The weaponisation of antisemitism against Richie Allen

Should Holocaust deniers be interviewed or ignored?

https://richieallen.co.uk

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/richieallen/episodes/2024-03-27T11_26_35-07_00

I recently appeared as a guest on the Richie Allen Show, for a second time. I’ve put up the podcast link above; should anyone want to listen, I appear from one hour in.

The Richie Allen Show is a daily (four days a week) internet radio talk show that covers topical, mostly political issues from the perspective of those whose views have been shunned by the mainstream media. Between 130,000 and 150,000 people listen to each programme live. I don’t know how many more catch up with the podcast. The Richie Allen Show is very popular within the freedom movement here in Britain – I have friends who try to catch every edition – as well as in Ireland (Allen is Irish), and in the USA, Canada, Australia and Spain (where Allen used to work).  

I’d certainly regard myself as someone who’s been excluded from mainstream media, given that Jewish publications refuse to interact with me or with my Jews for Justice group, and (as I have described in a recent Substack article) the Jewish Labour Movement went so far as to ban me from attending their conference this year on the grounds that I didn’t ‘share their values’.

I discussed a number of contentious topics with Allen on his programme, including the history of the Zionist sacrifice of fellow Jews in the interests of the Jewish state, which I believe connects the events of 7^th October last year – when I’m convinced that Israel allowed the massacre to happen – with the history of the Holocaust, when many Zionists regarded the murder by Nazi Germany of millions of Jews in Eastern Europe as a necessary precursor to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, to which end they went so far as to obstruct the efforts of others to rescue East European Jews and to try to prevent the news of the Holocaust from being publicised. (I’ll be writing more about this in a forthcoming Substack article, ‘What is Zionism?’)

Such a discussion would certainly be excluded from traditional media. Indeed, it is forbidden in public discourse even to suggest the possibility that the Israeli state knowingly permitted the massacre of 1,200 of its own citizens on 7^th October (and the capture of 240 hostages) in order to have a casus belli to go into Gaza and clear it out. This prohibition was made clear here in the UK earlier this year when the Labour Party candidate for the Rochdale parliamentary by-election (Azhar Ali) was revealed by a secret recording to have made just such a suggestion in a local party meeting back in October. The Labour Party dumped him as their candidate, but (according to election law) it was too close to the vote to replace him with someone else, so they ended up without a candidate in a by-election they’d been expecting to win. In effect, they sacrificed a parliamentary seat on the altar of the official 7^th October narrative. Instead, the by-election was won by the charismatic demagogue George Galloway standing (ironically) as an independent candidate on a pro-Palestine ticket.

Like (I suspect) many of us who would now consider ourselves members of the freedom movement, until the beginning of the COVID story in the early months of 2020 I still followed mainstream media, despite many misgivings. It was the lies about COVID told by national newspapers and national broadcasters that forced me to break permanently from traditional sources of news and opinion, and to look for alternative ones.

I hadn’t heard of the Richie Allen Show until October 2020, when the ‘Guardian’ newspaper tried to smear Martin Kuldorff, one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (which argued that lockdown should be abandoned in favour of ‘focused protection’ for vulnerable people), by reporting that he had appeared to promote the Declaration on the Richie Allen Show, a programme that had previously featured ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘Holocaust deniers.’

‘Great,’ I thought, ‘A radio programme that believes in free speech. I’ve been looking for one of those.’ From that point I started listening to Allen, and I never looked back. I shall always be grateful to the ‘Guardian’ for introducing me to the Richie Allen Show. I doubt that was the intention of its article.

Another prominent opponent of lockdown who appeared on the Richie Allen Show not long after Kuldorff was the Conservative MP (Member of Parliament) Desmond Swayne, whom Allen interviewed in November 2020, a week after a second national lockdown had been imposed by the Conservative government. Swayne was, said Allen, ‘pretty much a lone voice in Parliament’ in opposing lockdown. Swayne suggested to Allen that lockdown was a case of the cure being worse than the disease, as it would end up causing more harm and more deaths than COVID.

An MP speaking out against a lockdown that had just been re-imposed by his own party represented a public challenge to the government narrative. Something had to be done to silence him.

At the end of January 2021 an organisation called Hope Not Hate, which declared its purpose was to combat ‘far-right extremism,’ discovered that Swayne had appeared on the Richie Allen Show two and a half months earlier. It published a report of which the title, ‘Anti-Lockdown Tory MP appeared on Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory Show,’ demonstrated its agenda. It questioned Swayne’s opinion of lockdown, and condemned him for having appeared on ‘such an infamous and extreme show.’ It also published a letter it had written to the Conservative Party Chief Whip urging him to suspend Swayne from the Party on the grounds that his appearance had lent credibility to ‘those who seek to deny the Holocaust and who spread dangerous disinformation.’

