Bartholomew's Notes

From the Religion News Service:

 A new Hebrew-English Bible with a distinctly Israeli flavor will be published in honor of Israel’s 70th anniversary.

…The Israel Bible “is the world’s first Bible centered around the Land of Israel, the People of Israel and the unique relationship between them,” according to Israel365, the organization that produced it in conjunction with Menorah Books, a division of Koren Publishers Jerusalem.

…Maayan Hoffman, vice president of marketing and brand strategy at Israel365, wrote in The Jerusalem Post that the aim of the new Bible is “to convince a divided Jewish people, Christian Zionists and what sometimes seems like an anti-Israel world that Israel belongs to the Jewish people.”

The director of Israel365 is Rabbi Tuly Weisz, who founded the Breaking Israel News website (previously blogged here). The site acts as a conduit by which news stories that supposedly relate to the End Times from a Jewish perspective find their way onto Christian Right and conservative US websites (1): the site is frequently quoted on Charisma News and WND, and WND‘s CEO Joseph Farah – infamous for his promotion of anti-Obama birther conspiracy theories, among much else – appears on the Israel Bible‘s website endorsing the product.

Charisma News has also reported on the new Bible:

For nearly 2000 years, an undeniable tension between Christians and Jews has pierced the religious landscape. While some factions have followed paths that resulted in in the expansion of the gap—replacement theology—others have spent efforts to bridge the gap between the two groups.

…Rabbi Tuly Weisz, founder and director of Israel365 and publisher of Breaking News Israel, says that with the publishing of The Israel Bible, the Bible is “no longer source of disunity but unity between Jews and Christians.”

“We’re certainly living in critical times where support for Israel is more divisive than ever, and solidifying biblical support for Israel among the Christian Zionist community is more important than ever,” Weisz said. “The writers of the New Testament left us with a text that is not anti-Semitic. It does not put forth a replacement position. It’s amazing how that text became more misrepresented by some once the church became more Gentile.”

The Israel Bible, of course, does not contain the New Testament, and Weisz is not a believer in Jesus.

Anyone with a serious interest in the text traditionally known to Christians as the Old Testament ought to have a Jewish edition of the Bible, such as the Jewish Study Bible published by Oxford University Press. It’s also important that Christians should have a proper appreciation of Judaism, both as it existed during the Biblical period and afterwards. However, an edition of the Bible specifically pitched to Christians by a non-Christian with a view to influencing Christian theology seems to be a rather curious endeavour.

Christianity is not distinct from Judaism just because of “replacement theology” – the idea that Christianity has superseded Judaism – but because Judaism (with the exception of Messianic Judaism) does not accept that Jesus was the Messiah, and regards the idea of the Incarnation as incompatible with Judaism’s concept of God. US Evangelicalism, however, seems to have developed a compromise in which Judaism and Christianity are somehow essentially different perspectives on the same religion. In practical terms, this means there is no urgent need to evangelise Jews about Jesus – indeed, it seems to be more important for Jews to evangelise Christians about why they should identify with the modern State of Israel.

The Israel Bible comes with a slip-cover that shows David Ben-Gurion announcing the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Israeli soldiers at the Western Wall in 1967, and an image of the Jerusalem Temple. It contains “commentaries that highlight verses that relate to Israel, including relevant quotes and perspectives from prime ministers”, as well as “contemporary commentary highlight[ing] the role of the modern State of Israel in the fulfillment of biblical prophecy”.

Note

1. Prophecy articles on Breaking Israel News include “End of Days Yellowstone Volcano Prophesied in Zechariah“; “Disaster Comet Nibiru Coming to Cleanse the World, Says Jewish Academic“; “Global Warming Prophesied as Punishment for Not Building Temple“; “The World is Facing the Final War of Gog and Magog Says Rabbinic Scholar“; and “Bible Codes Reflect What Brexit Wrought for Europe“. Its most recent contribution – inevitably – is “An End-Of-Days Guide to the Current Conflict in Syria“.

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Satuday’s front-page splash at The Times:

Apologists for Assad working in British universities

Top academics claim chemical attacks were fake

Senior British academics are spreading pro-Assad disinformation and conspiracy theories promoted by Russia, The Times can reveal.

They are founders of a self-styled Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (SPM) and hold posts at universities including Edinburgh, Sheffield and Leicester.

Members of the group, which includes four professors, have been spreading the slur, repeated by the Russian ambassador to Britain yesterday, that the White Helmets civilian volunteer force has fabricated video evidence of attacks by President Assad, who is backed by the Kremlin…

The Times has here “revealed” the the existence of a group that publicises itself via its own website, and which was subjected to effective critical scrutiny by Brian Whitaker on Medium in February. The group is certainly of journalistic interest, but the decision to make it the lead item seems to me to be to be overkill, and to describe the “four professors” as “top academics” is sensationalising.

Given that the article was published on Friday night, just as western airstrikes on Syria were about to get underway, one has to suspect that the intention was not so much to “reveal” the group as to set up a contrast between support for the strikes and dubious and invalid reasons for opposing (or being wary of) them. Thus a follow-up item was headlined “Academics accused of speaking for Assad condemn Syria raids”, and consisted mainly of Tweets and blog posts by members of the group.

