Footballer and ‘rapper’ find out whose lives really matter

Tom Pope (above left) scoring for Port Vale against Manchester City in January 2020

Footballer Tom Pope has been banned for six matches by the Football Association – not for any offence committed on the field, nor for misuse of drugs, nor for anything remotely criminal.

His offence was to post something deemed ‘anti-semitic’ on Twitter.

Readers should understand that Tom Pope is not one of the multi-millionaire class of Premier League footballers. He has made his career at humbler levels of the English game, with 274 appearances for his present club Port Vale, in League Two – the old Fourth Division – scoring 90 goals and three times voted Port Vale’s Player of the Year.

Tom Pope is a long way from being a ‘famous’ footballer, but he has a cult following within a tiny subculture of the game – mainly among Port Vale fans, who are not numerous.

In January this year Tom Pope scored in one of Port Vale’s few ‘glamorous’ matches, an FA Cup tie against England’s wealthiest club Manchester City, who predictably won 4-1.

A jocular Twitter exchange after the match led one fan to ask him to “predict the World War III result”, to which Pope replied: “We invade Iran then Cuba then North Korea then the Rothchilds (sic) are crowned champions of every bank on the planet.”

Tom Pope’s offending ‘tweet’ for which he has now been fined and banned by the English Football Association.

The circumstances (and the typing error) showed that this was semi-jocular banter rather than premeditated ‘anti-semitism’, and indeed nothing about Jews or Judaism was mentioned.

However the thought police were soon on the case. This week an FA disciplinary panel convicted Pope of an “aggravated breach” of FA Rule E3 – “bringing the game into disrepute”.

One “aggravating” factor was that Pope had failed to accept that his post was “anti-semitic”. In his defence he had told the panel that he had watched hundreds of videos about 9/11. “He explained that he found the videos convincing in predicting the invasions of four countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Sudan. He believed, based on those videos, that the Rothschild banking business had funded the invasions of those eight countries so as to be able to take over their banks.”

Though the FA has never claimed that Pope held “anti-semitic beliefs”, its judgment argued that “the ordinary reasonable person knows very well that the Rothschild family have been used for centuries as a synecdoche for the Jewish people – maligning the family in discourse in order to malign all Jewish people.”

They added: “It is of particular concern that even now Mr Pope does not acknowledge the antisemitic message that is conveyed by the Statement. It is also of concern that he has not seriously questioned the conspiracy theories that he has allowed to inform his views.”

Consequently in addition to his six-game ban Pope was fined £3,500 and ordered to complete an “education course” – i.e. at the age of almost 35 he is being forced to undergo a brainwashing course in establishment definitions of ‘antisemitism’.

In a now-deleted ‘tweet’, Jeremy Corbyn thanked ‘Wiley’ for supporting Labour during last year’s election campaign.

Also in the news this week for Twitter ‘anti-semitism’ is the rapper known as Wiley (real name Richard Cowie), whose art will be little-known to H&D readers but who is “considered a key figure in London’s grime music scene”.

This acclaimed “Godfather of Grime” was awarded an MBE for his “services to music” in 2018 – perhaps a desperate effort by Theresa May’s Conservative government to win some credibility among young urban blacks and their fellow-travellers – though he endorsed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in last year’s election.

During recent weeks ‘Wiley’ has made several posts to his now-suspended social media accounts, comparing Jews to the Ku Klux Klan (on the basis that both Jews and the KKK supposedly exploit blacks), and calling Jews “cowards” and “snakes”. So far as one can make out, his politics seem to be a version of the usual ‘victim game’, by which everyone else in the world – Europeans, Arabs and Jews included – is responsible for Africans’ misfortune.

What ‘Wiley’ fails to recognise is that in this ‘victim game’, one set of people (not blacks) will always hold the ultimate trump card. He has entered an auction that he can’t win, but where he will nevertheless have to pay.

‘Grime artist’ Wiley is in trouble for ‘antisemitism’.

Unlike Tom Pope, it seems that there is a prima facie case against ‘Wiley’ under Britain’s race laws, and police are investigating. The Zionist lobby group Campaign Against Antisemitism (who were behind the prosecution and jailing of London Forum founder Jez Turner) are petitioning the government to withdraw the rapper’s MBE, and he has been dropped by his management company.

Needless to say, even this is not enough. Leading Zionist campaigners including Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard are staging a 48-hour boycott of Twitter this week, writing: “You refuse to act against Jew hate. You enable the likes of @WileyCEO to spread their poison.” The Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis also joined the Twitter boycott.

Even the Home Office and the Prime Minister’s office have joined in the kvetching, with Downing Street spokesmen saying this afternoon that social media companies must “go much further and faster in removing hateful content”.

And here of course is the real issue. While mainstream conservative parties on both sides of the Atlantic depend heavily on Facebook (in particular) to manipulate voters’ minds – including playing subtle games with racial politics – they are determined to censor anyone using social media to ask radical questions. Hence they seize on the likes of Tom Pope and ‘Wiley’, so as to justify a broader purge.