Police Investigate Former Labour MP for Calling Hamas “Islamists”
The police investigated House of Lords member and former Labour MP Ian Austin under hate speech laws for calling Hamas “Islamists”, it has emerged. Austin writes about what happened in the Telegraph.
It isn’t just journalists like Allison Pearson who have been investigated by the police for comments on social media.
I also fell foul of the thought police for tweeting about the Middle East, just as Pearson suspects she did as she was told it dates back to a year ago, when she was tweeting about the Hamas atrocities on October 7th.
Back in February I ridiculed UNRWA’s claim that it had not known about the Hamas operations centre underneath their offices in Gaza, saying: “Everyone, better safe than sorry: before you go to bed, nip down and check you haven’t inadvertently got a death cult of Islamist murderers and rapists running their operations downstairs. It’s easily done.”
Political opponents and extremists deliberately misinterpreted my joke, claimed my use of the word Islamists was Islamophobic or racist and caused a torrent of abuse and threats.
I suppose that was to be expected, but I was shocked and appalled when the police became involved.
Late one evening a few days later I received a call from West Midlands police asking about my whereabouts and safety. I assumed this was because of the threats.
How naïve that was. It was actually because they had received complaints about my tweet, had carried out an investigation but decided not to take action. They would, I was told by a senior police officer, have recorded it as a “non-crime hate incident” had the rules not been changed to raise the threshold.
They said it was because I had used the word “Islamist” and asked whether I had seen what people had said on LinkedIn.
I explained that Islamist is used 17 times on the Government’s list of proscribed organisations. It was coined to distinguish between decent law-abiding Muslims and extremists and is used by governments, academics, expert think-tanks, and the world’s leading media organisations.
It’s no coincidence that Pearson has “in all likelihood been targeted for speaking up for Israel, just as I was”, Austin adds. “Our laws and police force have been weaponised in the campaign to silence critics of Islamism. What begins with a few tweets won’t end there.”
Worth reading in full.
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Stassi? Thought police?
More like the Gestapo. Threaten people and they “disappear” from social media. More like intimidation. They may well physically disappear next. WTF.
The intensification of censorship is part the Establishment’s reality-derangement syndrome. It isn’t accidental. It serves several purposes. Firstly, it’s designed to intimidate dissenters and heretics into silence. Second, censorship serves to defend the Establishment itself from reality by cutting the feedback from reality. Third, by taking politics out of the sphere of public discussion and debate, censorship is designed to strengthen the hand of the non-elected – civil servants, police officers, international bureaucracies, etc. Censorship has at its heart a very dangerous totalitarian impulse, and for this reason has to be resisted, if we are to save our country and our people.
People should be free to hate….Love & Hate are emotions that you cannot eliminate. Once you give ground to the ‘left’ at imposing limits on free speech, it’s a slippery slope from there and you end up where we’re heading.
Totally agree about censorship.
What confuses me is the word “Establishment”, also used frequently by Farage when talking about the dark forces after him.
I looked it up. Cambridge dictionary says: the important and powerful people who control a country..especially those who support the existing situation.
And this is what puzzles me – NO NAMES. Ever. Even by Free Speech warriors. Just generalisations easily misinterpreted. Could someone throw some light please.
The term is not just about individuals – they tend to be temporary place holders. Often used to denote organisations, such as professional institutions, which establish things like standards, methods of working etc. Then again there is the legal side of the coin.
What confuses me is the word “Establishment”
I use “the Establishment” as a shorthand term for the ruling group. In modern Britain this is drawn from the state bourgeoisie* which is allied to the transnational corporate aristocracy (the TCA). The interesting thing about the modern Establishment is that it draws its ideology of social control (woke marxo-fascism) from the state bourgeoisie, but serves the interests of the TCA.
*The state bourgeoisie is the class that’s risen since the Second World War on the back of the vast increase in state interference in, and control of, society. It is composed of those people dependent on the government for jobs, income and status. It has displaced the entreprenuerial middle class as the dominant class.
You could start with more or less everyone in senior positions in government and the civil service, government agencies, the military, the judiciary, regulators, QUANGOS, their cousins in global organisations such as the UN, EU, WEF, WHO
Essentially the people who are “the establishment” are faceless ciphers whose actual identities are irrelevant, what matters is the unelected and obfuscated power that they exercise without those who are affected by this power being able to easily identify its source or its rectitude and thus to be able to deflect or defeat it.
