Tony Greenstein | 03 February 2017 | Post Views:

The Manufacturing of Consent Over False   Anti-Semitism

I want to thank Dr Alan Maddison for help in compiling this article.

Tony Greenstein

Alongside
the false narrative of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has gone the
creation of false and distorted statistics.  No body is better at doing
this than the secretive Zionist charity, the Community Security Trust.

It is extremely unusual for a charity to be allowed to keep the details of its trustees secret by
the Charity Commission but it has managed this.  It is an extremely rich charity having reserves
of over £12.3 million pounds at the end of the 2015 financial year.  I estimate that it seeks funding from half the
Jewish charities in Britain.  In addition in 2015 it obtained Home Office and Community Department grants of over £6m.

It is supported by the wealthiest
and most reactionary Zionist capitalists in Britain and in particular
Gerald Ronson, who was jailed for a year in the Guiness fraud trial.  He
is/was owner of the largest private company in Britain, Heron Ltd and
is a far-Right Zionist.

The
CST has historically seen its role as safeguarding the Jewish community
from Jewish anti-Zionists and it has been used to eject hecklers from
Zionist meetings and protect e.g. Israel’s fascist foreign minister,
Avigdor Lieberman when he came to London.  It is known to have close
links to Israeli intelligence and the Israeli Embassy, and its public
spokesman Mark Gardener used to appear regularly on the media to defend
Israel from ‘anti-Semites’ on the Left.  

His role has been superseded to
some extent by its Deputy Director Dave Rich who late last year brought
out a book entitled The Left’s Jewish Problem Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism

You can get some idea of the ideology motivating the CST from the self-promoting blurb accompanying the book.  Dave Rich writes:
‘There is a sickness at the heart of left-wing British politics, and
though predominantly below the surface, it is silently spreading,
becoming ever more malignant.’
This rubbish was written just a few months before Donald Trump gained the Presidency of the United States.  Rich was not of course to know that but what we have seen since his election is a rapturous reception by Netanyahu, the Israel government and the Israeli people.  Despite the support of open anti-Semites like Richard Spencer, the appointment of the CEO of the alt-Right Breitbart magazine Steve Bannon and what Spencer has called Trump’s ‘deJudaification of the Holocaust’ the Zionist Organisation of America invited Bannon to be a guest speaker at its gala dinner.
Once again we see that Zionism has absolutely no problems with real anti-Semitism.  The only ‘anti-Semitism’ the Zionist lobby hates is that which condemns the racism and apartheid of the Israeli state.

UPDATE

2016 Anti-SemiticIncidents Report

The Community Security Trust, a Zionist group, has just issued their latest Anti-Semitic Incidents Report for 2016.  Apparently there were 1309 incidents of anti-Semitism, recorded
over the last year compared to 924 incidents in 2015, an increase of 41% over the
last year (the Guardian and the Report itself state that there were 960 anti-Semitic incidents
recorded by the CST last year but the CST’s
2015 Incidents Report
states that there were 924).
Protecting the Jewish community or protecting Israel and the Zionist movement?
No explanation is given for why the number of anti-Semitic incidents for last year grew from 924 in last year’s report to 960 in this year’s report.
In their half yearly report for
January to June 2016 CST recorded 557 anti-Semitic incidents, so if the above
figures are correct, then there was a 35%  increase in the second half of the year from
557 to 752 incidents.  However many of these figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
CST reported Incidents in London
were 813, up 65% on last year (494). 
This is however very strange because anti-Semitic reports to the London Met this year were only 513, an increase
of 11.5% on last year (460).  Why is
there such a difference – 65% vs 11.5%?

For 2015 the CST tally of anti-Semitic incidents in London ( 494) was similar
to the London met’s 460.  For 2016 the CST result of  813 is 58.5% higher than the London met result
(513).

One explanation is that this can only reflect an increase in more trivial
incidents not transmitted to the police by the CST and one has to question their impartiality given CST’s links to
Israel and its Embassy. 

