bullying at school. Robinson, despite the evidence, immediately took the opposite view and decided that the lad’s White English assailant was really the victim. He interviewed him and put up the interview on YouTube. The Syrian lad and his lawyers won the case, and the beak ordered Robinson to pay £100,000 in costs and damages. Robinson has refused, pleading bankruptcy. Which is why Hope Not Hate are writing to me and others.

They’re not convinced Robinson is bankrupt, and are appealing to their supporters for funds so they can sue him and prove otherwise. Now as you might have gathered from the above description of Tommy Robinson’s sordid political career, I have no sympathy for him. In fact, I think he’s a counterproductive menace. He was jailed several times for contempt of court for his citizen coverage of the trials of Muslim grooming gangs. Except he broke all the rules real journalists have to follow to ensure that everyone gets a fair trial. He talked as if they were already proven guilty. This is dangerous, because if they were, but could claim that they didn’t get a fair trial thanks to Robinson’s reportage, they could get off.

But I have a problem with this, and with Hope Not Hate’s friends and allies. They’re connected to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Israel lobby organisation that was deeply involved in the witch hunt against supposed anti-Semites in the Labour party. Except those they accused of anti-Semitism were simply followers and supporters of Corbyn and campaigners and supporters of the Palestinians, who were overwhelmingly genuine, principled anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism. A very high proportion of the victims of this witch hunt are Jews. They are five times more likely to be accused of anti-Semitism as gentiles. As I keep banging on about again and again, many of them have suffered real anti-Semitic abuse and violence, and have been threatened with further violence after these smears.

I am concerned about the safety of these victims of the smears, and especially Mike, from legal persecution. The Israel lobby uses lawfare – legal action – to shut down its critics. This was powerfully shown in the YouTube video Mike did with other victims of the witch-hunt to mark the release of a film refuting the Panorama claim that Labour was rife with anti-Semitism. I am also very concerned about how such legal actions, like the one Hope Not Hate wishes to bring against Tommy Robinson, will affect Mike.

As you know, Mike is currently in a legal battle with Rachel Riley, Countdown numbers person, who is suing him for libel. It’s a thoroughly unfair battle, as Riley is a rich woman – forget all that bilge from her oppo Tracey-Ann Oberman about jobbing actors. Mike, like the rest of us, is just an ordinary bloke with a limited income, and carer for missus Mike. He has been forced to rely on crowdfunding to help fund his battle. Riley and her expensive lawyers have attempted to stop this. They have also enquired how much money he has and whether this will make it worth their while to sue him. Her followers have also shown themselves to be deeply unpleasant, vicious people. They have gloated over the prospect of Mike being left bankrupt and homeless, looking forward to him losing the case and having to sell his house to pay her damages.

Riley and Oberman and their supporters have shown themselves in their conduct to be nothing but litigious thugs in my view. I am deeply concerned that if Hope Not Hate uses this tactic against Tommy Robinson, the same tactics will also be used against Mike, and every other genuine anti-racist Riley or someone like her chooses to sue.

In normal circumstances I would have no hesitation in helping Hope Not Hate sue Robinson. I have considerable respect for the work they have done exposing and fighting genuine Nazis, White supremacists and Islamists.

But because of their connections to the militant Zionist witch hunters and smear merchants I cannot do so because of the danger this poses to decent people, simply because they support Corbyn, the Palestinians or the people who have been falsely accused.

I must therefore decline and strongly encourage others to think twice before contributing to their legal campaign.

Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin Tells You Not to Vote for Him

More internet fun at the expense of another far right, aspiring politico. This time it’s Carl Benjamin, aka the internet ranter known as ‘Sargon of Akkad’, amongst other, less polite epithets.

Sargon’s one of the extreme right-wing internet figures that Gerard Batten has invited into his party in order to restore its flagging membership and electoral viability, like Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, Mark Meechan, alias Count Dankula, and Tommy Robinson. Dankula’s notorious as the idiot, who was convicted of anti-Semitism after he trained his girlfriend’s pug to make the Nazi salute when he shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘Gas the Jews’. He put videos of it on YouTube, and claimed it was all just a joke. The Glaswegian Jewish community thought otherwise, prosecuted, and the judge agreed with them. And Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon, is the islamophobe who founded the EDL, then was involved with Pegida UK. After having been in the BNP, of course. He’s now Batten’s special adviser on Islam and prisons, because he’s been in a few, and not just for hate speech and contempt of court, but also for other crimes like assault and mortgage fraud. And now UKIP have chosen Sargon to be their candidate for the European elections for the southwest. Which isn’t surprising, as he comes from Swindon.

