Sam Swerling

IT IS WITHOUT a scintilla of regret that Searchlight reports the death of lifelong fascist and racist Sam Swerling, at the age of 83.

He first came to prominence in the 1970s as a member of the far-right Monday Club. He had earlier been a member of the League of Empire Loyalists, one of the founding organisations of the National Front (NF) in 1967. In the Monday Club, he was in the faction that, in alliance with the NF, tried to take over the club and install racist and anti-Semite George Kennedy Young as chairman in 1973. When Young lost the election Swerling’s chums were expelled and various club branches they dominated were shut down.

This led, later, to the formation of the Traditional Britain Group, which, of course, Swerling teamed up with and of which he was vice-president when he died. He also remained a member of Monday Club and was its president in 1980-82. He was elected a Conservative councillor to Westminster City Council for 1978-82.

In the 1990s, Swerling was linked to Western Goals (WG) which, posing as a group standing for the preservation of ‘Western values’ was, in fact, a private intelligence-gathering organisation snooping on opponents of the state and passing information to the authorities. One of its UK luminaries was Clive Derby-Lewis, later jailed for his part in the murder of South African communist leader Chris Hani.

In November 2000, Swerling organised a WG event in London to mark the anniversary of the death of Spanish dictator General Franco.

For the next 20 years, he immersed himself in the panoply of right-wing organisations that hovered on the borders of the far right of the Tory party and fascist groups: the Bloomsbury Forum, Traditional Britain Group, London Swinton Circle, the Iona London Forum, the Conservative Democratic Alliance and the Bruges Group.

For a quarter of a century Swerling taught law at City University in London and some years ago, bizarrely, contacted Searchlight’s editor Gerry Gable asking to meet. He explained, over coffee at a hotel near Liverpool Street station, that his lectures were being disrupted by anti-racists and he was seeking our help to put an end to it. Our response was predictable …

In 2009, Searchlight revealed that, under the pseudonym Peter Strudwick, he had joined the British National Party (BNP) and was speaking to activists on legal matters. He was unmasked by Searchlight mole Duncan Robertson, who identified him from photographs in the Searchlight files. Apart from his UK affiliations Swerling boasted of his membership of the French Front National and frequently spoke at meetings to excuse Jean Marie Le Pen’s anti-Semitism. Most recently, he was a founder member of the British Democratic Party with Andrew Brons and Adrian Davies.

He will not be missed.

Vincent Reynouard

ONE OF THE key figures in the anti-Semitic campaign against a UK Holocaust Memorial, nazi and Holocaust denier Vincent Reynouard (pictured above),  was arrested last November while hiding out in a coastal resort near St Andrews, in Scotland, and now faces extradition to France. The decision in his extradition case is not expected until shortly after Searchlight goes to press.

Reynouard is wanted in France for posting a series of Holocaust-denial videos while secretly living in Welling, not far from the old BNP headquarters. The videos over which he has been charged include one with the title What to Do About the Jews?, in which Reynouard states: ‘There is a Jewish problem. A problem Hitler was well aware of. But I would like to go further …’

Regarding the Holocaust and war crimes prosecutions, Reynouard adds: ‘Naturally, the Jews exploit the situation to dominate, even to subjugate us.’

Aside from criminal charges, there are serious doubts concerning Reynouard’s immigration status. Even if he wins any appeal against extradition, there is a strong chance that the UK authorities will expel him from the country.

Although he now poses as a scholar, he has a long record of anti-Semitism. He was previously active in French nazi party PNFE, whose leader Claude Cornilleau was one of the Tyndallite BNP’s closest European allies. Cornilleau travelled to London to address BNP rallies, and Tyndall travelled to central France to speak at the PNFE’s headquarters.

In his early twenties, Reynouard was the PNFE’s secretary-general. The party was dissolved in 1999, and in 2002 one of its former activists attempted to assassinate President Jacques Chirac. Reynouard went on to join the Catholic cult SSPX (Society of St Pius X), during the period when its leaders included the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson.

In his present case, Reynouard’s main supporters have included the longest established nazi journals in France (Rivarol) and the UK (Heritage & Destiny). Alongside Germar Rudolf – who is also a fugitive from potential extradition – Reynouard is the most active Holocaust denier in the world.

Reynouard and his network see the UK, Spain and Canada as the basis for renewed propaganda efforts to be broadcast and (illegally) circulated in the many European countries where Holocaust denial and other blatant neo nazism are banned.

