Community Solidarity Stroud District

How ‘The Light’ promotes transphobia and homophobia

[Note – as of 22nd June 2024 we had produced an updated leaflet with more examples from “The Light” paper since publication of the article below on 30th May 2022)

By Hannah Boss, member of Community Solidarity Stroud District.

The Light has published articles by many homophobic and transphobic people. It also gives credence, through praise and through web links, to groups and people that promote hate and mistrust of anyone that falls outside of their blinkered ideology. The origins of some of the myths that The Light supports are based in the rhetoric of the Religious Right from the USA about Black people, later extended to gay men, then further to other non-heterosexual and trans people. Here, I examine more fully the issues outlined in our leaflet The Light: Promoting transphobia and homophobia.

Community Solidarity respects all folk of all genders and sexualities. We accept trans and non-binary people are authentic and we note the continued media coverage of LGBT+ issues that is often overtly discriminatory or, at best, poorly researched. Community Solidarity understands that this coverage enables further marginalisation, harm to these groups and even hate from people regardless of political affiliations. In this article we look at The Light specifically, because this is a paper that some people locally have decided they should hand out on our High St.

Vernon Coleman writes for every issue of The Light. This not only makes The Light an exceptional platform for him, but shows its tacit approval of Coleman’s toxic views. In 1989, the year that over 300,000 people had AIDS and an additional 5-10 million HIV (1), Coleman declared AIDS the “hoax of the century” in his Sun newspaper column as it would not be of significant risk to heterosexuals (2). He continues to downplay the threat of AIDS and HIV. Coleman, even now, states that not everyone that has AIDS also has HIV (3). This is categorically untrue (4). Whilst there are, undoubtedly, issues with the way in which pharmaceutical companies function to make money from suffering, by trying to separate two entities there is a danger that those who are HIV positive may be less likely to take antiretroviral drugs, and we know that these drugs prevent AIDS and, by extension, prevent spread. An illustrative case is that of three year old Eliza Jane Scovill who died of HIV-related illness after her mother passed on the virus in her breast milk (5). The mother did not did not take antiretroviral drugs for her HIV having started to follow the works of Peter Duesberg, a prominent HIV/AIDS-denier who, like Coleman, spreads unevidenced conspiratorial theories about HIV and AIDS. I have friends who witnessed a lot of AIDS-related deaths in the 1980s and I have friends with stable HIV thanks to antiretroviral medication. They are all upset by The Light’s insistence on platforming Coleman who has always maintained that AIDS is not a problem for heterosexual people primarily, and maintains that, as a syndrome, does not need treating.

David Icke is an internationally-known spreader of conspiracy opinions and his media outlet, Ickonic, is advertised and promoted in the Light. His antisemitic credentials are well documented (6). But, as with many of the folk that silo people into groups to assign whatever ‘faults’ they conveniently wish to assign them, homophobia and transphobia are never far behind. A search for Icke and Transgender takes you to a page of trans stories, hand-selected by Icke, to show his version of events (7). He links to stories that appear innocuous enough in some cases by the fact he simply pastes in bare facts, but then urges you to look further at the story by linking you to, typically, Russia Today or Mail on Sunday. One of the links takes you to a story from the US that states “government wants to force doctors to chemically castrate kids” (8). Trans youth taking hormones are not going be sterilised, this is an old transphobic trope (9), but it is very sad and unsurprising that these people think that a teen’s future fertility is of higher importance than their suicide prevention (10).

The homophobia is a little more open in issue 10. According to this article taken directly from the Epoch Times (a Chinese/American pro-Trump publication), a pastor, Artur Pawlowski, was arrested in relation to street preaching. As with the case of Graham Hart who was jailed for inciting racial hatred (which we covered previously), The Light’s article neglects to mention the key facts of the case in order to generate sympathy for someone who is clearly spreading hate. Pawlowski had already been warned on several occasions against street preaching in respect of his homophobic and anti-Muslim rants, and his anti-Pride protests. He publicly condemned the 2SLGBTQ+ community for flooding in his hometown of Alberta, and he has supported a number of far-right causes (11, ‘2S’ refers to the ‘two-spirit‘ term used by some North American indigenous communities to describe ‘third-gender’ or ‘gender-variant’)).

