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“Jeremy Corbyn egging: Brexiteer jailed for 28 days”, the BBC reported on 25th March 2019.
“Woman sentenced for hurling milkshake at Farage”, the BBC reports today.
Notice that the BBC report about Jeremy Corbyn’s attacker specified in the headline exactly how long John Murphy was sent to jail for. In contrast, today’s BBC report about Nigel Farage’s attacker, Victoria Thomas Bowen, just says she was “sentenced”. Most people read only the headlines of news stories, and therefore are probably left with the impression that she was sentenced to jail time, as John Murphy was for a similar crime. She wasn’t. Victoria Thomas Bowen was given a suspended sentence.
Oh, and one mustn’t forget that she must complete 15 “rehabilitation activity requirement days”, which usually means something like an anger management course, and pay Farage a massive victim surcharge of £154.
Two British MPs, Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, have been assassinated in recent years. After both murders we heard fervent declarations that attacks on politicians were utterly unacceptable in Our Democracy. Of course we now know that neither Murphy or Thomas-Bowen intended to kill or seriously injure their victims. But when a person is struck by something thrown at them, they do not know at the moment of impact that the missile is harmless.
UPDATE: When I first saw people on Twitter pointing out the judge’s South Asian name, I dismissed the comments as the sort of snide racism that bedevils right wing Twitter. However Toby Young has assembled a list of six judgements by Senior District Judge Tan Ikram that are more than enough to give a rational person cause to doubt his impartiality.
He was last in the news six months ago:
A senior judge has been handed a formal misconduct warning for ‘liking’ a Linkedin post calling for a free Palestine, shortly before he oversaw the criminal trial of three women who displayed paraglider images at a protest.
Deputy Chief Magistrate Tan Ikram found defendants Heba Alhayek, 29, Pauline Ankunda, 26, and Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27, guilty of a terror offence at a pro-Palestinian march in central London, a week after Hamas had carried out the October 7 attack in Israel.
The judge’s handling of the case came in for criticism after he handed conditional discharges to the women and commented that they had “well learned” their lesson.
His impartiality was then called into question when it emerged he had previously ‘liked’ the LinkedIn message from a barrister which read: “Free Free Palestine. To the Israeli terrorist both in the United Kingdom, the United States, and of course Israel you can run, you can bomb but you cannot hide – justice will be coming for you.”
(While I was making this update, commenter John independently brought up the topic of Judge Ikram’s record.)
Danny Cohen was once the Director of BBC Television. When he writes in the Telegraph about the way that the BBC currently reports on Jewish and Israeli issues, one can sense the anger of someone who has been let down by former colleagues. In his latest article he writes,
This week the BBC has been reporting live from Syria as the wretched Assad regime collapsed. It is not clear yet whether Syria is destined for a democratic future or will fall prey to jihadists previously affiliated with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
It seems though that the BBC is optimistic. Reporting live from Damascus, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet said the following: ‘‘This is one of the most diverse countries in the Middle East with multiple Christian and Muslim sects. And you can see it here in the Old City, all the different Quarters – Jewish, Muslim, Christian. They’re all here. They want to believe they have a space now as Syria embarks on this new chapter.”
For anyone with the slightest knowledge of the 20th century history of Jewish people in the Arab world, this statement is both ignorant and offensive.
There are believed to be three Jews left in Syria. That’s right, three Jews. The rest fled for their lives. After Syria gained independence from France in 1946, Jewish people and their property were repeatedly targeted. In 1947, the Syrian government organised and encouraged Arab inhabitants of Aleppo to attack Jews. Pogroms followed. Synagogues, Jewish schools and orphanages were destroyed. From that point on it was clear that Jews were not welcome in Syria. The community fled to Israel and elsewhere and now there are just those three Jews left in the whole country.
Related post: Examples of spectacular historical ignorance. I will take the liberty of quoting one of my own comments to that post:
…the holes in the knowledge of innocent dupes are frequently – in fact almost always – the evidence that someone in the past succeeded in deliberately fostering a myth, or blanking out a truth.
The Daily Mirror has an exclusive: “EXCLUSIVE: Farmer protest organiser was behind racist and homophobic posts online”
An organiser of this week’s Farmers’ protest in London wrote historic messages including racist and homophobic language online attacking Labour voters, it can be revealed.