The original generation of Holocaust deniers are either dead (eg Faurisson, Zundel, Carto), very old (Irving, Haverbeck, Mahler) or inactive and discredited, even among their former supporters (Weber, Leuchter). Reynouard, Rudolf and Jürgen Graf are among the last of the veteran deniers who are still active and able to work with a new generation of self styled ‘intellectual’ nazis.

Searchlight will continue to monitor and combat their poison, whether or not UK courts are prepared to act.

The loopy channel

Tweets by Bev Turner, the latest GB News star to put her foot in the proverbial, has Martyn Lester pondering how the channel selects its cohort of blundering presenters

Sometimes I pause to wonder whether it is actually built into the contracts of GB News presenters that they must periodically say something so loony that it gets them splashed over the front pages of the newspapers (especially the Jewish Chronicle). Then I relax a little and decide that it really can’t be that organised. Surely, I tell myself, the trait is merely a product of the type of person that the owners appoint in the first place. When you buy yourself a Rees-Mogg or a Farage, you don’t have to order them to come up with jaw-dropping remarks – any more than you would venture into a forest with the intention of instructing bears in preferred toilet habits.

GBN – or, as some prefer to call it, GBH – weekday morning presenter Beverley Turner took her turn in the woodland defecation rota in July when she dropped a turd – sorry, tweet – which strongly implied that not only was Covid-19 a manufactured virus, but that it may well have been engineered to be Sino-Jewish, racially targeted biological warfare.

‘Sars cov 2 virus causes less harm to certain ethnicities – east Asians, and Ashkenazi Jews (Fauci anyone?) than to European, S Asian & African … Just let that sink in,’ Turner tweeted (we can’t bring ourselves to say X’ed, whatever Elon Musk may think). ‘This is looking increasingly like a bio weapon to destroy the west. Why is this not on the front pages of every paper?’

Her question may have been rhetorical, but in case it wasn’t, it is ‘Because it’s mostly bollocks’. I say ‘mostly’ because not everything in the tweet is wrong. It was recognised early on in the pandemic that several racial minorities in the UK were dying at a markedly faster rate than the core white population.

A tweet too far

Without going into too much detail, the latest Office for National Statistics update on deaths by ethnicity (analysed via ‘age standardised mortality rates’) across the first five phases of the pandemic show especially high figures for people identifying as ethnically Bangladeshi or Pakistani, high for Black African and Black Caribbean, and above average for those of Indian heritage. Figures for those identifying as Chinese are relatively low, but pretty much indistinguishable from those for White British and White Other. Had the virus been designed to spare ethnic Chinese, it was engineered pretty badly.

Jewish is not an ethnic category under the ONS, but it does show up in its mortality breakdown by religion, where Jewish figures were a trifle higher than those for Christians in the first phase of the pandemic and thereafter broadly similar (Muslims had by far the highest rate). Again, this would indicate poor engineering if you were looking to design a virus to which Ashkenazi Jews were anything like immune.

Not unnaturally Turner’s comments provoked a fair amount of outrage, especially among Chinese and Jewish families who had lost loved ones during the pandemic. After a fairly heavy backlash, including from MPs and anti-Semitism monitors, the tweet was quietly deleted.

When a fool rushes in

We suspect that Turner was inspired to publish this drivel by nutty Democratic primary prospective candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has been pushing much the same line in the USA, naming Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese as the explicit beneficiaries of the engineering. Whether the victim groups are ‘Black and Latino boys’ or it is ‘targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people’ seems to vary according to the nature of his (often private) audiences. Kennedy was caught on a hot mic using the latter phrase at almost exactly the same time as Turner made her ill-advised tweet in mid-July, although the topic has been simmering with him since as far back as 2020.

Kennedy, who is the son of the former US Attorney General and the nephew of President John F Kennedy, has been excoriated by several horrified members of that distinguished family – including his siblings – although thus far no one has pointed out that Jack, Bobby and Teddy’s father was a notorious Jew hater and Hitler heiler. Joe Kennedy was US Ambassador to the UK during the Blitz, which must have been uncomfortable for the fervent Führer fanboy.

You would think that the reputational consequences of shoot-from-the-lip tweet-slinging might have taught Turner to stop and count to ten before kneejerk tweeting over the next few months. If so, you would be mistaken.

When, in mid-September, high-profile comedian and on-off conspiracy theorist Russell Brand rushed out a video claiming to ‘refute’ a forthcoming mainstream media exposé about him, Turner wasted no time at all in leaping into the fray and declaring him a ‘hero’. With Brand having failed to offer even a hint regarding what he was being accused of (merely referring to ‘serious allegations’) or which media outlets were involved, a wise person might have felt that they should keep their powder dry until at least some of this became clearer.

