Chabloz succeeds in criminalising ‘Holocaust denial’

Yesterday in Southwark Crown Court, Alison Chabloz was again found guilty of posting “grossly offensive” YouTube videos, in contravention of the Communications Act 2003. This reaffirmed the verdict of District Judge John Zani, sitting last May in Marylebone Magistrates Court, who had found Chabloz guilty on three charges of “sending grossly offensive communications via a public communications network”.

This week Judge Christopher Hehir, sitting alongside magistrate Mena Rego (a Kenyan Asian immigrant and Roman Catholic school governor), reimposed exactly the same sentence as Judge Zani had passed last year: a 20-week suspended prison sentence, plus 180 hours of unpaid “community service”, plus a 12 month ban from social media.

So for Ms Chabloz, the outcome of her “appeal” (actually a full retrial of the facts, rather than an appeal on points of law), was unchanged. She (or rather her donors) will probably face a heavy costs bill for having pursued an unsuccessful retrial – especially after the prosecution instructed a QC for this retrial – but otherwise exactly the same verdict and sentence.

For UK historical revisionists and political activists, however, this week’s Crown Court judgment is far more serious.

That’s because the earlier court judgment could not set a precedent: it applied only to Ms Chabloz’s particular case. Richard Edmonds warned in an article for the Heritage & Destiny website published on January 2nd – ‘Does Alison Chabloz know what she’s doing? Or criminalising “Holocaust”-revisionism by the back door’. Mr Edmonds’ warning has been fully vindicated this week.

He wrote:
“This is not the case with the findings of a Crown Court. It is not impossible that should in February Ms. Chabloz lose her appeal at Southwark Crown Court, then her case, involving as it does elements of the so-called ‘Holocaust’, could be used as a legal precedent to launch criminal prosecutions against Historical revisionists by the back-door, so to speak, in the absence of any formal laws in Britain banning ‘Holocaust’-denial.”

Mr Edmonds (and H&D) were severely criticised for these observations. Ms Chabloz’s right-hand-woman – a Hungarian lady who uses the name ‘Sophie Johnson’ – sent Mr Edmonds an impertinent email calling him a “dotard” who had produced “stupid burblings” and “ugly bile”.

Yet the outcome this week has been precisely as Mr Edmonds warned.

Within hours of the verdict Zionist lobbyist Gideon Falter, a law graduate who founded the Campaign Against Antisemitism which began the case against Ms Chabloz, issued a triumphant statement:
“The decision sets a new precedent in British law. The case effectively delivered a landmark precedent verdict on incitement on social media and on whether the law considers Holocaust denial to be “grossly offensive” and therefore illegal when used as a means by which to hound Jews.”

For more than thirty years, Jewish lobby groups have been frustrated that the UK has stood apart from a general European trend towards criminalising ‘Holocaust’ revisionism, which they like to term ‘Holocaust denial’. In one form or another, most European countries outlaw the expression or publication of views which dare to question the established historical orthodoxy: that six million Jews were killed, mostly in homicidal gas chambers and mostly in concentration camps, during the Second World War, on the orders of Adolf Hitler and other senior figures in Germany’s National Socialist government.

In November 1991 for example – as revealed last month by H&D – a British government document prepared for then Prime Minister John Major in advance of a confidential meeting with leaders of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, stated that Anglo-Jewish leaders were wishing to prevent a visit to London by leading revisionists Prof. Robert Faurisson and Fred Leuchter. The document added:
“they are concerned that the UK may become the focal point for holocaust revisionism because of its being outlawed in other European countries and because the American revisionist organisation, The Institute of Historical Review, is facing financial problems.”

Fred Leuchter was duly arrested and deported from the UK, but there was no legal means of excluding Prof. Faurisson (a dual French-British citizen), and despite continual lobbying there has never been any anti-revisionist law in this country.

In 2008 there was an attempt to ban revisionism via the backdoor method of the European Arrest Warrant system. German authorities issued an EAW leading to the arrest of Australian revisionist Dr Fredrick Toben, who was seized from a plane while in transit at London’s Heathrow airport and locked up in Brixton prison awaiting extradition to Germany, where he would have faced imprisonment for ‘crimes’ that are not illegal in this country.

After the last-minute mobilisation of a legal team by Lady Michèle Renouf (acting on timely information from Dr David Duke) the authorities’ attempt to extradite Dr Toben was blocked. This meant it was impossible for European courts to extradite Bishop Richard Williamson or other historical revisionists living in Britain, such as the French author Vincent Reynouard.

During parliamentary discussion of the European Arrest Warrant system, several well-informed members of the House of Lords had criticised European laws restricting free historical research. Israeli-funded lobbies realised it would be difficult to pass a UK version of such laws through Parliament, and that even making the attempt might cause unwelcome scrutiny of the entire Holocaust story.

Time for Plan B.

In the UK, law can be made either through Parliamentary statute or through case-law precedent. In most cases of Holocaust revisionism, it is difficult to obtain a conviction using the race laws, since they demand evidence either that the words concerned were intended to stir up racial hatred, or that in all the relevant circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up.

Sometimes an element of ‘Holocaust denial’ can be bundled in with a wider set of charges against a ‘racist’ publication, as was the case in 1998 when Nick Griffin and Paul Ballard were convicted at Harrow Crown Court for editing and publishing a magazine called The Rune. But in most cases this avenue would have little chance.

Jewish activists looked instead at the Communications Act, which is the latest version of a law dating back before the Second World War, and originally intended to criminalise “grossly offensive” telephone calls. There is a technical legal question as to whether this law even applies to the internet (and in particular to YouTube), but assuming prosecutors could succeed with that technical argument, all they needed was a form of historical revisionism that could plausibly be portrayed as “grossly offensive”.