Issues 8 and 19 have articles by Joan Ginsburg. She presents some rather muddled arguments to support her view that children should not be allowed to explore gender concepts; she writes that the parents who allow their children to explore gender are abusers and that parents’ rights are “diminishing”. She supports, and has spoken at a rally for, the Public Child Protection Wales group that campaigns against compulsory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) on the school curriculum. A harmless enough sounding group (who would not want to protect children?), but they appear quite fixated on gender and LGBT+ relationships. The RSE curriculum is not without fault, but what it does not do is shut parents out. In fact, involving parents appears to be central to it (12). It seems that what Ginsburg really objects to is the child coming home with more open and inclusive ideas than their carers hold, and the carers’ perceived loss of influence in these matters. This is not about protecting children, it is about enabling unsupportive parenting, a restriction on information for children, and policing children’s freedoms.

Ginsburg’s views do not come from a place of evidence; she says that children in Scotland are being allowed to choose their gender. No, they are being allowed to choose their pronouns. No one gets to ‘choose’ their gender. Experimenting with pronouns is a harmless way for children to explore their identities. She even ends an article by promoting Paul Diamond, a barrister who is often found supporting those who object to equalities.

Online, Ginsberg comments: “Puberty blockers usually lead to surgical transitioning with the result that young people are being maimed and sterilised before they have even had their first kiss… this experimental medication” (13). Firstly, puberty blockers do not ‘sterilise’. This is a standard transphobic trope (14). Secondly, Ginsberg uses the myth that a person has to have had surgery to be trans. Thirdly, Ginsberg’s statement deliberately creates an illusion of young people and surgery coming together. Whilst it is not, strictly speaking, illegal for an under-18 to access gender-affirming surgery in the UK (otherwise, parents and medics would not be able to mutilate children born with ‘ambiguous’/intersex genitalia), it is not possible to do so for the purposes of affirming gender in the case of coming out as trans (15). Fourthly, puberty-blockers and the use of gender-affirming hormones are not ‘experimental’. They have been prescribed to children for over 40 years for precocious puberty. That they are ‘experimental’ is another fictional cliché, commonly used by transphobes. Her comments are in response to a video that argues that the opening up of the gender and sex debate is part of some undercover “androgynous, dystopian future”. This style of anti-equalities discourse is not new. It is a conservative one that props up the ruling status quo, it enables the continued domination of individual identities, of suppressing anything that questions tradition. It questions anything that flows against the fascistic, stereotyping of the masculine male and the fertile female. This is a discourse that focuses on wombs and domesticity. It is anti-feminist. The platforming of people that confuse opinion with evidence is not uncommon in conspiracy circles and The Light is no exception.

Laura Dodsworth wrote State of Fear, promoted in issue 12. She criticises the government’s ‘weaponisation of fear’ during the pandemic. However, it is not only the government that use the public’s fear to arm themselves. Dodsworth is no stranger to weaponising fear to promote her own biases. In a Medium article (16), she focused on a term known as ‘detransition’. This is where a trans person halts their transition process. This can be for a number of reasons and does not necessarily mean, as the term suggests, a person is changing their mind about being trans. Dodsworth comes up with some alarming numbers to highlight her point. She notes that there were double the number of trans surgeries in 2014 compared to a decade earlier. There are similar, if not greater, rises in many other surgeries of course, as medicine advances. Better access to trans and other surgeries should be celebrated. She says she spoke to people who “unquestioningly” accepted their transness as if they were all treated post-haste on finding out this revelation. She wants to create a moral panic, a ‘weaponisation of fear’. Yet, in the UK, waiting lists just for an initial psychological assessment are several years long (17, 18). Once seen, the person is meant to show they have lived in their gender for at least a year before being assessed for hormone therapy. Many people therefore, as with all surgeries currently, have to resort to private care. Dodsworth rightly mentions that she cannot know the statistics for private clinics. If her concern for people is that they are being treated too quickly, then her issue should be with the private sector. She could also aim her campaigning toward improving the NHS offering to ensure the statistics she wants are available, not for guessing in order to confirm her biases.