A few days ago Sargon put up a five minute people announcing his candidacy. Kirsti Winters, an American academic teaching in Germany, who is a feminist and a political scientist, put up this spoof video. It’s another piece of careful editing done to make Sargon look stupid. The video begins with the statement that UKIP is a ‘rational party for rational people’. It then shows Sargon introducing himself, and saying that he doesn’t want to be elected to the European parliament, and pleading with people not to elect him, as he won’t do sh*t. He also claims that he’s a ‘centrist moderate’ but comes from a part of the community, whose voice isn’t being heard. And he is firmly opposed to far-left ideology, which he will expose on the internet if he comes across it.

Well, Sargon is many things, but he most definitely isn’t a ‘centrist moderate’. For some bizarre reason he sees, or claims to see himself as ‘centre left’, but that’s only by the standards of the mid-19th century. He also describes himself as a ‘classical liberal’, which means that he stands for absolute free trade, the total privatisation of the economy and the destruction of the welfare state. As for being a member of a section of the community whose voice is being stifled, I have heard that Sargon’s Jewish and has a Black grandfather. But those aren’t the ethnic groups he means. Sargon’s a member of the manosphere, that section of the internet that believes feminism has gone far too far, and is a seething mass of resentment about how White men are under attack from aggressive feminism, anti-racism, ‘social justice warriors’ and other extreme left-wing ideologies. He has several channels in which he finds the most extreme or ridiculous feminists, Black or other ethnic minority activists or campaigners for gay and trans rights, criticises them and tries to claim that they are somehow representative of all feminists, Blacks, gays and transgender people.

I mentioned him a few days ago in a piece I put up about UKIP’s choice of Count Dankula as one of their candidates for the European elections. Zelo Street put up another piece on the pair at the same time, which gave a few more details of Sargon’s unpleasant opinions. Like the tweet he sent to Jess Philips, when she was talking about the vile misogynist messages she had been sent, including rape threats. Sargon’s tweeted ‘I wouldn’t even rape you.’ He also told a group of other extreme rightists on a livestream, in which he was taking part, that they were ‘behaving like a bunch of n****ers’ and ‘White n****ers’ when they started to fall out among themselves. Sargon isn’t, as far as I know, actually a member of the Alt Right. He defines himself as a civic, rather than ethnonationalist, which means that he believes that anyone born in a country is a citizen, regardless of their colour or ethnicity, rather than that only Whites have citizenship. On the other hand, he does hold many of their views, so that one of the leaders of the Alt Right has said that he’s a gateway into them. He’s certainly said that an Alt Right government would be less of a threat to him and his family than an ‘SJW’ (Social Justice Warrior) one.

As for the slogan underneath the spoof UKIP banner at the start of the video, ‘Service guarantees citizenship’, SF fans will spot that as the motto in Robert Heinlein’s highly militaristic novel, Starship Troopers, filmed in the 1990s by Paul Verhoven, the man who gave us Robocop and Total Recall. In the film and the novel, only those who have served in the military qualify as citizens with the right to vote. Heinlein started out as a socialist before moving to the extreme right, and he really believed this. So, apparently, do many UKIP officials and politicos, as they’ve also repeated it. Whether they really believe it, or even know where it comes from, is debatable. It may be they’re only using it to draw in extreme right-wing SF fanboys. But it’s there, nonetheless.

As for ‘a rational party for rational people’, Sargon’s party of the internet sceptic community, but it seems that this has increasingly given up promoting atheism or attacking ‘unscientific’ beliefs, and become dominated instead by self-proclaimed right-wing intellectuals attacking anything to the left of them. So much so that it’s fair to say that parts of it do resemble the League of Gentlemen’s Royston Vesey and its bizarre, twisted, deeply insular inhabitants. Like Tubbs and Edward and their ‘local shop, for local people’.

The best thing genuine liberals, moderates and leftists can do is take Sargon’s advice, and not vote for him or UKIP, if they don’t want this country run by a horde of deeply xenophobic, misogynist gammon. Some of whom may well have Tubbs and Edward’s snub noses.