The academics highlighted by the Times coverage are Dr Tara McCormack, a lecturer in international relations at Leicester University; Piers Robinson, professor of politics, society and political journalism at Sheffield University; Paul McKeigue, a professor of genetic epidemiology and statistical genetics at Edinburgh University; and Tim Hayward, professor of environmental political theory and also at Edinburgh University. The quotes provided in both Times articles (and a third) are not to their authors’ credit: Hayward has promoted a claim by Vanessa Beeley that the White Helmets had kidnapped and drugged children in order to fabricate the earlier gas attack on eastern Ghouta, while McCormack described the White Helmets as “basically Al [Qaeda]”. However, the print edition of the newspaper apparently contained one quote from another member, Louis Allday, that Allday has credibly shown to have been a misattribution.

Overall, the group comes across as dismissive and smug rather than critical and enquiring, and it is unlikely that any evidence of Assad’s culpability for gas attacks would be sufficient.This impression is strengthened in particular by Hayward’s uncritical use of the “SyriaHoax” hashtag (1), and by the group’s enthusiasm for Vanessa Beeley; as The Times notes:

Professor Hayward has written for the alternative news website 21st Century Wire, whose associate editor is Vanessa Beeley, daughter of the late British diplomat Sir Harold Beeley. She claims that the White Helmets are al-Qaeda-affiliated and, as “terrorists”, are a “legit target” for Assad’s forces.

Beeley, as I’ve noted previously, has attacked the White Helmets in the US on Infowars and in the UK on Brian Gerrish’s UK Column and the David Icke-affiliated Richie Allen Show.

The SPM’s advisory board includes “Mark Crispin Miller, who was said to have called the US government’s account of the 9/11 attacks a ‘conspiracy theory'”, and “David Blackall, an Australian academic who tweeted ‘CIA stages gas attack pretext for Syria escalation’ with a link to a blog article”.

The group’s activities appear to be extra-curricular, although participants use their academic credentials to promote their credibility. However, as Whitaker notes:

Last November the group set up a non-profit company called Organisation for Propaganda Studies (OPS)… The group also operates a website – propagandastudies.ac.uk – which is registered in the name of Sheffield University and is hosted on the university’s servers.

Note

1. According to The Times, the hashtag “went viral after being used by alt-right figures in the US, including Mike Cernovich, a main proponent of the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory… [and] was said to have been promoted by a Russian cyberoperation”. This seems to me to be stretching a point – most people use hashtags without delving into their origins. More on Cernovich and Pizzagate here.

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From the New York Times obituary of Efraín Ríos Montt:

In the panoply of commanders who turned much of Central America into a killing field in the 1980s, General Ríos Montt was one of the most murderous. He was convicted in 2013 of trying to exterminate the Ixil ethnic group, a Mayan Indian community whose villages were wiped out by his forces.

…In the late 1970s, after returning to Guatemala, General Ríos Montt reinvented himself. He took a Dale Carnegie course in human relations, abandoned Roman Catholicism, became a preacher in the California-based Church of the Word, and struck up friendships with American evangelists, including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

Ríos Montt’s links to Christian Right figures has long been notorious; here’s a discussion by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, as published in her 2010 book Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efrain Ríos Montt (p. 161-162):

…Mere days after the March 23 [1982] coup, Pat Robertson lauded Ríos Montt on The 700 Club as an anointed man of God for whom Americans should pray “day and night without ceasing.” Robertson also pledged that American evangelicals would donate $1 billion to his fledgling government, a contribution which, had it materialized (it did not) would have directly helped to circumvent the federal ban on U.S. military aid to Guatemala.

North American evangelicals who were outside the inner circle of the Moral Majority, in the thrall of new emerging evangelical news media, regarded Ríos Montt from afar with wide-eyed and naive optimism. (“Terrorists fear ‘New Source of Intelligence'” boasted one evangelical tabloid, “Holy Spirit Reveals Whereabouts of Guerilla [sic] Forces.”) This sector of true believers refused to be dissuaded by news of human rights violations, which many evangelical U.S. Christians dismissed, as one evangelical magazine put it, as “either totally wrong or totally perverted.” This media-victim perspective runs like a rich vein throughout Joseph Anfuso and David Sczepanski’s fawning 1983 biography of Ríos Montt, a work in English published by an evangelical press before it was translated into Spanish.

Meanwhile, one Church of the Word (“Verbo”) pastor allegedly told some visiting Pentecostals from California:

“The Army doesn’t massacre Indians. It massacres demons, and Indians are demons possessed; they are communists. We hold Brother Efrain Ríos Montt like King David of the Old Testament. He is the king of the New Testament”

The “evangelical tabloid” referenced above was The Forerunner, which was produced by the controversial Maranatha Campus Ministries; and after Ríos Montt was ousted in 1983, he was a keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by Maranatha’s Dennis Peacocke. Ríos Montt also held a speaking tour in the USA, organised by Ben Armstrong of the National Religious Broadcasters, which included appearances on Robertson’s 700 Club and on Jimmy Swaggart’s TV programme (1).

