SEARCHLIGHT ON THE BBC

How The Broadcast Media Peddles
The Fantasies, Paranoia And Poison Of
Arch-Liar Gerry Gable


At 7.30pm on March 16, 1995, BBC Radio Four broadcast the sixth programme in its Soundtrack series. The Radio Times 11-17 March 1995 issue contained the following write-up: “‘If you’re fighting a war, what does your army need before anything? Good intelligence.’ Gerry Gable has spent the best part of his life exposing the activities of the far right in the pages of Searchlight, the international anti-fascist monthly magazine he edits.” The programme was produced by Mark Burman.

The idea that Gable is some sort of beacon in the darkness is rather quaint, considering the lies and black propaganda this hate-filled little Jew has spewed out over the years, and his victims have been not just Nazis but two Members of Parliament; a Sun journalist (who sued him for libel and settled out of court); a gullible low level civil servant who was smeared as a Czech spy; (1) and, most emphatically, an independent researcher and schoolteacher with impressive left wing credentials. (2)

The radio programme opens with a message which was left, ostensibly, on Gable’s office answerphone, although the question of who left it there cannot be established. Such messages were played intermittently throughout the programme; the one thing that can be said for certain is that the voices were a shade too deep for Mrs Gable.

Gable says the name Searchlight was chosen by a committee, this may be true, although this committee probably consisted of himself and the late - and unlamented - Maurice Ludmer. The idea was, he says, to shine a searchlight on the Nazis, exposing them as the enemies of democracy. It will come as no surprise to anyone involved in extremist politics, certainly at the far right end of the spectrum, to learn that Gable’s definition of Nazis extends far beyond the devotees of German National Socialism and their latter day imitators, whether or not they happen to stamp around in swastikas and jackboots. (3) To wit, it includes any white person who opposes large scale non-white immigration into this or any other predominantly white country. And any white person who opposes governmentally forced race-mixing, in any country, including in South Africa. (4)

Curiously, blacks who oppose forced race-mixing are often smeared as anti-Semitic. Presumably their opposition to such is considered synonymous with the aspirations of certain Jews (in particular Gerry Gable and his Zionist buddies) to impose their own agenda of “racial tolerance”.

February 1975, says Gable, saw the launch of a small, tatty journal called Searchlight, the grammar was atrocious (so what’s changed?), and it contained information [sic] that “absolutely nobody else could produce”. This is indeed true, that is not to say that this information did not spill over into other journals, including the mainstream press. So let’s take a very brief look at just one of Searchlight’s early scoops: Column 88.

In the launch issue of Searchlight (which was available by subscription only, appeared the first ever reference to Column 88. (5) The April 6, 1975 issue of the Daily Telegraph contained an article Hitler birthday party uncovered, which appears to have been the first mention of this group in the mainstream press. The article was written by the late Peter Gladstone Smith, a liberal journalist and Quaker who was duped by Maurice Ludmer (then the leading light in this nascent nastiness) and Searchlight “mole” (read agent provocateur) Dave Roberts.

For a potted history of Roberts and Column 88 the reader is referred to the pamphlet In Serving The Wicked Expect No Reward. (6) It will suffice to say here that none of the sensationalist claims about this supposedly so sinister organisation proved to have any substance. The most serious allegation that was substantiated against it was that its members had organised a birthday celebration for their glorious gone but never forgotten Führer. (7)

Returning to the radio programme, in a cameo that was obviously posed for the listener, Gable referred to a hit list which was being circulated by the quasi-mythical Combat 18. Scotland Yard is said to have rung him to warn him that he is on the Combat 18 hit list; he said that it was he who gave the Yard that “information”. There are some people who think he may well have printed this list himself. Whether or not that is true, we can all print hit lists. How about this one?

Mrs Elizabeth Windsor: Buckingham Palace, Westminster.
Gerry Gable: 49 Herent Drive, Ilford, Essex.
Alexander Baron: 93c Venner Road, Sydenham, London.
John Major: 10 Downing Street, Westminster.
President Bill Clinton: the White House, Washington DC.

Impressive, isn’t it? I can even throw in an E-Mail address for Bill Clinton. But how many of the people on this so-called hit list have actually been hit? Apart from the current writer, that is! However sinister such hit lists may be, Gable is hardly in a position to complain about them because it was him and his kind who started the ball rolling. As well as publishing the addresses of known far right activists, Gable’s hate-filled magazine has frequently published details of their places of work.

