Foreword – 2017
In September last year, Milo Yiannopoulos gave a speech in Texas during which he discussed numerous cases of hate crime hoaxes in the United States, by lesbians alone. It remains to be seen if there are more actual cases today than there were twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, or if because the world and his dog are on-line, more cases are reported. I suspect the truth is a bit of both.
There have been many developments since 2002. Two of the alleged killers of Stephen Lawrence have been brought to book, though the veracity of the new forensic evidence against them remains to be seen. Murderess Tracie Andrews has been paroled; convicted murderer Satpal Ram was paroled in 2002, recalled to prison, and has since been paroled again. Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence has been replaced with life without parole; although his braindead supporters have not given up, by and large he now rots in darkness as he should have from the very beginning.
Herein I have alluded to mental illness. Having read and digested Thomas Szasz, I had abandoned the concept of mental illness before 2002, but have left it in here because the term is something most people recognise even if they don’t understand it.
Roger Ide gets a mention here; you will also find his name on my Michael Stone website.
This publication was written in Microsoft Word. I may at some point convert it to HTML and publish it on my main website with a plethora of links, in the meantime, I offer the reader this humble PDF. Enjoy.
Alexander Baron,
Sydenham,
South London
July 6, 2017
It is only in recent years that any documentation on hate crime hoaxes in the UK has come into the public domain in any meaningful sense. It is there, but what little there is remains buried in Public Record Office files or goes largely unreported by academics or by the national press. The pioneering studies of Laird Wilcox in the United States and my own modest contribution will, hopefully, change that for good.
Unlike the Wilcox study, which is largely a collection of press reports, this work has (I like to think) a more analytical slant with some historical background, and not a little philosophy. The recently important concept of hate crime and the not so recent (and increasingly boorish) concept of racial attacks/racist attacks, ad nauseam, are promoted incessantly in Britain more by the doctoring of, and the wilful false interpretation of, statistics, than by any other means. Indeed, the very concept of “political correctness” is based largely on the manipulation of such statistics. For example, convicted murderer Satpal Ram (whose crime is discussed below) whines that:
“Racism within the Criminal Justice System has also been instrumental in criminalizing a disproportionate number of Black people who are in Prison today. Black people constitute 7 per cent of the population at large, as opposed to 18 per cent of the prison population. This reflects the level of bias that exists within the system.”(1)
Does it indeed? What then are we to make of the following statistics?
The average prison population in England and Wales from 1999-2000 was as follows:
males
remand: 11,581
sentenced: 49,418
total: 60,999
females
remand: 741
sentenced: 2,514
total: 3,255
In other words, on average, males in prisons in England and Wales outnumber females by nearly nineteen to one. In 1999 there were 86 male suicides in prison and only 5 female suicides. Here, males fare a little better: by just over seventeen to one. (2)
In other words, using the logic of Satpal Ram and his ilk, the alleged racial bias of the prison system (3) is dwarfed by its sexual bias. Real life though is different; there are many factors at work in society which account for such so-called racial imbalances and “disproportionate representation” besides racism. It may be that black criminals are more stupid than white ones, or that blacks, as a race, are more violent. Ditto men and women.
Although this monograph is entirely my own work and any errors of fact or of interpretation are therefore my own, this study in its current form would not have been possible without the assistance of many people. In no particular order I would like to thank Nick Griffin and Tony Lecomber; Laird Wilcox; the staff of Hammersmith Library, the British Library at St Pancras and the Newspaper Library at Colindale, the Public Record Office and the Family Records Centre, Westminster Central Reference Library, Lewisham Reference Library and Local Studies Library, Croydon Reference Library, and the Probate Office. As usual, a very special thank you goes to my fellow independent researcher Mark Taha. And to anyone and everyone who assisted me in any way whatsoever, whether or not they are aware of it.
Alexander Baron,
Sydenham,
London.
June 1, 2002
In spite of extensive efforts at entrapment, heavy surveillance, and in two of the above, criminal investigations by the police, these Searchlight mooted/inspired “conspiracies” resulted in a grand total of three arrests: one night in 1975, three men were caught down a dark alley in Birmingham allegedly en route to assault the staff of an Indian restaurant. One of these men was a Searchlight agent provocateur. (8) And Gable refers to me as “the arch conspiracy theorist”. Nuff said.
Whether or not I am a conspiracy theorist, a raving lunatic, or the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper, this publication is researched almost entirely from the public domain and is minutely referenced. (9) Unlike Mr Gable and his gang, I ask my audience to take nothing on faith. If the reader is skeptical of the evidence I adduce, he can check every single important fact himself. If he disagrees with my interpretation of any of the facts, he is free to advance his own. And leave the Gerry Gables of this world to their ad hominem, sneers and innuendo.
Neither “hate crime”nor “hate speech”appear in the Second Edition of the mammoth 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary (1989) or in any of the three volume Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series published 1993, 1993 and 1997 respectively. In an E-mail dated June 12, 2000, Dr Jeremy Marshall, Associate Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary/Oxford Word and Language Service pointed out that:
“The phrase ‘hate crime’ is certainly of American origin, but we have not so far traced examples in print prior to about 1986, the date of a notorious fatal attack in New York City. The term seems chiefly to have been popularized after the passing of U.S. legislation such as the Hate Crimes Statistics Act 1990 (parts of which had been under discussion at Congress from at least 1985, but not published until 1987). On scanning the website of the National Criminal Justice Reference Service...I have not found any references to use of the term before 1986. Our draft dictionary entry for the phrase awaits further research in the U.S.”
While of “hate speech” Dr Marshall says this term:
“is similarly traceable in our files to the mid/late 1980s. You may find further information in ‘Hate Speech: the History of an American Controversy’ by S. Walker (University of Nebraska Press, 1994), which is listed in the British Library catalogue.”
He concludes:
“It is, of course, common for phrases to enter popular spoken use long before they reach the printed media, but we are usually unable to find or to reliably confirm evidence of such use.”
The terms “hate speech” and “hate crime” were applied in the first instance to alleged attacks on people by virtue of their race/ethnicity or religious orientation. This can be real or perceived. The two groups most often targeted by virtue of religion were Catholics and Jews, if only because they were two of the largest and most influential minorities. The debate over who is really a Jew is eternal; many, perhaps the vast majority of “Jews” nowadays are people who are not Jewish in any meaningful sense but are simply of Jewish origin. Likewise many Catholics are nominal Catholics. (13)
Political parties and other organisations which were/are perceived to attack groups by virtue of their ethnic origin have come to be designated “hate groups”. It should be stressed that it is not necessary to hate anyone to be smeared as a member, supporter or fellow traveller of a hate group. Most if not all organisations which oppose unrestricted (non-white) immigration into Britain have been designated hate groups by the organised left.
In recent years, the concepts of hate speech and hate crime have been quietly extended to cover attacks (real and imagined) on, or even perceived antipathy towards, people who engage in particular sexual practices, specifically homosexuals. Just as it is not necessary to hate any man by virtue of his race, so it is not necessary either to hate anyone by virtue of his/her sexual orientation in order to be branded a bigot or hater.
Under the entry for HOMOPHOBIA, the Encyclopedia Of Homosexuality reports that although precise definitions vary, it usually refers to “negative attitudes toward homosexual persons and homosexuality” and recommends that “Care should be taken...to identify homophobia as a prejudice, comparable to racism and anti-Semitism, rather than an irrational fear similiar to claustrophobia or agoraphobia”. (14)
The tendency for homosexual activists is to fudge the distinction between the healthy aversion most people have towards their obscene practices, with outright hatred. Because of the recency of the phenomenon and the consequent lack of data, we will not be covering hate crime hoaxes of a homosexual nature in this short study. I have no doubt though that a few will have been perpetrated here and there.
In 1988, Laird Wilcox began a study of “racist and anti-Semitic hoaxes” which culminated in the 1996 publication of his substantial large format pamphlet Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes In America. This seminal pamphlet was followed in 1998 by The Watchdogs: A close look at Anti-Racist “Watchdog” Groups. Together, these two publications should be requisite reading for anyone and everyone who is genuinely concerned about that most sensitive of subjects, race relations. In view of the nature and scope of the phenomenon, it is surprising that no one had made a dedicated study of it before; documentation on early examples is sparse, but a surprising amount can be found if one looks in the right places.
The current study is complementary in the sense that it covers hate crime hoaxes from a British perspective, but I have gone far deeper into the philosophical and historical background than Wilcox; I have also included such things as the manipulation of statistics and the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Satpal Ram and Winston Silcott, who while not perpetrators of hate crime hoaxes in the strict sense of the word have become icons for leftist/racial pressure groups. All three of these men were convicted of murder – and rightly so – yet they are presented as victims rather than perpetrators, fitted up by the racist system, (15) so in a very real sense their names are being used to hoax the public.
I have also gone further than Wilcox in that I have included a number of real crimes and incidents which have been cynically and sometimes callously exploited by presenting them to the public as racially motivated hate crimes, when the racial motive for the crime was tenuous to say the least, as in the case of the murder of eighteen year old Stephen Lawrence, or in that of fifteen year old Woolf Katz, when no crime was committed at all, the tragic accidental death of a Jewish theological student being used as cannon fodder in the struggle against a mythical Fascist menace.
Classical anti-Semitism originates with the killing of Christ and involves in its purest sense holding all Jews (past, present and future?) responsible for his death. The history of the Jewish people goes back a long way before Christ of course, (16) and it might be argued that their treatment by the Egyptians and others amounted to anti-Semitism, or simply to racism, but since the dawn of time all manner of tribes have been at each others’ throats, and the concept of race in pre-Biblical, Biblical and even Mediaeval times was not properly formed if formed at all.
Indeed, the idea of Jews as a race dates only from the 19th Century with the writings of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelsohn (1729-86), founder of the Haskalah movement; (17) the nationalist (and author of Rome And Jerusalem) Moses Hess (1812-75); and the German fanatic Wilhelm Marr (1818-1904) who founded the Anti-Semitic League in 1879. (18) Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of modern Zionism, was a somewhat late arrival on the scene.
Whether or not they were regarded as a race, antipathy towards Jews as a class of people often had a rational basis, because throughout history Jews have lived as a privileged minority amongst their host nations as much as a persecuted one (as their largely self-appointed spokesmen often claim).
The American-Jewish scholar Benjamin Ginsberg has written of the Jewish people that:
“Their relationship to the state has often made it possible for Jews to attain great wealth and power.” (19) The yellow badge the Jews wore under the Nazis originated not as a badge of shame but as one of privilege enjoyed by them in Moslem lands during the Middle Ages, “It was not originally intended as an instrument for segregating and humiliating the Jews...but to proclaim that its wearers enjoyed official protection.” (20)
During the 11th to 15th Centuries, Jews were so prominent in the economies of the Spanish kingdoms that:
“In some areas Jewish taxes accounted for one half of the total revenues. Hence, the economy of the country depended mainly on the Jews...” (21)
Even the conquest of England by William of Orange was financed by Jews, in particular by Dutch Jewish financiers. (22) The 12th Century Jewish usurer Aaron of Lincoln (circa 1125-86) amassed a fortune second only to that of the king. (23) Jews were useful to monarchs both as Court Jews (eg as doctors) and as tax collectors. When they allied themselves with a particular monarch they could indeed rise to positions of great wealth and power, as Ginsberg points out, but when things turned nasty, they and ordinary Jews could find themselves on the receiving end.
According to official Jewish sources, “The blood accusation has been discredited in many ways. Non-Jewish authorities have been distinctly prominent in exposing the absurdity of the charge.” (24) The charge is not necessarily absurd because ritual murder has been practised by many societies up until the present day. For example, ritual murder (or medicine murder) was commonplace in Southern Africa as late as the 1940s, and the British administration went to considerable lengths to stamp it out, particularly in Basutoland. (25) Unless one accepts the doubtful proposition that Jews are in some way morally superior to Africans, one must concede that allegations of specifically Jewish ritual murder may be wrong, but are not necessarily absurd, and under certain circumstances may be credible. (26)
Be that as it may, false allegations have most certainly been made over the centuries, not necessarily always out of hatred, but sometimes most definitely out of pragmatism.
Although the origins of the Blood Libel go back a lot further, (27) the first case in which Jews were actually accused of killing a Christian child for ritual purposes was St William of Norwich (1144). (28) No one was tried for the alleged murder of the four year old who was found dead on Good Friday, and as far as anything we know about this period is reliable, it is most likely that the boy’s death was not a homicide.
The first case in which Jews were accused purely out of malice is difficult if not impossible to determine, but according to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, “Philip Augustus, king of France, is known to have used blood accusation to replenish his funds with Jewish money (1180).” (29) If this is the case, then we might call this the first recorded hate crime hoax, although I will readily defer to any scholar who presents evidence and argument for an earlier date.
Werner was apparently sane and was gaoled for two years at hard labour for attempting to incite a pogrom. He had not mistreated the girl, but it is not stated what he intended to do with her. This incident happened the previous summer and appears to have been documented in the German press at the time. (30).
The response to this incident from the Jewish elite in both Damascus and England does neither any credit, but unfortunately this sort of response has become de rigueur from Jewish leaders and spokesmen over the proceeding century and more. The Chief Rabbi of Damascus demanded that the boy should not be punished simply because he was a Jew. Claims that the boys concerned were abused were dismissed by Burton as unfounded. (34)
The Protocols Of Zion is a mystical document rather than an anti-Semitic one; the anti-Semitism associated with the Protocols derives solely from the intentions of those who promote it. This does not include the modern mystic David Icke, who has been uncharitably smeared as an anti-Semite for endorsing it in a non-anti-Semitic context. (35)
The history of the Protocols, its origins and development, and even its probable author, have been well documented, This though is far beyond the scope of the current work. The reader is referred in the first instance to Norman Cohn’s 1967 study Warrant For Genocide, which was republished in 1996.
Although it was by no means the first document to accuse the Jews (or some of them) of plotting world revolution behind the scenes, the Protocols has become by far the most notorious. It was first published in Britain in early 1920 by the eminently respectable publishing firm of Eyre and Spottiswoode. (36)
Two more editions followed in quick succession: in August and September 1920. The Protocols was plugged unremittingly by the Britons, a small, cranky, anti-Semitic publishing house. There were even two editions published during the Second World War! (37)
In spite of its being thoroughly discredited and in any case intrinsically unworthy of belief, the Protocols continues to be plugged by both the mischievous and the gullible. It has acted as a progenitor for much anti-Jewish literature, but although it has gone through over eighty editions in Britain, (38) it never caught on with the same fervour as in the United States for example, where the International Jewish Conspiracy was given great prominence by its endorsement by the motor magnate Henry Ford the Elder. (39)
The bulk of the rest of this study will be devoted to more specific hoaxes in Britain, in particular those in which white Gentiles or white people in general are portrayed as the villains and where they are accused of real crimes rather than being involved in some nebulous plot to take over the world. We start though with a look at a couple of American hoaxes.