A little more can be said about the “fawning 1983 biography”, titled Efrain Rios Montt: Servant or Dictator?, for which Robertson provided the foreword. It was published by Vision House, of Ventura in California. The imprint was “a division of GL Publications” – “GL” here stood for “Gospel Light”, a company that was started by Henrietta Mears in 1933 specialising in Sunday School curricula. Mears also created GLINT (Gospel Literature International), which translates GL books and other evangelical works into other languages.

The book’s authors were members of Gospel Outreach in Eureka, California, which was the Church of the Word’s umbrella body. The two men featured in a 1983 New York Times profile of Gospel Outreach, which explained that the group had emerged out of the Jesus Movement; apparently “hundreds of ex-hippies” formed an initial commune in the town under the direction of one James Durkin, “now 58 years old, a real estate agent who had had an off-and-on career as a part- time minister for the Assembly of God Pentecostal church”.

Anfuso was the son of  Victor L. Anfuso, who was Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn in the 1950s, and he told the New York Times reporter that “he found a meaning to his life after climbing the Himalayas and discussing Eastern religion with Indian gurus.” In 2010, he published a memoir, Message in a Body, which came with a cover blurb by William Paul Young, author of the The Shack, and endorsements from the likes of James Goll and the president of World Vision US. A foreword was provided by Kevin Palau, son of the Argentinian-born evangelist Luis Palau.

Sczepanski, meanwhile, is the pastor of Durkin’s old church, now called the Gospel Outreach Reformational Church.

Note

1. Some details here are from Sara Diamond’s 1990 book Spiritual Warfare. This book is also cited by Garrard-Burnett as the source for the “Army doesn’t massacre Indians” quote, referring in turn to Sectas y religiosidad en America Latina, October 1984, produced by the Instituto Latinamericano de Estudios Transnationales. Diamond and Garrard-Burnett also both refer to support for Ríos Montt in Christianity Today.

Diamond further mentions the work of “Gospel Outreach, the Wycliffe Bible Translators/Summer Institute of Linguistics… and the Berhorst Foundation” among the Ixil; a PBS documentary called “The Gospel in Guatemala”, produced by Steve Talbot and Elizabeth Farmsworth; and, a few years later, Ríos Montt’s “Operation Whole Armor”, in which he and a Verbo missionary named Ronny Gilmore partnered with Bible Literature International of Ohio to distribute copies of the New Testament in Guatemala (pp. 167-168).

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From the website of Rahman Lowe Solicitors:

Rahman Lowe Solicitors have represented Mr [Nasim] Ashraf and Mrs [Hafizan] Zaman in their defamation claim against Associated Newspapers Ltd over MailOnline articles, which has been concluded successfully today.

MailOnline published a number of articles which falsely suggested that the couple were involved an Islamist campaign of intimidation to take over Clarksfield primary school in Oldham with the aim of imposing an aggressive and separatist Islamic agenda on the school. They now accept that such allegations are wholly unfounded and have apologised to Mr Ashraf and Mrs Zaman and have agreed to pay substantial damages and costs.

…Zillur Rahman of Rahman Lowe Solicitors and Mark Henderson of Doughty Street Chambers acted for the Claimants in this case. They have also acted for the Claimants in defamation claims against News Group Newspapers (“NGN”), Mirror Group Newspapers (“MGN”), and Telegraph Media Group (“TMG”) which have already concluded with payment of damages and published retractions and apologies for similar articles in The Sun, Daily Telegraph, and Mirror. Claims continue with respect to articles in The Express, The Times, and Sunday Times.

The articles were published on 19 and 20 February 2017, and the story originated with two pieces by Andrew Gilligan in the Sunday Times. The ST headlined one of its articles as “a new ‘Trojan Horse’ plot”, recalling allegations that emerged in March 2014 in relation to schools in Birmingham. The two stories, though, are quite separate, and should not be conflated. The term “Trojan Horse” was given in quote marks because the comparison had been drawn by the school’s headteacher, Trish O’Donnell.

Gilligan’s story was based on a confidential council report produced a couple of weeks earlier, which actually rejected any comparison with the Birmingham “Trojan Horse” claims. This is acknowledged in Gilligan’s reporting, but downplayed in relation to promoting O’Donnell’s view that the situations were comparable.

Ashraf gave an interview to the Guardian in September, in which he said that “he and his wife were accused of being at the centre of the conspiracy after they raised concerns about teaching and safeguarding issues.” According to the article:

Trish O’Donnell, who is on long-term sick leave, complained she was being subjected to “harassment and intimidation” in the form of “aggressive verbal abuse” from people allegedly pushing conservative Muslim values.

…However, the documents stated that while council officers believed Ashraf and his wife Hafizan Zaman were trying to undermine the headteacher, there was no evidence of a Trojan-horse-style plot. They added that Ashraf was not an extremist and “not part of any wider conspiracy”.