They are not Wealth Creators, usually remunerated by the public purse, either directly or indirectly. And I do wonder how many are very knowledgeable in the Arts and Humanities, and so are very good judges of Everything, including what they don’t know, like STEM subjects.
Rather than ridiculing UNRWA’s claim it had no knowledge of Hamas’ operations underground – which considering apparently very lengthy tunnels throughout Gaza is quite credible – perhaps it would have been educating to explain why UNRWA is in Gaza at all? Why is UNRWA necessary when Gaza is part of a supposedly highly civilized country such as Israel? Why is Israel not supplying sufficient commodities to its own countrymen? Why is Israel not looking after its own people in such a manner that they would not dream of attacking Israelis? Why are Israeli football hooligans allowed to sing songs saying “F*** the Arabs” and then attack innocent civilians in Amsterdam (https://www.doubledown.news/watch/2024/november/14/exposed-what-really-happened-in-amsterdam)? Where does all the hatred come from – it was obviously cultivated long before 7th October 2023 – and, most importantly, how can the hatred be cured?
These are interesting questions that Daily Sceptic could be addressing instead of a repetitively pushing these needle-pricks of Israeli propaganda.
So much drivel. I don’t know where to start; so I won’t.
Whether it’s drivel or not, it’s entirely irrelevant to this article about what happened to this former Labour MP, it’s totally missing the point.
That free speech is a subject for any police force shows how degenerate the world has become. It is not just a UK problem: a German re-tweeted an insulting message about a Green politician and is facing one year imprisonment. I find it tiring that Daily Sceptic uses every opportunity, every truly minor report, to praise Israel, a country currently on a massive killing spree. If it is not some Jew (who presumably looks like anybody else) complaining that a nurse had a pin supporting Palestine and finds the time to report it to some newspaper, it is an article like this where one sentence would have sufficed: the police are investigating Ian Austin as well as Allison Pearson. But no, we end up with an article claiming UNRWA supported terrorists and that Allison was targeted for speaking up for Israel. UNRWA was the last source of any nourishment for the Palestinians in Gaza. A UN-backed panel last week issued an alert, warning of “an imminent and substantial likelihood of famine occurring, due to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Gaza Strip.” In response to the alert, Oxfam’s Middle East Director, Sally Abi Khalil, said in a statement: “It is… Read more »
It is a crime against humanity for a country to unleash famine upon a population.
It’s a well established practice since it became a major English war strategy in Winter 1914. By that time, it was a breach of the so-called international law Lord Hermer KC can sing such beautiful arias of. But that doesn’t matter when it affects the right kind of victims. The victims tend to disagree but why listen to their impotent whining?
You have! Feel free to continue.
Well I’m glad the FSU has threatened legal action against Yvette Cooper if she doesn’t stop with this NCHI Orwellian nonsense. Britain is becoming the laughing stock of the world as these various examples and videos circulate online and go viral. People are now allowed to claim they’re offended by anything and everything and the sackless wonders will be motivated by spite to take things further and make reports to the police in an act of revenge. It’s just pathetic, isn’t it? ”Doctors, vicars and social workers have been among the professionals investigated by police over non-crime hate incidents, The Times has disclosed. Police forces across Britain, responding to freedom of information requests, revealed that hate incidents were being logged against people in authority doing their jobs. In 2014, the College of Policing came up with the concept of the NCHI in its Hate Crime Operational Guidance (HCOG). As defined in this document, an NCHI is any incident perceived by the victim or any bystanders to be motivated by hostility or prejudice to the victim based on a ‘protected’ characteristic (race or perceived race, religion or perceived religion, and so on). “Perceived” is the operative word here, since as the guidance goes on… Read more »
Unsurprisingly the same is happening in Nazified Germany, and should you post anything critical of the fascist government you can expect a knock on the door, or just kicked in, really. Germany needs its own FSU, I think; ”After a 64-year-old pensioner retweeted a meme of Green Economy Minister Robert Habeck, in which Habeck was described as an “idiot,” Bavarian police raided the man’s house and arrested him. The crime has even been recorded as a “politically motivated right-wing crime.” The man is accused of distributing a photo of Habeck via retweet, where Habeck is described as an “idiot.” The Bamberg prosecutor’s office indicates that this constitutes a federal criminal offense of “hatred.” “At a time that cannot currently be specified in more detail in the days or weeks before June 20, 2024, the accused published an image file using the account that shows a portrait of Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck with the title ‘Schwachkopf PROFESSIONAL’, based on the advertising campaign of the Schwarzkopf company, in order to generally defame Robert Habeck and to make it more difficult for him to work as a member of the federal government,” read the prosecutor’s statement. Schwachkopf generally means “idiot,” in… Read more »
It would appear that the STASI are alive and well. The evidence shows that they didn’t disband after reunification, just changed their name.