In response to the Hope Not Hate report, Jewish organisations such as the Board of Deputies and the Community Security Trust put out statements that it was ‘scandalous’ and ‘inexcusable’ that that an MP should have appeared on a programme that had hosted Holocaust deniers.

The Conservative Party conducted a damage limitation exercise in which it instructed Swayne to apologise, and to make it clear that he would not have appeared on the programme had he known it had ‘previously hosted antisemitic opinions’ and that he would have nothing to do with the Richie Allen Show in future.

There was a twofold purpose here. It needed to be made clear to Swayne – and to anyone else who might think of following his lead – that they would be punished if they diverged from the government COVID narrative. So he was found ‘guilty by association’ – connected via the medium of the Richie Allen Show with the ‘conspiracy theorists’ and Holocaust deniers whom Allen had previously interviewed. It’s a technique that’s frequently used to silence people who diverge from the official line. The fact that Swayne – like Kuldorff before him – was unaware of the other guests who had appeared on the programme, and was talking about a different subject, was held to be irrelevant.

The other purpose was to denigrate the Richie Allen Show itself, to make it clear that no respectable person should have any connection with it, and that if they did, they would be smeared in a similar manner to Kuldorff and Swayne. The timing was significant. In the autumn of 2020 the COVID vaccine was being prepared for rollout, to be followed by a third national lockdown through the first half of 2021, one purpose of which was to blackmail the public into getting vaccinated by withholding their freedoms until they had done so. In preparation for this process, it was considered vital to the maintenance of the official narrative that critics of lockdown and of the COVID vaccines – such as Allen and the people he interviewed on his programme – be marginalised.

The smearing of anyone who has appeared on the Richie Allen Show, on the grounds that Allen has given airtime to antisemites and Holocaust deniers, is yet another example of the weaponisation of antisemitism, a topic about which I wrote several articles for the Daily Sceptic website last year, revealing its deployment against the Conservative (now independent) MP Andrew Bridgen and the broadcasters Neil Oliver and Tucker Carlson. I’ve also written for Frontline News about the weaponisation of antisemitism to bring down the former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. (I’ll post links at the bottom of this article. The Bridgen case remains topical, because he’s suing for libel Matt Hancock, the former Health Secretary, who described him in a tweet as ‘antisemitic’ for having stated that the vaccine rollout was ‘the worst crime against humanity since the Holocaust.)

Antisemitism has been weaponised against Allen as surely as it has been weaponised against left-wing politicians Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott or - on the other side of the political divide – Andrew Bridgen and Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. It has nothing to do with antisemitism (real or imagined or indeed confected). Antisemitism is merely the pretext. The accusation of antisemitism is used as an instrument to silence critics of the state-sanctioned narrative, wherever they might sit politically, and whatever they might believe about Jews or Judaism. In my view, it’s an abuse of Jewish history to use accusations of antisemitism in this way. The weaponisation of antisemitism is itself antisemitic.

The weaponisation of antisemitism against Allen has proved successful. Some well-known politicians used to appear on his show, such as Ann Widdecombe, who had served as a minister in the Conservative government in the 1990s. But no longer. Allen frequently mentions that he has invited mainstream commentators and organisations to put their case on his programme, but they either refuse or simply ignore him. They know that if they are seen to engage with Allen, they will be accused of guilt by association.

In its smear article on Kuldorff, the ‘Guardian’ did not allege that Allen was personally antisemitic but referred to Allen having interviewed Holocaust deniers Nick Kollerstrom and Alison Chabloz (of whom more later). Similar comments were made by the Jewish organisations that condemned Swayne for his appearance on the programme. The intention was clearly to imply that anyone who gives airtime to Holocaust deniers is by definition antisemitic. That’s nonsense.

Was David Baddiel antisemitic when he presented the programme ‘Confronting Holocaust Denial’ on BBC television in February 2020, featuring an interview with Irish Holocaust denier Dermot Mulqueen? Baddiel certainly expressed doubts about the wisdom of making such a documentary. ‘Will this programme fan the flames of Holocaust denial?’ he wondered. Baddiel, who’s a comedian, is not especially well-known abroad, but he’s the most famous Jew in Britain, or at least the Jew who’s most famous for being Jewish. His description of himself on Twitter (where he has nearly 900,000 followers) is one word, ‘Jew.’