Rare or not, hoaxes by whites do occur, two of the most notorious were perpetrated in the United States, and in both cases the perpetrators attempted to lay the blame for their heinous crimes on (non-existent) black men.
This notorious case is reported briefly by Laird Wilcox. Carol Stuart had left a childbirth class at a Boston hospital with her husband Charles, and the two were on their way home when, according to the survivor, “a black gunman forced his way into their automobile. The gunman forced them to drive to another location where he demanded cash and jewelry. Then the gunman shot Carol Stuart in the head and wounded Charles Stuart in the abdomen.” (44)
Charles managed to call the police on his mobile phone; he became a media hero as the surviving victim. Unsurprisingly, the atrocity also caused outrage. A black man named Willie Bennett was identified by Stuart as looking “most like” the murderer. (45)
The hoax didn’t last long; although this was an apparently open and shut case (save for positively identifying the murderer), the police with their usual, nasty suspicious minds left no stone unturned. It soon transpired that as well as grieving for his murdered wife, Charles Stuart stood to gain from a substantial insurance policy, which in itself meant nothing, but when his brother went to the police and confessed to being an accessory after the fact by helping him to dispose of incriminating evidence, the game was up. Before he could be arrested however, Stuart jumped into the river. (46)
The suicide of Charles Stuart made the front page of The New York Times the following day. According to this report, Carol Stuart’s baby, which was delivered eight weeks prematurely after her death, survived for seventeen days.
The paper reported that Stuart was said to have made a positive identification of 39 year old William Bennett, who was in custody on another charge. (Bennett was subsequently sentenced to twelve to twenty-five years for an armed robbery on a video store on October 2, 1989). (47)
The bullet removed from Stuart’s body did not match the bullets found in his wife’s body. His brother had just implicated him in the crime, and the evidence that had built up against him was compelling. His motive appears to have been financial or primarily financial, and he claimed that the gunman shot the couple when he mistook Stuart’s mobile phone for a police radio. (48)
According to Wilcox, “What was scary about the case is how journalists initially bought Charles Stuart’s story when there was evidence to doubt it from the beginning”. And “His designation of the killer as a black man was credible in a community with a high black crime rate. Statistically, the killer was more likely to be black than white.” (49)
An even more heinous and callous murderer than Charles Stuart was 23 year old mother of two, Susan Smith. (50) On October 25, 1994, she reported that her car had been stolen by a black man who had forced her out at gunpoint and driven off with her two young sons on the back seat. The eldest was 3 years old and the youngest 14 months. A hoax was suspected fairly early on in the case for various reasons, not the least of which is that the story is prima facie hard to swallow. On November 3, Smith confessed to the sheriff and led the authorities to where she had dumped her car in 18 feet of water with her sons still inside. An angry crowd screamed for her blood. (51)
Some hate crime hoaxes have indeed changed social policy and public perceptions, especially of race relations, none more so than that of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, (see below). This was a real crime with real victims: first and foremost Stephen Lawrence himself, and secondly his family and friends, most notably Duwayne Brooks. In one sense the murder of Stephen Lawrence was indeed a hate crime, because no one ever stabbed an innocuous eighteen year old teenager to death out of love. But the wide ranging imputations about this cowardly murder, that it was/is part of a racist mindset, and all the subsequent recriminations against the police for failing to apprehend his killer or killers, have been totally unwarranted.
The resulting, prolix and for the most part totally irrelevant Macpherson Inquiry led to calls for, among other things, the abolition of double jeopardy so that the Lawrences – and especially Doreen Lawrence, the victim’s mother – can have their pound of flesh against the five youths originally arrested for and charged with her son’s killing if at any time in the future real evidence came to light against them to supplement the innuendo and supposition that led to the subsequently aborted indictment.
As well as for society as a whole, hate crime hoaxes can have dire consequences for specific individuals. In one of the most notorious, and more unusual hate crime hoaxes, the Tawana Brawley case of November 1987, the spotlight fell on three totally innocent men who continued to have the finger of suspicion pointed at them long after the allegations them were totally disproved and after it was established conclusively that Brawley’s alleged abduction and rape was a total fabrication. (54)
At the time of the murder, one of the gang is alleged to have uttered a “racial remark”. (57) Does this automatically qualify the murder of Stephen Lawrence as racially motivated? The reality is that street gangs have in general three motives for assaulting people. One is robbery, ie organised mugging. Another is sexual, ie gang rape. The third is just plain nastiness.
When the motive for street assault is robbery, the victim is likely to be someone who is unable or unlikely to fight back. Mugging is a cowardly crime, and women and old people are easier targets than healthy young men. (58) When the motive is sexual, young women and girls are naturally likely to be the victims; sexual attacks by gangs on mature women, and attacks of a homosexual nature are very rare indeed. The perpetrators of sex attacks and sex murders are overwhelmingly lone individuals, and the crimes often involve the abduction of the victim, or forced entry into premises.
The murder of Stephen Lawrence was clearly motivated neither by robbery nor by lust except perhaps blood lust. It is possible also that drink may have been a factor, but as the attackers were never caught (contrary to the facile assertions of the Lawrence family and the Daily Mail), (59) we will never know. Stephen Lawrence was not a victim of racism, rather he was the victim of a knife culture which is rampant in that particular area of London, mainly but not exclusively by white street gangs. (60)
After Thompson’s conviction however, the investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Douglas Auld, was adamant that there had been no racial motive for the murder. To this day though the death of Rohit Duggal, what was essentially a playground fight which resulted in personal tragedy, is misrepresented as a racist murder. At the time of Thompson’s trial, leaflets were distributed by protesters outside the court, something which could obviously have been prejudicial to the under-age defendant. Protesters were warned by the trial judge that they were in danger of being held in contempt of court. When the verdict was announced, cheers erupted from the public gallery, (61) an undignified spectacle which does rather make one question the motives of those engaged in “anti-racist” activities. At least one source has attempted to link the murder of Rohit Duggal to that of Stephen Lawrence. (62)
The “anti-racist” movement continues to make capital out of this tragic death, in spite of the lack of any sort of racial motive. (63)
When the seven strong gang were sentenced, they were described as a “gang of misfit second-generation immigrants”. (65) The far right made some capital out of this case, and there was undoubtedly a racial element in the crime, although it is just as likely that an African tourist would have been treated equally inhumanely. Be that as it may, the most noticeable and disturbing feature of this case was the youthfulness of the attackers; the Times reported that “the smallest of the gang” was fourteen years old at the time of the rape; he was sentenced to twelve years. (66)
On January 17, 1981, two young black girls – Angela Jackson and Yvonne Ruddock – were celebrating their birthdays at a joint party at 439 New Cross Road in South East London. As is not unusually the case with Afro-Caribbean parties, it went on well into (and in this case well past) the small hours. Just before 6am, a fire broke out in the house. Ten youngsters died in this fire; three more died later in hospital; and two years later a survivor of the blaze became the “fourteenth victim” by tragically committing suicide.
There was never any meaningful evidence that the fire was started by any outsider, but from the beginning it was reported as a racially motivated arson and mass murder. Irresponsible coverage by the left wing press (typically) and also by the black press (which should have known better) led to a great deal of ill-feeling and what could have been extremely serious public disorder.
Others tried to make capital out of the tragedy. A few days after the fire, graffiti appeared on a wall in Catford – “13 down, 1,500,000 to go” (67) Anonymous letters were also sent to families of the victims (68) and a letter that was sent to the West Indian World newspaper was forwarded to the Director of Public Prosecutions. (69) It is easy to ascribe such mischief to racists, but unless someone is brought to book, the actual motives of graffiti artists and poison pen letter writers cannot be confirmed.
In one case however, the motive appears to have been fairly clear. At the beginning of February, the News Of The World newspaper, (70) which had been running a smear campaign against the far right, revealed that the writer of the letter that was sent to the West Indian World was anything but a racist. The paper reported that...yesterday Commander John Smith, head of South London police, said: “The letter was anonymous, but the writer’s name and address had been impressed on the paper from the sheet above.
The lady concerned is known to us as having strong Left-wing views. A report has been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions.” (71) This incident was also reported in the local press where it was said that a woman had been questioned about the letter but that it was not being linked to the poison pen letters sent to the families of the victims. It was also reported that the Anti-Nazi League – a front organisation for the Socialist Workers Party – had staged a demonstration outside Deptford police station into the alleged police cover up. (72)
In the wake of the fire, a mass meeting was held at Pagnell Street Community Centre, New Cross. About a hundred and fifty people attended, but young blacks objected to whites being present and said they wouldn’t proceed until they left! Commander Smith of the Metropolitan Police was told to “Go away murderer.” (73)
Black agitators were prominent in the nascent campaign, none more so that John La Rose, who in 1984 published a collection of interviews in which it was claimed that the police had intended to frame a group of blacks who were at the party, (74) and that a group of them were forced to sign statements attributing the fire to a fight between youths. (75) The Declaration of New Cross was made March 2, 1981, and states blankly that “On Sunday, 18th January, 1981 in an unparallelled act of savagery, thirteen [young blacks] were murdered at 439 New Cross Road...” (76)
Not all blacks were happy with the way this tragedy was exploited though, and at the end of January, the mother of one of the victims said she was sickened that some people had tried to turn it into a racial issue: “There were white people at the party, too.” (77)
This sentiment was echoed by Johnny Kwango, a TV personality who was a relative of one of the survivors. He was quoted thus:
“I believe some people who have valuable information are frightened to come forward because of fear of reprisals from the coloured community...Some elements within our community are trying to make this a racial issue. That’s something it never was.” (78)
At the inquest, the Coroner recorded an open verdict, which in the circumstances was the most logical one, but this didn’t go down too well with either the black press or the left wing press.
The newspaper Socialist Worker gave prominent coverage to the fire, although the front cover of the issue following the fire was devoted to the shooting of Bernadette McAliskey by the British Army in Northern Ireland. On page 3 it was reported that Local fury grows over bombing. The author of this report was Kim Gordon, a black SWP member; the report, apparently written on January 21, stated that to date there were ten dead. (79)
The following issue, the fire found its way onto the front cover; a photo of the burned out building read: “...This was the house where 12 people died after racists set fire to a West Indian party on Sunday 18 January”. (80) There were also a number of speculations about the fire including an allegation that someone saw a (white) man throwing something at the house. (81)
One left wing magazine went too far however, and in June 1983, Commander Graham Stockwell, who was then head of the Metropolitan Police Fraud Squad, was said to be set to receive “substantial” damages in relation to an article published in the New Statesman. (82) If nothing else this demonstrates that it is far easier to make irresponsible and scurrilous allegations than to prove them.
Even more interestingly, later that same year it was revealed that the
police had sent a new report on the fire to the Director of Public
Prosecutions. According to one newspaper, although “Black pressure groups have
consistently maintained that the blaze was caused by a firebomb thrown by a
white racist, and that the police have been engaged in a cover-up”, a black man
then in the United States, was said to have been “almost certainly”
responsible, and several people were said not to have told the truth about the
fire. Charges were said to have been expected, (83) although none followed. The
police file on the fire was closed in August 1985. (84)
The most likely reason that racists have been scapegoated is the same reason the police were, that some of those
present saw what happened and feared the consequences if the truth came out. It
is well known that – rightly or wrongly – some young blacks bear a great
antipathy towards the police. No mention is made anywhere of drugs in this
case, but it is fairly likely that some drugs would have been circulated at
such a party, (86) and this may have been another factor in the wall of silence
that surrounded the investigation. This is a fairly common phenomenon even today.
In 1999, an alleged drug dealer was shot dead in a night club
“apparently for accidentally standing on a suspected Yardie’s foot”. There were
nearly 2,000 people present, hundreds gave police false names and addresses,
and 350 claimed to have been in the lavatory when the incident happened! (87)
This conspiratorial mentality, referred to in Mafia jargon as omertá (88) can be found in many circles
which young blacks frequent. It can also be found in Northern Ireland, in the
“canteen culture” of the Metropolitan Police, (89) and in all manner of
institutions and situations worldwide.
Wall of silence or not, it may even have been not racism but fear of allegations of racism which led to the fire in the first place. Photographs of 439
New Cross Road show it to be a fairly average size three storey house. A party
of this apparent size taking place in such a dwelling would obviously have been
a fire risk, and if the police had been called to the scene they would most
likely have ordered some of the guests to leave. But if that had happened to a
party that was predominantly black, screams of racism would have gone up. Even in the early eighties the police,
the Metropolitan Police in particular, were having to tread softly softly on
racial issues.
Twenty years and more on, the last has not been heard of the New Cross
fire. In its May 21, 2001 issue, the front page of New Nation, an otherwise largely intelligent black newspaper, screamed:
As usual though, the headline promised much, while the story itself – by
Stephanie Busari – delivered little or nothing. New forensic tests were said to
have proved that the fire was started by a naked flame placed next to an armchair rather than by a cigarette. Of course, even if this is true, it doesn’t prove arson.
I can only repeat that in spite of extensive investigations, no evidence
of a racial motive ever came to light for the New Cross fire, and that the fire
was most probably started accidentally, or at the very least the person
(obviously someone at the party) had no intention of causing a fatal blaze. We
turn now to a series of hate crime hoaxes which have been foisted on an at
times credulous media by an organisation with its own political and racial
agendas. This organisation is known as Searchlight.
The author of this non-story was a gullible Quaker journalist named
Peter Gladstone Smith. When he died at the age of 55, a glowing obituary was
published in Searchlight magazine.
(91) Leaving that aside, Gladstone Smith was the sort of dumb Christian who is
despised – and used – by the people who control Searchlight and similar organisations.
He was certainly useful to the magazine’s then controller, Maurice Ludmer,
because a number of stories about Column 88 crept into the heavies over the
next couple of years, and all of them were originated or inspired by Searchlight.