For example, the June 1987 issue published an article ROUND THE BENZ in which Mercedes Benz worker Steve Brady was singled out for persecution and it was suggested that his employers fire him. And much more recently, schoolteacher Larry O’Hara, whom we already mentioned in a footnote, had his photograph published along with paranoid ravings about O’Hara’s allegedly working for something called the Freedom Network Campaign, and much more besides. (8)

Returning to the call Gable supposedly received from New Scotland Yard, he made sure that he gave out the extension, 2175. This is the number of Special Branch Reserve. This call may well have been made, but Gable’s claim in the March 17, 1995 issue of the Jewish Chronicle that “We don’t work for the police, we work with the police” is pure garbage. (9) Gable’s libels have in the past been directed at the police; for example, he has repeatedly claimed in print that the police failed to apprehend the 1965 synagogue artists, and that he and his bunch of Jewish-born thugs and schemers brought the culprits to justice. Both claims are baseless lies. (10)

In the programme, Gable told the presenter that he took the number because it could be anybody calling pretending to be the police to find his address. The fact is that his personal address has been well known to the far right for many years. As long ago as January 1991, Gable complained that the security services had leaked his name to the National Front. (11) This is the story the current writer was told by a former associate of Gable’s, in particular that SIS had leaked his address to the NF because they were displeased with the lies Gable had been peddling in Searchlight about the security services safe-housing alleged Italian terrorists in Britain. Needless to say, the National Front told a slightly different story, and claimed that they had spent two years tracking him down. The current writer found it much easier to track Gable down; the Searchlight Organisation’s company documents are registered to his home address.

Of all the lies and poison peddled in this forty minute programme, none was more frightening than the undoubtedly truthful claim that after the recent Dublin soccer riot, no less than 118 calls had been logged to the Searchlight office; Gable said he had received over thirty at home and about a dozen the previous night. Can the press - the Irish press as well as the British press - really make such extensive use of the disinformation peddled by this hate-filled little Jewish-born former thug and mischief-maker? It appears so. (12)

The recent Dublin soccer riot will doubtless go down in Gable-esque folklore as being Combat 18 orchestrated, On February 17, 1995, an article in the Guardian which quoted Gable’s office boy Tony Robson said that football fans had given Nazi salutes. The current writer saw footage of this incident, and to me it looked for all the world like they were giving clenched fist salutes, which are more reminiscent of Black Power than white mayhem. (13)

After some more nonsense, Gable repeated the lie that in April 1947 a schoolteacher - who was a Mosleyite supporter - told his class as it broke up for Easter that the Jews had killed Jesus. “You’re a Jew, aren’t you Gable?” And poor Gerry had to run home under a hail of stones. (14) What are the facts about this apparently outrageous incident? Firstly, we have only the word of a many times proven liar that it happened, ie Gable himself. Secondly, the current writer contacted the Mosley Archive and asked them about this incident, could it have happened?

In a letter dated 20 August 1994, a correspondent for the Mosley Archive wrote thus: “The ‘Mosleyite’ schoolteacher...(15) If there had been one in London I doubt very much whether he would ‘have stuck his neck out’ with the wording you tell me was alleged to be used to Gable. A Mosleyite teacher would in fact take all precautions not to risk his beliefs being known, apart from the fact that I believe no Mosleyite would ‘persecute’ a small Jewish boy in this mode.”

Further confirmation of this is the fact that Colin Jordan, self-professed Hitler worshipper, was employed by the local authority in Coventry as a teacher in the late fifties and early sixties, and, because he was obviously a good teacher and didn’t bring his politics into the classroom, Jordan’s right to free expression was defended for three years by his employers; he was dismissed only after his 1962 “Free Britain From Jewish Control” rally in Trafalgar.

Even further confirmation comes from the lack of such an attitude towards Jewish schoolboys (and girls) by the Nazis proper. In connection with his ongoing researches into the Jewish Question and over a period of many months, the current writer read every issue of the Jewish Chronicle for the entire Nazi era. On page 18 of the June 16, 1933, was a report of bullying of Jewish schoolchildren and segregation in the classroom. But Jewish separatism was said to be favoured by the Zionists! An even more significant article appeared in the March 13, 1936 issue. It was stated on page 17 that “For sullying the purity of the fight against the Jewish people”, a Nazi blackmailer was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment and 3 years loss of civil rights. He had threatened to denounce a Jewish tradesman for an alleged offence against German schoolgirls in 1926. The paper’s tone was mocking.