This, though, sidesteps the claim as reported by Gilligan that the same documents specifically refer to Ashraf as having been “extremely problematic”. Perhaps the documents were wrong to make this assessment, but if they are going to be cited in his favour then readers surely ought to have been given the full picture. Other specific claims in Gilligan’s report are unaddressed.

Gilligan referred to a 2014 Ofsted report which noted the “strong leadership” of the headmistress; by contrast, the Guardian reported Ashraf’s claim to have been vindicated by a 2017 report that found the school to be inadequate. Both Ofsted reports can be seen here.

Note

Gilligan’s articles are still online, although with a note added stating “This article is the subject of a legal complaint from Mr Nasim Ashraf and Mrs Hafizan Zaman”. For potential liability reasons I am not providing a direct link at this time.

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From the Daily Mail:

Freelance demonstrators protesting against Brexit were paid thousands of pounds by an organisation linked to Max Mosley, it emerged yesterday.

The campaigners, from a group called the Fair Vote Project, were hired to increase support for a second EU referendum during a protest in Parliament Square.

But it has emerged the group received a £25,000 donation from an organisation called Byline Festival in which Mr Mosley, the former F1 owner accused of printing a racist leaflet [in 1961], holds shares.

The obvious implication in the first two paragraphs is that the protest was a concocted stunt involving fake “protestors for hire” rather than being a genuine expression of a point of view, and that Mosley was behind it.

However, this initial impression is not substantiated by subsequent text further down the page:

[The Fair Vote Project] is reported to have hired up to 30 people to target thousands travelling to work to convince them of the need for a second referendum.

The teams, armed with megaphones and placards handed out leaflets in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and London. They urged people to join a protest in Parliament Square to call for a second and ‘fair’ vote.

This is advertising ahead of the protest, not something that happened “during” it, as implied above. Further, there is now a significant discrepancy when compared with the start of the article: first, we were told that Byline had “hired” the Fair Vote Project; now, it is explained that the Fair Vote Project hired someone else.

This last point probably reflects the fact that the article is a hurried re-write and abridgement of a piece that appeared in the Daily Telegraph, which was itself less than clear. Here’s an extract from the Telegraph version:

Freelance flash mobs have been paid thousands of pounds by a company linked to Max Mosley to target commuters at major cities to drum up support for a demonstration calling for a second EU referendum, The Telegraph can reveal.

The Fair Vote Project, founded by a consultant who worked for the anti-Brexit group Best for Britain that was set up by prominent Remain campaigner Gina Miller and part funded by George Soros, hired up to 30 people to target thousands of people travelling to work.

…The Telegraph has established that the Fair Vote Project received £25,000 funding from organisers of Byline Festival, a company in which Mr Mosley, the son of the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley [who died in 1980], hold shares.

…Peter Jukes, a director of BylineFest and its sister company Byline Media, said Mr Mosley owned a total of four percent in those companies, worth around £40,000. He is one of a about 13 investors.

As for the hiring, Fair Vote’s Kyle Taylor

…said his company had paid the events specialists, Coalition, £3,066 to help with “event management and safety” at the “emergency rally” in London.

That fee included paying the hired hands, freelancers Coalition hires for such events, £60 plus £10 travel expenses to leaflet and shout slogans through the megaphone from 6am to 10am in the four cities.

This clarifies that although the Fair Vote Project may have received £25,000 from Byline, only a fraction of that amount was used to promote the rally via a third party.

The emphasis on Max Mosley in both articles is obviously overegged and polemical. To say that the Fair Vote Project is “linked” to Mosley implies communication between them, and that Mosley has a direct and active interest in Fair Vote’s activities. In fact, though, Mosley is just one shareholder in Byline, and he paid no part in the decision to provide financial support to Fair Vote:

“He would have been unaware of the £25,000 invested and may even be a Brexiter,” Mr Jukes, 57, said.

Certainly, another figure associated with the Byline Festival, John Cleese, is pro-Brexit.

The polemical and distorted reporting above reflects not just the two newspapers’ support for Brexit, but also a pre-existing hostility against Byline and Peter Jukes over criticism of press practices in the UK and support for Hacked Off. Both papers previously targeted Byline after the Byline website wrote about John Whittingale, as I discussed here.

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From California, a distress call on Twitter from street artist “Mear One”:

A UK politician has reignited a smear campaign against me and a mural I painted in Shoreditch over 5 years ago depicting a group of banksters playing a game of monopoly on the backs of the working class. @Lukewearechange @davidicke @DollarVigilante

Reaching out to David Icke for help is perhaps not the most sensible move for someone credibly accused of anti-Semitism, but “Mear One” – aka Kalen Ockerman – shares Icke’s view that the world is full of shadowy elites and supernatural powers, clues to which he sees in phenomena such as the ancient elongated skulls of the Paracas culture.

Thus it is not a great surprise that the artist’s critique of capitalism is conspiratorial, and fixated on the idea of particularly malign individuals manipulating the world through secret networks. Mear One’s Shoreditch mural  appeared to portray generic “greedy bankers”, although he has since clarified that the figures are “Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Aleister Crowley, Carnegie & Warburg” – only two of these are Jewish, but his caricatures focus on physical features that obviously recall anti-Semitic cartoons.