The magazine’s own coverage of Column 88 was intense during this period,
and bordered on the hysterical. (92) A report in a short lived “anti-fascist” magazine edited by photo-journalist and avowed Communist Daphne Liddle (93)
proclaimed that Column 88 had an underground army of three hundred men and
women. (94) David Irving was said to be a leading member; it was even hinted
that the Duke of Westminster might have bankrolled it. (95)
The name Column 88 was also linked to a number of possible terrorist
attacks. For example, on July 14, 1978 a fire gutted the Albany Empire cinema
in Creek Road, South East London, a venue that had been used for “anti-racist” concerts. Greenwich police
insisted there was no evidence of arson and, according to a local (and
obviously left wing) historian:
They made no comment on the scruffy note pushed under the main entrance the day
after the fire. Letters cut out of a newspaper said “GOT YOU” and the note was
signed with the number 88, which ALCARAF (96) believed was a reference to
Column 88, a secret paramilitary organisation on the terrorist wing of 1970s
fascism. (97)
If the police made no comment on this note it was for the same reason
they make no comment on the vast majority of the countless misleading phone
calls, letters and other hoaxes they and the other emergency services receive
constantly: they have better things to do. There is no evidence that Column 88
was responsible for this fire any more than any of the other terrorist
atrocities it was alleged to have been planning at the time.
Today, Column 88 has been quietly forgotten, it is almost as if it never
existed, (98) but it did exist. The current writer was informed by two people
who were active in the far right at the time (99) that it was basically just a
small outfit of military fantasists, and indeed this conclusion is borne out by
a critical examination of contemporaneous reports in the national press,
extremist press, and Searchlight
itself.
The myth of Column 88, as opposed to the prosaic reality, was created by
two men: Maurice Ludmer, the then editor of Searchlight, and his agent provocateur, Richard
David (Dave) Roberts. Dave Roberts was born December 15, 1949, the son of parents. (100) Roberts himself became a fanatical Communist
and dedicated “anti-fascist”, and in the mid-seventies, probably on his own
initiative, he decided to infiltrate the far right in his native Birmingham.
Before long though he had teamed up with Ludmer, who was in the process of
establishing Searchlight as the major
instrument of disinformation on the extreme right, fascism and racism in Britain.
Roberts joined the National Front in Birmingham under the name Ralph
Marshall. At that time, the Front was by far the largest far right party in
Britain. Roberts’ role was primarily that of agent provocateur, (101) in
particular he attempted to incite the more gullible members of the far right to
commit criminal acts, and more generally to stimulate racially abusive
behaviour.
In August 1975 it was reported by Searchlight
that Ralph Steven Marshall also known as John Green, a hyper-cautious and very
secretive individual, was said to have made a none too polite racial remark at
a meeting in East Anglia a couple of years ago: “WE have more than our fair
share of Blacks in the urban Industrial areas, now if we had enough tree’s they
could swing on them to their hearts content.” (102)
The previous month though, Roberts had been less concerned with swinging
through the trees than with swinging blunt instruments, because on the evening
of July 16 he was arrested in the company of two of Birmingham’s lunatic fringe “Nazis” while lurking in the vicinity of a left wing bookshop, Key Books, and an Indian restaurant, The Bombay. Roberts and his
co-defendants, King and McLaren, were accused of conspiring to burn down the
bookshop and were thrown into gaol. Roberts managed to get bail and, probably
in an effort to save his own skin, turned over a large number of covertly made
tape recordings to the authorities.
On March 19, 1976, King, McLaren and Roberts were found not guilty of
conspiracy to rob but guilty of conspiracy to assault the staff of The Bombay restaurant. King was also
found guilty of possessing offensive weapons – an air gun and a scaffold pole;
McLaren was found guilty of the scaffold pole only; Roberts was cleared of
both, and his conviction for the conspiracy offence was only on a majority
verdict, but guilty he was found! (103) His two co-defendants were gaoled, but
Roberts escaped with a suspended sentence, which he was later to serve after
assaulting National Front members on a demonstration. (104)
When the trial was over, the story of how Roberts had saved Birmingham,
Britain and the world from the hordes of Column 88 was told long and loud. The Guardian newspaper for example reported
in its March 25 issue that “evidence” handed to Minister of State Alex Lyons
was said to have included “the availability of guns at £25 a time”. A (tape
recorded?) statement was allegedly included in this “evidence” of members of a
Belgian militarist group being offered a working holiday [sic] in Ulster with a
guaranteed kill.
The authorities investigated all Roberts’ claims thoroughly, and several
reports appeared in the quality press which dismissed them in their entirety.
Two months later, one newspaper reported that Column 88 was dismissed by the
Minister of State for Defence as “a small drinking club of neo-Nazi nut-cases.”
(105) Another article revealed that one former “Nazi” had been involved in
exercises in the Savernake Forest the previous October. He had now been
dismissed. He had been an acting under-officer in the Army Cadet Force. This
was the sum total of the threat to democracy from the hordes of Column 88.
(106) Articles continued to appear about the organisation for a while but they
had all but fizzled out by the time Maurice Ludmer died from a heart attack in
May 1981.
Following his somewhat premature death, the July issue of Searchlight published a
virtual hagiography including dedications from public figures. However, on the
back page of the following issue a curious message appeared:
“We wish to make it clear that Dave Roberts is not and never has been a member of Searchlight’s editorial group and is in
no way associated with the work of the magazine. Some years ago he came to us
with his story, which we ran; in return for expenses he offered to compile an
index for us as he was unemployed and waiting to go to college. In the last few
weeks it has come to our notice that Roberts has been taking advantage of
Maurice Ludmer’s death and has been contacting journalists and anti-fascist
activists using Searchlight’s name.
He is not connected in any way with the magazine, nor would we wish him to be.”
Veronica Ware – Editor
Gerry Gable – Former Editor.
The proof of any pudding is in the eating, and anyone who trawls through the
relevant back numbers of Searchlight will realise that this claim that Dave Roberts is in no way connected with the
magazine (and by implication never was) is a blatant lie.
Dave Roberts died the following year at the young age of thirty-two; his
death went unnoticed by the “anti-fascist” movement which had made him out to
be some kind of hero six years previously, and was not even reported by Searchlight. (107)
It has often been said that liars ought to have good memories; one liar
who definitely hasn’t is Gerry Gable, who at the time of writing is publisher
of Searchlight. In 1991, Gable contributed an essay called The Far Right In Contemporary Britain”: An Analysis to a book called Neo-Fascism in Europe. (108) In this essay, Gable claimed that
Column 88 “has existed in this country since the war years”, (page 247); and
that the main reason John Tyndall was ousted from the leadership of the
National Front was that he had reneged on his oath of allegiance to Column 88,
into which he had been inducted at the age of nineteen, (page 260). Leaving
aside the fact that Tyndall resigned from the National Front and took with him
a core of members to form the New National Front (later the British National
Party), this is absolute nonsense.
The reader is invited to contrast these claims with the claim in the May
1978 issue of Searchlight which
claimed that Column 88 was formed around 1970. (109) An earlier Searchlight exposé reported that “Column
88 is a private army. It is illegal. There is no legitimate reason why it
should be allowed to continue.” (110)
Recall that Neo-Fascism In Europe was published in 1991, yet only two years later, Searchlight was to proclaim that Column 88 was “a honey-trap
organisation controlled by British intelligence”. (111) The reader can decide for himself which if any of Gable and Searchlight’s lies deserves the most if any credence. (112)
At 10.25am on August 2, 1980, a bomb exploded at Bologna railway station
which left a staggering 85 people dead and 200 injured. This was the worst
terrorist atrocity in Europe since the end of World War Two, and naturally led
to widespread outrage and condemnation.
On July 14, 1988, four right wing extremists were convicted of the
bombing and jailed for life, but on July 18, 1990, their convictions were
quashed. (113) The truth about who really planted the Bologna bomb and why
remains and is likely forever to remain a mystery, but as well as outrage, the
bombing caused inspiration. In his 1988 book The Other Face Of Terror, Ray Hill, who for a short time had been a leading
member of the British National Party, (114) recounts how he and his
puppetmaster Gerry Gable exposed the bomb plot and thus led to its abandonment.
Hill’s book does its best to implicate almost the entire far right in
Britain and Europe in the Bologna bombing, the Munich Oktoberfest bombing,
(115) and the supposedly aborted Notting Hill bomb plot. The story actually
first appeared as an exclusive on the front page of the Daily Mirror – a well-known Searchlight conduit – on July 21, 1981.
And on the front page of the August issue of Searchlight.
The current writer has published an extensive critique of the Hill/Searchlight bomb
plot claims, (116) as has his fellow independent researcher Larry O’Hara. (117)
The fact that the Metropolitan Police took no action says it all. A potential
terrorist outrage which could have killed and injured dozens or hundreds of
innocent members of the public, black and white, as well as police officers,
(118) would surely have warranted serious attention from the forces of law and
order. If there had been the slightest substance to any of the claims made by
Ray Hill and his evil manipulators.
On April 5, the second group was sentenced. Hughes was the oldest of the
synagogue arsonists and in mitigation for the others it may be said that they
were more young and foolish than evil. The same thing cannot be said for the
person who incited them to commit their dastardly deeds. On January 17, 1968,
Mrs Françoise Jordan (neé Dior), the French heiress and former wife of the
British Nazi leader Colin Jordan, was gaoled for eighteen months for
conspiracy. Mrs Jordan had fled to her native France and was arrested on her
return to Britain. Françoise Jordan was a lifelong and quite fanatical
anti-Semite; although she denied any role in the arson campaign she stated
openly that she would like to see all synagogues burned by Act of Parliament. (119)
The 1960s synagogue arsons were appalling acts of political terrorism,
but no one was killed during the campaign, and if anything can be said in
mitigation for the perpetrators, apart from their youthfulness and their naïveté,
it is that they appear to have gone to some lengths to ensure that they torched only empty buildings.
In 1984, Harry Bidney died, and when his obituary appeared in Searchlight magazine, its author, Gerry
Gable, claimed that “His greatest success came in the mid-60s with the arrest
and conviction of 13 members of Colin Jordan’s and John Tyndall’s nazi groups
for a series of synagogue arsons. Harry broke the gang by persuading one of its
young members to give himself up to the police. At the Old Bailey the Judge at
one of the three trials praised the work of Harry and his colleagues in
stopping the arsonists – something the police had been completely unable to do
for over a year.” (120)
Who was Harry Bidney? According to Gable he was an heroic Jewish
“anti-fascist”. In fact, Bidney was a notorious street thug, one of the leaders
of the 43 Group, a mostly (but not exclusively) Jewish gang which waged a
violent campaign against “Fascists” in and around London after the Second World
War. The 43 Group was wound up in 1950 under pressure from the Jewish
establishment. (121) In 1962, the 43 Group was revived as the 62 Group (or 1962
Committee); Bidney was a leading light in this too; a youthful Gerry Gable was also a member. (122)
What was Bidney’s actual role in bringing the synagogue arsonists to
justice? According to the case papers of the first trial, Paul Dukes appeared
at North London Magistrates Court for possessing an offensive weapon on October
25, 1965 where he was fined £10. After this court appearance, Dukes recognised
Bidney in the street, and, disillusioned with his handiwork, confessed to him.
Later, he surrendered himself to the police and when asked:
“Would you like to make a written statement?”
He replied: “Yes, that’s why I’m here.” He continued “I want to clear my conscience and finish with that mob for good.” (123)
The current writer found no reference in the contemporary press – Jewish or otherwise – to any judicial praise for Harry Bidney or any of his associates. The reader may draw his own conclusions.
He may also draw his own conclusions about the way this story has
metamorphosed, because in October 1987, Gable gave a now notorious interview to
the Jewish Chronicle, in which he made no mention of Harry Bidney but instead took the credit for catching the
arson gangs himself, and he added for good measure that a trainee rabbi had
died in one of the attacks.
According to Gable, an unnamed yeshiva was torched in the small hours
killing a student, and “I stood in the burnt-out shell of that yeshiva at four
in the morning and made a private vow to get the people who’d done that”. Gable’s
“investigation” was said to have resulted in thirteen convictions.
The Jewish Chronicle reporter who interviewed Gable parroted this story gullibly, but if he had taken the
trouble to dig into the paper’s own archive he would have found reports
relating to the actual fire which exposed Gable as a damned liar.
The Mesifta Talmudical College, Cazenove Road, Stamford Hill, in the
heart of Jewish London, went up in flames in November 1964. The fire left one
youth seriously injured, and 15 year old Woolf Katz dead. (124) According to
the fire brigade, there was no evidence of an incendiary device; the police too
were satisfied that there was no foul play. However, because of the nature of
the college, or because there had been Fascist activity in the area, or for any
of the usual reasons, gossip, etc, there were rumours that the fire had indeed
been set deliberately. These rumours were totally unfounded, and the
authorities went to considerable lengths to quash them.
The month after the fire, New Scotland Yard wrote to the local MP David
Weitzman to inform him that “Careful inquiries have been made into the
suggestions of suspected incendiarism consequent upon an outbreak of fire at
the above establishment. There is no evidence that any form of pseudo-fascist
or similar activity is present in the district, or that this incident was
perpetrated by any such local organisations.” (125) The documentation on the
accidental nature of the fire is substantial.
The current writer was refused access to the inquest file (which may not
be extant) because such documents are made available only to “properly
interested persons” (eg next of kin, the police, etc), but in a letter dated 12th
October 2000, Martin Leigh, Clerk to the Inner North London Coroner Dr S.M.T. Chan, confirmed that:
...the inquest was held on 4th December 1964. The cause of Volve Katz’s death was confirmed as “carbon monoxide poisoning due to fire fumes” and the Coroner recorded a verdict of “accidental death”.
It could be concluded from the wording of the verdict that the Coroner delivering it, having heard the evidence at the
inquest, did not consider that the deceased had been the victim of murder or manslaughter.
The first of the London arsons, at the Brondesbury Synagogue, which was completely destroyed, did not take place until March 1965, a full four months after the tragedy in Stamford Hill.
In March 1994 the current writer published a thoroughly documented exposé of Gable’s lies about this
mythical hate crime. In October of the same year I published a second, expanded
edition. I have continued to expose it as a lie, and Gable and his gang have continued to perpetuate this lie.
And later that same year, the Searchlight Educational Trust – part of the Searchlight Organisation – published a large format “Community Handbook” called When Hate Comes To Town..., in
the Introduction to which it was claimed that:
“In 1964 Searchlight appeared for the first time in newspaper format as an occasional publication. Its research work
led to the arrests and convictions of neo-nazi terrorist gangs who had carried
out racial and antisemitic killings and firebombing campaigns.” (127)
In fact, four issues of a broadsheet called Searchlight were published from Spring 1965. The last issue,
undated, was published, apparently, in 1967. (128) The reader will note the
death of Woolf Katz has now become “racial and antisemitic killings”.