They say that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Which seems true enough, but they might add that ‘on arrival, even fleet-footed fools will find that a GB News presenter has beaten them to it’. With nothing to go on other than Brand’s claims of persecution, Turner tweeted back: ‘You are being attacked @rustyrockets.’ She continued: ‘Establishment media don’t know what to do with the fact that you have 6 million subscribers & generate autonomous, knowing and original content. You are welcome on my @GBNEWS show anytime. We are mainstream media. But we are not Establishment media. There’s a difference. Keep going. This proves you are winning. You’re a hero.’

Had she waited until the next day Turner would have discovered that the case against Brand was not some scandal sheet tittle-tattle about whether the hirsute comedian had once been seen smoking a joint, but a combined Times, Sunday Times and Dispatches (Channel 4) investigation into accusations of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse offences against four alleged victims.

Searchlight is, to risk stating the obvious, in no position to adjudicate the truth or falsehood of any of the allegations against Brand, who suggests that there is ‘another agenda at play’. We feel on safer ground, though, in noting that, by throwing herself blindly into the fray, Turner more or less wrote her ‘hero’ a blank cheque for his (at that stage unspecified) behaviours.

More tweeting nonsense

Turner is of course not alone among GBN presenters in blithely courting controversy through casual tweets. In the previous Searchlight we looked at an uncritical repost by presenter Neil Oliver of an ‘artwork’ that appeared (to put it mildly) to link Covid vaccines with Nazi medical experiments.

As if to double down on this distasteful appropriation of Holocaust imagery, Oliver has more recently retweeted a post in which Auschwitz is openly offered as a parallel to, of all things ‘the 15 minute-city’. This is a planning concept that proposes that, where possible, urban areas should be developed in such a way as to place schools, GP practices, shops and other facilities within a 15-minute walk or 5-minute bicycle ride of residential property in the catchment.

You might think that such ideas would find favour with (small ‘c’) conservatives prone to sighing, ‘It was all so much better when I were a lad’ – namely, that they would approve of a tendency back to having local shopping streets instead of out-of-town malls, a GP around the corner instead of a health centre a taxi ride away and neighbourhood schools instead of car-run-distant mega-academies.

There are, as with anything, pros and cons, and plenty of room for discussion on how best to achieve those localisation aims. But not, it seems, to the dedicated conspiracy theorist. The 15-minute city is, they say, no more than a global plot (or ‘international socialist concept’ according to Don Valley MP Nick Fletcher) to lock the population into open-air prisons with masses of surveillance cameras equipped with number-plate recognition, where you will be fined for so much as waving a shammy leather at your car. (As we saw in the recent Uxbridge by-election, ‘They’re coming for your cars’ seems to be the UK equivalent of the US right wing’s perennial cry of ‘They’re coming for your guns’.) Back in February, GB News hosted a five-minute live rant segment on the issue, by Mark Dolan, which described the 15-minute city as ‘Dystopian’ with ‘a surveillance system that would make Pyongyang envious’. The only difference between your local councillors and Kim Jong Un is, it would seem, their choice of hairdresser.

Oliver’s latest contribution has been to retweet, uncommented, a post stating: ‘UN – 15 minute cities were planned for from a 1970’s UN action plan. Can you see it yet?’ All there is to ‘see’ in the tweet is a photo of the entrance to Auschwitz. So there you have it: in place of ‘local shops and schools’ read ‘Hitler’s death camps’. Why didn’t we all see it earlier?

Early in September, Oliver parted company with the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which had made him a Fellow in 2020. The prestigious scientific body had become increasingly worried that ‘His current views on various matters, widely aired on television, put him at odds with scientific and broader academic learning within the Society. Following discussions, he offered to resign his association with the RSE with immediate effect’, according to an RSE spokesperson. His views on Covid-related issues (such as vaccines) are thought to have featured strongly in these concerns.

Coincidentally (or not), like Turner, Oliver spoke out in support of the under-fire Russell Brand, saying: ‘The way [he] is being treated by the relic media is plain wrong. The fracture between reasonable people and this travesty of a media is being made permanent.’

‘Silver-tongued’ newby

One of the newest jades to be inducted into the GBN presenters’ stable is Conservative Party Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson. He fairly quickly got himself into trouble over his new job when he broke the rules by filming himself on a parliamentary rooftop to promote his show. He was told off by Parliament’s Serjeant at Arms, but it was a relatively minor matter compared with the sort of thing we might have been expecting from the Ashfield MP.

