LA Times reports Whittle and Sheppard straight and true

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 04 June 2009 23:04.

John de Nugent has circularised this LA Times article, published yesterday, about the incarceration and legal processing of Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle. Dana Parsons did a fair job with it, one has to say. He resisted the very tiresome temptation to demonise them. Instead, he treated them with some sympathy as people who naively thought America was “the beacon of free speech in the Western world”.

Men bedeviled in bid for sanctuary

... Sheppard and Whittle were convicted in England for a string of essays and other published material on Sheppard’s heretical.com website, which uses a server based in Torrance. Sheppard was convicted on 11 counts, Whittle on five. In January, Sheppard was retried in absentia and convicted on five more charges.

Their online entries follow the well-traveled path of other nationalist polemicists, with particular emphasis on decrying the influence and power of Jews in the world.

“People are entitled to hold racist and extreme opinions which others may find unpleasant and obnoxious,” Mari Reid, a lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service’s Counter Terrorism Division in England said in a prepared statement earlier this year about the case.

“What they are not allowed to do is to publish or distribute those opinions to the public in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner either intending to stir up racial hatred or in circumstances where it is likely racial hatred will be stirred up.”

The vast majority of the material in this case concerned Jewish people, Reid said, “but there was also material relating to black, Asian and non-white people generally, all described in derogatory terms using offensive language.”

... In denying asylum, Peters ruled that the men hadn’t shown they had been persecuted in the past or likely to face future persecution.

Sheppard and Whittle had hoped their story would attract media attention, but that never materialized.

“I think it has very wide ramifications,” Leichty says of their convictions. “I don’t share their views or the way they communicate their views, but I certainly don’t think we should be incarcerating people for what they did.”

Sheppard said he and Whittle are merely waiting for a middle-of-the-night wake-up and a quick trip to the airport.

“We’re not cowed and we’re not repentant,” Sheppard says. “We have the right even to make mistakes. We could be wrong, it’s not inconceivable. We have a right to be wrong. All we’re doing is speaking our minds.”

Whittle says he isn’t keen on making a career out of being a political prisoner in England. “Simon is from Yorkshire,” he says. “People from Yorkshire are strong-willed. I’m not from Yorkshire. He sticks to his guns. I don’t have his willpower and tenacity.”

After 11 months in custody, Whittle is not sure anymore that he and Sheppard would have remained free even if they had quietly gone through customs, left LAX and found a lawyer to handle their asylum request. “Once they became aware of who we were and that we came to the U.S. to flee,” Whittle says, “we would have ended up in detention.”

That is how it played out. Coming to America has been a bust.

“We’ve never seen California but through bars,” Whittle says.

The “offending” articles at Heretical.com were removed when the prosecution commenced. I had read various pieces by both authors, though I don’t know if any of those were among the ones cited by the Crown Prosecution Service. I certainly remember thinking that the writing was unnecessarily provocative. It stereotyped Jews in that familar way which just supplies “the answers”. It did not cause the reader to think, did not cause him to question his received wisdom.

Everyone who sits down with the intention of committing to “paper” his thoughts about Jewish ethno-aggression, Jewish elitism, Jewish power, Jewish double-standards, whatever ... everyone has to confront this un-European bug-bear of hate speech law. There are no established guidelines for how to deal with it. Unless one just concludes - as, no doubt, the B’nai Brith intends - that it’s more trouble than it’s worth, there is always risk involved. Since our people are suffering under the exercise of the aforementioned ethno-aggression, elitism, power, etc, silence is not an option. One has to accept the risk and find a way to live within our Judaised law.

I hold that the answer is to cleave to high principle - to two not entirely contiguous principles, in fact. And these are the right to free speech, which we all enjoy in theory, and the duty to free our fellow Man from his mental chains. Free speech is the default setting that licences the freeing of minds. Hate speech may indeed be free speech, but it is not freeing speech. It allows the hearer only a highly ideologised understanding and a minimal range of emotional responses. Surely, it behoves us to think more of our kinsmen than this.

Anyone who has read my responses to JR’s narrow and narrowing propagandism will know that, for me, the nationalist’s motives have to be morally irreproachable. We are above ethnic hatred. We do not, and Simon and Stephen did not, need to indulge in anything that could be exploited by agents of a hostile law. We need to free our people from their chains, not place around them chains of our own, and not place ourselves in chains of a different kind.

Of course, it is always possible that our enemies will not respect such distinctions. Why would they? But that is the risk of truth-speaking in a malign world, and in the end it is not less than the risk of holding our tongues.

Tags: That Question Again

Comments:

Posted by Fiotheth on Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:15 | #

Yes the Heretical 2 case is an OUTRAGE in my mind.

This is so clearly a violation of the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ that the liberals all supposedly hold so dear! What hypocrisy!

‘Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights#Human_rights_set_out_in_the_Declaration

The thing is alot of their site barely deals with Racial issues and there is alot more about Male/ Female relations then probably anything else.

I have sort of been hoping that if the BNP makes some serious electoral gains that perhaps they could point to this situation and help the Heretical 2 out.

