Open Eye, the major media, and the New Age anti-semites
Earlier this year, as editors/producers of the radical-green magazine Open Eye, we found ourselves investigating and trying to expose in the major media far right involvement in the Green and New Age movements. This included links to anti-semitic conspiracy theorists, Holocaust revisionists, the British Israelite and Christian Identity Movements, the US militias and so on. David Icke, the magazine Nexus and the London-based magazine Rainbow Ark attracted particular attention. But we found ourselves undermined by smears and rumours circulated by the very people who should have been most supportive.
The Independent on Sunday
Only days after we had discovered that David Icke planned to follow up on his use of the Tzarist forgery the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ in his book The Robots’ Rebellion, by including Holocaust revisionist material in its successor, the first interest was shown from the Independent on Sunday. The IoS were interested in running something using this and other information about Icke – for example that he had been helped to write a chapter on the Holocaust by Marcus Allen, the UK agent for Nexus. (Icke calls Nexus ‘incomparable’ and promotes it in his books and lectures.) Interviewed by us in December 1994, Allen spoke admiringly of David Irving (a shelf of whose books he had in his office) and displayed a copy of the ‘Protocols’. Almost as soon a journalist from the IoS began writing up the Icke/Holocaust revisionism/Nexus material, it suddenly expanded into a potential major exclusive with the April 19 bombing in Oklahoma. For in the months before the Oklahoma bombing, Nexus had been giving the US militias publicity with articles by militia advocates Mark Koernke and Linda Thompson. A 2000-word investigation of Nexus magazine and its links to the militias was written by IoS journalist Cole Moreton. All reference to the initial focus of interest, David Icke, was dropped the editor, Ian Jack.(1) The article was read out to us by phone, as agreed, on Friday afternoon at 6. It was ready and on the page, libel-checked, with photographs. At 8 pm we received another call telling us the article had been pulled by the paper’s out-going editor, Ian Jack. (Jack now edits Granta.) Devastated that our week of photo-shoots, meetings and research had ended in this way, we looked for another outlet.
Private Eye
We left a message for Paul Foot at Private Eye. He phoned us, very interested in the whole story and eager to run it. “Got to have it today…’ He was especially happy about a chance to attack Ian Jack for spiking the story. We spent a day writing out what had happened and his secretary confirmed that the story would be in the next issue. But nothing appeared in Private Eye.
The Guardian
We next contacted the Guardian. They spent a week working on the story and journalist Paul Brown drove to Glastonbury to listen to David Icke. After a three-week wait, an article, ‘Ex-nutter rails at New World Order mind benders’ (9 May), finally appeared; but only after author Paul Brown had had a ‘tremendous row’ over the continual delays. Despite the research done by the Guardian and the material we had provided for them, the article was essentially a surprisingly uncritical review of Icke’s lecture. All the connections with the militias and the wider picture had disappeared. Brown had apparently tired of getting to the bottom of the New Age/far right/ militia network.
The Jewish Chronicle
We also contacted the Jewish Chronicle. They were very interested in the anti-semites we were discussing, and their journalist also said, cryptically, ‘some of them are close to home’. We turned over our material to them and described our discovery of Holocaust revisionism in Icke’s then forthcoming book. We asked who these ‘close to home’ anti-semites were. The editor informed us it was a reference to Larry O’Hara, one of our sources on the story. Searchlight had warned them to avoid O’Hara, putting forward a ridiculous conspiracy theory that Icke’s exposure by Green Party member O’Hara, amongst others, was a ruse to increase the power of some imagined far right grouping of O’Hara’s within the Green Party.
The Jewish Chronicle did write about Icke but avoided any mention of Open Eye, carefully ensuring that any information that we had given them was obtained from other sources, bypassing the written agreement we’d drawn up with the editor guaranteeing credit for our material.
The Evening Standard
We were then contacted by the London Evening Standard journalist, Mark Honigsbaum. Though wary at first because of vicious smears on the Green movement which had appeared in the Standard, Honigsbaum seemed refreshingly aware of the seriousness of this novel guise of New Age anti-semitism. A hard-hitting piece, which added to our knowledge, appeared, ‘The dark side of David Icke’ (26 May 1995). Our fear that Honigsbaum would have been briefed with the same Searchlight rubbish as the Jewish Chronicle was unfounded. Indeed, Honigsbaum was scornful of Searchlight’s past role in playing up the nazi group Combat 18.
The Searchlight smears reached Radio 4’s Sally Hardcastle who had contacted Open Eye, and it took a long meeting to get across to her that we were not in any way connected to nazis, Third Way, the Third Position, imagined manipulators of the Green Party etc. A radio interview with Open Eye was recorded but never used.
The New Statesman
At this point, suspecting that Searchlight was planning to attack Open Eye and perhaps even the whole Green movement, we were asked to write a piece for the New Statesman, whose editor Steve Platt seemed to comprehend our view that there was a vast new audience that could be attracted to right-wing conspiracy theories and anti-semitism in a new guise. He gave the article the title ‘New Age Nazism’ and made it the cover story for the issue which appeared in time for Glastonbury festival (23 June). It was a long piece and we had few complaints. Larry O’Hara’s name was cut from at least one piece of research, the National Front’s Libya connection, though an attributed quote of his did remain in our conclusion.