In another version of the same work, apparently titled False Profits, the artist presents a different line-up. As listed by a retailer selling prints of the image, the figures in this version are:

BOTTOM ROW L. TO R. DAVID ROCKEFELLER, ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, EVELYN ROTHSCHILD, JACOB ROTHSCHILD, GEORGE SOROS, NICKY OPPENHEIMER

The print version also includes another, ghostly, set of figures standing behind them:

ILLUMINATI FOREFATHERS TOP ROW L. TO R. ALBERT PIKE, MAYER CARL FREIHERR VON ROTHSCHILD, ADAM WEISHAUPT, MAYER AMSCHEL DE ROTHSCHILD.

Mear One’s mural obviously reflects his belief that the world is controlled by an elite conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons; as such, it is difficult to sympathise with his complaint that he is the victim of a “smear campaign”.

Those who propound views of this sort sometimes complain that they are not being anti-Semitic because they are not claiming that all the world’s Jews are in on the conspiracy, which is instead a “clique”. But as I’ve noted before, this distinction is meaningless. “Rothschild” conspiracy mongering emerged out of explicit anti-Semitism (as discussed by Brian Cathcart here), and as a paranoid pseudo-explanation for human affairs it is the gateway back into back it. This process is evident from Mear One himself, who when the mural was removed back in 2012 stated that “some of the older white Jewish folk in the local community had an issue with me portraying their beloved #Rothschild or #Warburg etc as the demons they are”.

As has now been widely reported, the mural is currently controversial again due to a comment about it made by Jeremy Corbyn in 2012, long before his unexpected rise to leader of the UK Labour Party. Corbyn, responding directly to a Facebook post by the artist, notoriously compared it to Diego Rivera’s lost mural from the Rockefeller Center. Corbyn has a long history of anti-racist activism, and he has never expressed “Rothschild”-type conspiracy views, but obviously this comment was not to his credit. Presumably he simply saw a generic anti-capitalist cartoon, but he ought to have been alert to the anti-Semitic caricatures, and wary of the crudeness of the image. The depiction of the pyramid and Eye of Providence behind the bankers ought to have set off a “crank radar”, at the very least.

Worse, though, is that Corbyn didn’t just miss the obvious – he knew that objections had been made, but he didn’t bother to look into them before giving the work his vote of confidence. This suggests a doctrinaire character – someone whose judgements are based on preconceptions rather than the specific evidence in specific situations. Perhaps the demands and responsibilities of being Leader of the Opposition are broadening his outlook, but if so it will be a late blossoming.

“Rothschild” conspiricism has been festering within parts of the UK Labour Party – I looked at a couple of examples here and here.

UPDATE: Mear One has now written a defence of his mural, which has been published on David Icke’s website:

I decided the only platform, apart from my own, that I will choose to speak through is this one. I thank David Icke and Gareth Icke and their team for allowing me this opportunity to offer my side of the story, uncut and uncensored, for those who are awoken.

…Mayer Amschel Rothschild once said, “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.” Using this as my ideological starting point, I chose to depict the likenesses of such early turn of the century Robber Barons, specifically Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Warburg, as well Aleister Crowley who was a kind of philosophical guru to the ruling elite of that time and a well-known Satanist. 

In fact, the quote attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild first appeared in English in 1913, a hundred years after his death, and there is no evidence of a German original – but either way, the idea that it amounts to a revelation that explains the workings of the world is a wild extrapolation.

Crowley was an anti-Semite (“Israel has corrupted the world, whether by conquest, by conversion, or by conspiracy. The Jew has eaten his way into everything”), and as such his appearance as one of Mear One’s villains might be evidence in the artist’s favour. However, within the conspiracy milieu Crowley’s “Satanism” is conflated with the Jewish mystical tradition via Hermetic Qabalah; and his role in the mural is simply as a sinister association that underscores the moral turpitude of the depicted bankers.

In reality, Crowley didn’t know these people, and if he held influence over bankers one wonders why it was that he died in reduced financial circumstances.

UPDATE 2: Mear One’s sequence of “Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Warburg, as well Aleister Crowley” has led to some of the figures in the mural being misidentified, as in the annotated version below. Crowley is obviously the bald character (although he’s a bit thin), but he is here mistaken for Andrew Carnegie; knocking on from this, Carnegie becomes Paul Warburg and Paul Warburg becomes Crowley. This obscures the overemphasis on Warburg’s nose.

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2013: the Daily Mirror reports on Kevin Brewer, who set up a firm called John Vincent Cable Services Limited to alert the UK government’s then-Business Secretary to how easy it is to create companies based on false information:

“Fraud is simple to perpetrate and anyone can form a new company in anyone else’s name,” said Kevin, managing director of National Business Register.

“Companies House now forms one third of all new companies and does not perform any identity checks.

“It forms limited companies for anyone worldwide who chooses to use any name they pluck out of the air.”

