Yesterday provided yet more damning proof that we've entered the era of full on fake news in British politics, which goes so much further than randoms making up fake websites and spreading copy n' paste lies.
We've now reached the level where mainstream journalists are spreading ludicrous made up nonsense, because they know they can get away with it, because nobody will hold them to account.
The Hindu Council
The first piece of fakery was spread by the ITV journalist Paul Brand, who tweeted an anti-Labour letter from the "Hindu Council" accompanied by the dramatic claim that "Major interventions in this election today from pretty much every major faith in Britain. Astonishing".
But if you actually read the letter, it's a poorly written anti-Muslim diatribe, full of bizarre clunky language, spelling mistakes, weirdly tangential points, utterly brazen bias in favour of the Indian BJP government, and seething undisguised hatred of Muslims and the Labour Party.
Then if you look up who the "Hindu Council" are it turns out to be a tiny ultra-obscure pro-BJP pressure group with just 206 Facebook followers!
206 Facebook followers: "major intervention" ... "extraordinary"!
It looks an awful lot like Brand didn't research where the letter came from, didn't even bother to read the lamentable diatribe, and just tweeted it out as a "major ... major ... astonishing" scandal because the letter chimed with the anti-Corbyn agenda!
The anti-Corbyn mob obviously pounced on Brand's Tweet and retweeted it over 3,000 times amplifying it beyond the scale of anything this bunch of hyper-partisan weirdos could ever have dreamed of.
Then the Daily Mail picked up on it and included it in one of their grotesque anti-Labour diatribes, but they couldn't even find a picture of the leader of this ridiculously obscure 'Hindu Council' outfit (Anil Bhanot), so they had to include a picture of Corbyn himself in the article header image instead!
Instead of reporting the news, Brand blatantly created it by lavishing free publicity on a nasty hyper-partisan bunch of Muslim-bashing BJP extremists, and by fabricating the absolute fiction that this tiny ultra-obscure operation is somehow representative of the entire Hindu faith in Britain, purely because their vile, incompetently scrawled letter chimed with the mainstream media "Get Corbyn" agenda.
Leaked chat screenshot
The next piece of fakery was even more absurd, and even more widely retweeted, with multiple iterations of the image in question going viral on Twitter.
The original source for the screenshot was the Sky News Technology correspondent Rowland Manthorpe, who published an outraged Tweet about a supposed Labour WhatsApp plot to media-manage the reaction to the Andrew Neil - Jeremy Corbyn interview (more on that later).
The glaringly obvious thing about the leaked media management instructions from a supposed Labour campaigner is that they're all right-aligned, which means, as anyone who has ever used a messaging app will know, whoever leaked this set of instructions to the press is actually the person who wrote them.
You would have thought that the Sky News technology correspondent should have an understanding of the absolute basics of how messaging apps work, but apparently not.
Manthorpe shared the screenshot with absolutely no indication that the leak had been composed by the person who leaked it.
When pushed on the actual source of this screenshot, Manthorpe said it was posted in a Labour activist group, then said that the post has now (conveniently) been deleted.
He won't say which activist group it came from, nor who leaked it to him, so it's entirely unattributed, as well as being obviously fake.
All we know about it really is that whoever came up with this scam was so utterly thick that they didn't even bother setting up two accounts so that they could send it to themselves, then leak what they'd written themselves as received messages, rather than sent ones.
But despite the ridiculous cack-handed fakery of it, this absurd screenshot has been spread all over social media, and seen hundreds of thousands of times, all triggered by a technology correspondent who apparently doesn't know how messaging apps work!
Andrew Neil's lie
Corbyn's interview with Andrew Neil went about as well as anyone would have expected given Neil's ridiculous interview technique of spewing furious monologues, and then continually hectoring and interrupting when his interviewee victim attempts to reply.
Neil caught Corbyn in an all time classic trap, called the wifebeater fallacy, listing a load of Labour's failings on antisemitism, then demanding Corbyn apologise for it all, even though he had absolutely no influence over almost all of it (Labour disciplinary procedures are independent from the party leader for obvious reasons).
Corbyn refused to fall into the wifebeater trap, because he knew the mainstream media would play it as an admission that he was personally apologising for being an anti-Semite, which he obviously isn't ... but it's a double edged sword, so literally all of the front pages of the right-wing propaganda rags bar the Daily Star are blaring about Corbyn refusing to apologise to Jews!
The only problem is that in his barrage of 'evidence' about Labour anti-semitism, Neil included an outright lie.
