When Challenged Stebbing Claimed That His Emails Were ‘Pure Irony’
I have become used to receiving racist and anti-Semitic emails and posts. Often my first task is to work out whether they come from neo-Nazis or Zionists (or both). But on this occasion it seemed clear that it was the former.
At 15.36 on Sunday I received an email from Stebbing thanking me for having made him hate Jews. Since I’d never even heard of him I assumed that this was just another racist crank with time on his hands. Possibly it was a neo-Nazi who took my criticism of Zionism and Israel to mean that I was anti-Jewish.
After all Zionists claim that to be Jewish is to be a supporter of Israel so maybe Stebbing or whatever his real name was, had taken them at their word. Maybe it was one of those Trump supporters who stormed Capitol Hill wearing ‘camp Auschwitz sweat shirts.’
My immediate reaction was to make a complaint to the Police who quickly issued me with a crime number. I then circulated it amongst friends, one of whom googled the name and told me that there was a professor at Imperial College, London with the same name.
Stebbing then emailed me a second time with a link to a New York Times article, which has since been discredited, alleging that Hamas had weaponised sexual violence. I informed the Police and thought nothing of it.
I also circulated it to members of Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign one of whom suggested that I should contact Professor Stebbing to inform him that someone was distributing anti-Semitic emails in his name.
I therefore emailed Stebbing at 18.52 on the 22 January to inform him that
You will not know me though I am a well known anti-Zionist Jewish activist. I won’t even begin to (go) into the mentality of Zionists who do this kind of thing but it is not, by any means, unique.
I have been sent the following emails in your name. I assume that this is not you but someone impersonating you. Nonetheless they are vile and I have reported them to the Police in Sussex.
The two emails I had previously circulated had come from a gmail account but the email I received back from Professor Stebbing was from his Imperial College email address.
You could have knocked me down with a feather when Stebbing replied that the emails were from him and it was no impersonation.
My e mail was pure irony, but as always here the response to the crime is blamed. I have zero doubt that in WW2, you would have been thrilled to gas all Jews. That was the point I was making.
I have no doubt you understood this.
Israel gassed its own captives
Stebbing’s emails were apparently ‘pure irony’. There was nothing at all in the first email to suggest irony. As far as I was concerned it was mere assertion. His second email referring to the NYT article arrived over 5 hours later.
What he was saying was that when he said he supported gassing Jews, what he really meant was that I did. Except that I don’t. It is Israel which at this present time is pumping poison gas into tunnels and killing Jewish captives in the process.
But even when the second email arrived there was no reason why I should assume that his first email was ironic. Perhaps whoever sent the email had read the NYT article alleging that Hamas raped his victims and approved of what had allegedly happened. The email was headed ‘friends’.
Having falsely said that I had contacted him previously, Stebbing then accused me of being ‘the most anti-semitic person I have ever encountered in my life.’ But he hadn’t encountered me before. I had the feeling that maybe Stebbing had mental health problems in that he assumed that other people understood his disconnected thought processes. Or maybe the illness he was suffering from was an extreme form of Zionism.
A further email from Stebbing claimed that
you know i don’t think jews should be gassed but you do – that was my ironic point you miss, repeatedly but suspect you know this
Again there was an assumption that I knew what he thought despite not knowing who had sent the emails. Why should I know anything about someone I had never met? All I knew was what he had sent me. His claim that I believe Jews should be gassed is a typical evidence-free Zionist libel.
Finally I told Stebbing that I assumed he was not Jewish because no one who was Jewish would make a ‘joke’ about those who were exterminated in the death camps. Like most Jews I had relatives who had been murdered by the Nazis.
However I was wrong. Stebbing is not only Jewish but a Zionist and for most Zionists the Holocaust is something to be weaponised. That is what is happening now with the genocide in Gaza. As I have written previously, during the Holocaust the Zionist movement was focused on one thing and one thing only – creating a ‘Jewish’ state. All else, including rescue of Jewish refugees, was put to one side. It was a distraction.
At this point I emailed Imperial College authorities informing them of Stebbing’s emails and suggesting that he was not fit to teach students given his deep racism and anti-Semitism, itself not uncommon among Zionists.
Anders Breivik, Norway’s Mass Murderer
The following morning I received an acknowledgement from Joanna Ivison, Secretary to the President of Imperial College, Hugh Brady. I have heard nothing since. I assume that Imperial College has policy on racism, including anti-Semitism albeit that Imperial has adopted the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism which doesn’t cover genuine, far-right anti-Semitism of the Breivik/Trump kind. However if Imperial don’t suspend Stebbing and proceed to remove him altogether then they will have a lot of questions to answer.
People then started to find out more about Stebbing. In December 2021 he was suspended for 9 months and nearly struck off the medical register.
Stebbing had admitted adopting a “cavalier” approach in the way he treated some patients and having sent ‘inappropriate’ emails to a dying patient he nicknamed LMT (Little Miss Trouble). Stebbing had treated patients at the end of their life with aggressive treatments and had raised false hopes. Stebbing himself has since admitted, “I should not have treated any of these individuals; they were too sick to be treated.” An article detailing the nature of the case for his suspension is on the British Medical Journal blogs.
Sharon Beattie, QC for the GMC argued that Stebbing should be struck off because he posed an ‘ongoing risk’ to patient safety and that he’d embarked on a ‘persistent course of conduct’ and ‘persistent dishonesty’ which he’d attempted to cover-up. Shades of his behaviour today.
However these are medical matters though it is interesting that the Daily Mail leapt to his defence.
What isn’t in doubt though is that he sent a virulently anti-Semitic email to me, that he made assertions about me that are not based in fact and that he doubled down on them. Furthermore all his emails subsequent to the first two were sent from an Imperial College email address thus bringing Imperial College into disrepute.
Tony Greenstein