Interestingly under violent incidents
the 2016
CST Report
states that there were 107 violent antisemitic assaults in
2016, an increase of 29% over the 87 violent incidents recorded in 2015 and the
highest number since 2010, when CST recorded 115 violent antisemitic assaults.
It is difficult to know what constitutes violence but it is
noteworthy that none of the violent incidents recorded in 2016 were classified
as Extreme Violence, i.e. incidents involving grievous bodily harm (GBH) or a
threat to life as compared to four such incidents in 2015 and one in 2014.
287 (22%) of the incidents were social media related, cf. to
185 the previous year, an increase of 55%. 
The vast majority of anti-Semitic incidents, 1,006, involved
what is termed ‘abusive behaviour’ which is a catch all category that includes
social media content.  This is an
increase of 40% over 717 last year and constitutes 77% of the overall
total.  I would suggest that this
category in particular is highly subjective and open to both misinterpretation and
political manipulation.  
Of this 1006,
402 of these incidents were purely verbal abuse and given their Zionist bias, one has to question whether eg. support for the Palestinians directed at people who are Jewish counts as anti-Semitism in CST’s eyes.   In 2015 there were 458 incidents of
verbal anti-Semitic abuse.  In other words there was a decrease of
12.2% in verbal anti-Semitic abuse this year compared to last year. 
This strongly suggests that this
particular category should be treated with a great deal of scepticism because
last year verbal anti-Semitic abuse constituted 49.5% of the category of abusive
behaviour.  This year however the
percentage had fallen to 40%.  Again
there is no explanation of what this means. 
What is none verbal abusive behaviour?  What does the other 60% constitute?
Presumably this is social media interaction.  When discussing the ethnic background of
abusers the CST admits that ‘it is not always possible to obtain a physical
description of the offender. Where there is no face-to-face contact, it would
be a mistake to assume to know the ethnicity or religion of an incident
offender on the basis of the abusive language they use.’ 

There was an increase in damage to property with 81
incidents this year cf to 65 incidents in 2015, an increase of 25%. 
What is particularly suspicious is
that among the perceived causes of the rise in anti-Semitic incidents are ‘high
profile allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party.’
  Given that the CST has made a
false and misleading statement  to the Labour
Party concerning Jackie Walker where they say that it is ‘disappointed and disturbed’ in respect
of an ‘untrue slur; that ‘Jews played a leading role in the slave
trade’
one can only conclude that there is a high degree of political
manipulation buried in these figures.
Although
Zionists argue that there is a ‘new’ anti-Semitism – i.e. hatred of Israel and Zionism,
in practice they do their best to try and tie anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism together.  Some of them are honest, like Micky Davis,
one of the biggest Jewish capitalists in Britain who gave evidence to the Home
Affairs Select Committee on Anti-Semitism [HASC].   They reported
thus: 

Sir Mick Davis, Chairman of the JLC, told us that
criticising Zionism is the same as antisemitism, because: Zionism is so totally
identified with how the Jew thinks of himself, and is so associated with the right
of the Jewish people to have their own country and to have self-determination
within that country, that if you attack Zionism, you attack the very
fundamentals of how the Jews believe in themselves.

However
this was too blunt an approach.  The Committee
therefore tried to inflate the incidence of anti-Semitism and conflate this
with the upsurge in protests against Israel’s repression of the Palestinians.

In
the Introduction under Key Facts the Committee report that the ‘The first half
of 2016 saw an 11% rise in antisemitic incidents reported to Community Security
Trust (CST), compared with the same period during the previous year.’

If
true this is of course shocking but what is the reality?  In the CST’s Incidents
Report
for the first half of 2016 it is indeed reported that there was an
increase from 500 to 557 anti-Semitic incidents.

