Shofar archives:
Files
Press
Evening standard 052695
This was posted onto PSN, I think it may be of some interest to
the list?
Evening Standard (London)
Friday, 26 May, 1995,
The Dark Side of David Icke
He may seem like a harmless eccentric, but, says MARK HONIGSBAUM,
some of the views put forward by self-styled guru David Icke,
currently lecturing round Britain, are dangerously popular with
anti-Semites and neo-Nazis.
It has become fashionable, even among adherents of the New Age, to
dismiss David Icke as a crank. For a long time now the former Green
Party spokesman and self-styled “Son of God” has been collecting
fringe beliefs and theories like other people collect new shoes.
UFOs, CIA “mind control”, world apocalypse – you name it, David Icke
has tried it.
But judging by the response to Icke’s current lecture tour of
Britain, he is no longer quite the figure of fun he used to be.
At a recent meeting in Glastonbury, for instance, more than 100
people paid 5 pounds each to hear his views. During the lecture, David
Taylor, a national spokesman for the Green Party, repeatedly heckled
Icke about his use of the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Meanwhile, the Jewish Chronicle has
been pressing Icke’s Bath-based publisher, Gateway, to reveal the
truth about the manuscript of his latest book, said to contain
offensive revisionary passages about the Holocaust.
Now uncanny parallels are emerging between Icke’s thoughts – if that
is not too grand a term for his mishmash of conspiracy theories and
New Age – and the writings of senior figures in the armed militia
movement in America.
Icke’s last book, The Robot’s Rebellion, for instance, is peppered
with references to the “illuminati”, an occult elite said to have
originated in Bavaria in 1776, which both Icke and militia leaders
believe is at the root of the Global Government conspiracy they have
dubbed the “New World Order”.
According to Icke, this order – which he also calls the
“Brotherhood” – has the ability to plant microchips in people’s brains
so as to spread black propaganda against those, like Icke, who
challenge its power.
Significantly, about the only thing Timothy McVeigh, the former Gulf
War veteran accused of planting the Oklahoma bomb, has so far told his
police jailers – apart from his name, army rank and number – is that
he has a “bio-chip” implanted in his backside.
The implication is not lost on Icke, who has been arguing in his
lectures that the Oklahoma bomb is part of a “mind control” plot by
the FBI to increase the grip of the New World Order by producing a
backlash against those who seek to expose the “illuminati”.
It is all nonsense, of course. But it raises interesting questions,
not least about the links between Icke and the more sinister forces
operating within the New Age movement.
Is Icke simply parroting crackpot theories he’s heard on the New Age
grapevine, or has lie become an unwitting pawn of neo-Nazi and
anti-Semitic groups close to the militias?
In an inter-view this week Icke denied that he has been “fed” any
information. However, he said that the material for his controversial
new book “dropped in my lap in the most extraordinary way” and
admitted that a draft of his manuscript has been read by Marcus
Allen, the UK sales representative of Nexus New Times, an
Australia-based magazine that publishes articles by prominent
American militia members alongside bizarre stories about UFOs and
anti-Semitic tracts on the history of banking.
According to John Murray and Mathew Kalman, two young journalists
who run their own ‘eco-political’ investigative magazine, Open Eye,
Icke regularly plugs Nexus in his lectures and, on one occasion,
spoke with an American militia member who approached him after a
meeting.
And in the press release for his current tour, which sees him
lecturing in Bath this week and at the Global Future conference at
Olympia in June, Icke boasts that he has been given information by
“former high ranking Army officers and intelligence personnel”.
It is no secret that one of the sources for The Robot’s Rebellion
is another book, Behold A Pale Horse, whose author, William Cooper, is
a former US naval intelligence officer and guru of the Christian
Patriot militias in the US. And Nexus has recently run articles by
Mark Koernke, a former US intelligence agent and Michigan Militia
leader, who is on the run from federal agents investigating the
Oklahoma bombing, and by Linda Thompson, the self-styled adjutant
general of the US militias.
But what concerns Icke’s critics most is the suspicion that he is
now being used to spread anti-Semitic propaganda. Tucked away at the
back of Behold A Pale Horse, for instance, is the full, unexpurgated
text of the Protocols, a fraudulent document which purports to be the
secret minutes of a Zionist conference held in Switzerland in 1897,
outlining a conspiracy by Jews and freemasons to take over the world.
In The Robot’s Rebellion, Icke refers to them no fewer than 25 times
as the “illuminati protocols” – language that is taken directly from
Cooper.
Despite the fact that the Protocols were used by the Nazis to
justify the Holocaust, and now seem to be being used by the militias
to fuel paranoia about the New World Order, Icke refuses to
acknowledge they are a forgery. Instead he describes them as a
“copy”, arguing that whatever their origin the conspiracy they
describe has come true.
Denying he is anti-Semitic, Icke said this week: “If you’ve read my
book you will see that it says very clearly this is not a Jewish
conspiracy … The only time Protocols or Jews have been mentioned at
one of my lectures is when there’s been a question from the floor.”
He also denied that his new book, whose working title is And The
Truth Shall Set You Free, contained revisionist Holocaust material
and claimed that in a chapter on the Christian Patriots he makes it
clear that he does not share the aims of the militias. However, Alick
Bartholomew, Icke’s publisher at Gateway, admitted this week that an
earlier draft of the manuscript had contained revisionist material.
Because of differences over the book’s content Icke is now
threatening to publish it independently.
But what worries the Jewish community most is that Icke’s veiled
anti-Semitic references are now attracting the attention of more
sinister British forces, in particular Combat 18, the neo-Nazi group
which recruits among football’s violent hooligan fringe.
The Jewish Chronicle has reported how Combat 18 has taken to
publicizing Icke’s current tour in its internal journal, Putsch.
Citing Icke’s recent lecture in Glastonbury, Putsch claimed that Icke
spoke of ‘the sheep’ and how the Zionist-operated government, sorry
‘illuminati’, uses them for its own ends”.
The Combat 18 report continued: ‘He began to talk about the big
conspiracy by a group of bankers, media moguls etc. – always being
clever enough not to mention what all these had in common.”
According to the Green Party’s David Taylor, no matter how nutty
Icke seems, he can no longer be dismissed out of hand.
“A lot of people feel that world events are spiraling out of control
and are looking for someone to blame,” says Taylor. “Icke combines
conspiracy theories with a lot of Green politics and New Age ideas.
It’s a potentially lethal cocktail.”
[footnote: Icke was expelled from the green party several years ago
following his original messianic claims]
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