In the July 2000 issue of Searchlight,
this brazen lie was repeated yet again. This was a special issue devoted almost
entirely to David Copeland – the then recently convicted London nail-bomber. On
page 28 in an article entitled Nazi terror is nothing new, it is claimed that the 1960s synagogue arsons had
left “one theological student dead and another with serious spinal injuries”.
And of course, the only reason the arsonists were arrested was as the result of
investigations by “a Searchlight
investigation team”. The student who allegedly suffered serious spinal injuries
was Judah Gottesman; when I spoke to him several years ago, Mr Gottesman – who
worked and as far as I know still works as a shochet (129) in Manchester – told
me he spent several weeks in hospital as a result of jumping out of a window
during the fire, and that thirty years on his injured leg still gave him some
trouble in the cold weather, but he never mentioned spinal injuries.
No doubt, Gerry Gable in particular and the Searchlight Organisation in
general will continue to lie unremittingly about how he and his fellow
“Searchlight intelligence officers” were responsible for solving the 1965
synagogue arsons. (130) But another person who didn’t think much of this claim
was the investigating officer. In 1995, the current writer saw retired
Commander Albert (Bert) Wickstead (now deceased) on a TV programme and wrote to
him in connection with the arsons case care of the Metropolitan Police pensions
department. He ignored my first letter but in response to my second he sent me
a handwritten missive dated “9TH April 1995” which reads as follows:
“Dear Mr. Baron,
I have received your letter asking for information concerning one Harry Bidney.
As far as I can remember I did not meet Bidney, if I did it must have been very brief, because I have no recollection of the man.
Gerry Gable I knew well, and he was extremely helpful throughout the whole Jordan
& Synagogue enquiry. As for my officers and I being incompetent, what utter
nonsense. We had to give evidence and present the case in Court. The fact that
we were commended by both the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Trial
Judge gives the lie to any scurrilous assertions.
I have nothing further to say on this matter and do not want further communication on the subject.”
Neither have I, so let’s move on.
For example, the police and other law enforcement agencies often
exaggerate the risk of or the level of crime in order to justify higher
salaries for law enforcement officers, extension of police powers, and so on.
In other words they have a vested interest in the funding of crime prevention.
Likewise, doctors and medical people generally have a vested interest in
increasing funding for medicine, and so on. There is not necessarily any
all-encompassing conspiracy at work to con the public into believing we are all
about to be murdered in our beds, or to drop dead of cancer, but we should
learn to recognise vested interest when it is talking.
Journalists are one of the main perpetuators of hate crime hoaxes, often
for the same reason that they are great perpetuators of all manner of other
nonsense. Sensationalism sells, scandal sells, sex sells, so does crime, and so
does hate. Journalists often work under pressure, usually to meet deadlines.
Just as often they are lazy, and cut corners by relying on agenda-driven
special interest groups to provide them with their information – groups like
the Searchlight Organisation. They rush into print without bothering to check
their facts, and if the facts don’t fit, well, why let the facts stand in the
way of a good story? Man bites dog is news; dog bites man is dull; and nobody
bites anybody is less than dull, it is no news, and no sales. One of the
easiest ways of hoaxing the public is by spouting statistics at them.
“There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”
and
“Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.”
Statistics used correctly can be
extremely useful; without statistics, civilisation as we know it would not
exist. In isolation and out of context though they mean very little, and when
used incorrectly, or mendaciously, they can be used to prove almost anything.
The dogma of political correctness is based largely on the mendacious use of
statistics. They are frequently used to create the appearance of bias,
discrimination, and, bore, bore, racism, where none exists.
Nobody in his right mind would claim that the judiciary discriminates
against young men by virtue of the fact that most judges, and all High Court
judges, are on the wrong side of forty. Most people accept the fact that
judges, who hold positions of great power and authority, should be men and
women of mature years and therefore (hopefully) of greater understanding of the law.
The fact that a particular county has a higher than national average
death rate does not mean necessarily that it is an unhealthy place to live. It
may simply be that it has a large elderly population; if many people prefer to
retire to the seaside, then one should expect a higher than average death rate
in Eastbourne than in say Peterborough.
It is not necessary to doctor statistics in order to abuse them, but
nowhere are statistics more doctored or more abused than in the race industry,
where very few or even no reports of racial attacks are used as evidence of
widespread racial intolerance. How about this for starters?
In November 1999, the black newspaper the Voice announced the launch of a campaign to combat the mythical
disease of rural racism. This, according to Jon McKenzie, is particularly bad in the South West where he
lives. In support of this assertion, Mr McKenzie comes out with this gem:
“Another problem is the huge under-reporting of race incidents...Because Black people are afraid to come forward, the police never know about the racial harassment they suffer and therefore assume there is not a problem.” (131)
In other words there have been no – or precious few – reports of racial
abuse, harassment, attacks, etc, in rural areas, therefore racial antipathy
must be rampant! It is widely accepted that rape is a much under-reported crime, and doubtless there are many other real crimes which are likewise
under-reported for all manner of reasons – petty thefts, trivial assaults, and
so on – but any and all attempts to estimate the extent of any unreported
crime(s) is whistling in the dark. It is reasonable to assume that some racial
attacks, racial harassment, etc, go unreported, but it is manifestly not reasonable
without good reason to assume that there is a problem here, county-wide or
nationwide in scope, and that people are not reporting such incidents because
they are afraid to come forward.
The prosaic truth about rural racism
is that it is largely non-existent, as reflected in the lack of reported
racially motivated attacks and other incidents in rural areas.
“In Britain, racist violence is on the increase, and there are more than 140,000 racist attacks a year.” These “attacks” were said to include “threats” and “damage to property”.
The figure was said to have come from the Home Office. (132)
Does this mean that Britain is awash with bigotry and violence? No. This
Home Office figure is an extrapolation, and a particularly meaningless one at
that. In 1989, a far more accurate figure was put forward in a Home Office
report; based on real statistics gathered by the Metropolitan Police, the
contrast is staggering.
In 1986, there were 48 reported serious assaults on white-skinned
Europeans; 38 on Afro-Caribbeans; 132 on Asians. There were seven ethnic
categories in all, including unknown (For some reason they are labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9).
There were nine incidents of leafletting in which the victims (sic) were
white; nine in which the victims (sic) were Afro-Caribbean and nine in which
the victims (sic) were Asians. Other categories of “attacks” listed included SLOGAN WRITING and DISPUTES. (133)
If these figures are typical – and bear in mind that London has a larger
population of ethnic minorities than anywhere else in the country – then how is
one to reconcile this with the ARA claim of 140,000 racially motivated
“attacks” a year, a figure which the Home Office is said to endorse?
As I said, such figures are extrapolations, perhaps lies would be a better
word. They are plucked out of thin air and thrown around with gay abandon. They
make good press – sensationalism; and serve all manner of other purposes,
including keeping the shekels flowing into the coffers of organisations like
the Anti-Racist Alliance.
The above examples, especially the nonsense about rural racism, should give the reader an
insight into the way statistics on racial issues, particularly violence but
also “discrimination”, are gerrymandered by the venal, the indolent and the
gullible. The bulk of the rest of this monograph is devoted to a study of more
specific hate crime hoaxes in Britain. We begin with the earliest the current
writer has been able to trace.
In March 1937, Reynolds News, (136) reported that: “A brick thrown through the upper window of a Jewish worker’s home only just missed killing a tiny infant sleeping in a cot. The babe escaped by inches.” This story, which was attributed to a Reynolds correspondent, (137) does contain one element of truth; there was unrest in the wake of the defeat of Fascist candidates in the London County Council elections, which is part of this report.
The same canard appeared in the Jewish Chronicle two weeks later, here it was reported that the victim (ie the householder), was a non-Jew. (138) The baby was said to have been nine months old.
So what really happened? Documentation on this incident – or perhaps one should say non-incident – is held by the Public Record Office in the MEPO series; (139) this story was one of many “protests” which found its way into
the Corridors of Power. Several such protests were said to have been made by MPs and by the National Council of [sic] Civil Liberties. Some of these allegations were substantiated, but this certainly wasn’t one of them.
In the police report there is no suggestion that the worker concerned was Jewish, his name was George Lynch, and he was employed by the council as a
street scavenger. Mr Lynch was a member of the Labour Party, an active anti-Fascist, and appears to have been a serial complainer as well.
The police investigation established that the window was indeed broken. A two inch piece of granite was said to have come through it at the time. Mr
Lynch said the account which had appeared in the two newspapers had been exaggerated, and he was not happy with the NCCL man on account of this.
The window though was about forty feet from the ground and ten by six inches, ie very small. According to the police report:
“Examination reveals that only a small stone could have broken it. Whoever threw the stone could not have taken a deliberate aim at the window.”
“...by no stretch of the imagination could it have been done with intent to injure the child in the cot.”
The report continues: “Lynch thought so little of the incident at the time, that he did not even take the trouble to report the matter to the Police, and we have only his word – and his wife’s – that the window was broken in the manner alleged.” (140)
Reading between the lines, the police didn’t believe his account. (141) This may be uncharitable, but assuming that Mr Lynch was telling the gospel truth, the story easily qualifies as an early, racially motivated hate crime hoax.
He reported that at 10.10pm on February 10, 1937 while in the company of
two other men he had sustained a bruise over the left eye when he was assaulted
by six men, apparently Fascists. He could give no description of the men. He
was alleged to be “still carrying the marks on his body” when seen Sunday,
March 7, by an NCCL rep.
Law didn’t seek medical attention at the time, which would tend to
undermine the above claim, but he did report the alleged assault the same
night. Later though there was some genuine confusion over when the assault was
reported. Reading between the lines in this incident, the police doubted that
the assault happened, at least in the manner described.
The report says that:
“Neither of the youths has a typical Jewish appearance” and the lighting at the time would cause further identification difficulties for any would-be attackers.
The father of one of the youths suggested that because of the dark clothing they were wearing at the time they had really been attacked by “anti-fascists” who mistook them for Blackshirts!
The report concludes:
The fact that the father of the writer of the letter...should put forward such a theory shows that the family entertains considerable doubt that the alleged assault was committed by “Blackshirts”, or fascist sympathisers. (145)
As with many atrocity stories, it is difficult if not impossible to
determine how much substance specific allegations against the Nazis had. We do
know though that during the Second World War the British Government operated a
covert “black operations” outfit called the Psychological Warfare Executive.
This organisation was liquidated immediately after the war and an archivist was
engaged “to destroy rather than preserve”. (150)
Two men who worked for the PWE wrote revealing autobiographies: Denis
Sefton Delmer (1904-79) and Ellic Howe (1910-91). (151) To what extent black
propaganda episodes can be considered hate crime hoaxes is more of a
philosophical issue than an empirical one. There are two quotes the reader
might like to bear in mind though. Delmer wrote in Black Boomerang that “...the simplest and most effective of all ‘black’
operations is to spit in a man’s soup and cry ‘Heil Hitler!’”
A quarter of a century before he wrote these words, Sir Oswald Mosley warned in the Blackshirt
against violent anti-Semitic propagandists thus:
“Some do this in perfect good faith and honesty, and thus unconsciously help the
enemies of their cause. Others, no doubt, as the struggle develops, will
actually be employed, often unknowingly, by those very clever people, the big
Jews, to make wild and foolish attacks upon Jews in general, in order to
discredit anti-Semitism.” (152)
For several examples of professional if rather unsophisticated Jewish hate propaganda – including hate crime hoaxes – the reader is referred to the mischief-making of the Searchlight Organisation
discussed by the writer in this monograph (above), and in many of his other publications.
Groups targeted included the Ku Klux Klan and later the Black Panthers,
etc. The full extent of COINTELPRO and the quality of its operations is a
matter of debate and will probably never be known. Some people – mostly on the
left – claim that it was extremely extensive and imply that virtually every
rift in every left wing or “radical” organisation from year dot to the present
day has resulted from the dirty work of COINTELPRO. (155) Others regard the FBI’s
operations as rather amateurish. (156) As usual the truth is probably somewhere
in between. But leaving aside the war-time operations of Sefton Delmer and his
gang, the question needs to be asked: have and do the British authorities
operate such scams? And if the answer to this question is yes, do they operate
them in the field of race agitation/hate crime hoaxes?
The answer has to be yes, but finding evidence much less proof of such
dirty dealings is another thing entirely. Probably the best we can do is infer
the existence of such operations from some of the well-documented scams practised
by the security services in Northern Ireland. (157) In 1997, a man named Liam
Townson was gaoled for life in Ireland for the May 1977 murder of Captain
Robert Nairac, an undercover SAS officer.
In order to build up his false ID, Nairac had worked undercover in
London as a casual labourer to pick up an Irish accent and knowledge of the
building trade. He had been transferred to Ulster in 1974 when the SAS was not
officially operating there. The army denied he was in the SAS; (158) he was
listed as serving with a different regiment. (159) Undercover operations by
police (and possibly other agencies) in the far right would be both easier to
mount and less dangerous. Now let us return to some concrete examples of hate
crime hoaxes.
According to Andrews, the only eyewitness, Harvey was stabbed to death
by an enraged motorist who branded him a “Paki bastard”. Possibly because
Harvey was white the racial aspect of the case was played down by the media; it
was reported widely as a “road rage” murder rather than as a racist one, road rage being highly
fashionable at the time. (162) Harvey’s murder was said to have been the fifth
such fatal attack that year. (163)
Andrews made a public appeal for information about the killer, and as is
so often the case, went on to be arrested herself and charged with his murder.
She was first arrested December 7 as she left a hospital where she had been
treated for taking an overdose. The implication at the time and later was that
she had been suffering from a guilty conscience. Andrews was finally charged
with her lover’s murder at 10pm on December 19. (164) Initially she was
remanded in custody but was subsequently granted bail.
The trial of Tracie Andrews for the murder of Lee Harvey opened at
Birmingham Crown Court on June 30, 1997. She pleaded not guilty and maintained her
story about the mysterious attacker who was never traced, a “fat man with staring eyes”.
However, even though the murder weapon was never found, the case against Andrews was very strong; not only did forensic evidence point to her, but a girl
had heard the couple arguing, though she couldn’t positively identify a woman’s voice. Andrews also had a proven propensity for violence.
Although he clearly didn’t believe her, the judge in his summing up gave
a direction on provocation, ie he invited the jury to find Andrews guilty of
manslaughter as an alternative to guilty of murder or not guilty. This was most
unusual because both the prosecution and the defence had made their positions
clear. The victim had suffered more than thirty wounds, so the attack had
clearly been frenzied. The jury of nine women and three men didn’t believe
Andrews either, and on July 29, 1997, she was sentenced to life imprisonment,
still protesting her innocence.