It should also be borne in mind that those Mosleyites who were anti-Semitic, or who spoke out against what they believed to be - rightly or wrongly - Jewish/Zionist influence, had far more terrestrial reasons to hate Jews. In 1947 the situation in Palestine was of far greater concern; many British servicemen had been murdered by Zionist terror gangs in Palestine, as indeed had many Arabs and not a few Jews. There were unquestionably some Mosleyites and others who tarred all Jews with the same brush as the Zionists, but in this century at least, the Christ-killer propaganda has always been the work of crazies: “Christian” fundamentalists, mystics, and other loonies, the sort of people who were not welcome in the Union Movement.

Leaving all this aside, Gable grew up in Hackney; according to him here, his school was at the back of Hackney churchyard and Mare Street. The London Borough of Hackney has a heavy Jewish population, and indeed from the 1930s onward it was the scene of orchestrated fascist and anti-Semitic activity. So it is unlikely that Gable was the only racial Jew in his class, and certainly in his school. Is it really likely that a schoolteacher would have risked dismissal, scandal and worse under such circumstances? Furthermore, if Gable had been stoned and arrived home covered in blood, such an outrage would surely have elicited an immediate and vitriolic response from his father, who was by Gable’s own account a militant anti-fascist, ie a Jewish street thug.

But even leaving all this aside, this incident is still a colossal piece of fiction, although it most certainly has an historical basis. Writing in 1956, the Jewish historian Cecil Roth tells us that in the Middle Ages the good Christian people of England used to stone the Jews: “On Good Friday, in many places, they were stoned by the rabble and buffeted by the authorities - sometimes with fatal results.” (16)

This was religious anti-Semitism, ie blaming the Jews for deicide; which is of course the historical basis of anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism of the pre-Second World War Blackshirts was not based on religious bigotry at all but was largely political, financial and racial, and, it has to be said, largely the result of the Jewish attitude towards British fascism of tarring all fascists with the same brush as the Nazis. (17) Jews made considerable contributions to Italian fascism, (18) and in the early days of British fascism not a few Jews signed up with Mosley, including the former world welterweight boxing champion Kid Lewis.

As far as individual members of Union Movement were anti-Semitic, this was again of a largely political nature, in particular they objected strongly to Zionist terrorists murdering British servicemen in Palestine. The extremist violence of this time was almost entirely in one direction, from organised Jewish street thugs, in particular the 43 Group, against the Union Movement. (19)

However, even though Gable has read up on his Jewish history here, his story of abuse by a non-existent Mosleyite teacher and classmates must still be dismissed as a pack of lies, because in May 1985 he gave an entirely different account of how he became attracted to the heroic struggle against the mythical international Nazi conspiracy.

Here he told interviewer Bob Huntley that “His rage was triggered at an early age when, in 1947, a policeman called his father a ‘Jew boy’ and told him to make a path for a fascist street march. ’At the age of 10, that kind of impression sticks with you for the rest of your life,’ Gable says.” (20)

Then into this fairy tale comes the fairy tale Jewish princess, Sweet Sonia, who tells us that she has been involved with Searchlight for nearly twenty years, and during her early time fighting the forces of darkness, acted as one of its moles. This again is a lie. Sonia claims this for a very good reason. The current writer obtained from Companies House the official papers of the various arms of the Gable octopus, (21) and on some of these documents he found the name Sonia Gable nee Hochfelder, a name he recognised from an early issue of Searchlight. As a result of this, he began broadcasting the truth about Sweet Sonia’s early career to all and sundry with his usual indiscretion. It is now all but universally known on the far right, and in many quarters of the far left as well, that Sonia is a former far rightist herself. So what else could she and her spouse say?

Sonia says here that when she first came across so-called Nazis she decided to find out more about them in the hope of doing something to oppose them. She says they brought her in for translation because she read German, and that she had a contact in AJEX, (the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen). Later in the programme, it is claimed that Sonia’s first point of contact was with Maurice Ludmer, not Gable. More lies about how she allegedly infiltrated the National Front follow. Husband Gerry was said to have been her handler. He may be nowadays, but according to certain people, in her days in the NF, Sonia was more of a hole than a mole, and was handled freely and handed round by many people, including Directorate member Malcolm Smith, former Mosleyite Keith Thompson and a certain Steve Brady, who recruited her in the first place. Here then are the true facts about the former Sonia Kathleen Emma Hochfelder.