He said "let me give you the case of Lesley Perrin...She posted a video denying the Holocaust and questioned whether the six million figure was accurate. And what did the Labour Party do? It gave her a written warning. No expulsion, no zero tolerance, just a written warning".
This seems unequivocally bad, but then look into the actual facts of the case and it turns out that Perrin actually quit the Labour Party as soon as the investigation into her comments was opened.
Labour didn't let her off with "just a warning" as Neil claimed, because they actually had no power whatever to investigate or discipline her, once she'd quit the party.
Of course it's fair game and a legitimate line of questioning to ask Corbyn about antisemitism, and what Labour are doing to combat it, but if the problem is as awful as so many people are making out, why on earth is there a need to exaggerate and make things up?
Neil's lie isn't actually as bad as the previous two examples, because he could simply have got his 'facts' muddled up in his extended Labour antisemitism monologue, but it's far worse in scale because him hectoring Corbyn to apologise for something that didn't even happen formed the basis of anti-Corbyn hatchet jobs on the front pages all of the billionaire-owned right-wing propaganda rags the following day.
Consequences
The BBC's Andrew Neil won't be held to account for lying about Labour disciplinary procedures. Just like Sky's Roland Manthorpe won't be disciplined for sharing the kind of obvious fakery a technology correspondent should be able to spot instantly. Just like ITV's Paul Brand won't be disciplined for boosting a ridiculously obscure bunch of politically partisan, far-right Islamophobes purely because their rabid screed aligned with the "get Corbyn" mainstream media agenda.
These people, from three of the UK's biggest and most influential news broadcasters, will suffer no consequences whatever for amplifying extremist groups, spreading ridiculous fakery, and telling lies about antisemitism, so they'll obviously do it again, and again, and again, because they know they can get away with it, and because they know they get rewarded with masses of attention when their fakery goes viral.
No consequences for them means terrible consequences for the rest of us: which will manifest as the continued deterioration of journalistic standards to the point where journalists can just spread whatever made-up bollocks and lies they like in order to generate retweets, and front page headlines, to the point it becomes almost impossible to differentiate between what's real, and what's just partisan fakery.
How are we supposed to believe anything we see from mainstream media broadcasters when their journalists are willing to just make stuff up, and amplify palpable nonsense, purely to fit the partisan political agenda they're pushing?
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Let me start by saying that I think the Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr has done some fantastic work exposing the dodgy dealings and deceptiveness of interlinked Brextremists like Arron Banks, interfering foreign billionaires like Robert Mercer, Vote Leave, and the network of dodgy opaquely-funded hard-right pseudo-charity like the Taxpayers' Alliance and the IEA.
The work she's been involved in is a prime example of the kind of large scale investigative journalism that mainstream media organisations can do incredibly well when they focus on holding the powerful to account rather than attempting to shape public opinion through the dissemination of their groupthink-inspired political narratives, blatant smear campaigns, and/or recycling government press releases or the output of shady publicly-funded propaganda units.
The scale of the abuse she's received from Brextremist mobs like the Arron Banks' Leave.EU propaganda operation is a testament to what a good job she's been doing.
If Brexiteers like the BBC's Andre Neil really believed she was the ridiculous cat lady crank woman they routinely portray her as, they'd ignore her completely, rather than deliberately whipping up storms of online abuse to try to intimidate her into silence.
The problem of course is that if you set yourself up as a political integrity campaigner, then you need to make sure you're absolutely clean yourself, and unfortunately Carole has dropped a total clanger, that doesn't just undermine her integrity, but damages the fightback against the shady Brextremist liars by association.
When the Institute For Statecraft scandal broke people were rightly outraged that this UK government-funded pseudo-charity has been caught interfering in the domestic affairs of our European neighbours and smearing the government's political opponents at home.
Sure people should be allowed to criticise Jeremy Corbyn if they like, but if the Tory government has just flooded £2 million+ into their covert propaganda operation, there's absolutely no excuse for them repaying the favour by launching social media attacks on the Tories' political opponents.
Just imagine if it was the other way around and Jeremy Corbyn had handed £2 million in public cash to a shady left-wing propaganda unit to attack and smear his political rivals, the media outrage would be white hot and relentless.
In the wake of the breaking scandal Carole Cadwalladr made what seemed like a very strange intervention with a Twitter thread that clearly and quite brazenly pivoted criticism away from the Institute For Statecraft and back onto Jeremy Corbyn and other senior Labour figures.