At her appeal in October 1998, no mention was made of her fairy tale
about the overweight assassin; her Counsel argued simply that she should have
been convicted of manslaughter. (165) The sole ground for her appeal appears to
have been prejudicial pre-trial publicity. Among other things it was claimed
she had been portrayed as a “female terrorist” and “a firebrand”. The Crown
argued that she had courted the very publicity she was now complaining about.
The Court of Appeal concurred, and her appeal was rightly dismissed. (166) It
was not until April 1999 that Andrews finally confessed to the murder, in a
letter from Bulwood Prison published in a Sunday newspaper. (167)
Although the murder of Lee Harvey will go down in history as a crime of
passion, if Andrews had been able to destroy more of the forensic evidence, it
is quite likely that it would have been quoted widely in the years to come as a
racially motivated road rage attack.
In December 2000, 24 year old Christopher Levey was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment:
“Levey, 24, denied the charges saying the couple had just had sex in the park and were tidying up when a gang of black youths pounced on him, holding him down while they dragged Ms Sanderson off.” (168)
She died three days after the attack. Her body had been found in the undergrowth. The court heard that Levey had attacked a previous girlfriend when she refused to have sex with him. (169)
Obviously, Levey concocted this cock and bull story only as an
afterthought, and although it is unclear from the brief press report how much
credence the police gave it, it is difficult to believe they ever took it
seriously, but as in the other cases cited here, it had the potential to cause
unwarranted racial animosity.
Copeland worked alone and held most of the far right in contempt. In the
wake of the Brixton bombing however, there was obviously much speculation that
some sort of terrorist organisation was responsible, particularly a group
calling itself the “White Wolves”. The only thing that is known about this
group is that it has in the past distributed highly inflammatory literature
anonymously. There is no meaningful evidence that the group itself exists, and
its hate mail may be the work of one individual. As nothing is known about this
group, nothing meaningful can be adduced about its motivations. The police, and
others, doubtless, received calls and letters from many cranks claiming
responsibility. At least one of them was brought to book. His name was Mark
Ramos and he was described as the offspring of an Irish Catholic mother and an
Indian father. Incredibly, he escaped with a fine. The Daily Telegraph reported that “A STUDENT who sent race-hate mail
claiming responsibility for the Brixton nail bomb and threatening further
attacks...” was fined £650 apparently under the Malicious Communications Act. The letters were supposed to have
come from Combat 18; they were sent to Southall Monitoring Group and Talk
Radio. (170)
Mr Ramos should count his blessings; three and a half years earlier, a hoaxer who claimed to have planted a bomb the day after an IRA outrage was gaoled for four years! (171)
Local residents were less enthusiastic, one quoted in the same article
said he wasn’t surprised by the desecration because the Lawrences and blacks
were seen as getting special treatment. (172) At this time many ordinary decent
white people were indeed becoming more than a little tired with the media’s
incessant harping on about racism and “institutional racism”. However, it
was not, apparently, a racist nor even a white person with a grudge, who desecrated the memorial. On March 7,
1999, the Sunday press reported that a 15 year old youth of “mixed race” was
arrested and bailed over the defacing of the Stephen Lawrence memorial plaque
after it had been daubed with white paint. (173)
Unfortunately, because of the age of the suspect, further reporting was
killed. There is a lesson to be learned here though, this is that if the
accused youth had been white, this minor outrage would not necessarily have
been racially motivated. The world is full of sick people, people who like to
stir things up, and teenagers of all races who are capable of behaving
reprehensibly, and who will hopefully grow out of this sort of thing in due course.
“Manny, I heard your warehouse burnt down.”
“Shh, tomorrow night.”
Such “Jewish lightning” (174) is a staple of anti-Semitic folklore;
whether or not it has any basis in fact remains to be seen, but it is one of
life’s little ironies that urban legends are sometimes strangely prophetic.
(175) A genuine example of Jewish lightning occurred when 45 year old Jewish businessman Mauro Weingarten hired
32 year old Terry Dixon to burn down his factory in an insurance scam. Dixon
was black, and the sight of a black man in an isolated Scottish village aroused
suspicion, if not racism.
The police arrived as Dixon was leaving the building after setting the
blaze, and the link between them was cemented by Weingarten paying for Dixon’s hire car with his credit card! Both men admitted fire raising and criminal
damage but denied conspiracy to defraud. They were bailed pending sentence.
(176) Dixon was later sentenced to two years probation and two hundred hours
community service; Weingarten was sentenced to three hundred hours community
service. (177) Curiously, this story was not reported in either the Jewish Chronicle or the Voice, though had Dixon not been caught it is odds-on that the former would
have reported this as yet another example of the rising tide of anti-Semitism.
On June 12, 2000, Mr Bashir pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit arson
along with his 19 year old son and 36 year old Alan Stewart. [A multi-racial partnership?] (178)
Bashir, who had recently moved from Huddersfield with his family,
claimed to have been targetted unremittingly “From the moment I arrived in
Newcastle”. He said his family had endured “five months of sheer hell”. While
investigating the arson attack, the police discovered he had taken out an
insurance policy on his shop shortly before. (179) Something that is always to
be regarded with suspicion! His motive appears to have been purely financial.
When Bashir was gaoled for six years in July 2000, he warranted a short
paragraph in the Times, in contrast to the masses of publicity the alleged racially motivated arson received. His
son Umran received three years’ youth custody. (180) I could find no mention of
the trial, conviction or sentencing of Mr Bashir in the Asian Times for the two weeks following, although to be fair the arson
attacks don’t appear to have been reported by this paper either.
In April 2000, Chris Barton, a youth said to be “of mixed-race”, claimed
to have been sprayed with petrol, set ablaze, and called a Paki bastard. (182)
This was, clearly, a racially motivated attack. Or that was what it looked
like, but on April 13, the Sun newspaper in what was billed as an exclusive, reported that the seventeen year
old unemployed Barton had been arrested along with two older men in connection
with an insurance swindle. (183)
The following September, Barton’s photograph appeared in a big story in
the Daily Mail when, after maintaining his innocence, he changed his plea to guilty on the first day of
his trial for wasting police time. The stipendiary magistrate lifted a ban on
the reporting of the case. Barton, now eighteen, and said to be of “West Indian
origin”, had led with his hoax story to the setting up of road blocks and house
to house inquiries. And, undoubtedly, to a certain amount of consternation
among the non-white denizens of Oxfordshire. As well as trying to shift the
lion’s share of the blame onto an older accomplice, Barton was said to have
sold his story for four hundred pounds! (184)
Three weeks later, Barton was sent to a young offenders’ institution for
three months and ordered to pay four hundred pounds compensation. At the time
of the hoax, Barton, whose father, apparently, is white, was said to have been
on bail for “theft, handling stolen goods and driving offences”. (185)
The month following Barton’s hoax, a similar attack hit the headlines,
this too turned out to be a hoax. On May 2, the Guardian reported that “Police are hunting three white men who
yesterday sprayed a 24-year-old black man with inflammable fluid and then set
him on fire in a racist attack in Birmingham.”
The unidentified victim was said to have been subjected to racial abuse
during the incident and to have suffered 10% burns to his face and right arm.
He was in intensive care at Selly Oak Hospital. The police were quoted, and
obviously they were none too pleased. Detective Chief Inspector Neil James
appealed for witnesses saying: “It was a vicious, unprovoked attack, which
quite frankly is very sickening. It would appear he was walking home after
visiting a friend when he was attacked by three men. One of them sprayed a
substance in his face and set it alight.”
Forensic tests were being carried out to determine the liquid used.
(186) The forensic tests were unnecessary though; the police could simply have asked the “victim” what substance he’d used because on May 18, the Daily Telegraph reported that:
“A BLACK man who claimed he was set on fire by racist thugs has been arrested for
allegedly making up the attack, detectives said yesterday.
They believe Ashley Cane, 24, who was treated
for burns to his face and arms after the alleged attack in Northfield,
Birmingham, on May 1, may have been injured while setting fire to a stolen car.”
Cane and two other people, a man and a woman both aged twenty-eight, were charged with wasting police time and conspiracy to defraud.
On January 28, 1997, thirty year old Michael Menson, a black musician
who had at one time been fairly successful commercially, was set on fire in a
North London street. He died from organ failure on February 13. Menson was
suffering from schizophrenia, and because of this, when he told the police that
he’d been attacked, they dismissed his claims and simply assumed that he’d set
himself on fire. Self-immolation, especially in a public place, is extremely
rare, but there have been cases. In January 1969, a 21 year old Czech
philosophy student named Jan Palach made world headlines when he burned himself
to death in protest at the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. And
in Britain in 1995, the “anti-racist” magazine CARF reported the case of a
homeless 19 year old Ethiopian who set himself alight at a petrol station and
later died from his injuries. (187)
In the Menson case, the initial insistence of the police on the victim’s
responsibility for his own death didn’t wash with his family, and they
campaigned long and hard to have the case re-opened and a proper investigation
mounted. Once a belated crime scene investigation had ruled out self-immolation
it was assumed that the victim had been torched by a racist gang. On January 18, 1999, Michael Menson’s elder sister,
Alex, an advertising executive, published a long article in the Daily Mail in which she blamed her
brother’s murder – without any evidence – on “A Gang Of White Youths”. (188)
In view of her loss she can be forgiven for this outburst. Others should
have been more circumspect, for example, in March 1999, the same newspaper
asserted that “DETECTIVES believe they are close to arresting the white thugs
suspected of the race-hate murder of black musician Michael Menson.” (189)
Interestingly, Alex Menson’s article reveals that she and her brother came from a privileged family; Michael Kobina Menson was born in Moscow on July 19, 1966, the son of a Ghanaian diplomat. (190)
Once the Menson case had been re-opened, the police left no stone
unturned; the man put in charge of the investigation was John Grieve, who has
made a name for himself by making asinine statements about so-called racism, and other antics, but on this
occasion at least he proved that he has some uses. The killers of Michael
Menson were shortly brought to book, and whatever the alleged racial motive,
this was not a crime that could be laid at the door of the British National
Party (as the far left attempted to do with the murder of Stephen Lawrence).
His killers were Mario Pereira (191) who was gaoled for life for the
murder, and Charalambous Constantinou, who received twelve years including ten
years for manslaughter. Husseyin Abdullah aged 50 and by far the oldest of
those charged in connection with the murder, did not actually take part in the
attack but was gaoled for 21 months for perverting the course of justice.
(Prior to the trial of these three men, Ozgay Cevat, who had fled to Northern
Cyprus, was gaoled for 14 years in that country for manslaughter). The trial
judge said that although Pereira had used what might be termed “racist
language” he couldn’t be sure the case was racially motivated. (192)
Michael Menson was indeed the victim of both an heinous and callous
crime, and of prejudice, but the prejudice concerned here was not racial but
social. He was murdered by a gang of thugs who, although not exactly white,
thought it was a right laugh (193) to set a mentally ill man on fire in the
street and to watch him scream in terror as his body was consumed by the
flames.
A year later, Cotter stood trial at Birmingham Crown Court and was
convicted along with his co-defendants. As well as faking the attack on himself
he had sent hate mail to his former girlfriend, apparently to cover his tracks.
He was said to have been obsessed with Hansen, and motivated primarily in his
perverse actions by a desire to win her back; he was cleared of trying to sell
the story to a national newspaper. Cotter was gaoled for two years; his
co-defendants, Craig Wynn and Surjit Singh Clair, were gaoled for two years and
three years respectively. (196)
The best evidence indicates that the unfortunate young man fell into the
river while urinating. A briefing on the case posted to the website of the
self-styled National Civil Rights Movement claims that the alleged victims of
this so-called “racial incident” were in real danger and “Fearing for their lives they fled.”
A cynic, or even someone with a little critical faculty, might reason
that two against four is not good odds, and that as there was no mention of a
weapon being used, this “racial incident” has been blown up out of all
proportion, and that more likely it was simply an encounter between two groups
of youths who were out drinking, whoever was to blame.
An inquest into the death of the unfortunate teenager was opened at
Fulham, London, in November 1999. The police argued that a verdict of
accidental death should be recorded, but the jury returned an open verdict, which
given the lack of information about the actual circumstances of the death seems
to be eminently sensible, but of course this in no way vindicates the
persistent and at times shrill claims of Sukhdev Reel that her son was
murdered, claims that will undoubtedly continue for the indefinite future. (197)
Harold “Errol” McGowan, a thirty-four year old black man from Telford
who had worked as a doorman, was found dead July 2, 1999; his nephew Jason,
aged twenty, was found dead on New Year’s Day 2000. Both men had been hanged.
Harold’s body was found in a house; Jason’s in the street. It didn’t take long
for the rumour mill to start – something which under the circumstances was
hardly surprising – but the idea that Telford, which is 96% white, is a
stronghold either of the Ku Klux Klan or of racially aggravated violence, is
simply not tenable. It remains to be seen how much of the racial abuse that was
allegedly directed at both men prior to their deaths can be substantiated, but
the solicitor Imran Khan and the well known London “anti-racist” activist Suresh Grover were quick to jump in on the act, so
such allegations must be treated with extreme reserve. (198)
In April 2000, the Voice, which styles itself “BRITAIN’S BEST BLACK PAPER”, reported on its front page
that IT WAS MURDER. The headline was
billed as an exclusive, but the actual story, which appeared on an inside page,
was less clear. The police were said to be following more than 80 lines of
inquiry. (199)
Two months prior to this so-called exclusive though, a related story
which appeared in The Mail On Sunday
had added a further bizarre twist to this already bizarre tale. The Telford Two
was actually The Telford Three! Another man had been found dead some seven
months before Errol McGowan and in similar circumstances, and this time the
victim was white.
The thirty-eight year old Paul Hotchkiss appears to have been a bit of a
hard case; he was extremely fit and had trained doormen and taught
self-defence. Hotchkiss was found dead November 30, 1998; the inquest into his
death was March 1999. (200)
Other, and probably no more reliable rumours, were that the deaths of
the three men were drug rather than race related. Jason McGowan’s father (who
is white) believes his son committed suicide. (201) The Independent revealed that Jason McGowan had made a complaint
against the police weeks before his death, and that he had been arrested over
an incident in a night club in which he’d apparently been taunted over his
uncle’s death. By a Pakistani! (202)
At the inquest into Errol McGowan’s death, a Home Office scientist named
Roger Ide scotched suggestions of foul play. Ide, a specialist in knots and
ligatures, carried out a simulation which led him to more or less rule out
murder. (203) On July 6, 2001, after sitting for five weeks and hearing
sixty-two witnesses, an inquest jury returned a verdict of suicide.
