The Light appoints Hitler-lover John Hamer as a regular contributor.
Not so long ago Project Libertas, an offshoot of the local group of supporters of “The Light” paper announced a pair of meetings celebrating Hitler’s birthday and promoting the antisemitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. The speaker was to have been self-described “full-time geopolitical researcher” John Hamer, who promotes hatred of Jews and Muslims online. Hamer supports white nationalism, denies the Holocaust (which he calls the “Holofraud”) and a piece by John Kaminski published on his website says that “those leaders who allowed the Muslim invasion of Europe to occur should be tried for treason and executed for failing to protect their own people”.
Strong opposition from local community groups forced Project Libertas to cancel the meetings. Project Libertas emailed us and their contacts to say they were sorry for “the distress caused by a poster that seemed to suggest support for fascist and antisemitic views”. “Stroud Info-Hug” wrote that “the iconography and feel of these promotional materials could easily and justifiably be construed as unalloyed Nazi apologism”.
It hasn’t ended there, though. The latest issue of “The Light” announces that the paper will provide Hamer with a regular column “writing on history’s biggest events” in each monthly edition. A full page is given to an uncritical interview of Hamer by the paper’s editor Darren Smith, under the headline “Official history: The greatest deception”, promoting Hamer’s book and online channels.
Among the claims Hamer makes which “The Light” has decided to publish are that the Rothschilds started WW1 to take revenge on European monarchies, that they ensured the rise of Hitler to get rid of too-powerful Germany, and that “Judea declared war on Germany in the early 1930s”.
These conspiracist claims are not merely ones based on prejudice against Jewish people rather than evidence, but are antisemitic conspiracies popularised by the Nazis themselves.
Both the interview and the promise to adopt Hamer as a regular columnist are much worse than “The Light” paper’s defence of Cornwall-based Holocaust denier and genocidal racist Graham Hart. That article, in November 2021, led to the founding of Community Solidarity Stroud District. Back then “The Light” misled readers about the nature of the case and defended Hart on “free speech” grounds, and didn’t actually publish his views at all. Now it’s so happy with John Hamer’s views that it is to make him a regular contributor.
Hamer is a Holocaust denier. On his website was a page dealing with this description, which he notes “many” people have applied to him. We have edited this paragraph to update it – as of 10th June 2024 Hamer has taken this page down from his website. It was there until the 1st June 2024, however, and was stored by the Internet archive – we have also published screenshots below. It had been on his website since at least the 14th May 2024. We believe it was originally posted some time before this, but reposted when Hamer relaunched his website around May this year].
In the piece Hamer wrote:
“What I do deny however, is the ridiculous and exaggerated claim that there is ANY evidence at all that ANY Jews, much less ‘6 million’ of them, died from ANY intentional gassings or as a result of ANY kind of organised or systematic programme of genocide perpetrated against Jews by Germany’s Nazi regime… and I challenge ANYONE to produce ANY evidence or ‘proof’ that is not merely made up of either pre-war, wartime or post-war Soviet, American and British anti-German propaganda… because none, from either then or now, actually exists.”
These are the words of a Nazi-sympathiser, someone who preposterously thinks any evidence can be dismissed as propaganda, that anything detailing Nazi crimes is ‘anti-German’.
Elsewhere on his site, Hamer publishes a piece by John Kaminski [one of several – this one is still there, but we link to an Internet Archive store of it] which says:
“The real fake news is that Hitler wanted to take over the world and killed 6 million Jews to do it” […] Hitler only wanted his original country back, and for the Jews to leave Germany alone. […] Jews need to be excluded from civilization, permanently.”
This Nazi-sympathising language is shocking and disgusting. The quotes we have provided here are not isolated, or dated. The two quotes above are from pieces that were posted to the current version of the website on the 14th and 15th May 2024 (the website has clearly been relaunched in April 2024). Among the 40 most recent posts (originally made over a longer period but republished recently), at least 10 contain hatred directed at Jewish people, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and/or Holocaust denial.
Granting Hamer a regular column is not an accident or a mistake by the editor of “The Light”, but part of a pattern that we feel reveals the intent of the paper. Hamer has been published twice by “The Light” previously – back in April 2021. The Editor is clearly familiar with his work, and has chosen to promote it. It’s increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that “The Light” is a vehicle for introducing people worried about vaccines, or technology, or interested in health and wellness, to the ideas, organisations and personalities of the far right – including Nazi-sympathisers.
We ask readers to sign our statement as residents of Stroud, Dursley, and other parts of Stroud District who do not want to see The Light paper being distributed where we live. This is not a petition to any authority, but a request to those handing out the paper to reconsider what they are doing given the content of the paper and the level of community opposition.
Screenshots of Hamer’s website
The below captures both the headline of the interview with Hamer in The Light, and some of the antisemitic, Holocaust denial, and blatant material directing hatred toward Jewish people hosted on John Hamer’s website. Some is written by Hamer himself, some by John Kaminski – a particularly antisemitic author he regularly publishes pieces by. There is far more, but we do not wish to spread more of it than is necessary.
We issue a strong content warning and condemnation of this material, but feel it necessary to include it here to evidence the claims we make above.
As of 10th June 2024 Hamer has taken the above page down from his website. It was there until the 1st June 2024, however, and was stored by the Internet archive
The above two screenshots are from a piece Hamer republished by John Kaminski [this one is still there, but we link to an Internet Archive store of it]. Hamer publishes many of these pieces with similar language from Kaminski – it’s hard to imagine any reason for doing so other than that he agrees with them.
Community Solidarity Stroud District 