Who writes a thread about the scandalous smear tactics of a publicly-funded propaganda outfit that bounces criticism back onto the target of their smears by basically repeating all the hyperbolic accusations?
At the time I pointed out that what she'd done was a classic example of a propaganda pivot, but what I didn't know then was that Carole had deliberately concealed her own personal involvement with the organisation in question while she was deflecting criticism away from them and back onto the target of their smears.
Deliberately pivoting criticism away from a very dodgy government-funded propaganda unit by echoing their attacks on a political rival of the party that pumped £2 million+ into their coffers is bad enough, but omitting the fact that she'd actually worked with them just a month previously, well that's exactly the kind of deceptiveness and lack of integrity that Carole has so successfully exposed in others.
And given that she's an award-winning investigative journalist, there's absolutely no believing that she failed to spot the link between the Integrity Initiative organisation who invited her to speak at their lavish taxpayer-bankrolled seminar for journalists, and the Integrity Initiative Twitter account she worked so hard to pivot criticism away from in her Twitter thread just a month later.
She's been caught red-handed playing the exact same deceptive propaganda games as the people she (rightly) criticises, but her reaction isn't to stop, take stock of how damaging this mess is for her campaign for greater political integrity and accountability, or to apologise.
Nope, it's to play the victim and create false equivalence between the right-wing Brexiteers who abuse her so disgustingly, and critics who point out that she's been caught making a shocking lapse in judgement.
Of course Carole can involve herself with the shady government-funded Institute for Statecraft if she wants to, and nobody with any sense of proportion is going to say that she's a "deep state operative" for giving a speech at one of their many lavishly-funded anti-Russia seminars.
However people can rightly point out that if the Putin government had been caught red-handed pumping £2 million into a shady psuedo-charity propaganda unit that works to create a 'new cold war' siege mentality in European politics and the media, deliberately interferes in the domestic politics and media organisations of European democracies, and spreads anti-opposition propaganda at home, Carole would obviously have been all over it rather than actively running social media distraction for them.
People can justifiably claim that she's spectacularly undermined her own credibility by writing a prolonged Twitter thread pivoting criticism away from them and onto Jeremy Corbyn, without even bothering to mention her own connection to the organisation in question.
The sensible approach would obviously be for her to attempt to repair the damage with an apology for her appalling lapse in judgement, but we'll see what happens.
Judging by her antics so far, it'll be more spinning, more deflection, and more efforts to dismiss people's legitimate concerns about her behaviour with straw-man 'the Russian stooges are calling me a deep state operative ho! ho! ho!' tactics.
In the hope that you're reading this Carole, please just apologise for this terrible lapse in judgement, undertake to try and avoid such poor and deceptive choices, be open and honest about your associations with any organisation you write about in future, and get back to what you're good at (investigating the shady behaviour of people like Arron Banks and dodgy opaquely-funded hard-right pseudo-charities like the Taxpayers' Alliance and the IEA).
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
This week's Spectator magazine hosts an article by the right-wing agitator Rod Liddle calling for more Islamophobia within the Tory party.
This extraordinary call for even more anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks comes against a backdrop of Theresa May deliberately stonewalling Muslim people's demands for an inquiry into the shocking scale and frequency of Islamophobic abuse within the Tory ranks.
There's no denying that the Tory party is riddled with anti-Muslim bigots, from the rank and file all the way up to the top of the party.
One of the most bizarre things about Rod Liddle's Spectator article is that it starts off with one of his trademark transphobic rants, which is still going on as the article hits the paywall fadeout!
But if you do get beyond the paywall you find that Liddle is re-using the simplistic extreme-right trick of conflating criticism of the Islamic religion with bigotry and hatred towards Muslim people.
He tries to imply that the loony liberal left are somehow censoring people from criticising Islam by accusing those who criticise the religion of being Islamophobes.
It's an utterly misleading argument, but unfortunately right-wing idiots buy into it.
It only takes the briefest glimpse at reality to see that the majority of people criticising the vile homophobic, misogynistic, democracy-crushing, head-chopping, terrorism-promoting, tyrannical Saudi war criminals are lefties.
Meanwhile Theresa May and the Tories continually suck up to the vile Islamist Saudi tyrants in order to hawk them even more British weapons, and right-wingers like Liddle and his chums at the Spectator turn a blind eye to this absolute depravity.