The following day the victim’s elder brother was quoted thus: “I personally was not surprised by this verdict from an
all-white jury from the misinformation the police have given them. If he did take his life, obviously it’s quite clear from evidence given here he was
driven to it by racists.” (204)
The evidence indicated that McGowan “had become the victim of a racist hate campaign in his job as a pub doorman.”
Even the Telford Coroner got in on the act saying : “For this community
and each and every part of it the lessons are clear. The obscenity of racial
abuse and harassment must be rooted out”. (205)
On page 4 of the same report it is stated that “The Times has established five similar hangings over 25 months
involving a small community of people close to members of the McGowan family.”
There was certainly a fourth such mysterious death, the victim was again
black, and incredibly also a part-time doorman. Forty-four year old Johny
Elliot Junior was found hanged in his Telford flat in May. There were no
apparent signs that he was suicidal. His elderly father was understandably
distraught. He said there was a drugs link, maybe. (206)
On February 18, 2002, a jury returned a
verdict of suicide. The case was widely reported; to take one example, the
report that appeared in the Independent the following day said that the victim had repeatedly warned of threats to his
life. This could indicate genuine concerns, or it could indicate mental
illness. Needless to say, neither the victim’s family nor the usual vested
interests were satisfied. It is of course understandable that his family and
friends should seek another explanation, but this is no excuse for the ongoing
exploitation of such tragic deaths by people with political and racial agendas.
As with the Elliot case, the claim in the Times article (above) that Errol McGowan believed that he was on a
hit list drawn up by Combat 18 is (if genuine) more indicative of a deeply
troubled man than of one genuinely persecuted by racists. Doormen (bouncers) are not in general shrinking violets;
most would be likely to answer verbal abuse (racial or otherwise) with their
fists rather than with a rope around their own necks.
It is most likely that all these deaths were nothing more than a bizarre
if tragic series of coincidences. In the first place, suicide is a surprisingly
common cause of death. The following table gives the official figures for
England and Wales (207) for three recent years:
In 1999, (208) over .66% of deaths were classified as suicide (or self-inflicted), that is more than one in two hundred.
In the second place, no one really knows what goes on in another man’s mind, but a report of a double tragedy that appeared in the Guardian in April 2001 may hold the key.
A French schoolboy received a bad school report. His father took him to task for this, and the boy shot himself
“Seeing his son lying dead with the report beside him, the father picked up the gun and
killed himself in front of his wife.” (209)
Without wishing to belabour this point, in May 2002, the current writer
read four reports of the suicides of young people in the press in the space of
two days, three of them were by hanging, and three of them were very widely
reported. On May 30, the Daily Telegraph
(for example) alluded to the case of 23 year old law student Julie Wintersgill.
Desperate to enter a London chambers on her graduation, she held up a cleaner
at Swansea University at gunpoint to obtain the keys to her law department! She
failed but later burgled the, department and altered her 2.2 grade to 2.1. She
was arrested, charged and bailed. Believing her life to be ruined, this
obviously highly intelligent but tragic young girl blasted herself to death on
a cliff top with her father’s shotgun.
The day before the report on this inquest, my local newspaper, the NEWS SHOPPER Beckenham & Penge,
reported the suicide of a 25 year old Sikh man, Jasbir Singh More, who hanged
himself with his own turban! There was no suggestion of foul play – he appears
to have left a suicide note – but a motive was elusive; the coroner recorded that the only clue to this tragedy was
that the victim, a civil servant, had been facing difficulties at work.
The same day, a double tragedy was reported in the national press.
According to the Daily Mail, two friends, thirteen year old Michelle Stewart and 12 year old Natasha Lake were
said to have hanged themselves within three months of each other.
The inquest into the death of the first girl recorded an open verdict. The coroner stated “It is likely this was a deliberate act but there is no
evidence there was suicidal intent.”
It goes without saying that in this particular double tragedy both girls
were white, and that there was no suspicion of murder much less of a racial
motive and the de rigueur hysteria that would have been generated had they been black or Asian.
In the second place, a murder, even a senseless murder, of a loved one,
is more acceptable or even more romantic in a bizarre sort of way than the
alternative. The public perception is that a mother whose son has been murdered
by a racist gang deserves sympathy,
while the mother of a youth who drowned while falling into the river drunk as
he answered a call of nature would receive at best ridicule, and at worst
opprobrium for failing to raise him properly.
In the third instance, in both the Reel and McGowan cases it may be that
the police did not investigate the deaths as efficiently as they could have.
The sudden or violent death of any young person should always be investigated
with an open mind, if not outright suspicion, but whatever laxness there may
have been in police procedures here, these cases are a far a cry from that
exhibited in the tragic case of Michael Menson, (see above). Finally, without
wishing to sound unduly cynical, there is also the question of criminal injuries
compensation, which of course is not paid in the event of suicide or accidental
death.
Since the lunatic Macpherson Report, the British police have been gripped by hysteria over racism. One time-serving officer with
two commendations for bravery was summarily dismissed for snapping “Sit down,
you black bastard” in a moment of frustration while arresting a 14 year old
youth. (210)
Another, an inspector with 22 years service, was reduced to constable
for making a witticism: “we don’t eat missionaries any more” ! He was charged
with being “oppressive and abusive in that you made a racist comment”. (211)
The Trotskyite newspaper Socialist Worker reported that a Scottish police officer who made “racist remarks” was sacked,
but later reinstated by the Chief Constable, who substituted a hefty fine for
dismissal. (212) This punishment was far too lenient for the comrades, who
railed at his boss.
While most people would agree that this hysteria has gone too far, most
people would also agree that some cases of racial abuse do warrant severe
sanction, especially when they are made anonymously with the intent of causing
ill-feeling between colleagues, and at the same time blaming the abuse on
someone else.
A case like this which was widely reported was that of Sikh police
sergeant (sans turban) Gurpal Virdi. He was summarily dismissed on March 3,
2000 after being found guilty of eleven offences involving sending hate mail to
seventeen colleagues and himself. He was also found guilty on three counts of
having confidential police documents at his home. (213) The hate mail was sent
in two tranches, in December 1997 and January 1998 respectively.
Sergeant Virdi had originally been arrested, but instead of facing
criminal charges, the Metropolitan Police dealt with the case at an internal
disciplinary hearing. Although he would have had a greater chance of acquittal
by a jury, the sergeant should consider himself lucky; the case against him was
overwhelming, although he continues to protest his innocence.
He claimed he was the victim of resentment because he had criticised an
investigation into a racial attack. The Met took a different view; he was said
to have been unhappy at being passed over for CID work, and the letters were a
ruse to prepare the ground for a race discrimination case against the police. (214)
In August 2000, his case came before an employment tribunal which ruled
that he was not only the victim of racism
but that he was innocent of the charges which had been proved against him at
the internal hearing. No mention was made of the evidence against him, instead
the press announced that he had been treated unfairly because he had been
treated as a suspect in a different manner from another suspect, WPC Bachelor. (215)
This sort of argument is ludicrous; in the first place one might ask
what right has an employment tribunal to overturn the findings of fact of a
police disciplinary tribunal? In the second place, the suggestion that all
suspects should be treated in exactly the same manner is an affront to common
sense. In a murder inquiry there may be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of
suspects, especially if the killing is ostensibly motiveless, a sex killing or
the murder of a child, for example. The degree of suspicion with which a
suspect is treated will depend on all sorts of factors: the relationship if any
with the victim, opportunity, motive, alibi, antecedents...
The tribunal found that Virdi had created the offending documents on his own computer just hours before they were delivered. He attempted to cover up his authorship of the second batch of letters by framing WPC Bachelor.
The case against Sergeant Virdi was proved and should remain proved
until sufficient exculpatory evidence is adduced, but in the current climate of
political correctness and hysteria over racism,
anything is possible. In November 2001 it was reported that this rightly
disgraced former police officer was awarded £150,000 damages, and a further
£200,000 in an unfair dismissal claim. The same article revealed that in 1999,
one hundred and eighty officers sued for race and sex discrimination, which
cost (ie cost the taxpayer) £20.3 million in total – £14 million in
compensation and the rest in legal fees! (216) Sergeant Virdi was subsequently
reinstated, and the new Police Commissioner gave him a grovelling apology. So
much for the strong arm of the law.
These men are Mumia Abu-Jamal, Satpal Ram and Winston Silcott. Abu-Jamal
is an American who was convicted of murder in his home town of Philadelphia,
but I have included him in this study because the case has received widespread
international publicity including in Britain where there have been meetings of
his supporters; at least one march has been held, and at one time there was a
telephone contact for the campaign. The National Union of Journalists – of
which I am a member – has also taken up his case.
Mumia Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death for the December 1981 murder of police officer
Daniel Faulkner, and although I have no objection to people campaigning against
the death penalty either in general or for him specifically, it is an affront
to public decency for any half intelligent person who has investigated the
facts of the case to claim that he didn’t pull the trigger on officer Faulkner.
Satpal Ram is an Asian who was gaoled for life for the murder of a white
man during a frenzied knife attack in a restaurant; as far as murders go, this
was not the very worse type, but at trial Ram had the best legal representation
money could buy, and was undoubtedly convicted of murder on the clearest
evidence. And has been his own worst enemy since his conviction.
Winston Silcott’s case is unusual to say the least. He has the dubious
distinction of being both guilty of murder and framed for murder
simultaneously. The cases of Abu-Jamal and Silcott have both generated so much
publicity that they hardly require footnoting. The case of Satpal Ram is less
well known although his supporters have been extremely vocal. We will take the
case of Mumia Abu-Jamal first.
Abu-Jamal’s supporters have made much of this, but whatever files the
FBI or other government agencies may hold on him, to frame him for murder in
the manner suggested – or more often implied – by his most vocal supporters,
would take a quantum leap of the imagination.
By December 1981, Abu-Jamal had only a tenuous connection with
journalism; he was making a living driving a cab. At 4 o’clock one morning
while so engaged, he witnessed, by chance, his brother William Cook being
arrested by police officer Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal pulled out his gun and
raced over to Faulkner, shooting the officer in the back. Faulkner managed to
return fire, putting a bullet in Abu-Jamal’s chest. Abu-Jamal then emptied his
gun into his victim, before sitting down, probably in shock at his own wound.
He was arrested at the scene of the crime.
Any objective individual who has read contemporary press coverage of the
case and the transcripts which are now available on-line (217) can be in no
doubt whatsoever that Mumia Abu-Jamal shot and killed Daniel Faulkner. One can
of course debate whether or not he should have been sentenced to death, or
indeed if he should have been convicted of first degree murder, but the problem
with a total denial is that it undermines any possible mitigation, including
the state of mind of the accused. And Abu-Jamal did plead not guilty. Not that
he denied shooting Daniel Faulkner; he didn’t give evidence at his trial, or
take the stand as our American friends say.
The evidence against him was extremely strong; there were several
eyewitnesses, the forensic evidence was impressive, and at the hospital where
he was taken to be treated, forcibly, by the arresting officers he was heard by
two witnesses to boast that he had shot “the motherfucker” and hoped he died.
The slaying of Daniel Faulkner was reported briefly in The New York Times of Sunday, December 13,
1981. Although he may have been known and respected as a one-time radio
journalist in his home town, Mumia Abu-Jamal was in every other sense a
non-entity. (218) The masses of publicity came later when people campaigning on
his behalf began making outrageous – and for the most part blatantly untrue – claims
about the way his trial had been conducted, how exculpatory evidence had been
excluded, and even about the racial make up of the jury that had convicted him
and sentenced him to death.
Abu-Jamal’s one-time lawyer, a famous attorney named Harold Weinglass,
has written a book on the case called Race For Justice, but this work is so blatantly slanted that no objective
individual with a brain in his head could possibly be taken in by it.
One of the many things missing from the book by Weinglass – which does
rather taint the saintly image Abu-Jamal’s supporters have built up of his as a
champion of the “oppressed”, is that after sentence of death was passed on him,
Abu-Jamal threatened to kill the judge!
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer of May 26, 1983:
In a final act of courtroom defiance, convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal yesterday
threatened the judge who had moments before sentenced him to die in the
electric chair, shouting “Judge, you have just sentenced yourself to
die.”...Several dozen supporters of Abu-Jamal shouted their encouragement to
him. “Sabo, you won’t be around for the execution,” one of them yelled...
Threatening to kill a judge is always unwise, to say the least,
regardless of any means or lack thereof of carrying out the threat. For a more
detailed analysis of the Abu-Jamal case I would refer the reader to my own
pamphlet A TALE OF TWO CONVICTED COP
KILLERS: Why Mumia Abu-Jamal Is Not Winston Silcott, which was published in
1999. The Daniel Faulkner website – already cited – contains an exhaustive
analysis of the case and numerous updates. Regardless of the easily provable
facts of Abu-Jamal’s guilt, the “anti-racist” movement worldwide continues to protest his innocence, usually in the context
of a racially motivated fit up. It remains to be seen how many of Abu-Jamal’s
supporters are innocent dupes, and how many simply don’t care that he gunned
down a police officer in cold blood.
After the trial, it emerged that press coverage of an earlier murder
trial had been squelched under the Contempt Of Court Act; the defendant in that trial was none other than Winston
Silcott, and at the time he was arrested for the murder of Keith Blakelock he
was on bail for the December 1984 murder of a young black boxer, Anthony Smith.
By the time the Blakelock trial opened, Silcott was already a convicted murderer.
After years of campaigning, the “Broadwater Farm Three” as they became
known were finally cleared when the Court of Appeal heard that the police had
fabricated in its entirety the unsigned confession of Winston Silcott, and had
engaged in other dirty tricks. Silcott didn’t give evidence at the Blacklock
trial. Unlike Mumia Abu-Jamal who had no previous convictions that he could be
cross-examined on, Silcott’s antecedents would have been extremely prejudicial
to his defence, which was a complete denial. (219)
To this day, Winston Silcott remains in prison; his supporters (and
apologists) claim that he is yet another victim of racism; Silcott himself claims that although he was convicted of
the murder of Anthony Smith he is really serving time for the murder of Keith
Blakelock. (220) What is the truth?