The concept of the non-crime hate incident is one of the most disgusting, dystopian concepts to emerge in recent times.
To me anyone who thinks NCHs are a good idea is either stupid, because they haven’t fully understood what it entails, or evil because they want to police your thoughts.
In both cases they are dangerous people and should be treated as such.
What I find alarming is the extent to which islamist scum and their useful idiots are able to call the shots in our not Islamic (yet) country.
Quite sickening.
When you think of the contribution the Jewish community has made over the centuries, compared to the Muslim community whose main excellence seems to be organised child molesting an d rape.
Well what sort of man does this? And given his address is a hotel I’ll take a punt he came over on a small boat. He allegedly got kicked in the groin so walked into a doctor’s surgery and commenced tossing off to alleviate the pain, didn’t even stop when told to by staff! 😮 I’d have chucked a jug of cold water over him, or let loose with a fire extinguisher. Dirty b’stard; ”A man in his 40s has appeared in court accused of masturbating in the public waiting room of a doctor’s surgery in the midlands. Abdulasiis Ismail, Room 201, Great Western Hotel, Frenchvill Lane, Galway appeared at a sitting of Athlone District Court following an incident at Newtown Medical Centre, Newtown Terrace, Athlone, Co Westmeath on August 7 this year. Mark Cooney, defending, said Ismail would be offering the defence that he had been the victim of a serious assault shortly before arriving at the medical centre. “He accepts he was intoxicated, but he had been assaulted previously,” he said, adding how Ismail had sustained a head injury and kick to his groin. “He was in extreme pain and was waiting to see the doctor and because… Read more »
Mr Austin, for the record, I completely agree with your description: Hamas is a death cult of Islamist murderers and rapists.
I think it would be entirely factual to say that Hamas is an Islamic organisation.
Absolutely. Hamas would certainly agree that everything they stand for is rooted in and in total compliance with Islamic though.
And I would certainty not dispute that. Hamas is the epitome of Islam; it is quintessentially Islamic; nothing expresses Islam in a more concentrated, straight-to-the-point, down-to-the-basics way than Hamas.
In fact, if someone asked me to explain what Islam is about, I would suggest that they study the ideas of Hamas, their methodology and policies.
Yes it seems an odd thing to complain about, let alone launch a police investigation over. Even odder is the government’s distinction between ‘islamist’ and ‘Islamic’.
They tried first shutting people down by abusing the libel laws awarding ridiculous sums for what at best might have been technically libellous eg. Katie Hopkins, Lawrence Fox, Tommy Robinson
I don’t want to despise the police, but they make it difficult to have even a scintilla of faith in them. What is it they think they’re doing?
I don’t think thought is involved in their actions.
I feel that there is a failure of logic here. Whether or not you think Hamas is an Islamist organistion has nothing to do with whether or not ‘Islamist’ was a smear term. According to their nostrums Islamism is a brutal but natural reaction to the excesses of Anglo-American colonialism and therefore the term cannot be presented as a smear. Obviously its real roots are far more nefarious and interesting but I don’t understand the thinking here at all.
The West Midlands Police are in the enviable position of being overstaffed, 100% clear up rate on burglary, stopped all rape and domestic violence and allowed people to walk the streets safely. Plenty of time and resources for wokery.
Folks if your home is burgled, if you are physically attacked, if you witness shoplifting, vandalism etc then when you call the Police say that the offender as well as committing the crime said something that you considered hateful and hurty, for example “see you fatty, chubster” as they take off in your car, Or say they called you a Whitey Christian oh forget that last one that is not classified as hate as neither are protected. Just say they mis pro nouned you. By uttering the magic incantation of hurty word and feelings the Police force will no doubt have caught the attacker within a few days.
Perhaps Viz could have a new comic strip, called something like Super Plod, they,it,them,protector of feelings.
Apparently, the Police have nothing better to do…
Islam is a religion not a race so using ‘islamist’ can’t be rascist. A phobia is something a person suffers from such as agraphobia etc. You can show a phobia but not project it. Ian Austin would be the one to suffer from islamophobia – a perfectly reasonable response to the stabby terrorists. Mr Austin should publicly point out the dumb plod’s ignorance.
Anyone surprised that the woman’s body found in the boot of the car has a foreign name? No – thought not.