The recent proliferation in people talking about ‘detransition’ is misleading. What a lot of authors cite as detransition, is often people getting to a point where they are happy and need no further treatment, or people having to retreat to their former documented gender (get back in the closet) due to social or work pressures, or lack of acceptance by family. I doubt anyone who truly has trans folk’s best intentions at heart wants to halt all conversation on transition-halting but it certainly seems to be a talking point for transphobes.

The Light enjoys its ‘think of the children!’ stances on LGBT+ issues and is happy to allow Anne Marie Waters, leader of the Islamophobic party For Britain and director of Sharia-watch, to promote Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, in an article (issue 19) taken directly from the far-right For Britain website. This is the same Robinson that states that being “pro-LGBTQ+ whatever is going to end up being pro-paedophilia” in one video (19).

No conspiracy newspaper would be complete without complaining about being ‘cancelled’. And according to Issue 20 on the Letters page, this is happening to The Light. Although no-one in the local Community Solidarity group in Stroud has called for the paper to be cancelled (we’ve asked that people reconsider the support they give to it by distributing it, and decline to read or write for it), the paper itself appears to be calling for anyone that upsets its point of view to be cancelled. Perhaps one of the most famous characters crying that he is being cancelled is Alex Jones. Yet, Alex Jones himself wants a lot of groups ‘cancelled’. This is a bit rich even for The Light. Jones is highlighted in issue 11 as a man we are expected to feel sorry for because he was censored by the media. Amongst the other right wing conspiratorial beliefs that Jones spouts, he said “when a person identifies as transgender, it is like calling oneself a giant, colorful giraffe” (20). He also compared being transgender to mental illness, and stated that government is creating gay people through “a chemical warfare operation” (21).

Another person The Light is fond of is David Kurten of The Heritage Party. In issue 5 an article all about him writes of “installing the transgender agenda in schools by teaching children far too early about these niche issues. I am fighting this battle and the actual taking away of freedoms…”. The Light promotes people who feel they are having their freedoms taken from them whilst simultaneously wanting other people’s freedoms taken. The Light apparently does not believe that attacking people’s freedom to be who they are; be it gay, trans, bisexual, non-binary etc is contradictory.

As well as directly giving column space to bigots, The Light also promotes other outlets which have a lot of nasty content. In issue 10, the Light has an article from theBL.com by Jose Hermosa. Hermosa is a homophobe and The BL has a long list of anti-LGBT+ articles (22) that imply ‘agendas’ of ‘indoctrination’ and even inserts articles on far-right governments and “anti-paedophilia laws” (23) that aim to prevent school-aged children learning about sexuality and gender identity. As for Hermosa himself, his own social media profile has transphobic and anti-Semitic (24) cartoons and supports the Hungarian anti-LGBT laws. One article he wrote for The BL suggests that any support for the LGBT community in children’s television programming is “destroying the morality of humanity”(25).

Several themes run through The Light that tie up its bigotry toward LGBT+ groups. One of these is the belief that governments are using vaccines, gender and microchips to bring about a future in which the human species will no longer remain in its current form. Issue 16, for example, encourages the reader to research Jennifer Bilek and her work on gender. Bilek is convinced that people are transgender as part of a transhumanist plot to enslave humanity (27).

Another theme is one of biological essentialism. Essentialism is a belief that any object has certain characteristics that are necessary to its identity e.g. a square must have 4 sides. However, applied to people, as is done with ‘biological essentialism’, denies the individual their individuality and it is easier to support and not stand against people with hateful narratives when your starting point is an ‘essentialist’ one. There are plenty of science articles and articles based in science that show how essentialism is not an accurate way to describe any human. Essentialism is damaging to feminism and to everyone striving for equality. Men and women cannot be broken down into two separate entities, but this must be the case if the structures that enable sexism in work, home life, sports etc. are to be supported. Why mention this now? The Light’s homophobia and transphobia is backgrounded by repeated references to women in respect of fertility and birthing and wombs etc. We are not a womb (some of us do not even have one), we are not child-bearers (some of us may never want them and some may never be able to). We are more than a receptacle for penis-in-vagina sex and for child-bearing. Some of us are intersex and may not even have the external genitalia that traditional biology books teach. No one person’s hormones or chromosomes are identical. The dominance of the fertility narrative tells us a lot about how The Light’s homophobic, lesbophobic, biphobic and transphobic views are reached and their quest for preserving the conservative dominance of our understanding of gender and sexuality.