One of the 2019 House of Commons intake, ‘30p Lee’ found himself in hot water even before polling day, when he was one of three candidates investigated for alleged anti-Semitism. Anderson was an active member of a Facebook group that promoted conspiracy theories about Jewish financier George Soros and featured Tommy Robinson supporters among its members. He quickly quit the group and ‘voluntarily’ received training from the Antisemitism Policy Trust.

More recently, in August, Anderson made the news by declaring of asylum-seekers: ‘If they don’t like barges then they should fuck off back to France.’ What a silver-tongued, sophisticated fellow he is.

As Searchlight was going to press, Ofcom found that GB News breached its impartiality requirements in an interview with the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, conducted by two Conservative MPs, Esther McVey and husband Philip Davies. Hardly a surprise; and hardly a surprise if it’s the first of many such adjudications.

Bad company Michèle Renouf (second left) hosts a gathering at her home in 2022, with guests Bishop Williamson (second right) and Jürgen and Olga Graf

He kept a relatively low profile during the pandemic, but is now back on the extremist circuit, peddling anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial, as Richard Pembroke explains

Bishop Richard Williamson, the notorious traditional Catholic anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, has a tendency to disappear from public view for a few years and then re-emerge, unable to resist satisfying his ego-driven personality and bask in the adulation of his followers.

This has happened again recently, in the wake of the global pandemic. As the world has slowly emerged from Covid-19, so too has Bishop Williamson, who throughout the pandemic was restricted to his online blog and several online interviews.

Williamson, who has been twice excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, was a devotee of the far-right French catholic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The two were excommunicated together in 1988 when Lefebvre consecrated Williamson as a bishop in defiance of the Pope.

Lefebvre founded the Society of St Pius X, which for many years has been the focus for Catholics of a far-right wing, traditionalist bent. Williamson’s virulent anti Semitism proved too much even for them, however, and he was expelled in 2012.

Since then, he has emerged as the leading representative of this particularly backward-looking wing of Catholicism, but one that harbours a nasty streak of traditional anti Semitism as well.

The Earlsfield controversy

Since his forced and highly publicised return from Argentina in 2009, Williamson had been conducting the traditional Latin Mass in a fairly low-key manner for worshippers at the Earlsfield Library in London without courting any significant controversy.

This was until 2022, when it transpired that he was not only performing his sacred duties for a small congregation – that now included some members of Patriotic Alternative – but also delivering sermons with strong anti-Semitic themes embracing Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories blaming the Jews for the Covid pandemic.

Williamson has been particularly astute in the past and has not referenced the Jewish community directly by name. At a London Forum event, held at a prestigious London hotel in 2015, he used the phrase ‘you know who’, while simultaneously making a caricature anti-Semitic gesture with a hooked finger close to his nose.

Fast forward to 2022, when to an Earlsfield congregation – again including several Patriotic Alternative members – Williamson delivered a sermon that was little more than a conspiracy-laden rant, suggesting that Jews were behind Covid in an attempt to reduce the global population and thence enslave the world.

He declared: ‘They want to be slave owners, and it’s much easier to enslave a reduced population, so they want to bring the world population down from seven billion to 500 million … A very large number of people have to be gotten out the way, and they are starting with Covid.’

Following a report in the Jewish Chronicle and having been made aware of Bishop Williamson’s anti-Semitic diatribe, the social enterprise owners of Earlsfield Library expressed serious concerns and terminated his future bookings with immediate effect. To date, the police appear not to have taken any action against Williamson in relation to this event and, as a result, he has continued to spread his lies through his YouTube channel and social media accounts.

The Iranian TV interview

Always the master at avoiding prosecution for his anti-Semitic views in the UK, Williamson accepted an offer to be interviewed by Iranian TV early in January 2023. In this context it is important to bear in mind that Iran has been at the forefront of hosting and providing a platform for Holocaust deniers over many years, including Williamson’s friend and supporter Michèle Renouf.

Of all his recent rants and diatribes, this one stood out as being his most comprehensive and hateful. The bishop appears to have emerged from the pandemic with an increased sense of his own self-importance, emboldened by the support garnered from groups such as Patriotic Alternative and others here in the UK, alongside hostile foreign powers such as Russia and Iran.

Of the many untruths contained in this conspiracy-heavy interview the following primary messages emerged:

• Jews control the media and universities, manipulating people’s minds
• The Holocaust is a ‘myth’, an ‘emotional scenario’ promoted by the Jewish community
• The Jews were behind the JFK assassination, 9/11, and the war in Ukraine.