“It can be revealed” – this looks like it’s going to be spicy.
Clive Bailye, one of the five farmers who organised the march in the capital, is founder of online community The Farming Forum.
But a Mirror investigation found Mr Bailye had posted a series of remarks using racist language, and disparaging remarks towards people with disabilities, the unemployed and LGBT people.
During the 2019 general election, Mr Bailye suggested “only a disabled, unemployed, black, LGBT, transgender, non tax paying, homeless, vegan immigrant in immediate need of NHS help” would vote for Labour.
I’m waiting for the part where Mr Bailye actually says that being a disabled, unemployed, black, LGBT, transgender, non tax paying, homeless, vegan immigrant in immediate need of NHS help is bad. Unless the Mirror thinks that voting Labour is bad?
In other disparaging comments about race, gender, religion, and disabled people, Mr Bailye suggested “the way to get something done is to claim […] you tripped an suffered injury […] maybe throw in something about being a disabled, transsexual, black, muslim, vegan with learning difficulties while your at it”.
Again, that is an assertion about how claiming to be any of those things gets more favourable treatment, not an actual insult to the groups concerned.
In more recent posts, this summer – in the fall out of riots across England – Mr Bailye posted asking whether “if accused of being far right / anti immigrant hate speech in court do we think saying “i’m on the spectrum” would get you off ?”.
Well, would it? The question is not unreasonable. The official guidelines of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales on sentencing offenders with mental disorders, developmental disorders, or neurological impairments state that the fact that an offender has such a condition should always be considered by the court, although it will not necessarily have an impact on sentencing. It is certainly commonplace for people in the dock to put forward their autism as a mitigating factor.
He also repeated a conspiracy theory in the same post, saying “We have two tier law in this country it seems”.
If belief in the existence of “two-tier law” in the UK is a conspiracy theory, it is one that half the country shares.
A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German.
That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning.
Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has been bringing criminal speech complaints against his critics for years. As of August 2024, he had filed 805 such charges – well over half of the total raised by all cabinet ministers since September 2021 combined.
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use.
In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up something that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump.
Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a man in SS or SA uniform holding a placard with the words “Germans, do not buy from Jews!”. Niehoff gave the whole group of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”.
Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis?
Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement.
What happened here is clear enough: Insulting cabinet ministers may, if you squint, count as online “hate speech,” but it does not remotely qualify for the Eleventh Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column.
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is.
Sometimes the journalist really is the story: “Telegraph journalist faces ‘Kafkaesque’ investigation over alleged hate crime”, reports the Telegraph.
A Telegraph journalist is facing a “Kafkaesque” investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last year.
Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, has described how two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was being investigated over the post on X, formerly Twitter, from a year ago.
In an article for The Telegraph, she said she was told by one officer that “I was accused of a non-crime hate incident. It was to do with something I had posted on X a year ago. A YEAR ago? Yes. Stirring up racial hatred apparently.”
When Pearson asked what she had allegedly said in the tweet, the officer said he was not allowed to disclose it. However, at this time last year, she was frequently tweeting about the October 7 attacks on Israel and controversial pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of London.
The officer also refused to reveal the accuser’s name. Pearson recalled: “‘It’s not the accuser,’ the PC said, looking down at his notes. ‘They’re called the victim.’”
An accused person is not told what crime they are alleged to have committed nor who is accusing them, but the police speak as if the crime is already proven. There was a time when Britain defined itself as a place where this could not happen.
Here is another account of the same events from GB News:
“Fury as police officers spend Remembrance Sunday knocking on journalist’s door over social media post: ‘A day celebrating freedom!’”
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
– Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post
I have heard that Trump was quite entertaining at the Al Smith Memorial dinner, but this riposte from the Guardian’s Helen Sullivan displays true comic genius. Her effortless mastery of the role of the po-faced straight man (replace “mastery” and “straight man” with gender-neutral equivalent terms if required) is a joy to behold.
Trump speaks at Al Smith dinner – as it happened
03.35 BST
Trump’s speech ends and he receives warm applause from the crowd. We will end our coverage of this event now.