If the real concern of The Light is to protect children, if they feel children are too young to learn about gender and relationships, The Light should also campaign against children being taught to prepare themselves for straight, cisgendered lives in which they will either be child-bearer or sperm-donor. It would be biased not to do so. The writings of The Light are as ridiculous, selfish and misogynistic as the article in issue 8 (page 4) where a father says that he sees no point in his son having an HPV vaccine as his son has no cervix. The father clearly does not understand the concept of passing on infection. Nor that these types of HP virus can cause warts and, less commonly, become cancerous in everybody who contracts it, regardless of sex or gender.*

To conclude: The Light promotes myths around LGBT+ people. The origins of this rhetoric are rooted in ‘Religious Right’ claims from the USA in the 1970s and 1980s that centred on how gay men were supposedly “child molesters” and “paedophiles” who were out to “recruit children.” Around the 2000s when false claims were losing their effectiveness against gay and lesbian people, the Religious Right shifted their efforts toward targeting people of other (non-heterosexual) sexualities, and then trans people instead.

Community Solidarity Stroud District stands against all forms of hate. We also understand that falsehoods used to ‘other’ people based on gender and sexuality hurt everyone by redirecting conversations away from the everyday misogyny and bigotry essential in propping up systems that oppress us all.

We have been handing out a summary version of this piece in a leaflet.

*Edit made as of 26th June 2023: This final sentence regarding HPV replaces the original sentence which closed the paragraph “Or he does not care as his son’s body will not be affected by the virus, only those his son passes it on to.” We always welcome feedback to correct mistakes.

References:

AIDS worldwide, R Yared, Population Today, Feb 1989; 17(2):4

2. ‘AIDs, The Hoax of the Century’.

www.TheSceptic.org.uk article: Vernon Coleman: How the Pandemic has Brought Some Unpleasant People New Fame , published 19.01.2022

3. “article taken from the Question and Answer section of Dr Vernon Coleman’s Health Letter” on HIV/AIDS

4. ‘HIV vs. AIDS: What is the difference?‘ Medical News Today

5. “HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore is dead“, Respectful Insolence blog

6. “Why de-platforming David Icke needs to happen now” — Get The Trolls Out website

7. “Transgender Agenga” tag on David Icke’s website

8. From David Icke’s website: “Mrs Doubtfire transgender Mayor to give monthly payments of taxpayers money to other transgender and ‘non-binary’ residents while government wants to force doctors to chemically castrate kids”

9. “A flawed agenda for trans youth” Editorial in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, May 14, 2021

10. “Family Acceptance in Adolescence and the Health of LGBT Young Adults” (pdf), Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, Volume 23, Number 4, November, 2010.

11. ‘”Get Out”: A Timeline of Hate Preacher Artur Pawlowski’s Activities Across North America‘, from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network website

12. The New RSE Curriculum | Teaching Resources for Schools

13. Is MINNIE MOUSE In A SECRET SOCIETY? / Hugo Talks #lockdown – Hugo Talks

14. see 9.

15. ‘The truth about trans‘ from the stonewall.org.uk website

16. ‘The Detransitioners’ by Laura Dodsworth (Medium article)

17. ‘Transgender people face NHS waiting list ‘hell’, BBC News, 9 January 2020

18. NHS Gender Identity Clinics, from the Trans Health UK website.

19. Homophobic comments by racist Tommy Robinson, 1 minute video by YouTuber ‘Debunkage’

20. “Alex Jones Says Being Transgender Is Like Calling Oneself a ‘Giraffe With Purple Spots'”, yahoo.com article

21. “Infowars’ Alex Jones has a long history of inflammatory, anti-LGBTQ speech“, nbcnews.com article

22. thebl.com (search LGBT)

23. “EU threatens Hungary with economic sanctions over anti-LGBT law“, article from thebl.com

24. Cartoon 1 on Facebook and cartoon number 2 on Facebook

25. “‘It’s just sick’: Franklin Graham lashes out at transgender Jesus in play shown in Germany“, article from thebl.com

26. “ALERT: Transphobic feminism and far-right activism rapidly converging“, article in Freedom News

How have local people responded since we started to raise our concerns about distribution of The Light ‘newspaper’ in Stroud district?

