According to The Times (UK £), doctors, vicars, social workers and other professionals have been investigated by the police for “non-crime hate incidents”. Oh — so too have nine year-olds.
Eh? Say again?! And what exactly is a non-crime hate incident? What do these words even mean? If the incident isn’t a crime, why are the police investigating it at all?
You may well ask. When a furore developed over this issue last week Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions, was baffled. “I had to look up what on earth the term meant — I was puzzled by it,” said Britain’s chief prosecutor.
This was hardly surprising, since it makes no sense at all unless you have a mindset forged in the Soviet Union. For the point is not to police crime but to police people’s thinking.
This is utterly inimical to a free society. Or rather, it certainly should be. Yet it’s now utterly out of control. According to statistics from 45 of Britain’s 48 police forces, more than 13,200 “hate incidents” were recorded in the 12 months to June this year.
Government guidance says that non-crime hate incidents are supposed to be recorded where an incident is “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and where there is a real risk of escalation “causing significant harm or a criminal offence”.
Yet police forces have recorded such incidents against a nine-year-old who called a primary school classmate a “retard,” and against two secondary school girls who said that another pupil smelt “like fish”. Officers similarly recorded them against a man who voiced his view on transgender pronouns; a journalist who described a challenging interview with a “deaf and dumb” person; and a vicar who told a parishioner it was a sin to be gay.
The issue blew up when a Telegraph journalist, Allison Pearson, was visited at her home by Essex police who told her that she had been accused of committing the criminal offence of stirring up racial hatred in a tweet posted a year previously. The police have indignantly denied her claim that they had first told her she was being investigated for a non-crime hate incident; but clearly an actual criminal offence is more serious, and so the treatment of Allison Pearson becomes even more invidious.
While some details remain unclear, it seems that she had called a group of demonstrators from a Pakistani political party at an anti-Israel demonstration “Jew-haters” (“seems” because in true Stasi fashion she wasn’t even told what she’d written or who had complained about it).
There have been claims that her tweet contained errors. But since when were errors or inaccuracies a reason to treat a journalist as a suspected criminal? More to the point, she had made no comment about the race of those demonstrators. So how could her comment have been an example of racial hatred?
One night be forgiven for concluding that, for the police, any criticism of the behaviour of anyone who is Asian is an example of racial hatred, regardless of whether that person’s race was the subject of the comment at all. In other words, the police have stopped assessing behaviour and are basing their decisions on racial background instead.
The police action was even more grotesque because the offending tweet was actually protesting against racial hatred. Ah, but it was hatred of Jews; and hatred of Jews seems to be a non-hate thing altogether.
For more than a year since the October 7 atrocities in Israel, huge demonstrations have taken place in the streets of London and other cities aimed at intimidating Jews, chanting for their mass murder and the destruction of the world’s one Jewish state and inciting murderous hatred by accusing Israelis of “genocide”. These demonstrations — and countless smaller but similar incidents — have left many British Jews too frightened to go into central London or use public transport.
Yet by and large the police have treated these behaviours neither as crimes (which they are on multiple counts in law) nor even as “non-crime hate incidents ” (even though they are certainly peddling hatred under any reasonable definition). The police have simply stood by and allowed the streets to be made unsafe for Jews — while harassing Allison Pearson for protesting about it.
Last month, after the Union of Jewish Students shared a message online about increased antisemitism on campus, Alex Hearn, co-director of Labour Against Antisemitism, complained to the Cambridgeshire police that a man on X had sent him and the UJS an image of the Star of David entwined with a bloodied swastika accompanied by the message: “The irony of becoming what you once hated.”
Cambridgeshire Police replied that this did not meet the required threshold of being “grossly offensive” and that this was instead a non-crime hate incident. The force added:
This was hardly surprising, since it makes no sense at all unless you have a mindset forged in the Soviet Union. For the point is not to police crime but to police people’s thinking.
This is utterly inimical to a free society. Or rather, it certainly should be. Yet it’s now utterly out of control. According to statistics from 45 of Britain’s 48 police forces, more than 13,200 “hate incidents” were recorded in the 12 months to June this year.