03.31 BST
Trump says he will bring back the SALT tax deduction. Some context from NBC’s Sahlil Kapur: [screenshot of tweet]
03.26 BST
Trump makes another transphobic joke.
03.26 BST
Trump repeats claims that he has been treated worse than any other president.
He takes a jab at Gaffigan, saying that hopefully his role as Tim Walz will be short-lived.
03.25 BST
Trump makes a joke to boos, then says, “That’s nasty. I told the idiots who gave me this stuff.”
The joke was about Harris’s support for childcare and was directed at her husband, Dough Emhoff and paid child care workers.
“Last time I did this I was wondering against crooked Hillary…I had the meanest guy you’d ever seen write stuff up and man was the room angry,” Trump says.
They said “It’s too much, but I did it anyway.”
Trump jokes that he is meant to make self-depracating jokes, then says, “So here goes. Nope! I got nothing”.
03.15 BST
“Chuck Schumer is here looking very glum, Trump says. “But look on the bright side chuck, considering how woke your party has become, if Kamala loses you still have the chance to become the first woman president,” Trump says – it is a transphobic joke.
03.13 BST
Trump again refers to Harris not appearing in person, and says she is “receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” to claps and cheers.
“If the Democrats really wanted someone to not be with us this evening, they would have just sent Joe Biden,” Trump says.
Trump claims – not clear if joking – that Biden is having second thoughts and wants to come back. There is no evidence of this.
Trump says the term “fake news” is no longer in vogue.
He refers to President Barack Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama” – dog whistling for the baseless ‘birther’ conspiracy theory that Obama is secretly a Muslim born in Kenya.
03.07 BST
Trump says of Harris, “I like her a lot, but now I can’t stand her.”
“Catholics you gotta vote for me,” Trump says. “I’m here and she’s not.”
Trump lists good deeds done by Catholics.
“If you wanted Harris to accept your invitation you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the rioters and looters in Minneapolis,” Trump says, to loud whoops and cheers.
Trump is referring to the George Floyd protests that took place in the historically Catholic city of Minneapolis in 2020.
03.03 BST
“The last Democrat not to attend this important event was Walter Mondale,” Trump says, “And it did not go very well for him. He lost 49 states and he won one: Minnesota. So I said there’s no way I’m missing it.”
Mondale “was expected to do well, then it didn’t work out,” Trump jokes. “It shows you there is a god.”
Trump then says that Harris is weird and it is weird that Harris isn’t here tonight – saying the word several times, referring to the insult Harris and Tim Walz direct at Trump and his supporters.
03.01 BST
“Always: It’s a rule, you gotta go to the dinner, you gotta do it, otherwise bad things are going to happen to you from up there,” Trump jokes, getting a laugh – he is referring to God.
“But my opponent feels that she does not have to be here which is disrespectful to the event and in particular to our Catholic community,” Trump says. The crowd claps.
02.59 BST
“They’ve gone after me. Mr Mayor, you’re peanuts compared to what they did to me,” Trump says.
02.58 BST
“Mayor Adams, good luck with everything, they went after you,” Trump says to a big laugh.
02.57 BST
Trump is receiving a warm response from the crowd.
“They told me under no circumstances are you allowed to use a teleprompter and I get up here and see there is a beautiful teleprompter,” he says.
Unclear if that is a joke or more of Trump’s obsession with whether Harris is using teleprompters or not.
I particularly loved Sullivan’s deadpan re-telling of Trump’s jokes in the character of a robot explaining human humour: ‘…if Kamala loses you still have the chance to become the first woman president,” Trump says – it is a transphobic joke’ and ‘Trump claims – not clear if joking – that Biden is having second thoughts and wants to come back. There is no evidence of this’.
Do I detect a call-back to a famous anecdote about one of Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoons depicting life in the trenches during World War I? The cartoon in question, headed “So Obvious”, shows an old soldier – probably but not certainly his recurring character “Old Bill” – slumped wearily against a brick wall with an enormous hole in it while his younger companion looks on. The caption says,
The Young and Talkative One: “Who made that ‘ole?”
The Fed-up One: “Mice.”
