BBC Platforms Another Bigot

Those who look in regularly on Zelo Street will need to introduction to the machinations of one Carl Benjamin, who styles himself Sargon of Akkad. Nor will the three now ex-UKIP female MEPs who yesterday resigned from the party after new leader Adolf von Batten stated on The Andy Marr Show™ that Benjamin’s Tweet at Labour MP Jess Phillips - “I wouldn’t even rape you, Jess Phillips” - was “Satire”.

I em not a racialist but, und zis is a big but ...

This photo has a message, and the message is CREEP

That must have been the excuse they left out of the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch. Twitter certainly didn’t think it was “satire” and duly banned Benjamin, although he has since snuck back on to the platform, first as the custodian of the @warplanpurple account, and then as both @backworldsman and @CarlUKIP. Lying and cheating within UKIP is not, it seems, restricted to the deeply unsavoury Neil Hamilton.

Nor is offensive and, let us put it directly, sick behaviour. Benjamin, as I’ve told previously, has past form for excusing paedophilia, deploying the N-word, calling Chinese people “Chinks”, calling those with learning difficulties “Retards”, and using terms like “Spic”. More recently, the @backworldsman account has been caught telling a female Doctor “I wouldn’t even rape you either” (the account is suspended as I type).

Carl Benjamin is, let us not drive this round the houses for too long, a creep of the lowest order. The excuse from Batten that he is a mere “Classical Liberal” is tosh. No-one with brain plugged in and a hole in their arse should be giving him a platform for his further self-promotion. But that has not stopped BBC Points West asking him “@CarlUKIP Would it be possible to use a short clip from your campaign video on BBC Points West?”

As Mrs T might have put it, No, No, No, No, No, No. Why this should be was pointed out plainly by BuzzFeed News yesterday under the headline “A YouTuber Standing As A UKIP Candidate Invited Supporters To A Gaming Community That Has Chatrooms Filled With White Supremacist And Anti-Semitic Content … Sargon of Akkad - one of UKIP’s candidates for the European elections - invited supporters to join a Discord server from a video on his YouTube channel last week”. That would be Carl Benjamin.

Benjamin’s pals have been furiously denying the BuzzFeed claims, but Ash Sarkar of Novara Media needed no prompting to tell her what he was about: “Death threats, antisemitism, and racism: welcome to campaign nerve-centre of UKIP’s star MEP candidate … This isn’t just a Facebook group that Carl Benjamin happens to be a member of. This is the digital platform through which he’s soliciting campaign donations and recruiting would-be activists”. Got it in one.

Also, BuzzFeed might even now have been too late in acting, as Mike Stuchbery pointed out: “If you think Sargon's is bad, wait until you see Dankula's. Unfortunately nobody seemed to care last year when we were sharing some of the stuff there”. Mark Meechan, who styles himself Count Dankula, also claims to be in it for the laughs.

The BBC should not be giving either of them a platform. Racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, is not “satire”. Misogyny is not “satire”. Death threats are not “satire”.

This is another little Wild West Show that deserves no attention at all. End of story.

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