Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
On August 8, Bernadette Spofforth, a 55-year-old British Twitter user, was dragged out of her home, arrested and held for 36 hours for posting that the murderer of 3 girls in Southport was a Muslim terrorist. The charge she was held under was “posting inaccurate information”.
Bernadette was one of thousands of people arrested in a massive crackdown by the Starmer government aimed at suppressing political dissent over its open borders migrant policies.
After Axel Rudakubana, a Muslim terrorist, entered a children’s Taylor Swift dance workshop and stabbed 11 little girls, killing 3 of them, British authorities declared an emergency. The emergency was not the latest act of horrifying Muslim terrorism targeting local children.
It was that some of its citizens had noticed the latest Muslim terror attack and were outraged.
These included the the Dublin stabbing of children outside a Catholic school by Riad Bouchaker, an Algerian Muslim or the Manchester Arena bombing at an Arianna Grande concert by the Muslim Abedi family which wounded over 1,000 people and killed 22 people, many of them children, forming a consistent pattern of Muslim child killing.
The Southport stabbing at a Taylor Swift dance workshop fit the pattern. So did the immediate torrent of media disinformation accompanied by police threats and government crackdowns.
British authorities, which usually make a point of withholding the names of Muslim terrorists for as long as possible, released Axel Rudakubana’s name even though he was underage. Axel’s name and his Rwandan background were used to mislead the public into believing he was not a Muslim. In reality, the authorities knew he was a Muslim convert and did not reveal that.
Instead the authorities began arresting people for describing the stabbings as a Muslim terrorist attack. Media outlets, including Sky News, conducted ‘analyses’ of ‘misinformation’ denouncing trending hashtags like “Southport Muslim”. PM Starmer demanded an immediate crackdown on such ‘misinformation’ as posing a threat to public safety and the justice system.
While the Starmer government and British authorities had tolerated and continued to tolerate widespread Muslim terrorist rallies calling for the murder of Jews at which the flags of known terrorist organizations are waved, they declared an emergency over open borders protests.
Dystopian scenes were televised of police raiding people’s homes for “spreading misinformation”. Over 1,000 people were arrested for protesting and speaking their minds. In the same nation where police stood by while Muslim waved Hamas flags, shouting “who the f___ is Allah” earned a 61-year-old British man over a year in prison for opposing open borders.
This was in sharp contrast to the soft treatment meted out to Muslim terrorists like Mohisnath Chowdhury, who had attacked police officers with a sword outside Buckingham Palace while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and spent only a year in prison, before being released, and then arrested yet again for another terrorist plot targeting British people and tourists in London.
Much as in Dublin, the emergency was not a brutal attack on little girls, but criticism of Islam.
Even as PM Starmer demanded censorship of ‘misinformation’ and Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood, a Pakistani Muslim with her own extremist views, unleashed a ruthless crackdown on the British people, the regime was undoubtedly aware of the truth about the terrorist.
After denying that Axel Rudakubana was a Muslim terrorist and arresting people for saying that he was, the police have finally admitted that he possessed an Al Qaeda manual titled ‘Military Studies in the Jihad’ and, like a number of previous Al Qaeda terrorists, had been making Ricin in an attempt to produce a biological weapon.
“You may have seen speculation online that the police are deciding to keep things from the public. This is certainly not the case,” Chief Constable Serena Kennedy claimed of the new charges. “At this time, Counter Terrorism Policing has not declared the attack on Monday 29 July a terrorist incident. I recognise that the new charges, may lead to speculation… for a matter to be declared a terrorist incident, motivation would need to be established. We would strongly advise caution against anyone speculating as to motivation in this case.”
It took the police nearly four months to reveal that the Muslim terrorist possessed an Al Qaeda manual, but the authorities are still denying that he stabbed the little girls in the name of Islam. The authorities deem this to be “transparent” and continue to warn the public about “speculating” about the motive of a Muslim terrorist who was getting his ideas from Al Qaeda.
“Don’t engage in rumour and speculation and don’t believe everything you read on social media,” Kennedy insisted.
Social media is unreliable, but the authorities are more so. Social media may have gotten the name wrong, but it got the essential truth of the story right. And social media does not engage in sustained cover-ups or break down your door to arrest you to protect those cover-ups.
In “early August”, the authorities had turned up the Ricin. The Al Qaeda file probably came up even earlier. While the authorities were arresting people for describing Axel as a Muslim terrorist and warning about the dangers of misinformation, they were well aware of what he actually was.
Was the media aware of the truth even while it was warning about “misinformation”? Likely so.
Over the course of the ruthless government crackdown that followed, the media became the main source of ‘disinformation’, falsely claiming that Axel was not a Muslim, demanding urgent censorship and arrests of anyone who told the truth, and even attributing it to Russia.
All of these were not only lies, but calculated lies used to aid a government cover-up.
Few media platforms, even the more prestigious and conservative ones, have corrected their false claims that Axel was not Muslim. For example, the Financial Times continues to falsely claim that Axel “is not Muslim” even as it urges greater censorship. The FT quoted a professor employed by the Islamic terrorist state of Qatar, to bolster its claims about ‘misinformation’.
Nor is the crackdown by the Starmer government over. The same British establishment which has made few arrests in a year of Hamas riots has announced that months later, “inquiries continue regarding 216 wanted people whom the police are actively seeking to arrest” in the protests against the Islamic terrorist killings of British little girls.
But if there are to be arrests for ‘misinformation’, they should begin with PM Starmer, the authorities and the media which spent months lying to the public and using those lies to justify a crackdown, political persecution, arrests, and the chilling of free speech and protest in the UK.
The Southport crackdown was one of the ugliest periods in British history in this century. And it was all based on a government lie. There must be a reckoning for the illegal arrests, the warnings by police to social media users and the lies spread by the political establishment.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