In fact, the very same Boris Johnson who the extreme-right hate mob are lauding for sticking the boot into Muslim women this week is the very person who outlined the Tory government's position that Britain will continue selling weapons to the Saudi tyrants to commit their war crimes with because if we don't cash in on their war crimes, someone else might!
Then if you look at the countries that are banning arms sales to Saudi Arabia and openly criticising them for their grotesque human rights record, it's the kind of socially liberal governments that Liddle and the Spectaror mob regularly spit their hate at (Canada, Norway &Germany).
If you look at the UK politicians who do the most to oppose arms sales to Saudi Arabia while they're committing war crimes in Yemen, it's lefties like Emily Thornbury, Caroline Lucas, and Jeremy Corbyn (all hate figures for Rod and his mates in the Spectator mob).
If you look at people who are actually leading the fight against grotesque practises like female genital mutilation, forced under-age marriage, and rampant misogyny, again it's usually leftie liberals and western Muslim women doing the heavy lifting, while hard-right idiots like Liddle carp from the sidelines and use these issues as ammunition to call for even more bigotry and hatred towards Muslim people in general.
Let's get it absolutely straight. It's absolutely possible to utterly condemn vile Islamist regimes like Saudi Arabia, and to oppose barbaric practises that are still commonplace in the Muslim world (like FGM and forced marriage) without spitting bigoted Islamophobic vitriol at all Muslims in general.
In fact there's nothing Islamophobic about criticising the Islamic religion at all (especially if you're doing it from an atheist/agnostic stance that includes criticism of other religions too).
But if you're using cheap and nasty appeals to "our Judeo-Christian history" to deliberately conflate criticism of Islam with spewing bigotry and hatred at Muslim people (as Liddle does in his article), you're blatantly being an utterly disingenuous shit.
We all know that had a left-leaning magazine or blog posted an article that openly called for "more anti-Jewish bigotry in the Labour ranks" and created a ridiculously deceptive argument that the freedom to criticise Israel somehow justifies this call for more anti-Semitic abuse, there would have been an absolute tidal wave of condemnation, but somehow Liddle continually gets away with this kind of extreme-right trolling.
What's even more telling is that the BBC's heavyweight political presenter Andrew Neil is the chair of Spectator magazine which published this disgracefully deceptive article calling for more anti-Muslim bigotry in politics.
So next time you see Andrew Neil, or any other BBC journalist, spewing faux outrage about the Labour anti-Semitism row, just remember that Neil is perfectly happy to turn a blind eye to outright calls for more anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks, and that the BBC are quite happy to have Neil continue to be the heavyweight front man for their supposedly impartial political coverage.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The most infuriating thing about Andrew Neil is that we all know that he's well capable of being a ferocious interviewer, but his pro-Tory and pro-Brexit biases prevent him from holding right-wing politicians and Brexiteers to account in the same way as he savages people he's ideologically opposed to.
His pro-Brexit bias is as obvious as it is understandable, after all he's a right-winger who has worked for all three of the main pro-Brexit mainstream media propaganda outlets in his time (the Murdoch empire, the Daily Mail, and the Barclay brothers' Press Holdings).
Anyone who is aware of Neil's background must be continually on the look out for the pro-Tory and pro-Brexit spin he puts on the news.
On the evening of Monday 20th November Neil posted a bizarrely hyperbolic tweet claiming that the breakdown in the German coalition government talks represented the worst political crisis in Germany since the 1940s, which he claimed to be even more severe than the Brexit mess the UK has been enduring for the last year and a half.
The reason he came out with this hyperbolic nonsense is obvious. The latest delusional Brexiteer trope is that a weakened Germany would somehow be good for the Brexit negotiations, as if the rest of Europe are just going to roll over and give the UK everything the Tories demand, just because Agela Merkel is having some domestic difficulties pulling together a coalition government!
The Tweet was utterly bizarre for several reasons. One of the main ones being that one party or another walking out of coalition talks is absolutely commonplace in countries with fair and proportional voting systems. If wrangling over coalition deals is a major Century-defining crisis, then Spain had two Century defining crises with unresolvable coalition talks in the last two years!
Another reason the Tweet is so ridiculous is that Germany has endured all kinds of extreme political situations since the 1940s. The nation was divided in half by the Berlin wall. Tensions were extraordinary. East Germany was stalked by the Stasi. West Germany was the absolute frontier of the Cold War. Then the Berlin Wall came down and Germany had to persuade the EU to break their own entry rules in order to allow East Germany fast-track entry through the process of reunification.