In a telephone call January 24, 1995, the lecturer and Conservative Party member Sam Swerling, (22) told the current writer that Sweet Sonia had attended a lot of meetings of the Young Conservatives in 1974-5, including the 1974 Brighton Conservative Conference. From the Conservative Party she appears to have gone to the other end of the political spectrum. According to Keith Thompson, “I first met her around 1977; she’d been in some lunatic Maoist organisation at Imperial College, where Brady was. She went into the NF, made donations to the National Front, worked very well, worked very hard, seemed in every way genuine. Obviously we never really trusted her but it seemed unlikely to me that she was a spy because she looked so much like a spy; she was a walking caricature of a Jew really. That’s all I can say about her.” (23) Yes, Thompson did say she was a Jew. “I said to Sonia Hochfelder: ‘Are you a Jew?’ She said: ‘My father used to be.’ Those were her exact words. Her mother was a Gentile, her father used to be a Jew.” (24)

This may sound strange but it isn’t really, because the National Front wasn’t anti-Jewish! Rather it was Organised Jewry, and the sweepings of the ghetto - ie Gerry Gable and his gang - who were anti-Front. The reason the reader is likely to believe otherwise is because of the lies, hatred and poison Gerry Gable and his gang have spread throughout our media and other institutions for the past two decades and more. Briefly the background to the founding of the National Front is as follows. It was founded in 1967 by A.K. Chesterton. The cousin of G.K. Chesterton, A.K. fought in both world wars. In the thirties he had been a leading member of the British Union of Fascists, but was never pro-Nazi. (25) Neither, incidentally, was Sir Oswald Mosley. (26) Although he had been a virulent pre-war anti-Semite, Chesterton - who appears to have been a fairly uncritical believer in the Holocaust - was horrified by what allegedly took place in the alleged Nazi extermination camps. After the Second World War he teamed up with the Orthodox Jewish writer Joseph Leftwich, and in 1948 they published a book called The Tragedy Of Anti-Semitism.

Chesterton went on to found the League of Empire Loyalists, one of the organisations which later merged to form the NF. In 1954, the future Nazi leader Colin Jordan joined the League of Empire Loyalists but was expelled because of his “intransigence on the Jewish question”, as one author put it. (27) (In other words, anti-Semitism). The National Front was a mixed bag, its main platform was to stop further non-white immigration into Britain (which hardly makes it Nazi) and to begin repatriation of those non-whites already here; this latter is a somewhat more controversial policy, but few people branded Idi Amin a Nazi when he expelled the Ugandan Asians at about the same time. As late as 1970 the National Front’s membership included a vicar! (28) There were also several Jews in and around it. (29)

At one point the National Front made a great play of recruiting or attempting to recruit Jews, and there was probably a great deal of sincerity in this. (30) Unfortunately, neither those wonderful people who went on to give you Sabra and Shatila or the sweepings of the ghetto - ie Gerry Gable and his hatemongering co-racialists in the “anti-fascist” movement - would give them the time of day, and instead they embarked on a successful smear campaign.

In the National Front were a number of people with Nazi antecedents, some of them very recent. One of these was Martin Webster who in 1962 told the People newspaper “...we’re busy forming a well-oiled Nazi machine throughout the country.” And “Yes, Hitler was right. The Jew is the maggot of society.” (31) Webster was about nineteen at the time (ie in 1962) and a member of the National Socialist Movement.

All Organised Jewry, the organised (and misnamed) anti-fascist left and their fellow travellers did was to hammer away at these Nazi antecedents and use violence and all manner of other dirty tricks against the Front until they had frightened off all but the hardiest elements, and of course, if you give a dog a bad name... All the above has taken us a long way from Sweet Sonia, but it was necessary to show how the daughter of a man who “used to be a Jew” was able to join the NF fairly easily. As stated, Sonia was a popular young lady with the menfolk, and was especially pally with Malcolm Smith. There was no question of her being any sort of mole. Another thing that should be borne in mind is that the National Front was (and still is, what’s left of it), a legal political party, and never engaged in nor condoned criminal activity. The only sort of information Sonia could have supplied Gable with - if she had known him - was purely legal information: the names and addresses of members, times, dates and places of meetings, etc. There is absolutely no evidence that she did, or that she knew Gable, and in any case, as Keith Thompson has already pointed out, she was never really trusted in the Front. I repeat, Sonia was no kind of mole. What she was was a mixed-up little Jewish girl.