He wrote to Mr Cable: “To illustrate the point, we have formed a company in your name without your consent and could start trading using your identity.”

2018: A follow-up in The Times:

Kevin Brewer, 65, was ordered to pay £12,000 yesterday after he admitted giving false information to Companies House, having formed a company five years ago that wrongly claimed to be owned by Sir Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader and former business secretary.

Brewer then set up another company in 2016 called Cleverly Clogs Ltd that named Baroness Neville-Rolfe, the government minister with responsibility for Companies House, as a director and shareholder, as well as James Cleverly, a Conservative MP. Brewer also created an entirely fictitious Israeli called Ibrahim Aman as a director and shareholder.

…”This prosecution shows the government will come down hard on people who knowingly break the law and file false information on the company registry,” Andrew Griffiths, the business minister, said.

A spokesman for Companies House said: “Deliberately filing false information on the register is a serious offence and people who have been found to have knowingly done this can face prosecution.”

Breaking the law in order to demonstrate a failure in enforcement may still be illegal, but Brewer’s stated purpose (which obviously is confirmed by the fact that he wrote to Cable) ought at least to have been mentioned in the Times article. Instead, the broadsheet has simply regurgitated government spin – the whole article is just a re-write of a Companies House press release.

Brewer was not “found” to have filed false information – he readily confessed to it, in order to prove a point. As such, the case falls far short of being evidence that “the government will come down hard on people who knowingly break the law and file false information on the company registry”. It was an anomaly, and the prosecution looks more like an instance of shooting the messenger.

Here’s the reality of the situation, as explained by Prem Sikka of the University of Essex in December:

Recently, journalists were moments away from registering company with 10 Downing Street, UK Prime Minister’s address, as its head office. The government’s response is that “Companies House does not have powers to verify the authenticity of company directors, secretaries and registered office addresses”.

Sikka’s emphasis here was on the potential for money laundering, but the broader point is that most people are under the misapprehension that registration with Companies House means that a company and its directors are thereby made accountable. This may influence potential partners or customers, or be useful in other ways for someone who wishes to misrepresent his or her public profile.

There are various ways in which Companies House records may be misleading, beyond blatant identity theft or creation. They include:

• A director using variations of his or her real name, in order to obscure financial history or connections between companies;
• A company having a listed address that used to be true, but that is now out of date;
• A company listed with false address: this can be obscured by giving an address in a large office block, but not providing a suite number or similar that would confirm the specific location.

There is also little evidence that late or missing filings are actively pursued by Companies House, despite the power to levy fines.

The pursuit of Brewer does nothing to persuade that the system is not still unfit for purpose. Indeed, it is a distraction from the problem.

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From Channel 4 News:

An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News reveals how Cambridge Analytica secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers.

…Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.

…The company’s chief executive Alexander Nix… when asked about digging up material on political opponents… said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.

In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”

Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.

Channel 4’s coverage of Cambridge Analytica – researched in partnership with the Observer and the New York Times – has been justly celebrated as an urgently needed exposé of the machinations and manipulations of a sophisticated political consultancy in the digital age. The existence of the “dark arts” in political campaigning is hardly new, but tracing CA’s specific interventions around the world is important for the historical record, and an advance in the perennial battle between those who want the public to be informed and those who would prefer us to be misinformed. Nix’s statement that “there are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed” is not a great surprise, but such a candid admission ought to mean that the reputational risk of involvement with CA will now outstrip the benefits it promises (or has previously provided) to clients.

And that’s before we even get onto possible breaches of the law in data-gathering and in how anti-Clinton attack adverts were funded.

However, the above point about bribery seems to me to be questionable. The lead-in’s reference to “using bribes” gives the false impression that politicians are actually being bribed, rather than being stung, and it would be ironic if laws against “offering bribes to public officials” made it more difficult for politicians to be put to the test. The motive for a bribery sting may be hidden or dishonourable, but politicians ought to be capable of rebuffing corrupt overtures, and at least have the sense to properly scrutinise who they might be dealing with. In some countries, there may be mitigating reasons for accepting a bribe – for example, if otherwise it would simply be accepted by a rival, who would then enjoy extra resources – but politicians feeling that they have to adapt to a corrupt system won’t change unless the risks of exposure outweigh the benefits of acquiescence.

CA of course is not interested in cleaning up politics, and its use of bribery scandals is selective and manipulative. However, attempting to show whether politicians are corruptable through stings is a normal part of journalism – and it is something that Channel 4 News has itself done in the past. (1) Why should it be illegitimate for other interested parties to create news in the same way?

I draw a distinction here with Nix’s unattractive admission about using “Ukrainian girls”. Sex stings are always tawdry, and if the “honeytraps” are supposed to go all the way then Nix is effectively a pimp. The fact that someone may be induced to behave foolishly in such matters is rarely in the public interest – although again, politicians ought to bear in mind the old adage that if something seems too good to be true, then it probably is. (2)

Footnotes

1. In 2013, a BBC Panorama journalist posing as a lobbyist for Fiji successfully stung the then-MP Patrick Mercer. Mercer’s subsequent departure from public life was very welcome, but I did wonder why it was that he had been targeted in the first place. Perhaps his various antics (briefing against an ex-lover in newspapers; promoting fake terror threats; drunkenly railing against David Cameron) made him certain enemies who then used media links.