But perhaps the most ludicrous thing about Neil's initial Tweet is that there is one country that is definitely going through it's most severe political crisis since the 1940s, and that's the UK thanks to the Brexit shambles that Neil promotes so vehemently.
Being an ideologically blinkered Brexiteer isn't what made Andrew Neil such a pompous tit though. He made an absolute arse of himself when a guy called Jon Worth showed up to explain that all that had actually happened in Germany was that one of the four parties in the coalition talks had walked out, and that this was actually no big deal.
Neil couldn't tolerate being corrected like this so he went into full-on pompous attack mode, by replying "Guess you're not reading/watching German media".
The problem was that in his haste to bite back Neil failed to even bother to check who he was actually talking to.
It turns out that had Neil even bothered to read Jon Worth's Twitter bio, he would have found out that the guy is actually a member of a German political party, a political campaigner and a blogger on German politics.
Literally all that Neil had to do to avoid making such an arse of himself was to mouse over the guy's Twitter handle to check who he actually was before he snapped back, but he didn't bother.
And what's worse is that the comments beneath Neil's snarky reply called him out over and again for it, but he didn't backtrack or apologise at all, presumably imagining that if he just ignored it, nobody else would notice.
In a way Neil's Twitter blunder is indicative of the Brexiter mentality. These people have an ideological agenda which they propagandise for relentlessly, but they're so riddled with confirmation bias that they won't do even the slightest background research on anything that contradicts their worldview, to the point of not even checking who it is they're patronising with their bullshit.
Thus we end up with Neil making a pompous tit of himself by seeking to Brexitsplain German politics to someone who is actually an expert in German politics!
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The BBC Sunday Politics presenter Andrew Neil just described the Tory social care plan (Dementia Tax) as "A stealth inheritance tax of 100% on everything above £100,000".
This is quite some observation from a staunchly conservative former Rupert Murdoch journalist to make in the middle of an election campaign.
More astounding than seeing Andrew Neil battering the Tory party over this depraved policy of asset stripping elderly people when they develop age-related diseases, is the spectacle of Tories trying to defend Dementia Tax after they've spent decades arguing that inheritance tax is terribly unfair and that the threshold should be raised.
Boris Johnson was one of the most high-profile Tories to come out in support of this 100% stealth inheritance tax saying "the broad thrust is right", describing it as "reasonable" and even praising Theresa May as "brave" and "resolute" for planning to asset strip pensioners as she simultaneously hands out a mind-boggling £70 billion in tax cuts to her corporate mates.
So somehow Tories like Boris objected to a 40% inheritance on assets above £325,000 because it's supposedly far too harsh ... but now they approve of a 100% inheritance tax on assets above £100,000 because ... well ... they have to defend their party, no matter how depraved the policies, and no matter how wildly unhinged Theresa May's behaviour is becoming.
In a way it's amusing to see these people performing demeaning acts of mental gymnastics in order to defend something they'd be (rightly) attacking with furious indignation if any other party was proposing it.
But it's also worrying.
It's worrying because it demonstrates that people's tribal political allegiance to the Tory party extends way beyond anything like reason. It demonstrates that Tories are so wedded to their party that they're essentially immune to cognitive dissonance. It demonstrates that they will defend literally anything their beloved Tory party do, even if it runs completely against the grain of their own conservative ideology.
If so many Tories are ready and willing to defend a depraved 100% inheritance tax on assets above £100,000, they're obviously willing to defend literally anything that Theresa May comes up with, which is surely deeply concerning given her increasingly unhinged behaviour of late.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Over the years I've written several articles criticising the mainstream press for their biased coverage and the way that they frame the political debate in order to create the impression that popular liberal and centre-left ideas (opposition to imperialist warmongering, renationalisation, serious action against tax-dodging) are radical, extremist or unelectable, whilst portrying failed hard-right Thatcherite economic dogma (the austerity con, privatisation of core services like schools and the NHS, tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich) as normal, necessary or even fundamentally unquestionable. However it is important to recognise that the mainstream media is not one homogeneous blob, and that elements of the mainstream media are capable of providing good political coverage.
Even though huge numbers of mainstream journalists are perfectly happy to collect their pay packets for lazily churnalising press releases direct from Tory party HQ or some rotten Blairite thinktank, rather than doing anything resembling investigative journalism of their own, there are still journalists in the mainstream press who do a good job of holding the powerful to account.
