Guido Fawked - Racist Mask Slips

When someone tells you who they are, as the saying goes, believe them the first time. The adage is certainly true of the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, who have just done a racism so egregious that it has now been pulled. It is shocking but not surprising.

Look who sits in judgment on others ...

After all, that first time came back in the mists of time when Staines was a student in Hull, and a member of the Federation of Conservative Students. As the Guardian reported at the time, “A leader of the Federation of Conservative Students wrote to an organiser of the British National Party proposing joint ‘direct action’ to disrupt the meetings of leftwing students”.

For some reason, The Great Guido is most sensitive about this part of his Curriculum Vitae, and the episode never stays on his Wikipedia entry for long. But back to the Guardian: “The author of the letter is Mr Paul Delarie-Staines, the chairman of the federation’s 50-strong branch at the Humberside College of Higher Education. Mr Delarie-Staines, who is in his first year of a degree course in business information studies, wrote on May 22 to Mr Ian Walker, a BNP organiser in Hull”. So what did Staines tell the BNP?

“‘I share a lot of your objectives.' These included a return to leadership and statesmanship, the abolition of the welfare state, and ‘the elimination of Communism in Britain - the mass media, the trade unions, and the schoolroom”. Paranoid like Joe McCarthy. And then there is the racism.

While Ed Miliband was Labour leader, the Fawkes blog published two virulently anti-Semitic attacks on him. Both posts are still live as I type. He also sympathised with disgraced former MP Aidan Burley after the latter decided not to contest his seat in 2015 over a Nazi-themed stag party.

More recently, the Fawkes blog started calling anti-Semite on people who demonstrably were not, with the odd sly deletion when rumbled. Playing both sides of the racism field just like their pals in our free and fearless press. The Great Guido was caught siding with actual Nazis against a Jewish Labour MP. And also got caught using the Nazi-era “Cultural Marxism” trope.

... and look where he's at

Which brings us to the incident which caused a panicked Labour leadership to suspend PPC Graham Jones, after the Fawkes blog told that he “repeatedly referred to ‘f**king Israel’ and even ranted to Azhar Ali at the now infamous Lancashire meeting that Britons who volunteer to fight for the Israeli Defence Forces ‘should be locked up’ … He claimed - falsely - that it was illegal for Brits to fight for Israel”. Why is that “false”, O Great Guido?

“Many British Jews with dual citizenship have gone to Israel to fight … The claim that it is unlawful is an unfounded smear”. But Jones didn’t say anything about dual nationals. This is a logic leap of the kind previously favoured by Staines’ pals at the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance. Anyone who is not a dual national is breaking the law if they go off to fight for a foreign power.

So where’s the anti-Semitism there? Jones says “effing Israel”. Exasperation yes, anti-Semitism no. But Keir Starmer and his pals panicked. And rather too many in and around the right-wing press took the Fawkes rabble on trust. They may have chosen poorly, after Staines let the racism mask slip.

“The thing that nobody says yet we all know, is that the Labour Party have chosen to seek unsophisticated Muslim community support for numerical reasons at the expense of sophisticated Jewish support” he claimed. And then deleted the effort, but not until after several observers had taken screen shots. That’s straight-up Islamophobia. And straight-up anti-Semitism.

Staines and his rabble are driving this pile-on against Labour. And that now deleted Tweet is where he’s at. He told you the first time that he was not only a straight-up racist, but also that he was prepared to play both sides of the racism field. Shame on the right-wing press for going along with him. And shame on Keir Starmer and the Labour leadership for not standing their ground.

And shame on anyone who believed the Fawkes rabble because they wanted to believe it, rather than it being factually correct. Same old, same old.

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