Bartholomew's Notes

An anti-EDL Twitter feed (@everythingedl) has a screen-capture of cyber-bully and pseudo-activist Charlie Flowers railing against him and against a Facebook group called “Exposing Racism and Intolerance Online”. As ever, it doesn’t take long before Flowers turns the subject to me, and he and a crony (both middle-aged men, by the way) are quick to turn to some feel-good schoolyard abuse:

Flowers complains that “Exposing Racism” unfairly accuses him and his associated Facebook groups (the “Cheerleaders” and “NiceOnesUK”) of being EDL front groups – I don’t think they are, although Flowers’ objection is somewhat hypocritical given his insistence that I’m an “SWP operative” (I’m not).

Flowers, as I’ve written previously, claims to be an activist against Islamic extremism, and he’s managed to persuade a few people who should know better that he’s on the level. However, he’s really a vigilante rather than an activist, using the internet to act out a self-righteous fantasy of self-empowerment through cyber-harassment and abuse. Back in 2009 he began a campaign of harassment against Tim Ireland at the behest of bogus “terror-tracker” Dominic Wightman; when he belatedly realised that Wightman had manipulated him, he then claimed instead that his inspiration had in fact been Nadine Dorries MP’s complaints against Tim – Flowers continues to insist on this, despite the fact that Dorries has in the meantime been discredited (The full background is here). Flowers’ need to find a self-justification for acts of cyber-harassment is pathological: for a while in 2010 he made an alliance with Farah Damji, sending abusive and threatening messages to individuals (particularly women) who had made complaints to the police about her.

Flowers objects to me because I stood up for Tim, and his claim that I’m a left-wing extremist is the explanation he gives to his friends for why I deserve his abusive attention. It also in his mind justifies the creation of around a dozen anonymous abusive blogs, which have appeared over the past few months and which he has spammed around Twitter in the middle of the night. One struggles to imagine the thought process: here is a mature adult, the wrong side of 40, using sockpuppets to disseminate abuse and lies through the internet, and he somehow thinks that isn’t a shameful and debasing way to carry on.

Particularly unpleasantly, Flowers has also sought to make links with some Nigerian neo-Pentecostals who believe that children can be witches. The plight of “child-witches” is another subject that I’ve written about, and as a result a church in Nigeria has created a website dedicated to abusing me and other activists on the issue. Given that Flowers claims to be against religious extremists (and falsely claims I’m in cahoots with MPACUK), one would have thought he would have given this church a wide berth  – however, the temptation proved too great, and he duly created a sockpuppet Facebook account with a Nigerian name and visited the church’s website to advertise his abusive blogs. I was genuinely surprised he was willing to go that low.

Flowers also created a Twitter feed in the name of the church and used it to spam-advertise the blogs, but he gave himself away by adding abusive comments about some other people and by making reference to the “Exposing Racism” Facebook page (background here). Any lingering doubts about his authorship were removed a few days ago, when the same Tweets appeared on his @BlackEyedGirls Twitter feed, although he deleted them the morning afterwards (perhaps he’d logged into the wrong account by mistake).

One unknown factor is whether Flowers maintains any association with Dominic Wightman. Like Flowers, Wightman also sees the internet as a place of self-empowerment through fantasy, and like Flowers he also uses sockpuppets to create abusive websites – this was proven recently when I asked a friend of Wightman about an abusive song posted anonymously to YouTube in the autumn of 2009; Wightman (who appears in the song affecting a very poor fake Northern accent to disguise his voice) quickly removed it after I made contact. Publicly, Wightman and Flowers purport to dislike each other, but there’s a mutual interest, and a mutual willingness to engage in behaviour that most people grow out of at the age of fourteen or so.

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