Enter Searchlight
In its July issue, which appeared days after the New Statesman, Searchlight sought to claim the credit for the work we had done with their own article which focused mainly on the Australia-based magazine Nexus. ‘Here Searchlight reveals for the first time (sic) in Britain, not the unimportant sideshow that is Icke, but the facts about the man whose magazine Icke promotes, his international connections and the response to his activities in Australia…’ Icke had ‘attracted a disproportionate amount of media attention’, they complained, and was a ‘fringe lunatic with no political influence’. A muddled introduction to the article did not mention any of the links between Icke, Don Martin (British League of Rights), Rainbow Ark and Nexus’s UK agent, and even claimed that the ‘Protocols’ were to be a source for Icke’s next book when it was in fact his previous book, The Robots’ Rebellion,in which it was used.
The anticipated smear on us appeared in the August edition of Searchlight which partially credited Open Eye with doing much of the work to expose Icke’s far right connections while simultaneously fingering it as part of the very far right network we had been struggling for months to expose! The article was titled ‘Fascists step up fight to take over the Green and New Age movements’. Under this title appeared photos of three far right activists, some contents pages from Nexus and a reprint of part of a page from the current issue of Open Eye. Next to the reprinted pages of Nexus and Open Eye the magazines were described as ‘political bedfellows’ – about as accurate as saying that Simon Wiesenthal is a bedfellow of David Irving. In support of this smear was the claim that both Nexus and Open Eye have ‘promoted the views of Joe Vialls’. Nexus have published a series of articles by Vialls, as, on one occasion, did the magazine of ex-Ayran Nations’ representative Robert Pash, New Dawn. On the third page of their piece Searchlight continued, ‘If Open Eye wishes to discover the far right, it need look no further than its own publications’, claiming that we had published a ‘book’ by Vialls, ‘who has a long connection with the far right’. The only evidence offered of this ‘long connection’ was the Vialls articles in New Dawn and Nexus. In fact the Nexus articles were Vialls’ fictionalised account of his experience of being a mind control victim; that in New Dawn was Vialls’ analysis of the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. None of them contain any of Vialls political opinions; indeed, we have no idea what Vialls’ political opinions are. Neither, manifestly, does Searchlight.(2)
The Vialls ‘book’ we are supposed to have published is a 22-page, A5 pamphlet about the politics of oil during the Gulf and Falklands war – Vialls was a petroleum engineer by profession – which is copyrighted to Vialls, not Open Eye.
Further down the text, after this attempt to label us as far right for distributing Vialls’ pamphlet, Searchlight claims that an article in Open Eye was ‘based on the same bullshit that Harrington and Griffin were peddling around town six years ago’. Most of the offending article (Open Eye 3, p. 5) was about the agent provocateur Tim Hepple who worked on behalf of Searchlight and was, according to them, meant to be infiltrating the BNP. Hepple, however spent a lot of time infi-trating green and anarchist groups, urging them towards violence. The Hepple episode took place in the last 2-3 years and is unrelated to anything Harrington or Griffin could have been talking about six years ago. Most of the rest of the offending article was about the intelligence-gathering activities of the US Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a controversy which was covered last year by many journals, including the Covert Action Quarterly. This can have nothing to do with Harrington or Griffin either.
This leaves one final paragraph in the piece we published which simply reflected the continuing suspicion of some left-wingers and anarchists that Searchlight publisher Gerry Gable may be continuing the activities outlined by Duncan Campbell et al in his 1980 New Statesman piece which first revealed the existence of the ‘Gable memorandum’, and included a quotation from a profile of Gable in the Jewish Chronicle which mentioned his ‘contacts…..in the security services’.
The allegation that our article is ‘based on’ whatever former NF members Harrington and Griffin were writing or saying six years ago is totally untrue. We have never met nor spoken to Harrington and Griffin, and have no idea what they were saying six years ago. This is potentially highly damaging to Open Eye, a magazine publicly committed to anti-racism and anti-fascism, which had spent the previous few months helping the media with information on fascists and racists.
In an article in The Big Issue (August 21) about the Searchlight atttack on us, Paul Anderson, acting editor of the New Statesman, was quoted as saying that ‘Searchlight has a tendency to label anyone who disagrees with it as Nazis. To suggest Open Eye is anything but anti-racist…is ridiculous.’ Other sections of the Jewish community, which did not rely on Searchlight’s disinformation about us, were willing to meet us and we have since been published on Icke and anti-semitism in the New Age movement in the London-based Jewish community affairs magazine, New Moon.
Searchlight has no letters page and has never replied to letters from Open Eye. We did attempt to communicate with publisher Gerry Gable, but he told us to ‘fuck off’ before we could finish what we had to say. We complained to the Press Complaints Commission (who reject 95% of complaints) about the Searchlight article. They responded that the PCC ‘takes the view that the entire content of a magazine such as Searchlight will be seen as partisan comment’. This apparently releases them from the duty in the PCC code ‘not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted material’.
Open Eye, PO Box 3069, London SW9 8LU
Notes
- The paper was embarassed that a couple of months earlier, they had featured ‘author and mystic’ David Icke in the ‘Ideal Homes’ column of the paper’s magazine, allowing him to plug The Robots’ Rebellion.
- Nexus and to a lesser extent New Dawn cleverly mix articles from the far right with other from non-right sources. Nexus has been successful in attracting both a readership and contributors who are unaware of this.