However
133 of these ‘incidents’ involved social media, which could of course be just
one individual racist tweeting something anti-Semitic.  Hardly a major incident.  These 133 incidents were themselves an
increase on the 89 incidents recorded in the same period in 2015.  In other words, of the 57 extra number of anti-Semitic
incidents, no less than 44 were on social media.  But there is more.  The CST tells us that:

‘The 557 recorded
antisemitic incidents included 41 violent antisemitic assaults, a 13 per cent
fall from the first half of 2015. None of
these violent incidents were classified by CST as ‘Extreme Violence’, which would
mean they involved potential grievous bodily harm (GBH) or threat to life.’

In
other words there was a fall of 13%
in violent anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2016, none of which were
classified as being of ‘extreme violence’. 
Looking at the January-June CST Anti-Semitic
Incidents Report
for 2015, one finds that there were 2 incidents of extreme
violence.  So there was another, welcome
drop in anti-Semitic incidents for 2016 but the HASC, through statistical
manipulation, managed to dress this up as an increase.  The question is why they would do that.

The
HASC Report was the subject of a scathing critique by David Plank, a former
Special Advisor to the Social Services Select Committee.  He describe it as:

‘a partisan party political
polemic which should not have been agreed and made public by a House of Commons
select committee. It fails to meet the basic standards required of select
committees as to their inquiries and reports. This is particularly distressing
on so important and contentious a matter as antisemitism in our country….
C.     The Report purports to
be the result of an inquiry into “Antisemitism in the United Kingdom”. It is no
such thing. The Inquiry has no terms of reference: as a result, it is
ill-defined from the outset. Its evidence base is partial and excludes a swathe
of evidence sources that would have been essential to such an inquiry. It is
unbalanced in the coverage it gives to political discourse as against other
aspects of antisemitism in the United Kingdom – and grossly imbalanced within
the topic of political discourse in the entirely disproportionate attention it
gives to the Labour Party and personally to its Leader.
You can
read the full critique here

David
Plank has put his finger on at least part of the problem.  In order to sustain the false anti-Semitism allegations
that have become part of the accepted narrative in the Labour Party it was
essential that the HASC produce a report showing that anti-Semitism is on the
increase.  In criticising Jeremy Corbyn for
the alleged increase in anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, in actual fact there
has been no independent evidence of such anti-Semitism and the Chakrabarti Report
didn’t manage to find any either, it is clear that this Report was motivated
primarily by an animus towards Corbyn.

This
manufacturing of an atmosphere of hysteria and false panic over anti-Semitism is
tied to an attempt to redefine what a racist incident is, by deliberately
misinterpreting the conclusions of the MacPherson Report into the Police’s racist
inquiry and handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.  Remember that Stephen Lawrence was the victim
of a racist murder.  We now have the
appalling vista of Zionists and imperialists using the findings of an Inquiry
into racism to justify their attacks on anti-racists who criticise Israel, the
world’s only official apartheid state.

Hate Crimes and
Racist Incidents – How the Establishment Uses the Language of Racism to Protect
Racism

The
CPS’s Racist
and religious crime – CPS prosecution policy
explains ‘What we mean by racist or religious crime’ by reference to the
Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report which was published in February 1999.  According to the CPS, the Lawrence Inquiry
defined a racist incident as:

“˜… any
incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other
person.”

The CPS state that ‘We accept this
definition.
’ And it goes on to say that ‘We
define a religious incident as:


“Any incident which is believed to be motivated
because of a person’s religion or perceived religion, by the victim or any
other person”.



At first
sight this seems bonkers.  How can a
racist crime, or indeed any crime, be decided on the basis of the victim’s
perception alone?  Racism, like sexism or
any form of discrimination, is not a subjectivity existing independently of the
actual evidence.

What the
CPS and the State, encouraged of course by Britain’s Zionist lobby is trying to
do is to distort and decontextualise the findings of the Lawrence Inquiry.  The Lawrence definition of a racist incident
was directed at forcing the Police to record
the perceptions of the
victim if s/he though they had been the victims of a racist attack.  It didn’t therefore mean to say that the
attack was, automatically to be treated as proven or fact.  It applied to the Police’s own attitude to a
possible racist attack in view of their blind disregard of the circumstances of
Stephen Lawrence’s murder.