On 29th January, a group now known as Community Solidarity Stroud District started leafleting about a publication regularly distributed on Stroud High St, in Dursley, and occasionally in other parts of the district – including through door to door posting through people’s letterboxes. Our leaflets pointed to a lengthy article “Why are people in Stroud handing out a paper that defends Holocaust denial and antisemitism?”, the first of a planned series dealing with the paper in the content. We’ve had a range of reactions when chatting with people either while leafleting or in other conversations, and before we continue with the series we wanted to address some of these

First, while we’re grateful to all the people who have engaged with us and had conversations about The Light, we want to extend particular thanks to those who have shown their support. As of 17th May, 268 people have added their names to a short statement, “We the undersigned are residents of Stroud, Dursley, and other parts of Stroud District, and do not want to see The Light paper being distributed where we live. We have our own criticisms of the government’s approach to the pandemic. However, we are alarmed by The Light’s use of the pandemic to push support for antisemitism, Holocaust denial and racist hate speech – as well as for denial of climate change, NHS-bashing, and other reactionary views.” If you have not already done so, you can add your name at: tinyurl.com/TheLightStatement.

Secondly, we want to welcome that even where people have not gone so far as to sign the statement, we have had many constructive conversations with people who have some degree of sympathy to The Light, who acknowledged that their piece defending Graham Hart despite his conviction for inciting racial hatred wasn’t something they approved of, or who at least listened to us and understood that our concerns about Holocaust denial and other forms of antisemitism are genuine and important.

Other responses have been more difficult – ranging from evasive to antisemitic. And these are those we feel need a fuller response