Government guidance says that non-crime hate incidents are supposed to be recorded where an incident is “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and where there is a real risk of escalation “causing significant harm or a criminal offence”.
Yet police forces have recorded such incidents against a nine-year-old who called a primary school classmate a “retard,” and against two secondary school girls who said that another pupil smelt “like fish”. Officers similarly recorded them against a man who voiced his view on transgender pronouns; a journalist who described a challenging interview with a “deaf and dumb” person; and a vicar who told a parishioner it was a sin to be gay.
The issue blew up when a Telegraph journalist, Allison Pearson, was visited at her home by Essex police who told her that she had been accused of committing the criminal offence of stirring up racial hatred in a tweet posted a year previously. The police have indignantly denied her claim that they had first told her she was being investigated for a non-crime hate incident; but clearly an actual criminal offence is more serious, and so the treatment of Allison Pearson becomes even more invidious.
While some details remain unclear, it seems that she had called a group of demonstrators from a Pakistani political party at an anti-Israel demonstration “Jew-haters” (“seems” because in true Stasi fashion she wasn’t even told what she’d written or who had complained about it).
There have been claims that her tweet contained errors. But since when were errors or inaccuracies a reason to treat a journalist as a suspected criminal? More to the point, she had made no comment about the race of those demonstrators. So how could her comment have been an example of racial hatred?
One night be forgiven for concluding that, for the police, any criticism of the behaviour of anyone who is Asian is an example of racial hatred, regardless of whether that person’s race was the subject of the comment at all. In other words, the police have stopped assessing behaviour and are basing their decisions on racial background instead.
The police action was even more grotesque because the offending tweet was actually protesting against racial hatred. Ah, but it was hatred of Jews; and hatred of Jews seems to be a non-hate thing altogether.
For more than a year since the October 7 atrocities in Israel, huge demonstrations have taken place in the streets of London and other cities aimed at intimidating Jews, chanting for their mass murder and the destruction of the world’s one Jewish state and inciting murderous hatred by accusing Israelis of “genocide”. These demonstrations — and countless smaller but similar incidents — have left many British Jews too frightened to go into central London or use public transport.
Yet by and large the police have treated these behaviours neither as crimes (which they are on multiple counts in law) nor even as “non-crime hate incidents ” (even though they are certainly peddling hatred under any reasonable definition). The police have simply stood by and allowed the streets to be made unsafe for Jews — while harassing Allison Pearson for protesting about it.
Last month, after the Union of Jewish Students shared a message online about increased antisemitism on campus, Alex Hearn, co-director of Labour Against Antisemitism, complained to the Cambridgeshire police that a man on X had sent him and the UJS an image of the Star of David entwined with a bloodied swastika accompanied by the message: “The irony of becoming what you once hated.”
Cambridgeshire Police replied that this did not meet the required threshold of being “grossly offensive” and that this was instead a non-crime hate incident. The force added:
As well as this, there is a balance to strike with article 10 of the Human Rights Act, which protects freedom of expression and allows people to say things that “offend, shock or disturb the state or any section of the population”.
Yet Allison Pearson was not allowed that freedom. Moreover, accusing Jews of becoming Nazis is much more than merely offensive, shocking or disturbing. It turns Jews into enemies of humanity and thus makes them the target of murderous hatred.
But when it comes to Jews, the police threshold of tolerance for attacks against them seems to be extraordinarily high. The Jewish Chronicle reports:
The Met have said that an imam who led a prayer for the destruction of Jewish homes “did not meet the threshold of a crime” in a decision that has baffled security experts. Just two weeks after Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel last year, a preacher at an east London mosque – located near a sizeable Jewish community – told his followers: “Oh Allah, curse the Jews and the children of Israel. Oh Allah, curse the infidels and the polytheists. Oh Allah, break their words, shake their feet, disperse and tear apart their unity and ruin their houses and destroy their homes.”
A spokesperson for the Met has now told the JC that despite the fact that “many people found the content upsetting… the entire sermon, including the wording, context and narrative have been reviewed and officers concluded that it does not meet the threshold of a crime”.
“Upsetting?” This was open incitement to attack British Jews. This is being permitted by the police with no come-back — yet Allison Pearson is being accused of a crime for protesting at police indifference towards Jew-hatred.