Is it
seriously suggested that all allegations of rape are to be treated as
fact?  If so why bother with a
trial.  It is a trite fact that
supporters of the Israeli state and Zionism consider that anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism are one and the same thing. 
According to this logic, anyone who opposes Zionism is automatically an
anti-Semite.  And because, according to
the spurious logic of the CPS, it is for the ‘victim’ of racism to define a
racist incident, an expression of opposition to Israel or hostility to Zionism
can be counted as anti-Semitic if someone who is Jewish says they are racially
offended!

Historically
anti-Semitism was treated as hostility or violence to Jews as Jews.  Today it is treated as a form of hostility to
Israel and its founding ideology, Zionism. 



According
to the CPS’s ‘logic’ any Jewish Zionist who feels that an expression of
hostility to Zionism or Israel is ‘anti-Semitic’ is entitled to declare that
s/he is a victim of a racist incident. 
Of course a Jewish anti-Zionist is likely to disagree, so it is not so
much as the victim’s ‘perception’ so much as the politics of the ‘victim’ that
counts.  Indeed one can go further.  A Zionist who is not Jewish may feel that
they have been the subject of an ‘anti-Semitic’ incident and this too is to be treated
at face value.



Shami
Chakrabarti was faced with this dilemma, when Zionists in the Labour Party started
alleging that the MacPherson Inquiry gave them carte blanche to define any
expression of hostility to Israel as ‘anti-Semitic’.  In her Report she found that:



Submissions to my
Inquiry reveal a level of concern and confusion (in some quarters) about the
Macpherson” definition of a racist incident. This is of
course a reference to the famous Report of 1999 into the Metropolitan Police
after its appalling mishandling of Stephen Lawrence’s murder. The principle
that an incident should be recorded as “racist” when perceived
that way by a victim may indeed have some useful application outside the
policing context, and even here in the world of Labour Party discipline.
However the purpose of the approach is to ensure that investigators handle a
complaint with particular sensitivity towards the victim. It is to suggest the
seriousness with which a complaint must be handled, but in no way to determine
its outcome. If I complain to the police that I have been the victim of a
racist attack on the street, I should expect my complaint to be so recorded.
However investigation and due process must of course then follow and it is
perfectly possible that an investigator, prosecutor or magistrate will
subsequently find either that no attack took place at all, or that its
motivation was something other than racism. In the present context, my
complaint that I have been subject to racist or other personal abuse by a
fellow Party Member should be so recorded, taken seriously and handled
sensitively. However it will be for the investigation and any subsequent
process to determine whether my complaint was ultimately well-founded.

In other words the CPS’s definition of a
racist incident as being dependent on the perception of the ‘victim’ is
seriously misleading, not least as a statement of law.  An incident should, in the first instance, be
recorded as racist if the victim declares that they believe it to be so, but
that is only the starting point.  An
allegation of racism has to be investigated and subject, if there is sufficient
evidence, to a trial.  An allegation or
‘perception’ of racism is the beginning not the end of the matter.

Hate
Crimes & the Depoliticisation of Race



We also have in recent years the growth of what is referred to as ‘hate
crimes’.  Under this heading just about
anything can be classified as hate. 
Strikers who call those who go to work ‘scabs’ can no doubt be found guilty
of this ‘crime’.  If we demonstrate
against the bigotry and racism of UKIP and Nigel Farage then that could be a
hate crime.  Indeed hating Donald Trump
might also be a hate crime!  Therefore
when we demonstrate our hatred of what Israel and its supporters do, then that
too is a hate crime.
In other words racism, class rule, imperialism – all have been
depoliticised.  Everything is subsumed
under the rubric of ‘hate’ – I hate capitalism so maybe I should be charged
with a hate crime.  Of course Zionists,
who are adept at playing the victim, use this to the full extent but we should
be aware that what is happening is a redefinition of racism such that racists
can also be classified as victims.  Hence
why arch-racists and bigots like Sir Eric Pickles, the former Tory cabinet
member, who has no problem working with anti-Semites in the European Parliament,
is nonetheless very concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ when it comes to Israel.
This redefinition of anti-Semitism has gone hand in hand with the manipulation
of statistics.
Is there an Upsurge in Anti-Semitism
in Britain?