One recent example of good work from elements of the mainstream media is the investigation into the massive electoral fraud that helped the Tories to win two dozen marginal seats at the 2015 General Election. The Daily Mirror exposed the way in which the Tories failed to declare expenses from their 2015 "Battle Bus" (the cost of the bus, hotels, catering ...) even though they explicitly admitted that the bus was campaigning for individual Tory candidates on their Twitter feed. Channel 4 News kept the public informed about the ongoing criminal investigations into Tory electoral fraud when the story was being studiously ignored by the news departments of other channels.
Of course independent media has also played an important part in exposing the 2015 Tory electoral fraud. I've posted several updates on it on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page, Éoin Clarke has covered it on Twitter, and without the campaign by the Canary to get people to contact their local police forces to report the Tory election fraud, it seems unlikely that at least police forces would be actively investigating their fraudulent over-spending.
As a result of the hard work of the Daily Mirror, Channel 4 News and various independent media sources, the Electoral Commission took the unprecedented step of resorting to the High Court to demand documentation that the Tory party had been trying to hide from the electoral fraud investigation. Such a drastic step from the Electoral Commission must come as quite a shock to anyone who remembers their timid failure to properly investigate Britain First's extraordinarily dodgy fundraising activities.
After the Electoral Commission used the courts to demand the evidence the Tories had been refusing to hand over, Andrew Neil (a staunch Conservative and ex-Murdoch hack who now works for the BBC) took an interest in the story that most of the mainstream media seem intent on ignoring. Even though in the past I've been highly critical of Andrew Neil's biased reporting, he deserves some credit for (eventually) highlighting a story that few at the BBC or other mainstream news outlets seemed willing to touch.
The development of social media means that the mainstream press is under serious pressure from independent journalism like never before, but the idea that the corporate press will simply disappear to be replaced by hard-working independent journalists is a complete fantasy. The mainstream press will remain a powerful force for shaping the political debate. The important though factor is that it is possible for us to make the mainstream press better. If they get a lot of positive feedback, and a lot of shares on social media for running good investigative campaigns, they'd clearly be likely to invest more effort in producing that kind of journalism in the future.
If we want a mainstream media that does good investigative work and tries to hold the powerful to account (rather than lazily churnalising government press releases or pushing the hard-right propaganda favoured by sociopathic press barons like Rupert Murdoch, Jonathan Harmsworth and the Barclay Brothers), we need to demand it.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Two weeks before the London Mayoral election David Cameron used parliamentary privilege to launch an utterly desperate effort to smear the Labour candidate Sadiq Khan with accusations that he had associated with an Imam called Sulaiman Ghani. David Cameron described Ghani as being an extremist who "supports ISIS".
Cameron's "pick a Muslim, any Muslim" smear tactics soon fell apart when it became clear that not only had Sulaiman Ghani spoken out against ISIS barbarity on many occasions, but that he had recently been invited to a Tory party event aimed at encouraging high profile Muslims to become Tory politicians!
In the weeks after David Cameron's lies about him Sulaiman Gani has suffered death threats, but all David Cameron has done is offered a pathetic mealy-mouthed apology over any "misunderstanding".
David Cameron can't be sued for slander because he's completely free to make up whatever lies he likes when addressing parliament, however the Tory defence secretary Michael Fallon and the BBC presenter Andrew Neil have no such defence because they repeated David Cameron's lies outside of parliament (in a radio interview and on BBC television).
Just one week after David Cameron spouted a load of lies about Muslim man with no connections to ISIS whatever in order to score cheap political points against a Muslim political rival, the Home Secretary Theresa May allowed a real Islamist hate preacher into the UK to give a speech at a mosque in Luton!
Hanif Qureshi is a notorious Pakistani hate preacher who promotes discrimination and intolerance towards Ahmadi Muslims. Not only does he promote intolerance and discrimination, the Pakistani authorities claim that one of Qurashi's hate sermons was the direct inspiration behind the assassination of the liberal governor of Punjab in 2011.
The events of the last few weeks make the Tory strategy on Islamist hate preachers absolutely clear. They think it's fine to publicly accuse an innocent Muslim of being an ISIS supporter in a pathetic effort to smear one of their their political rivals who happens to be a Muslim, whilst simultaneously handing out Visas to genuine Islamist hate preachers so they can come to the UK to give speeches!
The Tories see Islamist fanaticism as a brilliant propaganda tool (for smearing political rivals or trying to scrap our human rights) but when it comes to genuine Islamist fanatics coming to the UK, they clearly couldn't give a damn.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