According to the Bairnsfather’s Wikipedia article, in the next war along, the Nazis, puzzled by the apparent paradox that humour about grumpy British soldiers seemed to actually raise British morale, made careful study of the phenomenon and explained it to their own soldiers, using this very cartoon as an example:
Quoting a Nazi textbook taken from a German prisoner of war that shows the cartoon, the clipping reads: “Obviously, the hole was not made by a mouse. It was made by a shell. There is no humor in this misstatement of facts. The man, Old Bill, was clearly mistaken in thinking a mouse had made it. People who can laugh at such mistakes are obviously not normal; therefore we should pay careful attention to their psychology. Their very decadence may prove to be a weapon of self-defense.”
Call me cynical, but I find it hard to believe that anyone, even an employee of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, ever really believed that it was necessary to explain that the hole was not made by mice. I suspect that claimed “Nazi textbook” was in truth written by some chap in the British Ministry of Information who enjoyed his work. Helen Sullivan continues in that great comedic tradition.
Strange times we live in. A British newspaper, the Daily Mail, has published a damaging allegation about the spouse of the US president*, but so far I haven’t seen a word in any British or American newspaper about a damaging allegation about the UK prime minister. Given the relative strength of the libel laws of the two countries, one would think that “the shape of the PM’s family” would be all over the American press.
I must stress that at this stage both allegations are merely allegations. If the one about Sir Keir Starmer turns out to be true, I am not sure it will make much difference. Gone are the days when Cecil Parkinson had to resign as a minister because he impregnated his secretary. Boris Johnson’s behaviour imitated that of a medieval lord siring a bastard child in every nearby village without eliciting any noticeable political effect other than mild envy. Given that Starmer’s popularity has already suffered one of the steepest falls in recent political history, it might actually improve his polling. And get people calling him by his first name.
The allegation against Mr Emhoff is a slightly different nature, as if substantiated it would almost certainly be a crime. I repeat that it has not yet been substantiated. On the other hand, as the Daily Wire‘s Mary Margaret Olohan pointed out,
The #MeToo allegation against Doug Emhoff has more corroboration than Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation against Brett Kavanaugh, which Kamala Harris herself aggressively defended.
*Edit: Commenter Barracoder reminded me that Kamala Harris is not the president of the United States. I literally, genuinely forgot that Joe Biden still holds the office of president.
OK, that headline from 11:45am has been superseded by Hezbollah’s admission that Nasrallah is indeed dead, but props to the Telegraph‘s headline-writer.
I did not expect to see anything like this on a fairly mainstream site like “Conservative Woman”: “Mystery of Andrew Bridgen’s vanishing votes” (Via Sara Hoyt on Instapundit.) Andrew Bridgen, for those not familiar with him, is the former MP for North West Leicestershire. He has had a chequered career. He was expelled from the Conservative Party after criticising the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He then joined the Reclaim Party but resigned from it a few months later. He then lost his seat in the 2024 election – which in itself was no surprise, but the spectacular scale of his loss, dropping from 63% of the vote to 3.2%, was unusual.
I said I did not expect to see this piece on the CW website. I would not be entirely surprised if I am soon unable to see it anywhere but Twitter/X. After the US election of 2020, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (before it was owned by Elon Musk) had a policy of deleting any discussion whatsoever of the possibility of electoral fraud. Even arguments that fraud had not been significant were censored. Most of the UK media followed suit, as it usually does.
If anyone reading this has power or influence over the censorship policies of British media organisations, I humbly beg you not to repeat that mistake. My argument does not depend on taking any view on how many votes Andrew Bridgen got in the UK election of 2024.
When “Stop the Steal” and similar Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members were deleted overnight after the American election of 2020, what effect do you think it had on the beliefs of members of those groups? Do you think they concluded that since they could no longer discuss their suspicions, those suspicions must be groundless?
Of course it had the opposite effect. A majority of US voters think it is “likely” that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 election. That includes 45% of Democrats. The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and of the hypothesis that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a laboratory (the first of which is no longer contested and the second of which is accepted as a probable hypothesis by the US and UK governments) only reinforced this.