According to the Office of National Statistics there were 449,844
offences of violence against the person where injury was sustained.  There were another 624,972 violent incidents
where there was no injury.  Compare this
to the 4 violent anti-Semitic incidents against Jewish people in 2015 and none
in the first half of 2016.
In other words using the pro-rata risk per 100 000 of each victim
population
4/263 000 Jews gives 1.5
risk. 
Disabled assaults with violence were
409/ 11 million giving 3.7 risk.
BUT the pro rata risk for
non-hate crimes is  431 000/ 58 million ( E&W) = 743.
Of course there may have been Jews
amongst the latter, we don’t know as they aren’t broken down into religion or
ethnicity but regardless the number of violent anti-Semitic attacks is
tiny.  Certainly it doesn’t merit a
Parliamentary Select Committee Report unless there is a hidden agenda.

In terms
of what were termed ‘hate crime’s then the following figures provide some
context for anti-Semitic hate crimes.

 

49,419
(79%) were race hate crimes;
7,194
(12%) were sexual orientation hate crimes;
4,400
(7%) were religious hate crimes;
3,629
(6%) were disability hate crimes; and
858
(1%) were transgender hate crimes.

 

Even
assuming that the CST figures of 557 for the first half of 2016 are correct,
making approximately 1,100 for the whole of 2016 if the second half of the year
mirrors the second half, that mean that just over 2% of hate crimes were anti-Semitic.  Bearing in mind that 24% of these incidents
were on social media.  Anyone can post a
thousand hateful tweets and create a complete statistical absurdity.  In terms of actual person to person anti-Semitic
incidents it would appear that there are about 800 incidents.  But even then, given that the CST is an
overtly Zionist organisation, there is good reason for believing that what it
sees as anti-Semitic is in fact a reaction to Israel’s crimes and that any
anti-Israeli comment is likely to be classified as anti-Semitic.

 

In terms
of the seriousness of such offences, even anecdotal evidence suggests that
anti-Muslim racial incidents are of a far more serious nature than comments
about Mohammad or social media tweets. 
They involve firebombings of Mosques, the murder of individual Muslims
and attacks on Muslim premises, not least by the far-Right. 

Below are statistical tables taken from the Office of National Statistics.

                                Reference sources for the Table below.

 Source
: Overall Crime to March 2016

Note 15% growth in violence with injury over 2014/15, it
fell for CST in 2015 and again first 6 months of 2016. Suggest CST exaggerates
their total AS incidents to encourage support.
or
https//www.gov.uk/hate-crime-1516hosb1116-appendix-tables-4.ods
The Sexual Orientation and Transgender figures are combined to
give LGBT data.
CST data source is used for incidents for the incidents
against Jews in the table.
I as unable to get separate data for Violence with Injury
against Muslims as Tell Mama only recorded this for Islamophobic incidents
(about 1/3 total) reported directly to them, and not the ones sent to them by
the Police. I have written to them for this but no answer. I am told that TellMama
are under the influence of CST who are giving 
them “advice”!  Dave Rich of CST
is involved in TellMama.
Below is an interesting article

Britain’s real hate crime scandal

Believe what you see on the streets, not the media hype

6 August 2016

Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. Barely a day passes without some policeman or journalist telling us about the wave of criminal bigotry that is sweeping through the country. It’s been bad for years, they say, but has become worse since the EU referendum. Police forces tell us that hate crime has ‘soared’ in recent weeks; there’s been an ‘explosion of blatant hate’, according to some newspapers. Twenty-first-century Britain, it seems, is a pretty rancid, rage-fuelled place.