Perhaps the ‘Guardian’ and the Jewish organisations would say that what they had intended to imply by their comments was that anyone who interviews Holocaust deniers sympathetically is by definition antisemitic. But Allen wasn’t especially sympathetic in his interviews with Holocaust deniers Kollerstrom and Chabloz. He was polite, but he did challenge their opinions.

One problem confronting anyone who might want to judge for themselves whether Allen had interviewed Kollerstrom and Chabloz effectively – had challenged them – is that these interviews have been shadow-banned. They can’t be found online simply by searching for the names of the participants. It requires a certain amount of ingenuity to find podcasts of the interviews. It took me a while to do so.

I’ve listened to four of Allen’s interviews with Chabloz (from 2017-19) and he repeatedly made it clear that he didn’t agree with her claims about the Holocaust. These interviews didn’t actually focus on Chabloz’s Holocaust denial (she used the term ‘revisionism’) but on what Chabloz described as a campaign of persecution against her by the Campaign Against Antisemitism. In one of the interviews, Chabloz argues that Jews are indoctrinated with a persecution complex, and that the Holocaust narrative is being used to implement globalist agenda, and Allen suggests that she’d do a lot better to focus on these arguments rather than on denying the Holocaust.

Allen’s interview with Kollerstrom (from January 2016) dealt with the claims of Holocaust deniers in more detail. (I’ve posted a link at the bottom of this article.) Kollerstrom, a science historian who had been an honorary research fellow in the Department of Science and Technical Studies at University College London until he was sacked in 2008 on account of his views about the Holocaust, had been invited on the programme to discuss the content of his book ‘Breaking the Spell: the Holocaust: myth and reality.’ 

The Hope Not Hate report on the Richie Allen Show highlighted Kollerstrom’s claim that there had been no Nazi policy to murder Jews in gas chambers, and criticised Allen’s conduct of the interview by suggesting that ‘Allen lightly challenges Kollerstrom on some of his assertions.’ Obviously Hope Not Hate was intending to denigrate Allen, but in this instance Allen had already denigrated himself. In a video in 2019 he had stated that ‘The interview with Nick Kollerstrom wasn’t my finest hour. I wasn’t nearly as robust as I could have been in challenging him. Mea culpa.’ But he also insisted that ‘I didn’t support his point of view.’

Allen did in fact push back in the interview against Kollerstrom’s claim that there had been no policy to murder Jews in gas chambers. Allen questioned the technical document (the Leuchter Report) on which Kollerstrom based his contention that the gas chambers had been used for disinfection rather than murder; he cited the accounts of German camp guards who had subsequently stated that anyone who denied that the Jews had been gassed was either ‘crazy’ or malevolent; he brought up the photographs of piles of dead bodies taken by the Allies when they encountered the camps; and he pointed out that in his time as a broadcaster he had spoken both to Holocaust survivors and to the families of victims.  

The gas chamber issue is always raised by Holocaust deniers. I’m not sure that it’s as favourable to their position as they like to imagine. They point out that the gas chambers at Auschwitz are ‘fakes’ because they were reconstructed by the Soviets after the war. That’s true, and it’s a mistake that this isn’t made clear to people who visit Auschwitz today. But why did the Soviets need to reconstruct them? Because in late 1944 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had ordered them to be destroyed in the face of the Soviet advance. Himmler was delusional. He thought that a deal could be done with the Allies. That’s why he ordered the evidence of the gas chambers to be destroyed. Their discovery would have scuppered his plans for a settlement. In 1945 Himmler tried to negotiate his own peace deal with the Allies, and even had Norbert Masur, a Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress, flown into Berlin for a meeting before which – amazingly – he declared that ‘I want to bury the hatchet between us and the Jews.’

I think Allen’s biggest failing in the interview was when he said nothing to counter Kollerstrom’s claim that the ‘real death camps’ were the ones in which the Allies held German prisoners after the war. That’s another standard argument of Holocaust deniers: that the Germans actually suffered worse than the Jews (whether in the bombing of Dresden or in these prison camps or in the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe when the war had ended). There’s no good evidence to support Kollerstrom’s claims of a deliberate policy of extermination in the Allied-run camps – although it’s true that the conditions in them were very bad, and many Germans did die.

The reason why Allen didn’t counter Kollerstrom’s claims about the post-war camps is that they aren’t mentioned in his book, so Allen hadn’t been prepared for him to bring them up. There’s always an imbalance when a journalist interviews an expert on his specialist subject: however much he prepares for the interview, the journalist will never have the same command of the material as the expert, so it’s hard for him to ‘win’ the debate.

