We sent the following letter to the Stroud News and Journal on Monday 22nd January. Below is a photograph of the letter as it appeared in print in the Wednesday 31st January edition. Beneath this is a photograph of the letter we responded to.
“Your anonymous correspondent’s recollections of Nazi Germany are important. But as our community prepares to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, their suggestion that the breaking of a single window at the back of a pub is somehow “Kristallnacht in well-heeled Whiteshill” is both dangerously wrong and highly offensive.
On 9th November 1938 Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. At least 91 Jews were murdered. Painting those who attended Katie Hopkins’ “comedy show” as somehow victims of Nazism is grotesque and disrespectful to the memory of the actual victims of Nazism.
Many readers may be unfamiliar with Hopkins and the reasons for the demonstration before her performance. It is important to emphasise that she is not merely a celebrity whom some people don’t like. In 2015, her comments referring to people migrating as “cockroaches” in an article saying she would “use gunships to stop migrants” prompted condemnation from the UN high commissioner for human rights. The commissioner emphasised that the term was similarly used by both the Nazis and those behind the genocide in Rwanda which occurred 30 years ago this year. In 2018, Hopkins spoke alongside a Holocaust denier at the conference of a far-right political party, and was banned from South Africa for ‘spreading racial hatred’. We could fill an entire letter with further examples.
Those of us who attended the 200-strong protest against Katie Hopkins in Whiteshill were surprised and saddened to learn that a window had been broken, not least because it could overshadow the effectiveness of an entirely peaceful demonstration against the platforming of hate speech locally.
To imply that the same people who organised the protest and took such effort to ensure a calm and positive atmosphere, would then arrange for someone to return 90 minutes after the demonstration had dispersed to break a window of the pub where Hopkins was speaking, is beyond ridiculous. The people of Whiteshill expressed a peaceful message of tolerance and hope, reminiscent of those in the past who stood up in opposition to Nazism. Let us recognise this, and thank them for it.
Denise Needleman
James Beecher
Jacqui Stearn
Jeremy Green
Rosie Wingate”
The letter as it appeared in the Stroud News and Journal on Wednesday January 31st 2024
The letter we responded to, from an anonymous author:
Community Solidarity Stroud District 