2. The nadir was probably the Brooks Newmark sting.

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Two recent Tweets from Lucy Allan, MP for Telford:

These 10 important men told @AmberRuddHR no inquiry into #TelfordGrooming #TelfordCSE was necessary [here] … Tackling #CSE [Child Sexual Exploitation] is about tackling the establishment [here]

The “10 important men” are identified in an image posted with the first Tweet, which shows the names and signatures of Telford councillors and other local officials who had signed a letter to the Home Secretary on the subject in September 2016. The whole letter has been posted online by Telford and Wrekin Conservatives on Facebook, with the commentary that it is “shameful and shocking”.

The letter was written in the wake of a Prime Minister’s Question asked by Allan on the issue of child sexual exploitation in her constituency. The authors explained to Amber Rudd that

We have had three enquiries into this issue in 2016 and understand that the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse chaired by Professor Alexis Jay OBE will assess the extent to which we have learned lessons, implemented recommendations and put in place effective strategies to prevent child sexual exploitation in the future.

The letter goes on to quote Ofsted’s assessment of child protection in the area:

Work with children and young people at risk of sexual exploitation is very strong. The local authority has been a champion for tackling this issue.

Thus:

Given the recent findings of Ofsted and the fact that the Government’s own independent inquiry, chaired by Alexis Jay, is already committed to looking at what happened here in Telford, we do not feel at this time that a further inquiry is necessary.

We would like to be clear that we are under no illusions that there are significant concerns around the sexual exploitation of children in Telford. In towns and cities across the country it is clear that some of the most abhorrent offences are being committed against some of our most vulnerable members of society.

We are not blind to this issue though. We are not sticking our heads in the sand or sweeping it under the carpet. Instead, we have acknowledged the problem and committed ourselves to taking action to address it. We are keen to emphasise that investigating these crimes and protecting children from harm remains a top priority for all the partners concerned.

…We would be very happy to work with [Allan] to achieve the goals we all share around safeguarding young people and bringing offenders to justice.

…To summarise, we remain committed to tackling this difficult issue in Telford and will support Professor Jay in any way we can…

The Telford Conservatives have highlighted in purple the “Given the recent findings of Ofsted…” paragraph as being the “smoking gun”, although if the letter was so obviously “shameful and shocking”, why did they not use such terms in 2016?

The letter has come to the fore now following a series of articles in the Sunday Mirror and Daily Mirror suggesting that convictions against offenders in 2013 and in some earlier cases ought to have been pursued further to identify other related offenders, and revealing that some police documentation used the term “child prostitutes” and referred to “consensual” underage sex. The paper’s coverage also consulted a campaigning academic named Liz Kelly (1), who said that the evidence suggested “up to 1,000” victims; this seems to have been an off-the-cuff guestimate based on the Mirror‘s reporting rather than a rigorous statistic, but the figure has now become the essential shocking fact about Telford.

The town’s chief of police says that the 1,000 figure is “sensationalised”, but when it comes to child protection issues anyone who falls short of a “maximalist” position about the extent of a problem and the measures needed to tackle it will be regarded with suspicion and hostility. Thus Allan’s decision to publicly denounce “10 important men” and to frame the issue in terms of “the establishment” was red meat to the social media mob: within a very short time, a “Wanted”-style poster appeared online with the ten men’s names and photos, alongside false claims that they had “stopped investigations” and far worse luridly malicious comments. It’s difficult to believe that Allan was unaware that her decision to personalise the issue in this way would have such a result.

Footnote

1. Kelly is director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit (CWASU) at London Metropolitan University, and her efforts to highlight the problem have been recognised with the CBE. In the early 1990s, she contributed to the literature on Satanic Ritual Abuse, co-authoring an article on the subject with Sara Scott.

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The recent ITV documentary Rachel Nickell: The Untold Story (for KEO Films, written and presented by Fiona Bruce ) is a good opportunity for renewed critical focus on the practice of criminal profiling and its influence on police investigations.

Nickell’s murder in 1992 – in broad daylight on Wimbledon Common, in front of her young son – prompted the Metropolitan Police to seek advice from a profiler named Paul Britton. Britton had previously worked with police on a series of unsolved rapes along southeast London’s Green Chain Walk, and a year after becoming involved with the Nickell case he advised on the profile of the unknown killer of a single mother named Samantha Bisset and her four-year-old daughter Jazmine, again in the same part of the city.

We now know that the perpetrator in all three cases was a man named Robert Napper. However, as Fiona Bruce explains in the documentary, Britton “created three different criminal profiles” before Napper was identified – an unanswerable indictment of the methods used.