Perhaps the most common response we have received has been some degree of acceptance that the article we focused on wasn’t perfect – or shouldn’t have been written (depending on the person), followed by a claim it doesn’t matter because it is “only one article”. In a recent letter to the SNJ, Richard House writes that our piece “is based on just one article out of perhaps 300-400 since the paper was founded”. This is a very strange response – but because so many people have made it it is important we discuss it. First, the opening paragraph of our piece reads “we are alarmed by the Light’s use of the pandemic to push support for racist hate speech – as well as for denial of climate change, NHS-bashing, and other reactionary views, which we will address later in the series.” We couldn’t have been clearer that this isn’t about one article – it’s about the publication as a whole. We focused on one article at first both because it was a particularly horrific example, but also because we had to start somewhere. We will, in time, write detailed pieces on many more of the 300-400 articles (starting with a piece on the nearly 20 articles pushing climate contrarianism), but choosing one as an example does not mean that is the only problem. In our piece we highlighted how key facts from the case in question were missing from the coverage, asking “How does it serve anti-racism, truth, or free-speech to mislead readers about antisemitic speech and threats of violence?” We are inviting readers to see this article not as a rare lapse, but as indicative of the attitude of the paper to facts and evidence, as well as tolerance for bigotted, racist, and other nasty views.
We’ve also been accused of being divisive, which is a claim we find almost laughable given what is being defended. In our leafleting, conversation and articles we have been careful to remain calm and polite, despite the fact we are dealing with a paper than – in this particular instance – was defending someone who broadcast that Jews (like some of us) were “like rats”, “filth” and needed to be “wiped out”. The idea that for pointing out this is indefensible we are the ones causing division is an astonishing inversion of reality.
An accusation that what we are doing represents ‘cancel culture’, or ‘censorship’. We made clear in the original long piece, and in our behaviour while protesting (leafleting, having conversations), that we are not seeking to appeal to any government authority to prevent the stall handing out The Light from taking place, nor to achieve this objective directly ourselves. Instead, we made an appeal asking that people “that you take the time to listen, to research the subject. We ask that you think very carefully about whether you want to continue reading, sharing – even writing for – The Light.” We even noted that the apparent defence of free speech seems a bit strange, saying: “It seems clear that freedom of speech is only of interest to The Light when it is the freedom to peddle hatred, misinformation, or falsehoods. When criticisms of this behaviour are made, the freedom of speech of those making criticisms isn’t welcomed.“
Blatant antisemitism. The worst responses we have had – either in the street or in online spaces – have involved a doubling down on Holocaust denial and further antisemitic conspiracy theories. One defender of The Light argued in comments under an SNJ article that the only reason the paper was covering activity by a group of Jewish people and their friends concerned about Holocaust denial and antisemitism, was because the paper is owned by a “Jewish company”. Even if this were the case, it’s a very strange argument to suggest that Jewish people cannot have legitimate reasons to oppose Jew-hatred and Holocaust denial, but the idea that the presence of Jewish people working in media organisations or attention is given to antisemitism means “the media is controlled by Jews” is of course a long-running antisemitic conspiracy theory. Another person defending the paper came up to the stall to tell us “it does all go back to the Jews”, while one accused a member of our group of being an “Israeli government agent”, despite no reference in any of our content or conversation to matters concerning Israel. Again, the suggestion that merely by dint of being Jewish someone is a tool of another state is a long-running antisemitic belief. Perhaps the worst of this was a woman who hands out The Light regularly telling us “the Holocaust did not happen as we’ve all been told”.
Finally, it has been suggested that we and the people who distribute The Light should talk to each other and explore our differences. We are open to the idea of a well-facilitated conversation if a neutral chair can be found and ground rules agreed upon – in private, without grandstanding. We will keep an open mind on how useful this might be. We’ve repeatedly emphasised that there are areas where we are happy to have conversations. We of course ask people to reject, condemn, and apologise for the endorsement of racist hate speech. In the meantime, we’ll continue with our approach, encouraging people to educate themselves about the content in The Light and to decline to get involved in distributing it.

Why are people in Stroud handing out a paper that defends Holocaust denial and antisemitism?

This is the first in a series of articles on why many local people do not want to see The Light being distributed in Stroud town centre. We have our own criticisms of the government’s approach to the pandemic. However, we are alarmed by the Light’s use of the pandemic to push support for racist hate speech – as well as for denial of climate change, NHS-bashing, and other reactionary views, which we will address later in the series.

This first article is about a piece in The Light’s November 2021 issue regarding an online radio host, Graham Hart (69), who has been jailed for 32 months after pleading guilty to eight counts of making a “programme in service with intent or likely to stir up racial hatred” (an image of the article is included at the end of this piece).

Before our article, a content warning. In order to make our case we have had to provide quotations regarding violent antisemitic language. This piece also discusses Holocaust denial, and some aspects of the Nazi genocide, in some detail.

The article in The Light, headlined “‘Hate speech’ pensioner jailed for 32 months” presents Graham Hart as a sympathetic character, “entitled to” his opinions. He is described as “question[ing] significant events throughout history”, and sharing “research findings”. The article uncritically reports his view that “his passion for the truth got the better of him and nobody was hurt or harmed by his sharing his opinion”. It does not question his claim that his efforts were motivated by an interest in “the truth”, nor tell you the truth of what the case was actually about.

The article suggests “his sentence poses serious questions about censorship and freedom of speech”. Given that the Light’s other articles generally focus on the idea that readers’ ‘free speech’ is also threatened, the overall impression given by this article is to invite readers to empathise with Hart.

In asking “How does it harm anybody else for him to have a different view of history?”, The Light misleads readers about the nature of Hart’s actions and the case against him. Hart did not only praise Adolf Hitler as “the greatest man of the twentieth century”. He broadcast that Jews were “like rats”, “filth” and needed to be “wiped out”. He made explicit threats of violence, saying, “If you’re listening Mr Jew we’re coming to get you. Let’s get rid of the Jews, it’s time for them to go. After Christmas I’m going to work, going on the attack because I’ve had enough. I don’t want bloodshed but if that’s what it takes to get it done.” He asked listeners to send him a gun. He said “that although baby rats look cute, they grow to be adult rats and that in a similar way, young Jews should also be killed.”