At his trial for the murder of Anthony Smith, Silcott made a complete denial; he never did it. Period. His position now is
that he did kill Smith but that he acted in self-defence. (221) The victim
though suffered horrific injuries, a fact which even Silcott’s arch-apologist
David Rose cannot explain away as lawful self-defence. (222)
http://www.geocities.com/satpalramisguilty/
Full citations for what follows here can be found on that website, including the post mortem (autopsy) report on Ram’s victim.
In the small hours of Sunday, November 16, 1986, the Sky Blue Indian restaurant in Birmingham
was fairly crowded; two parties concern us in particular. In the first party
were three couples: 22 year old Clarke Edward Pearce and his fiancée Jacqueline
Watson; Mrs Nadine O’Neill (Clarke’s elder sister) and her husband Eddie; and
David Lea and Sharon Badger. All were white. In the second party were two young
Asian men and a white German girl: 20 year old warehouseman Satpal Ram,
Narinder Singh Shinji, and Evelyn Schneider (Ram’s girlfriend). (223)
At some point Clarke Pearce made a remark about the background music, to
which Ram – who was drunk – took offence. Exactly what happened next is still a
subject of some dispute; in its 1995 judgment the Court Of Appeal accepted that
Pearce had provoked Ram, that the two men had come to blows, and that maybe
Pearce had struck the first blow. Both Mrs O’Neill and her husband deny this in
its entirety. Having interviewed them both at length several times I am
satisfied that they are credible witnesses. Whether or not that is the case,
the version of events given by Ram to the police when he surrendered himself
eight days after the murder was not credible, and the lies that have been
churned out by the Free Satpal Campaign and its fellow travellers over the
years are for the most part both readily falsifiable and inconsistent.
The bottom line is that Ram drew a flick knife, an illegal weapon, and
made a ferocious attack on Pearce. He then left the restaurant accompanied by
his two friends and with the knife still in his hand, but not before gloating
over his victim.
Clarke Pearce was taken to Birmingham General Hospital where he was
pronounced dead at 4.23am. Ram attended a different hospital, and using a false
name, sought treatment for a cut face. He needed three stitches, which a doctor
managed to insert in spite of Ram being drunk and abusive. A murder
investigation was launched, and subsequently Ram surrendered himself to the
police accompanied by his solicitor.
Pleading self-defence and claiming that he was the victim of a racially
motivated attack, Ram failed to impress the police, and was charged with
murder. Racial abuse had indeed been used during the incident; according to Mrs
O’Neill, Ram had shouted at her brother: “Don’t you like Paki music?”
An independent witness, a diner named Mark Trace, reported that the
phrase “white bastard” was used by a member of Ram’s party (presumably by either Ram or Shinji, but probably Ram).
Ram was remanded in custody and was appointed a top flight QC. Douglas
Draycott (1918-97) had been called to the Bar as long ago as 1950 and had been
Recorder of Shrewsbury 1966-71. Draycott and his Junior, Stephen Linehan, read
the case papers, and like the police were unconvinced by their client’s
purported defence.
The two men managed to convince Ram that the only chance he had was to
plead provocation rather than self-defence. Ram agreed, albeit reluctantly.
Because he had told a pack of lies to the police, they advised further that he
should not give evidence in his own defence. Again, reluctantly, Ram agreed.
When Ram’s trial opened in June 1987, Navinder Shinji appeared in the
dock with him, charged with assisting his friend to escape. Like Ram, Shinji
did not give evidence, probably because to do so would have left him with no
choice but to implicate Ram under cross-examination. Shinji was rightly cleared
of assisting Ram, although he was gaoled for eighteen months for possessing a
flick knife after the murder. Ram was
rightly convicted. Evelyn Schneider gave evidence for the defence.
Having taken the advice of his legal team, albeit reluctantly, Ram was
bound by this decision. As Douglas Draycott pointed out subsequently (and at
the time), Ram’s claim of self-defence would have been hopeless; the Court Of
Appeal concurred.
Bound by his decision or not, Ram and his supporters wanted a second
bite of the cherry, and as well as launching an appeal, a campaign to free
innocent “race attack victim” Satpal Ram was launched. What the Free Satpal
Campaign lacked in integrity, it made up for in enthusiasm; Ram was convicted
because the police were incompetent, or racist,
or both; the judge was said to be both biased against Ram and surprised that he
had been convicted; Ram was the victim of a witch hunt, and so on. But the
grossest lies and the vilest calumny were reserved for the victim and his
family. Clarke Pearce was said to be a violent racist, Ram had been attacked not just by Pearce but by his entire
party, who are sometimes referred to as six white men.
The most vile lie concocted by Ram’s supporters though is the claim that
Clarke Pearce died only because he refused medical treatment. A widely
distributed leaflet says that he became abusive, refused to be treated by a
woman doctor, pulled out his drips, went home and died. Such has been the
persistence of this easily provable lie that in January 2000, an Early Day
Motion couched in the same terms was laid before Parliament by a gullible left
wing MP. The Court Of Appeal is made of different stuff though.
In controversial cases, judges often warn the jury that they must
consider only the evidence that is put before them, and not what they read in
the press or hear elsewhere, a dictum the Court of Appeal follows; Ram’s
appeals – in 1989 and 1995 – have both been dismissed, the second time in a
strongly worded judgment. The gullible masses will no doubt continue to read
about this supposed miscarriage of justice, on the WorldWideWeb and elsewhere,
but the documented facts about convicted murderer Satpal Ram are now in the
public domain and only a few keystrokes away. Ram was not the victim of a
racially motivated attack, he is a cold-blooded killer who stabbed another man
to death in a drunken rage, and then tried, with a little help from his
friends, to pass himself off as the victim.
In September 1903 a young girl in Pontypridd, Wales, who was in the
service of a Mr M. Fishout told her friends that she had been taken to the
local synagogue by force, wrapped in a cloth, insulted and spat upon. As a
result of this, a mob gathered but was dispersed by the police. They thought
the girl had been abducted for “ritual purposes”. Later she confessed she’d
made the whole thing up “for a lark”. At this time the Jewish population of
Pontypridd was estimated at a hundred. (224) A follow up report in the Jewish
press claimed that in spite of the girl’s admission that she hadn’t really been
pricked with needles and severely injured as she had previously claimed, many
people were said to still believe her story. (225)
In 1994, an American student was gaoled for life for the murder of a
British student. Twenty-four year old Catherine Ayling was knifed to death by
Curtis Howard, who had developed an obsession with her. (226) It was reported
that, among other things, the mentally disturbed Howard had carved a swastika
in her bedroom, (227) Catherine Ayling was white; Howard was black. (228)
Finally, in 1999 a story appeared on the front page of my local free
newspaper which proclaimed CHURCH DEFACED BY RACE HATE. (229) The headline though was misleading; the story was not
about race hate but mental illness. Ian Carstairs, a highly educated 35 year
old (with degrees in astrophysics and theology) had been accused of throwing a
beer can through a church window and of daubing a church notice board with
“swastikas, Stars of David and 666s”. However, a photograph of the board showed
one inverted swastika, two 666s and two encircled pentagrams – not Magans David.
He didn’t appear in court because he’d checked into a mental hospital.
The 1903 case was curious indeed, but there is no suggestion that it was
motivated by anything other than childish female hysteria; the case from my
local press makes a good headline but it is clearly a non-story. The tragic
murder of Catherine Ayling may well have led to a racially motivated hoax if
her killer hadn’t been brought to book. As the case of the Searchlight
Organisation demonstrates clearly, it doesn’t take much imagination to jump
from a carved swastika to a secret Nazi society.
According to a report published February 8, 1999, around 238,000 white
people claimed to have been victims during a 12 month period against 101,000
Asians and 42,000 blacks. These figures are said to have come from the British
Crime Survey and “should be treated with caution”. It is claimed that there
were eight murders or manslaughters between 1996 and 1998 for which there was
“a racial motivation”. Four of these victims were white. (230)
Eight months later, whitey was said to be still
under pressure. A report in the Daily
Mail claimed that “SOARING numbers of attacks on white people have led to a
police force setting up a specialised race crimes unit”. This was in Oldham,
Greater Manchester, which hit the headlines in 2001 when so-called race riots
erupted in the town. But a close reading of the Daily Mail article suggests that these so-called racial attacks
are largely the work of Asian street gangs. One of the cases cited was clearly
a robbery, whatever language may have been used against the victim. (231)
The rising tide of racially motivated violence against whites is an
international trend, it would appear. In the Foreword to a supposedly scholarly monograph on “hate crime”, Morris Dees, who is better known as an anti-white agitator, wrote that “A few
years ago, hate crime was literally a black-and-white issue, usually involving
white perpetrators and black victims. Today, we see a significant increase in
black-on-white attacks.” (232)
But are “hate crimes” really rising? In their misnamed 1993 booklet racism: the destruction of civil and
political liberties, Conor Foley and Sharron Nelles claim that there were
ten racially motivated murders in Britain in 1992. If that were the case then
the number of racially motivated murders had actually decreased over the past
few years, recall above, eight murders or manslaughters between 1996 and 1998
for which there was “a racial motivation”, including of four whites. But do
these figures have any basis in fact? (233)
The prosaic reality is that we live in a violent society and a violent
world. Most of us don’t face violence every day, but we each and every one of
us encounter it at some point, if only as a spectator. We in Britain also live
in a society which although still predominantly white, is now far from racially
homogeneous, as it was largely in the sixties, and certainly in the fifties.
Indeed, in some places whites are actually now in a minority. Not only are
non-whites everywhere but violent criminals are everywhere, and it stands to
reason that there will be some overlap. If an area is 20% Asian and 20% black
for example, we shouldn’t be surprised if some Asians are mugged by blacks, some blacks are beaten up by whites, and if occasionally a black man is knifed by an Asian street gang.
In March 1999, an unnamed Asian man wrote to the Asian Times newspaper to record his disappointment “at the growing
number of young Asian prostitutes working in and around Birmingham”. Being a
“respectable man” he said “I have been brought up to believe that we Asians
have a higher moral upbringing than our Western counterparts”. (234) Sadly, he
is mistaken. Ironically, the same issue reported the case of another Asian who
was fined £200 for racially abusing a pregnant white woman. (235) Reminder
Singh Upal was condemned in an editorial. (236) In fact his “crime” was not racially motivated at all in any meaningful
sense, his heated words were in an argument over a taxi fare. The pregnant
white woman was driving a taxi! Obviously if Mr Upal hated white people so much
he wouldn’t have hired one to drive him. In fact if he hated white people so
much he probably wouldn’t be living in this country at all.
When people argue they use angry words, including sexual swear words and
racial epithets. When people attack other people in the course of committing
robberies or gratuitous violence, politeness and etiquette are usually the last
things on their minds. The main evidence for the supposed racial motive in the murder of Stephen Lawrence is that one of
the gang which attacked him is said to have used the word “nigger”, which is
certainly a racial epithet. It is also the preferred racial epithet of American “street” blacks, as anyone who has seen the Janet Jackson film Poetic Justice will realise. (237)
It is true that some street criminals target primarily or exclusively members of
other ethnic groups, but there need not be a racial motive for this. The
ghoulish American serial killer (and cannibal) Jeffrey Dahmer murdered mainly
young black and non-white men, not from a racial motive, but because they were
easier targets. (238) By contrast, serial killers usually target members of
their own racial group, one of the most notorious black serial killers, Wayne
Williams, murdered exclusively young blacks. (239)
Indeed, the greatest irony of supposedly racially motivated crime is
that the most horrible outrages are perpetrated against members of similar
ethnic groups. In Nazi Germany, Jews were singled out for persecution, both by
the state and by individuals, yet most Germans would have been hard pressed to
tell a German Gentile from a German Jew save for manner of dress in the more
Orthodox Jews. The killing fields of Rwanda is another terrible example: who
could tell a Hutu from a Tutsi?
In Britain, for all the talk of racially motivated violence and a few
tragic and dubious examples like the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the greatest
“racially motivated” violence in these islands is and always has been between
its “white tribes”, in particular those of Northern Ireland. Between 1969 and
1987, a staggering 2,618 people were killed and more than 33,000 injured in
such outrages in that strife torn land. (240) As a result of the “peace
process” many of the people who were brought to book for such outrages are now
back on the streets, including Michael Stone, a “Loyalist” who served twelve
years for murdering six people, and Sean Kelly, an IRA man who in October 1993
planted a bomb which killed ten people including his fellow bomber and a seven
year old girl.
By the same token, the only significant acts of racial terrorism against non-whites by members of the white majority in
Britain in recent years and perhaps at all has been the work of a lone
psychopath, David Copeland. Murders and other crimes which are motivated purely
by racial bigotry are rare indeed, as any honest, objective investigation of
this phenomenon will reveal.
As far as the left are concerned however, and the “anti-racist” industry in all its myriad
manifestations, the facts must never be allowed to stand in the way of a good
story, or of ideology. For many years alleged white on black (read non-white)
racially motivated crime was used as a big stick to batter the white population
over the head. Reports of black on white crime were suppressed, and indeed
those who reported it have risked being dragged into court under the notorious Race Relations Act, most outrageously
Nick Griffin, whose “crime” was to publish a magazine called The Rune which a Jewish politician (and hatemonger) found offensive. (241)
Incredibly, there are those who call for Britain’s already Draconian race laws to be strengthened yet again, particularly since the September 11,
2001 atrocity in New York. Now, the tide has turned somewhat, partly because the truth about non-white crime – in particular black street crime – can no
longer be suppressed, and partly because whites have learned to play the race card as well.
At one time racism was seen primarily or almost exclusively as a white disease, nowadays anyone who stands in the way of the multi-racial juggernaut is likely to be squelched, and that means anyone.
There is no single agenda at work here, and some hate crime hoaxes – the
murder of Lee Harvey, the self-immolation of Ashley Cane, the “Asian lightning”
of Mr Bashir – are clearly the work of individuals or small groups of
individuals who need a scapegoat. Tracie Andrews invented the fat man with
staring eyes in the hope of escaping retribution for the frenzied knife murder
of her lover; Ashley Cane had been up to no good and likewise sought to cover
his tracks; Mr Bashir was motivated by greed, so invented a racist gang to detract from his own
misdeeds.
Such has been the hysteria over racism that as with tales of Nazi atrocities, any allegation of racism has come to be believed almost uncritically. In 1996 it was
reported that the misnamed Commission for Racial Equality spent £16 million of taxpayers’ money a year and employed about 240 staff, 17 of them earning more
than £30,000 a year.