The salient point here is that Allen hasn’t been demonised because he could (and should) have pressed Kollerstrom harder on his claims. Allen has been demonised because he’s perceived to be a dangerous journalist who threatens the stability of the official narrative. He’s dangerous because he’s prepared to interview people who have been excluded from mainstream media on the grounds that their views challenge what the public have been told they are supposed to believe. So a pretext is found – his interviews with Holocaust deniers – and it’s used to denigrate him.

Politicians and mainstream media don’t really disapprove of people who interview Holocaust deniers, just of people they don’t like who interview Holocaust deniers. The term ‘confected outrage’ comes to mind. The very same organisations that expressed offence over the appearance of Chabloz and Kollerstrom on the Richie Allen Show had fallen over each other some years earlier (in 2000) to interview the military historian David Irving, after he lost his libel action against Deborah Lipstadt, whom he'd sued for describing him in her book ‘Denying the Holocaust’ as a Holocaust denier who had distorted historical evidence to fit his political agenda. After his legal defeat Irving conducted multiple interviews with radio and television journalists, who said nothing to counter his claims of a Jewish conspiracy against him and who proved in several instances much less capable of challenging his arguments than Allen had been in his interviews with Chabloz and Kollerstrom. The Jewish Board of Deputies even complained officially to the BBC about the amount of airtime it was giving to a man whom the High Court had described as an antisemite and Holocaust denier. Not that it did them any good.

In his BBC programme about Holocaust denial in 2020 Baddiel suggested that it had become much more urgent to interview Holocaust deniers in the twenty years since the Irving trial. He interviewed the lawyer Anthony Julius, who had defended Lipstadt against Irving. Julius told Baddiel that ‘You don’t need to seek out these Holocaust deniers and give them airtime – so don’t,’ explaining that he’d only been forced to confront Irving because of the court case. Baddiel replied that times had changed and Holocaust deniers now could publicise their views on social media, so they could no longer simply be ignored.

A good deal more has changed in the four years since the BBC broadcast Baddiel’s programme. This short period has seen a dramatic collapse in the credibility of traditional media. The BBC and other mainstream sources have revealed themselves no longer to be news organisations, but propaganda ones. They have spread disinformation (to use their own term) about topics from COVID to climate change, and from the war in Ukraine to the one in Israel/Palestine. They have suppressed discussion of COVID vaccine damage, of fraud in the 2020 US Presidential election, and of Israeli state complicity in the 7^th October pogrom. Many of those who have seen through the lies coming out of traditional media have now adopted a default position that wherever debate has been silenced, the opposite of the official narrative must automatically be the truth. The more that Holocaust denial is suppressed, the more people will believe that the official Holocaust narrative is false. As someone who has been immersed in the freedom movement for the past three years, I can confirm that Holocaust denial is everywhere.

In the first of her interviews with Allen, Chabloz told him that it was the existence of legislation on the Continent (where she had been living) making it a criminal offence to deny the Holocaust, that had caused her to start questioning the Holocaust narrative.

Chabloz is a satirical singer-songwriter against whom the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) brought out a private prosecution over videos of some of her songs which had mocked victims of the Holocaust. In 2018 a magistrate found her guilty of the offence of communicating obscene material, on the grounds that she had deliberately intended the content of her songs to be offensive, rather than merely satirical. The CAA suggested that this decision sent a legal precedent for the criminalisation of Holocaust denial here in Britain, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they? I can see nothing in the judgment to support their claim. It’s not currently illegal to deny the Holocaust in the UK.

I can’t imagine that I (nor anyone else) would have heard of Chabloz, had the CAA not launched a prosecution against her. Allen certainly wouldn’t have interviewed her, had they not done so. One thing that can be said for sure about criminalising Holocaust denial and prosecuting Holocaust deniers is that doing so gives them publicity. It's ironical that the very same organisations who accuse journalists like Allen of giving unwarranted publicity to Holocaust deniers by interviewing them, argue in favour of prosecuting them, which draws even more attention to their arguments.

The same point is demonstrated by the Irving libel case. Although Irving wasn’t being prosecuted – he’d started the legal action himself as the plaintiff in a libel suit – the trial afforded his claims enormous publicity, as demonstrated by media reporting of the case and the interviews he gave after it had ended. Not to mention a film (‘Denial’) that was made about it some years later.