If you feel this doesn’t tally with your experience of life in Blighty in
2016, you aren’t alone. There is a great disparity between the handwringing
over hate crime and what Britain is actually like. The open racism even I can
remember in the 1980s has all but vanished. Racist chants at football matches
are a distant memory. Hard-right, foreigner-bashing parties may be thriving on
the Continent, but they are dying over here. The likes of the BNP and EDL have
withered due to lack of interest. This is a British triumph.

It’s not vainglorious to say that Britain is the most tolerant country in
Europe, perhaps the world. In France, for instance, a national news-making hate
incident is the attempted burning down of a mosque, which happened last month
in Toulouse. In Britain, it is somebody shouting something nasty on a bus.

It’s almost impossible to argue reasonably that Britain is a bigoted country
where ethnic minorities are somehow kept down. On the contrary, they are now
more likely than whites to hold top jobs (doctors, lawyers, chief executives).
More than a million Londoners voted for Sadiq Khan in May, giving him the
largest direct mandate enjoyed by any individual in British history — not bad
for the capital of a nation in which, according to Lady Warsi, it has become
‘socially acceptable’ to despise Muslims.

Yes, the statistics are scary, and nobody should downplay the hurt caused to
those who are attacked and abused. The number of hate crimes recorded by the
cops has grown year by year. Six years ago, there were 42,255; in 2014-15,
there were 52,528.

But these figures need to be taken with a fistful of salt. There is
something wrong with the way we report and measure hate crimes in this country.
The numbers do not necessarily speak to any objective spread of hate in modern
Britain. On the contrary, what the BBC calls an ‘epidemic’ is a product of the
authorities redefining racism and prejudice to such an extent that almost any
unpleasant encounter between people of different backgrounds can now be
recorded as ‘hatred’.
Consider the Brexit aftermath. The police say that 3,192 reports of hate
incidents were received in the last two weeks of June, and 3,001 in the first
two weeks of July. Apparently that constitutes a rise of 48 per cent and 20 per
cent respectively on last year’s levels of incidents. But can we engage in some
scepticism here? Many of these incidents (the police can’t at the moment say
how many) were reported through True Vision, a police-funded website that
allows anyone anywhere to report something they either experienced or
witnessed, anonymously if they like. No evidence is needed. Everything is
instantly logged as a hate incident. This inevitably presents a warped view of
reality.
Already, two infamous post–Brexit ‘incidents’ have been debunked. It was
widely claimed, for instance, that an attack on a tapas bar in Lewisham, south
London, was a hate crime; actually, police say it was a burglary. A photo of
four boneheads in Newcastle holding a banner saying ‘Stop Immigration, Start
Repatriation’ was widely shared as evidence of xenophobia. But Geordies have
pointed out that those idiots have been holding up that banner every weekend
for ages, long before Brexit.

Beyond the post-Brexit hysteria, it’s incredible how subjective the idea of
‘hate crime’ has become. The police and the Crown Prosecution Service first
agreed a common definition of hate crime ten years ago and started measuring
national hate-crime levels in 2008. A hate crime, the police say, is ‘any
criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be
motivated by a hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal
characteristic’. They monitored ‘five strands’: crimes driven by prejudice
based on race, religion/faith, sexual orientation, disability, and gender
identity.