This list of disgusting racism is long enough, but it is incomplete – you can read further examples at the links. None of this information is in The Light’s article, however. Nor are any opinions from people who might find these things harmful, including Jewish people.

The article in The Light can only bring itself to say that “inciting people to violence in the name of anything is rarely a good idea”. It does not mention the word antisemitism, nor the comments of the Judge that Hart had “entrenched antisemitic feelings”. The article attempts to downplay the impact by misrepresenting the size of his audience, as “very niche” despite the fact his ‘Hoax train’ Holocaust denial song was viewed over 7,000 times on YouTube, for example. It says he “maintains he was just ‘mouthing off’”, but fails to mention that his own barrister said “He accepts racial hatred was likely to be stirred up”. For an organisation that describes itself as a ‘truthpaper’, these seem important truths that readers would want to be aware of. What purpose is served by leaving them out?

To defend someone like Hart and minimise the harm their words and actions cause is to promote hatred. To invite people to empathise with an antisemite and to downplay the harm their words and calls to action can cause is to promote antisemitism.

From Holocaust as metaphor to Holocaust Denial

It might seem particularly strange that the Light would seek to defend someone who’d enthusiastically praised Hitler, given that in previous issues The Light regularly suggests that our current political situation is comparable to the Nazi period – with headlines such as the “Nazification of the NHS”. Why would a paper that sees the Nazi period as their main metaphor for negative developments in society take such a sympathetic approach to someone that denies the reality and horror of the period and who, they note, urged people to “question the official account of the Holocaust”?

There is a link: antisemitism. The Light barely conceives of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust) as a real event. It is an event with an “official account”, rather than a genocide. The Light’s references to the Nazi period are not an effort to educate about oppression or genocide, but to harness an emotional response through a symbol of pure evil. They do not engage with it as a historical event that slaughtered millions, one that was situated in a context of a long history of antisemitism, racism, imperialism, oppression and genocide across the world. There’s more to say about how the Nazi period is often invoked in Britain in ways that avoid our state’s own role in this wider history, but writing antisemitism and the racism of the project of Aryan supremacy out of the history in the way The Light does is a particularly blatant attempt to manipulate people.

There are many criticisms that can be made of immunity/vaccine passports, but they are not the same as the yellow stars Jewish people were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. The yellow star was connected to centuries of European antisemitism, which had involved compulsion to wear distinguishing garments, mass deportations, and violent pogroms since the 13th Century (including in Britain). Immunity passports have been introduced during a pandemic, rather than following such a pogrom (Kristallnacht in November 1938). Death by shooting is not a punishment for not holding an immunity passport, as it was for Jews who did not wear a yellow star. There is societal debate about the effectiveness and ethical implications of immunity passports, and we can hope or expect them to be temporary measures. None of this was true of yellow stars.

Comparing NHS staff administering vaccines to the doctors who stood trial at Nuremberg for the experiments they conducted on concentration camp prisoners – as the Light and its supporters do repeatedly – is shamefully inaccurate and offensive. The horrors Nazi doctors performed were brutal. The experiments involved investigating the limits of human endurance and existence, forcing people to stay outdoors at temperatures below freezing for hours while naked, for example. People were involuntarily infected with viruses including smallpox, or had bacterial infections, together with wood shavings and ground glass, inserted into wounds. There were grotesque transplantation experiments. People were burned with phosphorus, fed poison, or shot with poison-coated bullets. There was no regard for whether the people subject to these experiments lived or died, ‘experiments’ akin to torture were conducted without anaesthetic. The war crimes identified in the Nuremberg Indictments include the “systematic and secret execution of the aged, insane, incurably ill, of deformed children, and other persons, by gas, lethal injections, and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums” [and] “the mass extermination of Jews.” Those who did not die were often disabled for life. Extreme pain and suffering was routine. None of this is comparable to the UK process for development or rollout of vaccinations against COVID-19.