It has sometimes been said that the Irving libel case put the Holocaust on trial, but one could equally see it the other way round, that it put Holocaust denial on trial – and found it wanting. Truth thrives in daylight, as the saying goes. Had Irving not brought his libel action, the historian Richard J. Evans, a leading expert on the history of Nazi Germany, would not have been employed by the defence as an expert witness, and would not have devoted two years of his life to the forensic examination of Irving’s claims about the Holocaust. Irving’s arguments did not differ significantly from those later put forward by Kollerstrom – that relatively few Jews died at the hands of the Germans, that there was no extermination of Jews in gas chambers, and that the suffering of the Germans at the hands of the Allies was much worse than that of the Jews at the hands of the Germans – and they were comprehensively demolished by Evans in the witness box at the trial and in his subsequent book ‘Lying About Hitler’ (2001). Irving’s reputation never recovered from the trial. The story of the Irving libel trial demonstrates the benefit of confronting the arguments of Holocaust deniers.

There are credible arguments against debating Holocaust deniers. In her book ‘Denying the Holocaust,’ Lipstadt stated that she always refuses to debate Holocaust deniers, on the grounds that such a discussion would give their position a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve. She argues that Holocaust denial is not a genuine historical perspective, because it relies on a deliberate distortion of the historical record.

But if one doesn’t debate with Holocaust deniers, they are left in control of the arena – the argument Baddiel made to Julius.

Given the prevalence of Holocaust denial within the freedom movement, we have been discussing in our Jews for Justice group whether we should organise a debate with Holocaust deniers. Currently we’re uncertain. It would demonstrate our openness to discussion, but would it really change anyone’s mind? As is often said in connection with efforts to persuade ‘normies’ that COVID was not in fact a deadly disease that threatened the very foundations of civilisation, and to which the only appropriate responses were lockdown, testing, masks and vaccination, it’s impossible to reason someone out of a position they weren’t reasoned into in the first case. Because people were made terrified of COVID by state and media propaganda directed at their emotions, they can only be persuaded to change their minds by working on their emotions in the opposite direction.

So too with Holocaust deniers. I really don’t believe they’re interested in considering the overwhelming evidence of the mass murder of Jews (and others). They’ve made up their minds, and nothing’s going to change them. They’re interested only in evidence that supports their position, not that challenges it. Holocaust denial is a cult, a matter of faith rather than reason.

What’s more, Holocaust deniers say the same about those of us who accept the reality of the Holocaust (while being prepared to consider questions about the precise number who were murdered, and how many of them relatively were shot or gassed or allowed to die of disease, which are subjects of debate among historians).

In another interview (on TBR Radio) Chabloz claimed that believing in the Holocaust is a ‘religion’, that you’re declared a ‘heretic’ if you don’t believe in it, and that ‘they’ will ‘execute’ you as a result. If this is also what other Holocaust deniers believe, then one might wonder why they would ever want to debate the subject with their opponents. Maybe only to provide legitimacy for their arguments – the very reason Lipstadt gave for refusing to debate them.

Again, it’s the same as the COVID issue. We think of those who believed (and believe) the official COVID narrative as having been brainwashed into joining a cult. Well, many of them think the same about us – if the various articles that have appeared in mainstream publications on this topic are to be believed. Yes, there’s an element of gaslighting here, but there are also journalists who genuinely believe the nonsense they’ve written. I’m often reminded of the headline put out by the ‘Times’ at the beginning of last year after Andrew Bridgen MP had started speaking out on the issue of COVID vaccine harms, about his having been ‘groomed by gangs of anti-vaxxers’. Really?

This is the tragedy of the modern world about which Allen has so often spoken. People on opposing sides of the political divide don’t just disagree; they inhabit different realities. They’re no longer interested in debating their ideological opponents, but simply dismiss them as ‘deluded’ and ‘brainwashed’. Whatever one might think about his opinions, Allen is an old-fashioned journalist who’s prepared to debate with anyone who’s prepared to debate with him. I suspect that many of people who say they won’t go on his programme because he gives airtime to antisemites and Holocaust deniers, are really looking for an excuse to avoid participation in an actual debate – as opposed to the regurgitation of pre-prepared soundbites – because it’s just not something they’re capable of doing any longer.

Allen’s interview with Kollerstrom:

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/richieallen/episodes/2016-01-27T14_16_32-08_00

‘Holocaust Controversies’:

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com

My articles on weaponising antisemitism for the ‘Daily Sceptic:’:

https://dailysceptic.org/author/andrew-barr/

My article on weaponising antisemitism for ‘Frontline News’:

https://frontline.news/post/weaponizing-antisemitism