Forum or Against’em?

By Max Musson:

It was with a certain amount of surprise and intrigue that I heard the words “Hello, I’m Russell Jenkins, from the Mail on Sunday …” I was on the telephone at the time, speaking to one of my closest friends, Mike Woodbridge, and during the course of our conversation Mike had noticed someone coming down his garden path and had opened his front door to find out what they wanted. It was then that I overheard the reporter introduce himself and Mike rang off in order to deal with the situation, promising to call me back later, to let me know what had happened.

When we spoke again, Mike told me that the reporter had been enquiring about a recent meeting of the London Forum that both Mike and I had attended, and Mike told me that an article in the form of an exposé was likely to feature in the next issue of the Mail on Sunday.

Mike informed me that the reporter who had visited him, Russell Jenkins, was a local man and that he was simply collecting information for a regular Mail on Sunday journalist by the name of Nick Craven. Russell Jenkins had apparently conducted himself in a very polite and gentlemanly way according to Mike and had appreciated the fact that Mike had received him hospitably. Russell Jenkins said he felt rather embarrassed as a result of Mike’s good natured reception and apologised in advance, forewarning Mike that Nick Craven’s article was never-the-less almost certain to be hostile in nature.

I was not too surprised therefore as I opened a copy of last weekend’s Mail on Sunday, at the tone of the article that had been published, in which the London Forum meeting – a very civilised event at which the international line-up of speakers expressed themselves in very restrained and measured terms, was portrayed as a “Nazi invasion of London” and a “secret race hate rally”.

The article was as Mike was forewarned, primarily the work of Nick Craven, but a subordinate named Paul Cahalan was also involved and also promising ‘cub-reporter’, Simon Murphy, who has won a number of ‘newcomer to journalism’ awards but who until recently had struggled to command payment by way fees for any of his writing.

Until about eight years ago, Nick Craven had been employed by the Daily Mail, but he decided to develop his career as a freelance journalist, setting up Craven Hubbard Media Ltd and moving with his wife, Frances, and their three children to Norfolk. It would seem that despite his apparent ‘professional’ antipathy towards people who dislike the growth of multiculturalism and multiracialism in Britain, Nick Craven prefers to raise his children in one of the least multiculturally ‘enriched’ parts of these British Isles.

Assisting the trio named above was the éminence grise of gutter journalism, Gerry Gable, and just as with David Irving’s flat in 1963, Gable’s ‘fingerprints’ were all over this article, dragging the standard of journalism down to a level that must have been an embarrassment to a ‘high-powered’ freelancer like Nick Craven and the multi-award winning, Simon Murphy.

Referring to the London Forum, the Mail reporters set the tone for the remainder of their article early on, stating: “Nazi sympathisers, Holocaust deniers and their supporters from across the world have held a sickening secret rally in Britain at which speakers unleashed anti-Semitic rants, referring to Jews as ‘the enemy’ and ‘children of darkness’.”

Laughably, the trio referred to themselves as ‘a Mail on Sunday undercover team’, and instead of using Simon Murphy’s Politics degree in order to deliver a withering point-by-point dissection and refutation of the arguments and assertions of the speakers at the London Forum meeting, they confined their reporting to ad hominem attacks upon both speakers and attendees.

Apparently, the three reporters found it “shocking” that political dissidents in the UK should be allowed to hold private meetings and enjoy freedom of speech. They described a perfectly orderly and civilised meeting as a “vile event”.

They described criticism of Zionism (Jewish nationalism) by White nationalists as “sick anti-Semitic rants” and evidence of “incitement to racial hatred”, and yet found criticism of White nationalism by Jewish spokespeople, perfectly acceptable.

Furthermore, there was within the article the almost obligatory identification of several of the individuals who attended the meeting, together with the inference that these are ‘sinister’, quaisi-criminal individuals, when in reality they are simply individuals who in-so-far-as they have criminal convictions, have received these simply through their efforts to exercise their right to freedom of speech.

The Mail on Sunday article stated, “As the 113-strong audience filed out from the hotel, their true extremist credentials became clearer …” and the article then listed several people, together with details of their past political activism and couched in terms intended to suggest that despite the pensioner status of many of them, they are dangerous political extremists. All this while at the same time the Mail on Sunday reporters ignored the fact that according to Wikipedia, their informant Gerry Gable; had been a member of the Communist Party, standing as a Communist candidate in an election in 1962; has a conviction for a politically motivated burglary; and was associated during the 1960s with the violently extremist Zionist ’62 Group’.

Lastly, there was the repeated assertion that conveniently undisclosed members of the audience, “laughed at [the] Charlie Hebdo massacre”, but it did not occur to the reporters that their exposé, pregnant with inferences that meetings such as those hosted by the London Forum should not be allowed, and that the organisers should be pursued by the police, was an absolute travesty of the sentiments of freedom of expression that symbolised the Charlie Hebdo affair. So much for ‘Je suis Charlie’ — more like ‘Je suis Lavrenti Beria’!

By Max Musson © 2015

http://www.westernspring.co.uk/forum-or-againstem/