Anyhow as an American Citizen it is clear that actual Freedom of Speech is not valued here, just look at the treatments of Hendrik Mobus, Ernst Zundel, and the Heretical 2 and then compare that to how all the mestizo trash are just allowed to come and go!!!

This is a sick, twisted, hypoctritical society that claims to value Freedom of Speech and the 1st amendment, but just can’t wait to jump on anyone that actually utilizes those rights and if possible deport them because they do not have the politically correct opinions!! May the USA government Collapse like the Soviet Union did! “Ride the Tiger!”—Baron Julius Evola.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:42 | #

The main problem here is that Jews don’t believe in freedom of speech. They can’t fathom the concept; it’s not in their Asiatic genes, any more than it’s in a Chinaman’s or an Arab’s genes. And Jews exert lots and lots and lots of pressure here.

Posted by J Richards on Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:02 | #

Guessedworker,

Anyone who has read my responses to JR’s narrow and narrowing propagandism will know that, for me, the nationalist’s motives have to be morally irreproachable. We are above ethnic hatred. We do not, and Simon and Stephen did not, need to indulge in anything that could be exploited by agents of a hostile law. We need to free our people from their chains, not place around them chains of our own, and not place ourselves in chains of a different kind.

It’s not possible to have morally irreproachable stances when the arbiter of the yardstick to judge moral propriety is the enemy. Comply with the enemy’s requirements and you have an ineffective, useless argument.

Simply stating verifiable facts should not be seen as promoting hatred, but it will be when the enemy decides what constitutes hatred.

Consider Holocaust denial laws in Germany. German law doesn’t care about whether the Holocaust happened. All it cares about is whether you have denied it. How can people be freed of chains in a scenario like this? By complying with the law?

Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle were prosecuted for two publications, a newsletter that was apparently print only (I can’t find copies online) and a satirical publication called ‘Tales of the Holohoax’; the prosecution called it Tales of the Holocaust. Tales of the Holohoax is a cartoon book of absurd Holocaust claims. It cites references such as Arthur Butz, Ditlieb Felderer, Michael Hoffman, various news reports, etc. But what makes it markedly offensive to Jews is how the cartoons of the great artist A. Wyatt Mann (A white man) satirize absurd Jewish claims. Heretical still features a mostly complete scan of Tales of the Holohoax (missing endnotes).

Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle were prosecuted, in part, for a publication that they had no part in preparing.

You may argue that the appropriate manner of exposing ludicrous Holohoax claims is to post scholarly claims, but how many people are going to read pages after pages of dull scholarly text? Tales of the Holohoax makes numerous Holohoax claims accessible to a wide audience in a very engaging manner, and the references are listed in the endnotes for those looking for scholarly documentation.

In light of the prosecution of Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle, what should we do? MR’s in a similar situation as heretical.com: English owners hosting their websites offshore. So I can’t post Tales of the Holohoax at MR, but I can link to it. I’m going to come up with The Annotated Tales of the Holohoax, with extensive text-based commentary to help visually-impaired individuals get the gist of it (because an OCR program will have a difficult time with the text in the scans), and then link to it from MR. This way we work around the laws the enemy creates to undermine us and do our part to spread the message in a manner that both children and adults will enjoy.

Something most definitely needs to be done. I don’t advocate doing anything rash, but if the necessary act is morally sound but not legally sound, then the legal boundaries need to be pushed, the laws need to be worked around or, simply, defied. Or else, far from removing the chains from our people, we’ll see them enmeshed in thicker, heavier chains, and our task will become increasingly harder.

Posted by 1z0-052 on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:30 | #

I was initially concerned about this story due to ramifications concerning web site hostings in other countries, After hearing just how vile the defendants were My only concern is that Shepperd hasn’t actually killed himself yet…..I would have payed money to have seen old glue bag whatmough Blubbing into his Leiderhosen.1z0-055

Posted by Dan Dare on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:08 | #

In what is probably the final chapter in the H2 case, Sheppard and Whittle were sentenced at Leeds Crown Court today. Sheppard received 4 1/2 years and Whittle two, with each receiving an additional four months for skipping bail. To the best of my knowledge, Sheppard’s sentence is the longest yet imposed for ‘racial hatred’ offences.

Whether or not we agree agree with Sheppard and Whittle’s tactics and approach, website proprietors and contributors in the UK may find the following comments made in the BBC report particularly disturbing:

... The pair thought that they could circumvent English law because their website was hosted in the US.

That, said Adil Khan, head of diversity and community cohesion at Humberside Police, makes their conviction a first.

“This case is groundbreaking,” he said.

“The fact is now that we’ve been able to demonstrate that you’ve got nowhere to hide; people have been hiding on [sic] the fact that this server was in the US.

“Inciting racial hatred is a crime and one which seems to occur too regularly. This kind of material will not be tolerated as this lengthy investigation shows.”

Posted by Captainchaos on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:56 | #

website proprietors and contributors in the UK may find the following comments made in the BBC report particularly disturbing

Jonathan Bowden says British hate speech laws are specifically designed to target the way in which working-class Whites are comfortable voicing their objections to divershitty. That is why he keeps an academic tone, he avers.