The police’s ‘Hate Crime Operational Guidance’ now stresses that the
victim’s perception is the deciding factor in whether something is measured as
a hate crime. No evidence is required. ‘Evidence of… hostility is not required
for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident,’ the
guidance says. ‘[The] perception of the victim, or any other person, is the
defining factor… the victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of
their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this
perception.’ So you don’t need actual evidence to prove hate crime, just a
feeling. The police are discouraged from asking for evidence. This is reflected
in the policies of individual constabularies. So the ‘Hate Crime Procedure’ of
the Surrey Police says ‘apparent lack of motivation as the cause of an incident
is not relevant as it is the perception of the victim or any other person that
counts’. No clear hateful motivation? Doesn’t matter. Record it as a hate crime
anyway. Indeed, even when nothing hateful was said to the victim of a crime, still
the police must record the incident as a hate crime if the victim perceives it
to be so. The police guidance gives the example of a gay man being ‘sworn at
and threatened’ by an assailant who said absolutely ‘nothing… about his sexual
orientation’. If this gay man ‘perceives that he was targeted [because] he is
openly gay’ then the police must ‘record this as a hate crime based on sexual
orientation’. Think about this. If any gay man is shouted at in the street, by
anyone, about anything, with no mention of sexuality, that can be recorded as
an anti-gay hate crime. There’s no need for any proof whatsoever that anything
anti-gay in sentiment was said or even intimated.

The unhinged subjectivity of the hate-crime definition becomes even clearer
on the issue of what is called ‘secondary victimisation’. This is when a victim
of an alleged hate crime feels that the police are not being sensitive enough
and thus compound the ‘hate’ he or she has experienced. The police guidance
says ‘secondary victimisation is based on victim perception, rather than what
actually happens. It is immaterial whether it is reasonable or not for the
victim to feel that way’. Again, this sanctification of perception over ‘what
actually happens’ has trickled down into hate-crime policies of local
constabularies. So the ‘Hate Crime Policy and Procedure’ of Greater Manchester
Police says that if a hate-crime victim feels indifference from the police,
this ‘victimises them a second time’ and ‘whether or not it is reasonable for
them to perceive it that way is immaterial’. Truth, then, is ‘immaterial’.

In a world obsessed with evidence-based public policy, it is odd that a new
crime category which explicitly eschews evidence in favour of emotion is
subjected to such little scrutiny. And it gets worse: the prosecution of a hate
crime doesn’t actually have to prove that hatred was the motivation. The CPS
states: ‘The prosecution does not… need to prove hatred as the motivating
factor behind an offence.’ The CPS says any crime that involves ‘ill-will,
ill-feeling, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism,
resentment, or dislike’ on the basis of a ‘personal characteristic’ could be a
hate crime. So unfriendliness can now be criminal. Next time you read about a
hate-crime epidemic, bear that in mind.

Burglaries and robberies are often recorded as hate crimes. According to the
Home Office, of all the hate incidents in the Crime Survey for England and
Wales, 8 per cent are burglaries. And 1 per cent is bicycle theft. A racially
motivated bike theft? You might think stealing is just about stealing, but if
the victim thinks his stuff was nicked because he’s foreign, gay or trans, then
it is recorded as hate crime.

The ‘Hate Crime Operational Guidance’ demands ‘increasing the reporting and
recording of hate crime’. It specifies that success should not be measured by a
reduction in hate-crime levels, perhaps because this will give people the
impression that community life in Britain is getting better, and we can’t have
that. ‘Targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate,’ it
says, as this won’t ‘motivate managers’ to ‘promote positive recording’ or
‘increase the opportunity for victims to report’. So ‘success’ has one meaning
only: creating evidence to suggest the problem is getting worse. The police are
incentivised to find hatred, because their goal isn’t to tackle crime so much
as to create a public impression of mass hatred.

Why are our authorities so willing to push this deceptive agenda? Why is our
country determined to see itself as bigoted? It’s because creating a panic
about hate crime gives officials and others a sense of purpose and history. But
the squalid search for, and exaggeration of, hatred is dangerous and, to use a
word so popular on social media, divisive. It is a slur on the white working
classes to claim that what they think and say — on immigration, Europe, life in
general — is racist. Such a perception convinces minorities that they should
live in fear. It spreads anxiety and silences discussion. It rips Britain
apart.

According to one leftie online magazine, Britain now evokes ‘nightmares of
1930s Germany’. But this doesn’t square with the reality of our country today,
and you shouldn’t believe it. The hate-crime epidemic is a self-sustaining myth
— a libel against the nation.

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Tony Greenstein

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