One of the proposals of this lunatic organisation was that in cases of
alleged racial discrimination the burden of proof should be shifted to the
alleged discriminator because “the discriminator’s evidence as to the state of
their mind is likely to be unreliable.” [The Commission’s quotes.] As one
critic pointed out “the race zealots only have to make the charge to find it proven”. (242)
If you pay people enormous salaries to find racism they will find it, and will continue to find it even when
and where it doesn’t exist. As stated, whites have now discovered the race
card, and the CRE – perhaps hoping to avoid charges of racial bias – has now
started taking up cases of alleged racism and discrimination brought by white people, including cases against non-whites.
To Notes And References
Return To Baron Pamphlets Index
The Column 88 Nazi Underground Hoax
Styling itself Searchlight Against fascism and racialism, the first issue of Searchlight magazine is dated February 1975. On page 4 is a
reference to Column 88, which is said to be an “Under-cover hard-line Nazi
group”. This is the first such reference the current writer has found to this
outfit. Two months later, an article in the mainstream daily press announced
that Special Branch was said to have uncovered a sinister plan by Column 88 to
celebrate Hitler’s birthday in the heart of Sussex on April 20th. (90)
Column 88, The Notting Hill Carnival Bomb Plot And
Another “Searchlight” Agent ProvocateurNineteen eighty-one was an eventful year for the Searchlight team. The
death of Maurice Ludmer was both unpredicted and unavoidable, but the deaths of
perhaps dozens or even hundreds of people in a massacre at the Notting Hill
August Bank Holiday Carnival was thankfully averted due to the ultra-vigilance
of the magazine’s undercover agents. At least that is their version of the
story, but an examination of the facts as presented by them and the media over
the following months and years indicates otherwise.
The Death Of Woolf Katz –
An Anti-Semitic Murder That Never Was
In 1966, two groups of young men were convicted at the Central Criminal
Court in relation to a series of arson attacks against London synagogues. On
February 15, Hugh Llewelyn Hughes and five others received sentences varying
from 6 months to 5 years. Hughes received the longest sentence; Paul Dukes, who
had shown genuine remorse for his involvement in the arson campaign, received
the shortest.
Hate Crime Hoaxes Specific And General – Preamble
Having disposed of this notorious gang of mischief-makers and damned
liars, we will turn shortly to the perpetrators of specific hoaxes, usually of
a one-off nature. First though a few words of a more general nature to
illustrate to the reader the way hate crimes are whipped up out of thin air.
Unlike the Searchlight Organisation, not everyone who perpetuates the numerous
myths of hate crime hoaxes has a political or racial agenda. Some people do so
for personal or professional reasons, and this is something that is not limited
to hate crimes or even to crimes.
Bogus Statistics As Hate Crime Hoaxes
There are two well known aphorisms concerning statistics:
140,000 Racial Attacks A Year?
In 1994, the Advertising Standards Authority rejected a complaint made
by the Freedom Association against the Anti-Racist Alliance over an advertisement in the national press. The advertisement read:
A Fascist Outrage That Never Was
In the 1930s, Sir Oswald Mosley, a charismatic politician who had
supported both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, founded first his
“New Party” and then the British Union of Fascists. (134) At first Mosley
enjoyed a certain amount of Jewish support and in fact went out of his way to
build bridges with British Jewry, but some Jews had other ideas, and both Jews
and Communists (with a great deal of overlap) declared war on Mosley’s
movement. At first Mosley ignored these attacks, but eventually he reacted by
excluding Jews from the party and then finally allowing (and very likely
covertly encouraging) rowdier elements to take over. (135) Although Mosley
himself was never personally anti-Semitic when – as he saw it – Organised Jewry
declared war on British Fascism – he had no qualms about using anti-Semitism as
a political device. This was clearly a case of giving a dog and bad name. But
although this dog did indeed bite, Mosley’s and Fascism’s opponents were not
content with portraying their enemy in a bad light, they had to lie and
fabricate about them as well.
From Brick Through Window To Child Through Window
Nearly forty years later, the brick through the window by the wicked fascists story reappeared in none other than Searchlight magazine where it was
claimed in a new twist that in October 1936, a group of fascists had hurled a
young girl through a plate glass window. (142) It remains to be seen how many
times this lie has been parroted in various forms over the years. (143)
Another Fascist Attack
A report of an alleged attack by Fascists on an innocent man is
contained in the same Public Record Office file as the “brick in the baby’s cot” incident. The report was filed from the same division and resulted from
the same “protests”. The alleged victim was Albert Frederick Law, apparently a
Gentile. He was distributing a Labour newspaper The Citizen (apparently shoving it through people’s doors late at
night). (144)
But Were They Fascists?
Another MEPO file relating to the same subject contains documentation on
an attack about a year before the Law and Lynch incidents, an attack which
undoubtedly did happen. This attack though had an interesting twist to it. A
Special Branch report dated 2nd March 1936 records that the previous
month, two North London Jewish youths – who were cousins – were set upon by a
group of men they believed to be Blackshirts.
A Modern Anti-Semitic Non-Outrage
In 1992, the Trotskyite newspaper Socialist Worker reported that the Anti Nazi League (146) had organised a march in
which three hundred and fifty “anti-fascists” led a “lively and angry
demonstration through the centre of Brighton last Saturday”. They then stood
outside the cemetery gates and observed a two minute silence for the victims of
the Holocaust. (147) This was in protest at the desecration of a Jewish
cemetery with swastikas. The rally was addressed by Brighton’s Jewish mayor.
But the normally wailing and gnashing of teeth Jewish Chronicle was far from impressed, probably because the
swastikas were said to have been removed by the cemetery’s gardener. The
punchline is that the cemetery didn’t employ a gardener! (148)
Black Propaganda Against Nazi Germany,
And Against Mosley
The 1930s saw the rise of Nazism. Because of the persecution of the Jews
under the Nazis – which was real enough – and because of the subsequent
revelations about the Nazi concentration camps, there has been a tendency since
the end of the Second World War to take any and all allegations of Nazi
atrocities at face value. This wasn’t always the case though. In April 1933,
the Jewish Chronicle reported that “...certain Jewish organisations abroad circulated exaggerated atrocity stories” about Nazi Germany. (149)
“Official” Black Propaganda In Peacetime
It has often been said that the first casualty of war is truth, this
applies as much to the “war on crime”as to any other war. (153) In the 1950s,
the American FBI launched its Counterintelligence Program against domestic “extremists”. (154)
The Murder Of Lee Harvey –
A Racially Motivated “Road Rage” Hoax (160)
On December 1, 1996, 25 year old Lee Harvey and his mistress Tracie
Andrews (161) were involved in a motoring incident which led to Harvey being
stabbed to death. Andrews was a single mother, and her live-in lover Harvey was
the father of one of her children; both she and Harvey were white, although the
dark complexioned Harvey was sometimes mistaken for a non-white.
Black Gang Falsely Accused Of Murder
Black muggers and street gangs are real enough, but they rarely murder
young girls – white or otherwise – for no rational motive. A potential hate
crime hoax involving one such mythical gang was the brutal and senseless murder
of a sixteen year old girl by an “obsessive boyfriend”. The murder of Carol
Sanderson received no extensive media coverage, and I noticed it only because a
report of the trial appeared in my local newspaper.
A Bomb Hoax
In the Spring of 1999, a psychopath
named David Copeland planted a series of nail bombs in London. The first
exploded in Brixton, an area well known to be “black”; the following week a
second bomb was planted in Brick Lane, which has a large Bangladeshi
population; the third was planted in a Soho public house known to be frequented
by homosexuals, and was the only bomb to cause loss of life. Copeland was
convicted of causing all three explosions at the Central Criminal Court in July
2000 and gaoled for life. He was picked up on closed circuit television
planting the Brixton bomb, and the police worked frantically to track him down,
eventually catching him after tip offs from the public, most notably from a
workmate.
An Unseemly Desecration
In August 1999, Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered black teenager
Stephen Lawrence, was interviewed by the Daily Mirror newspaper in Jamaica where she had taken her son’s body out of fear
that his grave might be desecrated. This was no idle speculation, because the
previous February the memorial which had been erected to the unfortunate youth was desecrated. Not for the first time.
The police came in for renewed criticism because a CCTV camera that had been
trained on the site turned out to have been empty! When the memorial was
defaced, one senior police officer was quoted thus: “Only sick and racist
people would do something like this in London”. The Government was unhappy too,
and it was reported that “Last night the Home Secretary called for the incident
to be seen as proof of the need to drive out racism.”
“Jewish Lightning?”
Years ago, the current writer heard a very politically incorrect joke on
an early evening TV comedy programme that would probably cause howls of outrage
and demands for the prosecution of the offending comedian were it to be related
nowadays. It went something like this:
Mr Bashir’s “Asian Lightning”
Mohammed Bashir, who ran a shop in Newcastle called Cut-Price Mini Market, told police he was being targeted by white
youths “who taunted and abused his family”. Two weeks later his store was blown up.
Two Similar – And Shocking – Hate Crime Hoaxes
From Arson To Self-Immolation:
While Mr Bashir’s supermarket arson conspiracy must have come as a bit
of a shock to people who’d seen this poor man relating his tale of woe to a
sympathetic media, the crime of arson, although extremely serious, (181) doesn’t
cause public revulsion when there is no threat to life. Setting people on fire
though is a different matter entirely, so it is all the more shocking when
people set themselves on fire.
Another Case Of Self-Immolation?
The Sad Tale Of Michael MensonIn addition to the chimera of institutional racism, the Stephen Lawrence case raised the question of police
competence, or the lack thereof. Anyone who has studied this case though and
who knows something about police procedure, especially in relation to murder
investigations, will conclude that any errors made by the investigating team
were of a relatively minor nature. The same cannot be said of those investigating
the murder of another young black man, one who didn’t have the same appeal of
Stephen Lawrence as a martyr to the wicked racists.
Chris Cotter An Insane Act Of Self-Inflicted Wounding
Chris Cotter was an athlete. As well as being white he was the boyfriend
of black track star Ashia Hansen. (194) When he was the victim of an appalling
knife attack by up to five white men in which he lost a considerable quantity
of blood, the police announced that the attack was being treated as racially
motivated. Shortly though, Cotter himself was arrested, and the police said
“they were no longer treating the incident as racist”. (195)
When In Doubt, Blame Racists: The Reel Case
On the evening of October 14, 1997, twenty year old Lakhvinder (Ricky)
Reel and three Asian friends went out drinking at Kingston, Surrey. During the
course of the evening, there was an incident involving this group and two white
youths. The four Asians broke up and three of them regrouped. On October 21,
the body of the fourth member of the group, Lakhvinder Reel, was found in the
River Thames. That much is known. The rest is a matter of speculation,
intelligent speculation on the part of the police, wild speculation on the part
of the Reel family, and especially on the part of the victim’s mother, Sukhdev.
When In Doubt, Blame Racists: The Telford Two
Just as there is no meaningful evidence that Lakhvinder Reel was
murdered, so is there no meaningful evidence that the so-called Telford Two
were murdered, in fact what evidence there is indicates that no one else was
involved in the deaths of either Errol McGowan or Jason McGowan, and that the
similarity of their deaths was simply a bizarre coincidence. It’s a pity the Independent newspaper didn’t do its
homework before raising the cry of racism.
This is another widely reported case, the aforementioned Independent and the usual suspects (ie the left wing press and
“anti-racist” groups) have made a lot
of noise about it, but as in most such cases they are long on speculation, short on facts.
year suicides and deaths from self-inflicted injury total number of deaths
1992 3952 558313
1998 3614 555015
1999 3690 556118
Afterword On The Reel And McGowan Cases
>One should not judge Sukhdev Reel or the McGowan family too harshly for
their ill-founded claims that the deaths of Lakhvinder Reel and the McGowans
were racially motivated murders. In the first place, the “anti-racist” lobby has so brainwashed a
significant percentage of the population (both non-white and white) with its
lying propaganda that many people will accept any such claims at face value; racism if not the white man has surely
become the root of all evil.
’Ello, ’Ello, ’Ello
Self Defence Is No Offence: Framed By The “Racist” System?
Three cases of men convicted of murder – two of them black, one Asian –
deserve mention here because they have all three been presented by “anti-racist” propagandists as victims rather
than as perpetrators, purely on account of their ethnic origins. Their supporters are in a very real sense hoaxing the public.
“Innocent” Mumia
Mumia Abu-Jamal (formerly known as Wesley Cook) was a radio journalist
who had at one time had a promising career; there is no doubt that he had
talent, and could have gone far, but, failing to recognise the difference
between objective reporting and advocacy, he had clashed with his employer over
his approach to reporting on the MOVE organisation, a controversial black
sect/political outfit, and had subsequently been fired from/quit his job at
WUHY-FM, earlier in 1981. As a youth, Abu-Jamal had been heavily involved with
the Black Panthers, but significantly he had no criminal record whatsoever,
although there is evidence that he had in the past been under state
surveillance.
Winston Silcott: A Bad Man Framed
In October 1985, serious public disorder broke out on Broadwater Farm
housing estate in North London. The most notorious outcome of the riot was the
death of a 40 year old police constable, Keith Blakelock, who was literally
hacked to death. Three juveniles and three adults were to be indicted for the
murder of PC Blakelock, the three adults, headed by black greengrocer and disc
jockey Winston Silcott, were convicted and gaoled for life.
Satpal Ram: A Hate Campaign From Beyond The Grave
I could write reams about the Satpal Ram case; actually I have, most of which can be found on the website satpalramisguilty, the full address of which is
Three Potential Hate Crime Hoaxes That Never Materialised
>A brief mention here of three incidents which could have been classified
as hate crime hoaxes or which could have escalated into such if they had been
handled indelicately by the media or if the opportunity had arisen for capital
or speculation to be made out of them; the first happened early in the 20th
Century, the second was reported nationally; the third I found in my local press.
Conclusion: Hoaxing The Public –
The Prosaic Truth About Racially Motivated “Hate Crime”Over the years the media and in particular the extreme left and “anti-racist” groups and campaigners have made
enormous political capital out of this apparently escalating phenomenon.
Alleged racially motivated attacks on blacks (anyone who is not white!) have
been used to demonise the far right and all forms of white nationalism, except,
curiously, the two most murderous forms of “white nationalism”: Irish
“Republicanism” and Zionism. The Jewish-controlled, anti-British and anti-white
race-hate magazine Searchlight makes it clear that any manifestation of racial consciousness by the white (Gentile)
majority is to be viewed as nothing less than the resurgence of Nazism, and is
to be stamped on forthwith. Ironically though, figures released by the misnamed
Commission for Racial Equality indicate that in Britain the majority of victims
of “hate crimes”are white.
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