Most of the protests against hate crime and non-crime hate have concentrated on the threat to free speech. That, though, doesn’t get to the nub of this lurch into oppressiveness. It’s not that speech is being suppressed. It’s only some types of speech — those that don’t conform to a culture-wide power grab by certain protected groups.
This is “victim culture”. Any incident that’s perceived by the supposed victim or bystander to be motivated by hostility or prejudice against a “protected characteristic,” such as somebody’s race or perceived race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, is deemed to be unarguably a hate incident.
These expressions are deemed hateful not because they necessarily do any harm to anyone. The harm they do is not objectively real. It’s merely the opinion of the alleged “victim” that it’s done harm. If the complainant belongs to a “protected” group, they are indisputably considered a victim and the person they have accused is accordingly indisputably deemed to have harmed them.
And so the offending utterance must be banned and the offender must be denounced, vilified and accused of committing a crime — or, if there isn’t any evidence of an actual crime having been committed, a non-crime hate incident which will also do the job of branding the accused as an enemy of humanity but without any trial at all.
This entirely subjective criterion of hate has opened the way for utterly vexatious claims that can ruin the reputation and life of their unjustly denounced target. People who are in fact the objects of real hatred are either ignored or find themselves accused of promoting hatred when they protest or seek to defend themselves against the hatred being expressed against them. This is the kind of abuse of power associated with a totalitarian police state.
Real victims are not only having the hatred against them erased, but hate crimes being committed against them are being turned into hate-crimes by them. The principal target of this Orwellian mind-twisting is the State of Israel, and to that end antisemitism is being weaponised against Jews everywhere — the one truly oppressed minority in the world that’s not regarded as a victim group but as oppressors.
The Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, based at the University of London, has announced a online programme next month about “Aliya, Antisemitism, and US Zionism in the World”. This programme is set to feature Doug Rossinow, a Minnesota professor who peddles incendiary falsehoods and demonisation of Israel and its American Jewish supporters.
In July 2002, days after Palestinian Arab terrorists massacred nine Israeli civilians on a bus near the town of Immanuel, Rossinow and others demanded the expulsion of Jews from Judea, Samaria, the Old City of Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
Israel Resource Review reports:
Rossinow’s group also urged the US government to use “our massive economic and military support” as “leverage” to force Israel to agree to those demands. They even asserted that “foreign troops may well be required to enforce [the terms], and they must be prepared to accept casualties.” Demanding that American and other soldiers give their lives in order to force Israel to its knees is a remarkable position to take, to put it mildly…
In two articles that he authored in 2018, Rossinow denigrated the “swaggering” American Israel Public Affairs Committee, declaring it was “born of violence and conflict” and “born in awful knowledge.” He wrote that AIPAC was “formed to spin positive PR after Israeli atrocities” and “to deny, obscure, or downplay the piercing impact” of Israeli actions. And he added this vicious comment: “Violence by the Israeli state against Palestinians…lies like a hard stone gnarled in the roots of the Israel lobby.”
Rossinow’s upcoming talk isn’t the first time that the Birkbeck Institute has turned to a harsh critic of Israel to lecture about Israel. Last June, it organised a seminar by Harvard professor Derek Penslar, who has publicly accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “Jewish supremacism”. Penslar was the person Birkbeck decided would be most qualified to lecture on Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
Imagine if a university department of black studies were to invite white supremacists to lecture on slavery and racism in America. That wouldn’t ever happen? Too right! So why is there only silent indifference to Birkbeck’s hijack of antisemitism?
Britain’s Labour government is uneasily shuffling its feet over the policing of hate incidents. But since so many Labour party members and “progressives” in general are fanatical supporters of victim culture and fanatical haters of Israel, the chances of ministers doing anything to arrest this slide into cultural darkness are nil.
But let’s not forget — these monstrosities were allowed to develop under successive Conservative administrations which turned a blind eye and went along with them. The Sovietisation of Britain may have started under Labour, but it was given rocket fuel on the Tories’ watch.
It’s not enough for the Tories now to protest. If they really want to turn this round, they must first own it — and show us all what they now understand they got so badly wrong for so long.
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE.
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