As Hila Shachar has written: “the victims of the Holocaust continue to be “appropriated as political metaphors and dehumanised in the process”. As Jewish people and as their friends we have on multiple occasions pointed out that such analogies are inappropriate and offensive (whether in response to window displays, or a speaker at a local protest wearing a yellow star). Our complaints are always dismissed. We hope that this piece helps explain why we feel so strongly.

When The Light denies that blatant antisemitism of the kind expressed by Hart is harmful, it denies the humanity of Jewish people – it denies that they can be harmed. When it presents Holocaust denial as a “different view of history”, it denies the genocidal intent of the Nazis. It denies not only the murder of six million Jews, but the murder of millions of members of other groups persecuted by the Nazis – Roma and Sinti people (sometimes referred to as ‘Gypsies’), Black people, Slavic people (such as those from Poland and Russia), disabled people, gay people, and those with other political or religious beliefs – communists, trade unionists and social democrats, Jehovah’s Witnesses. When it claims that Holocaust denial is an “opinion” to which someone is “entitled”, it denies that it is antisemitic and morally repugnant.

Refusing reality, refusing to listen

These forms of denial are not the only ways in which The Light engages in denial of truth, rather than the pursuit of it. Nor is the article about Hart the only example of The Light platforming or defending people with racist and/or antisemitic views. It seems clear that freedom of speech is only of interest to The Light when it is the freedom to peddle hatred, misinformation, or falsehoods. When criticisms of this behaviour are made, the freedom of speech of those making criticisms isn’t welcomed. When local residents wrote and signed an open letter calling on organisers of an anti-lockdown rally to withdraw their invitation to another person who has published antisemitic content – Sandi Adams – was our use of freedom of speech welcomed and defended? The opposite. Despite acknowledging the difficulties caused by, and necessary debates about restrictions associated with, the pandemic, we were baselessly accused of being ‘government agents’, and told our piece was ‘libellous’ and should be taken down.

There is a debate to be had about the role of the criminal justice system in resolving the problems of hate speech and racism (and in perpetuating racism), but it is false to suggest that antisemitism is the only form of racism that generates prison sentences. The Light claim “Nobody is in prison for using harsh words” against Muslims or other groups, but the leaders of far-right extremist group Britain First were jailed for anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2018. More recently, a number of people were arrested, and so far one jailed, for posting racist messages on social media in the aftermath of the Euro 2020 men’s football final. Politicians and the media certainly often perpetuate Islamophobia and anti-refugee sentiment (as well as other racism including anti-Blackness) in ways that are insufficiently challenged, even rewarded. But it’s not consistent to raise these issues only to excuse antisemitism. A consistent anti-racism condemns both Hart’s broadcasts and Boris Johnson’s history of racist remarks, for example. Being consistent as an anti-racist means opposing the racism of the attacks on Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill and the Holocaust denial that harms people in these groups as it harms Jewish people.

The article tries to imply that Jewish people are uniquely and specially protected against incitement to racial hatred – a common theme for antisemites. Why do this? How does it serve anti-racism, truth, or free-speech to mislead readers about antisemitic speech and threats of violence?

The article in The Light asks “What would George Orwell make of it?” In 1945 Orwell wrote that many people “will admit that they are frightened of probing too deeply into the subject… of discovering not only that antisemitism is spreading, but that they themselves are infected by it”.

We ask that readers of this piece confront this fear. We ask that you take the time to listen, to research the subject. We ask that you think very carefully about whether you want to continue reading, sharing – even writing for – The Light.

Whatever we think of how to best deal with Covid, none of us should have anything to do with a paper that defends spreading racist hate, and we don’t want to see it on our streets.

We invite people to join us in making our opposition to The Light being handed out locally clear by signing their statement at tinyurl.com/TheLightStatement

Written in January 2022 by the following authors, and originally published by Amplify Stroud.

James Beecher

Caroline Molloy

Jeremy Green

Hannah Boss

Denise Needleman

Simon Jacobson

Pammy Michell

Paul Shevlin

Megan Sheer

Polly Stratton

Adam Horovitz