Censorship destroys trust, and the loss of trust is not limited to the subject being censored. Once people know they are being censored in one thing, they inevitably ask, “What else aren’t they telling us?”
And they can work out that if all accusations of a particular crime are censored, it makes it more likely that that crime will be committed in future.
Related posts here, here and here. In fact, that entire category of “Deleted by the Woke Media” is related.
Edit 25th September: The man who replaced Andrew Bridgen as Conservative candidate in North West Leicestershire, Craig Smith, has responded strongly to the Conservative Woman piece:
Mr Bridgen seems to overestimate the weight of any candidate’s personal vote. In elections most people vote for the party with a personal vote of – somewhere around – a couple of thousand votes for the candidate themselves. It’s arguably why I did marginally better than Conservative candidates in demographically similar constituencies elsewhere, because I had something of a personal vote as a truly local candidate. A personal vote is why Mr Bridgen received around 1,500 votes. To provide Mr Bridgen with a similar example to his own in 2015 Rochdale’s MP, Simon Danczuk, then standing for Labour received 20,961 votes. In 2017, expelled from Labour and and standing as an independent he received 883 votes. Using Mr Danczuk as a base Mr Bridgen could argue that he outstripped expectations!
Mr Smith goes on to say that of course he was not happy with the result – he lost to Labour – but he is convinced it was fair. He then makes some quite detailed observations about electoral procedures, both in general and specifically for that constituency. I thought he came across well. His use of Simon Danczuk in Rochdale as a comparator for assessing whether it is credible for an MP expelled from their party to have such a large drop in votes was reasonable.
That is how it should be done. That is how it should have been done in the US. Don’t forbid discussion, contribute to it. I repeat my plea for there to be no censorship of the claim that the election was rigged against Mr Bridgen.
On August 11, the Sunday Times reported that the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, was under fire for a ‘fawning’ letter to Iran’s new president:
Irish president sent his ‘best wishes’ and congratulations to Masuoud Pezeshkian in a communique that has drawn criticism from Fine Gael.
If the story had ended there, I would have been on the Irish President’s side. Diplomacy inevitably involves sending polite greetings to despots. Though looking at a screenshot of the letter, I do think that President Higgins was a little more oleaginous than he needed to be. Perhaps he felt it would protect the staff of Ireland’s new embassy in Tehran from being taken hostage.
The story did not end there. Yesterday, 22 September, TheJournal.ie reported that, “Michael D Higgins has accused Israel of leaking his letter of congratulations to President of Iran”.
Higgins was asked by a member of the press today about the criticism he received for the letter to which he responded: “Yes, why don’t you ask where it came from?”
The President then accused the Israeli embassy in Ireland of circulating the letter.
When asked how he thought the embassy obtained the letter he said he had “no idea”.
Fortunately the rest of the world does have an idea. The whole controversy started when a woman called Karen Ievers saw the letter and and commented unfavourably about it in this tweet on 28th July. And if you are wondering by what dark arts she saw it, the Iranian embassy in Dublin put their nice letter from President Higgins on their website.
I went into my segment with Tucker intent on challenging him if the opportunity presented itself, but the brief appearance focused on my Oxford speech and ended before I’d had the chance to raise my objections to his coverage of the war in Ukraine.
His producer WhatsApped me immediately after to congratulate me on the appearance with the invitation to “Please come back soon!”. ”Here is my moment”, I naively thought to myself and replied with the offer to come back and discuss my disagreements with Tucker on the war in Ukraine.
The response was telling:
”I’m just not sure it would be great TV to have him debate you on the war”.
[…]
The message was clear: we don’t want to have a discussion about this and if you keep pressing the issue you won’t be coming back on the biggest show in America.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. No one is entitled to appear on anyone’s show to talk about a subject they nominate. Tucker and his producers are perfectly entitled to invite the guests they want to discuss the subjects they want. But the incident made it obvious to me that Tucker was not a truth-seeking journalist and that when it came to Russia and the war in Ukraine, at least, he had no intention of being objective. That much is obvious, especially after the events of the last week. But the real question is why?
– Konstantin Kisin
Like Kisin, I once saw Tucker Carlson as one of the good guys, on the same side. I am wiser now, even if we share a few of the same enemies. But sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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