At one point during the interview Williamson speaks in a particularly mocking tone, with the following words voiced as a parody Holocaust survivor: ‘I was there and I saw it. When the Hungarian [Jews] were being burned, it was green smoke, and when the Czechs were being burned, it was red smoke.’

The Russian connection

Which brings us to his highly vocal support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, following the latter’s invasion of Ukraine.

In a sermon delivered in Poland in 2022, Williamson said: ‘Among the heads of state, there is only one who faces the forces of evil. Don’t rely on Boris Johnson in England, don’t rely on Macron in France, don’t rely on Draghi in Italy. Vladimir Putin, who may not be an angel or a saint, is nevertheless a man of great intelligence and courage. And at the head of Russia he has the means to confront the one world government.’

Russia’s Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov shared this footage with much hyperbole in a Telegram post on Thursday, July 21, 2022.

Kadyrov posted the following: ‘The world is opening its eyes to the real picture of what is happening. And this is one more proof that the NWO [New World Order] of the Russian Federation is a moral struggle against the global evil. After all, representatives of different faiths around the world are talking about it … The fighters from the Chechen Republic are successfully defeating this evil, and we are proud that their feat will forever remain in history.’

The Kensington tea party

Recently republished online is a video from March 2020 of Bishop Williamson, in the company of Swiss revisionist Jürgen Graf and his Russian wife Olga, enjoying tea at the Kensington home of Michèle Renouf, one day after Williamson’s 80th birthday.

In the video Graf summarises the revisionist case, speaks of disinformation about Hitler, observes that in Russia a revisionist was acquitted and awarded financial compensation for supposedly wrongful prosecution and sings the praises of Vladimir Putin.

The conversation is interrupted by a telephone call from Renouf’s Berlin neo-nazi attorney Wolfram Nahrath informing her that the German authorities had summonsed her for trial in May 2020 for a speech given in Dresden in 2018.

Throughout all this, Williamson remains uncharacteristically quiet, fidgety and unsettled, somewhat in contrast to the figure that appears elsewhere online.

Link to video of March 2020  : https://www.bitchute.com/video/IfpNmN7omkYw

Sandro Petrini, antifascist

The town council of Lucca, one of Tuscany’s most treasured artistic places and favoured destination for tourists from all over the world, has rejected a motion in favour of naming a street after a leading figure of antifascism.

Traditionally a stronghold of the left, the council came under the control of the far-right at the 2022 election which brought Giorgia Meloni to form a government rooted in fascism. This result was replicated in a number of simultaneously held elections for the renewal of regional and local councils.

The motion in favour of naming a street after an antifascist was presented by a councillor of the left. It was rejected with 17 votes against and 12 in favour.

According to some reports the outcome was greeted in the chamber by a councillor with a shout of “A noi!” (To Us!) the fascist military command usually accompanied by the Nazi-fascist salute.

Sandro Pertini with his partner,  former nazi resistance fighter, Carla Voltolina

The leading antifascist who was to be honoured with a street named after him is Sandro Pertini, former president of Italy from 1978 to 1985 and the first socialist to be elected to the highest office of state after WWII.

Pertini was first sentenced to internment under Mussolini’s dictatorship in 1926 before escaping to France to become a leading member of the antifascist movement in exile. Arrested and interned again from 1935 to 1943, he subsequently managed to save Antonio Gramsci’s diaries and joined the Italian resistance movement against Nazi German occupiers and Mussolini’s puppet Salò Republic set up in 1943 by Hitler. Arrested by the Germans, he was sentenced to death but freed by a partisan raid.

It was a councillor belonging to Forza Italia, the party founded by Silvio Berlusconi, who communicated the decision saying that the administration was focusing on “a road map with different priorities”. But the prime movers for the rejection were widely thought to have been two councillors close to CasaPound, including Fabio Barsanti, a former leader of that same organisation that describes its members as “third millennium fascists”.

At last year’s mayoral election in Lucca Barsanti stood as a candidate coming third with 9.5% of the vote and was eliminated. But in the second round his support for the candidate of the right and far-right, proved instrumental in defeating the favourite for the left.

Hailing the result as an example for the rest of the nation, Barsanti invited Meloni to adopt the same strategy of uniting the right, the far-right and CasaPound fascists like himself to bond together. He said that Lucca could become “the laboratory” of the country’s future.

Now the laboratory is at work. A street named after an antifascist? “No, we have a road map with different priorities”.