Enter Alison Chabloz, a cruise-ship singer with no background in revisionism, or any other form of historical research. (Her political activism had previously been limited to the fringes of Corbynite Labour, and even there she could hardly be described as active or at all significant.)

A couple of Chabloz’s anti-Zionist songs were posted on YouTube in 2016, attracting complaints from the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a charity funded by Jews who believed their community’s leadership was too ‘soft’ on their enemies. CAA pursued a private prosecution, but at this early stage it seemed possible that the case could be won. Brave lawyers agreed to take on Chabloz’s defence, despite the pittance paid by legal aid and the bad publicity they would attract.

During 2017 and 2018 Chabloz repeatedly damaged her own defence, for example by uploading an additional song (while on bail) which was both non-revisionist, or even anti-revisionist, in singing about soap, lampshades and other long-discredited aspects of the Holocaust myth; and more blatantly “grossly offensive” within the meaning of the Communications Act, since the words suggested that one should wish that Jewish children had indeed been turned into soap, lampshades, etc.

As her trial proceeded early in 2018, Chabloz launched an extraordinary tirade against her own sole defence witness Peter Rushton. After she received a light sentence at Marylebone Magistrates, she decided to escalate the case at a higher legal level. The only thing this was likely to achieve was to establish a precedent that (in certain circumstances) criminalises Holocaust denial in the UK.

And so it has turned out, much to the delight of Gidon Falter and his backers. There was even a veteran of the 43 Group on hand in the public gallery to mark the occasion. (This was a Jewish criminal gang who specialised in violent attacks on British nationalist meetings in the late 1940s.)

So where do we now stand.

The good news is that this week’s judgment is not a blanket ban on Holocaust denial. Judge Hehir and his colleague write:
“it is important to bear in mind, as Mr Davies [Chabloz’s barrister Adrian Davies] understandably stresses, that there is no crime of Holocaust denial in this jurisdiction. Material which consists of or includes Holocaust denial can only found liability under section 127 [of the Communications Act] if it is grossly offensive. No type of speech, Holocaust denial included, can be characterised as grossly offensive per se: the question of whether particular speech is grossly offensive is always fact-specific.”

Later in the judgment, it is confirmed that:
“we emphasise that anti-Semitism is not a crime, just as Holocaust denial is not. Nor can the fact that somebody is a Holocaust denier or an anti-Semite prove that anything she writes or sings is grossly offensive. However her anti-Semitism and her attitude to the Holocaust are in our judgment highly relevant to her state of mind so far as her musical compositions are concerned.”

Here we move to the bad news. Where this week’s judgment does break new ground is in the bald statement:
“no tribunal of fact is required to proceed on the basis of absurdity or fiction. The Holocaust – by which we mean the systematic extermination of millions of people, predominantly though not exclusively Jews, by the forces of Nazi Germany and their collaborators, between 1941 and 1945 – happened. World War II is surely the best documented and most extensively studied period of modern history, and the Holocaust is one of the best documented aspects of that conflict, if not the best. A mass of evidence, of various kinds, attests to it. Moreover the Holocaust has been the subject of extensive judicial enquiry, from the Nuremberg Trials onwards, in a number of jurisdictions.”

This week’s judgment quotes the ruling in a civil rather than criminal judgment from 2001 (a libel case between British historian David Irving and his American critic Deborah Lipstadt) to the effect that:
“no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews.”

Judge Hehir and his colleague for the first time enshrine this conclusion in a criminal judgment:
“We therefore take judicial notice of the fact that the Holocaust occurred. We agree with Mr Mulholland QC for the prosecution that the undoubted historical fact of the Holocaust represents part of the context in which these songs must be judged.”

The judgment will be closely analysed by lawyers in the coming weeks, and we should bear in mind that (so far) the precedent is ‘persuasive’ rather than ‘binding’. If the case proceeds further then on certain points of law a ‘binding’ precedent could be set, which would of course be even worse news!

However at first sight it seems that revisionists – even in the UK – have now been placed in one respect in an equivalent position to their German colleagues. Just as the German courts refuse even to consider revisionist arguments, a British criminal court now (for the first time) regards the “historical fact of the Holocaust” as “undoubted” – or as the German courts put it, “manifestly obvious”.

It has always been the case that revisionists (just like racial nationalists) have had to take care that their words would not be seen as likely to “incite racial hatred”.

But now the criminal bar has been substantially lowered. Revisionism no longer needs to incite hatred to be prosecutable, it can merely be “grossly offensive” – and it is accepted that anything deemed grossly offensive to Jews should be deemed by the law as grossly offensive to the general public.

The effect of the Chabloz case has therefore been to shift the goalposts considerably to the benefit of organised Jewry and International Zionism, and much to the detriment of free historical research. The only reason why any aspect of this case this has become a ‘persuasive’ legal precedent, endangering both native Britons and fugitive European revisionists, is that Ms Chabloz’s vanity (or worse) caused her to escalate the case above the level of Magistrates’ Court where it would otherwise have remained. Richard Edmonds (and the anonymous author of an article circulated in 2017 by Agence Bocage) are fully vindicated by this week’s developments.

Alison Chabloz and her chief crony ‘Sophie Johnson’, motivated by spite or perhaps something worse, acted as informants for the ‘antifascist’ organisation Hope not Hate, disrupting the final meeting addressed by the late Prof Robert Faurisson in his Shepperton birthplace last October. That disgusting betrayal already put them beyond the pale.

This week’s disaster is arguably even worse. Alison Chabloz has succeeded in criminalising revisionism (at least in certain circumstances). Those (including at one time ourselves at H&D) who have afforded her financial and other assistance should examine their consciences.