Another reason Sonia was no kind of mole is because a mole - to be effective - has to build up confidence, which requires a certain commitment to activism. Rather than show such commitment, Sonia bounced about all over the place. Not only was she in the National Front but she joined both the National Party and the League of St. George. Whatever their attitude towards her, the far right, including the so-called Nazi fan club League of St. George, allowed her to give free rein to her aspirations.

In the August 12, 1976 issue of League Review, the future Mrs Gable published No More Wars Between Brothers. She attended the pan-European rally at Diksmuide, and on page 19 of the journal she wrote: “The enemies of the White Race operate on an international scale and will continue to dictate to us if we fight amongst ourselves.”

Anyone familiar with far right terminology will recognise that phrase as a coded reference to the International Jews. In the December 1976 issue, Sonia published a long article called FROM UNITED KINGDOM TO UNITED EUROPE.

In the February 1977 issue, Sonia replied extremely moderately to James Hill in the READER RESPONSE column; Hill’s epistle was anti-Semitic and offensive, at least, some people would have found it so. In the April 1978 issue, S.B. of Reading wrote in to protest against “the fervently Zionist SH...” And in the August 1978 issue, C. Horner whined: “Dear Sir, I am heartily sick and tired of Jew S. Hochfelder’s ceaseless efforts to force this troublesome tribe of self chosen people down our throats...Must their infiltration, whining and take-over be put up with even in the last bastions of white-racial circles?” It is evident from this that Sonia was paraded as a Court Jew, and that whether or not she was entirely trusted by the League and other far rightists, they had absolutely no illusions about her. Mole, indeed. Now let us return to the lies of her husband, Gerry.

We have demonstrated, I think, that the claim that the National Front was both intensely anti-Semitic and always so is simply not true. Certainly no vicar would have joined it had this been the case! The claim that members constantly referred to Jews as Yids and Kikes is again not true; in any case, Jews - real Jews (32) - refer to themselves as Yids, because Yid is the Yiddish word for Jew. (33)

On leaving school, Gable says that he went for an interview with a careers officer who immediately recognised him as a racial Jew and asked him “Cabinet making or tailoring.” This is nonsense. Apparently (he would have us believe) this was on account of his skin colour and the shape of his nose. I have no idea what colour either of them were then, but since Gerry crossed swords with me his nose has become distinctly bloody and his skin has become very pale indeed - due primarily to legal fees. By the time I’m finished with him he’ll have been bled white. (34) Another point is that Gable doesn’t have a Jewish nose, inasmuch as there is one. The hooked nose of anti-Semitic cartoonists is largely propaganda; it is actually a Semitic nose rather than a Jewish nose, one that is more typical of the Semitic Sephardic Jews and the equally Semitic Arabs; Gable is not most definitely not Semitic and like the majority of Western Jews is actually of Ashkenazic stock.

Then he did the rounds of Fleet Street, went to the (now long defunct) Daily Sketch and got a job interview in which he did very well, giving all the right answers. (That certainly doesn’t have the ring of truth!) But, after passing the interview with flying colours he was told that there would be no place for him simply because he was a Jew. “And it was as plain as that.”

Again, it is difficult to credit this story. To begin with, if the interviewer had hated Jews that much why would he have given Gable an interview at all? Why didn’t he tell him he’d failed or say “We’ll let you know?” Leaving that aside though, this story still does not have the ring of truth. Although the extent of Jewish ownership/control/influence of the mass media is often greatly exaggerated by anti-Semites, the Western media has certainly been a Jewish stronghold, newspapers especially so. For example, the Reuters agency was founded by the German-born Jew Julius Reuter; the Daily Telegraph was founded by a Jew, Joseph Levy. (35) Many other racial Jews have become distinguished journalists, most of them - unlike Gable - rightly so. The claim that anti-Semitism was rife in the British media in the 1950s and that there was some sort of barrier against Jews is simply not true. It may well have been that Gable had this interview and was turned down, but it is more likely that he was rejected because he was an obnoxious little bastard even then. It is even more likely that he was turned down because he was considered unsuitable, because his face didn’t fit, or because, then, as now, this is a difficult field to enter whatever the merits of the applicant, although Gable has himself proved many times that, once a journalist has a foot in the door, he is virtually impossible to dislodge, whatever crap he churns out.


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