Notoriously, Britton’s involvement in the Nickell case was significant in convincing the police that the killer was Colin Stagg, a man living nearby who had no forensic link to the crime scene. Stagg was in prison on remand when the Bisset killings occurred, but this did not shake the confidence of the Nickell detectives, even though police dealing with the Bisset case had consulted them and the similarities between the two incidents were obvious even from media reports. This latter point is discussed in the documentary by Bill Clegg QC, who was working on Stagg’s defence:

I remember reading the papers in chambers, and within two or three hours I came out of the room and said to my clerk, “I reckon that’s the man that killed Rachel Nickell”. It seemed to me to be perfectly obvious. Statistically, it’s extremely rare for a mother to be murdered in the presence of a young child.

Detective Mike Banks, who led the Bisset investigation, gave Bruce this assessment of Britton’s contribution:

It wasn’t my request, I was told to get him in… Very nice chap. But I think one of my youngest DCs gave exactly the same outline of who he thought would be responsible as what Paul Britton came up with.

Footage from Crimewatch shows Britton suggesting the “possibility” that the Bisset killer might be wanting to call into the programme to talk to him.

Bruce also spoke with Professor David Canter on the limitations of criminal profiling; according to Canter:

People think that it’s some clever, insightful individual that really owes more to Sherlock Holmes actually than to scientific psychology. For a start, to actually say you can indicate something about a person from the brief details you got at a crime scene is really speculative… We can’t know what people are feeling and thinking, particularly criminals, who often don’t even know themselves exactly what’s going through their minds at the time.

Canter is the founder of the International Research Centre of Investigative Psychology at the University of Huddersfield, and the author of Investigative Psychology: Offender Profiling and the Analysis of Criminal Action; his centre “compiled a report on the eyewitness testimony that was crucial in convicting Al Megrahi as the Lockerbie Bomber”.

Bruce’s decision to use Canter as Britton’s peer critic sidestepped a broader debate about whether criminal profiling is of any value whatsoever. The work of Professor Craig Jackson of Birmingham City University is significant here, and his criticisms brought him some media attention in 2010:

…according to a team of psychologists at Birmingham City University, the practice of offender profiling is deeply unscientific and risks bringing the field into disrepute.

In many cases, offender profiles are so vague as to be meaningless, according to psychologist Craig Jackson. At best, they have little impact on murder investigations; at worst they risk misleading investigators and waste police time, he said.

The journalist Nick Cohen summed it up nicely in 2008, when it was at last confirmed that Napper had killed Nickell:

Britton would never have impressed detectives if he had said that Stagg was a bit of a weirdo. When he dressed up that same thought in psychological language and talked of “deviant interests” and “sexual dysfunctions”, he sounded fatally convincing.

…Genetic fingerprinting catches the guilty and frees the innocent. Psychological profiling traps the innocent and sends the guilty out to kill again.

Cohen had previously written about Britton in 2000, noting his media profile:

His case shows that once your name is in the newspaper contacts files and BBC libraries as the authoritative expert without compare you can elbow out competitors and ensure your fame stretches to the crack of doom. Whenever there is an unsolved crime to discuss or an opinion is needed on the effects of Hollywood violence on the young, Britton is called for his view by everyone from the Sunday Times to the Today programme.

It should be remembered that profiling is used not only to identify suspects, but as expert evidence in trials. The most famous example how this can contribute to a miscarriage of justice is the case of Randall Adams, as discussed in Errol Morris’s celebrated 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line. Adams – an innocent man accused of fatally shooting a police officer – was diagnosed as a dangerous killer by Jim Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist nicknamed “Dr Death” for his testimony in capital cases in Texas. Grigson’s pseudo-assessment of Adams was based at least in part in how Adams answered questions about the meanings of various proverbs.

Excurcus

Britton’s profiling skills is just one strand in the ITV documentary, which also discusses in some detail the police’s ludicrous “honeytrap” plot to get Stagg to confess. The programme says that the officer chosen for the task was “guided” by Britton; the judge at Stagg’s trial, Mr Justice Ognall, described Britton as the “puppet master”, although it seems to me that the police must take most of the responsibility for the fiasco.

Famously, the “honeytrap” (which never elicited a confession anyway) led the judge to declare a mistrial, which meant that Stagg was acquitted – but not exonerated. Police continued to maintain that Stagg was guilty, and he and the judge were subsequently subjected to tabloid monsterings. Some of this is mentioned in the documentary, but not the most egregious example, in which the Sun juxtaposed Stagg’s face with the headline “No Girl is Safe”. Such reporting can be seen as a precursor for the media vilification of Christopher Jefferies more than 15 years later.

Bruce’s view, based on her memories of reporting on the Nickell case at the time, is that police had taken the Nickell killing personality, and she “felt as if they’d all slightly fallen in love with her”. As such, they “lost objectivity”.

Footnote

(1) Britton was cleared of misconduct by the British Psychological Society in 2002, on the grounds that he could not get a fair hearing. He also maintains that he advised police to broaden the Nickell investigation, and that he referred back to the Green Chain rapes. However, according to the Telegraph:

His account contradicts a book he wrote 10 years ago, The Jigsaw Man, in which he said there was no link between Miss Nickell’s murder and Green Chain Walk attacks, but he now insists he was guided away from his original views at the insistence of senior detectives.

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