Hope Not Hate & Searchlight: civil war?

While some IM readers wili undoubtedly see this article as irrelevant to the struggle against fascism, that is only because they may not appreciate the hugely malign influence Searchlight have had on antifascist politics for decades. NFB deserve to be congratulated for continually exposing Searchlight, and more recently Hope Not Hate.

Sounds like a load of scurrilous shit-stirring to me. For all their faults Searchlight / Hope not Hate have inflicted far more damage on the BNP and EDL than anyone else, ever, while, over the last few years, the main priority as regards the "militant" anti-fascists who habitually post smug and boring shit about Searchlight, is to keep them largely OUT of visible anti-fascist politics, to stop them steaming-in, breaking BNP heads, and delivering the BNP tons of free / sympathetic publicity. Scuse me for asking, but what has Lara O'Hara EVER contributed to Anti-Fascism, in terms of actively damaging the NF, EDL or BNP? So far as I'm aware all he's ever done is find fault with people who, for all their faults, were at least focussing pro-actively wrecking the campaigns of the real enemy.

The "undemocratic nature of HNH"? Since when was Borderland "democratic"? The real issue here isn't the (manifestly imperfect) financial aspects of Hope not Hate, it's the raw jealousy of people whose magazines never attract ANY donations... get a life

"Putting personal issues to one side..."? - the one thing this article NEVER does is put personal issues "aside"

"Searchlight's death-grip monopoly on anti-fascism"? - if this writer hasn't noticed there are MANY anti-fascist groups and freelancers - from One MIllion..., Emma's Trust, Nothing British, UAF, EDL News, Antifa, CSC, CST, Expose and some very potent freelance campaigns on You Tube - then clearly they don't know what they're talking about.

Searchlight has been a bug up Larry's arse for years and he's always tried to attack and destroy it. Tough shit, Lazza, it's here and it's staying here, along with the many other anti-fascist groups it has supported and which work with Searchlight. So what if HnH split off? Decent anti-fascists will work with them, too. Funny that hardly anyone cares about working with Larry O'Bonkers though.

...none of those hurling abuse have attempted to engage with the substance of the article. Says it all really.

"Hurling abuse"? WHO, exactly, is "hurling abuse" here? As for engaging with the substance of the article, the bottom line is this article's one person's opinion, presented with zero real hard evidence, purporting to come come from a publication so historically biased it makes my cat wince

Strange how HnH's latest ad (of many) for Matt Collins' book was advertised on its Facebook page just yesterday with the following tagline.

"All proceeds from copies bought from HOPE not hate will go to the Searchlight Educational Trust."

Not much evidence of this great split there.

Regarding the above comments: yes, there are deep ongoing links between the two factions: PO Boxes, control of domain name to name but two. Yet none of these connections, including a lack of full distenglement, means there are no frictions between the two camps. As the article states, it is in the interests of both factions to reconcile. Yet, again as the article states, there are undeniable tensions: Lowles resigning/Searchlight no longer being HNH magazine (or selling Collins' book) etc. Apologists want instead to focus on the ongoing links, while hoping onlookers forget that the things indicating rupture are not merely "opinion" but fact. Of course, Searchlight/HNH dupes wouldn't begin to understand the difference.

No, really, what has Lara O'Hara EVER contributed to Anti-Fascism?

Anybody interested in Larry's contribution to anti-fascism can visit www.borderland.co.uk and look up/read 'Searchlight Fiction Pulped', plus various other articles answering this non-question.

However, I again draw your attention to the fact that the points riased in this article have not been addressed by the trolls here.

Gratifyingly, if you wait long enough you will see even a worm turn. The Alliance for Workers Liberty have posted an article on their web-site asking very pertinent questions. Excellent! The truth may indeed out...

Why does every generation of activists have to re-discover that Gerry Gable is a conduit to one or another underground political dirty tricks arm of the state? O'Hara identifies his links as being to MI5, and that may be correct. If not, they are to some similar outfit. Cable may provide them with information on fascists, but he also spies on US and is willing to publish smears and lies against sound, sussed-out anti fascists. I, too, once thought the invective against Searchlight sounded like a phantasm from the nuttier fringes. Larry O'Hara's personal and writing styles don't help in that regard. Then Gable came out with the smear that the Stamford Hill Estate squatters (1980s) were a bunch of nazis. Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course, but they were very well organised, highly principled and had clearly got powerful people rattled. This was a very potent way to try to discredit them.

Gable's usefulness to the secret state and his ability to spy on us has probably diminished in recent years, along with his credibility, but it still a mistake to trust this double-dealer any further than you can throw him. Beware the facade of Searchlight. Much of what it publishes about fascists and their organisations may be accurate and useful, but it is the cloak behind which Gable operates, and you never know whether what you're reading has been written to order for a purpose..

No, I am not any sort of conspiracy theorist and think the conspiracy mentality is diversionary, unsound in its analysis and politically damaging. This is experience speaking.

"No, I am not any sort of conspiracy theorist and think the conspiracy mentality is diversionary, unsound in its analysis and politically damaging. This is experience speaking." - It may be experience speaking, but it is certainly not backed up by evidence.

"Cable may provide them with information on fascists, but he also spies on US and is willing to publish smears and lies against sound, sussed-out anti fascists. " - no proof provided

" Then Gable came out with the smear that the Stamford Hill Estate squatters (1980s) were a bunch of nazis." - again no proof provided, and in no way can this be seen as proof that the man has links to MI5 or "some similar outfit".

"Much of what it publishes about fascists and their organisations may be accurate and useful, but it is the cloak behind which Gable operates, and you never know whether what you're reading has been written to order for a purpose.." - surely that applies to anything you read anywhere?

Its no wonder that each generation has to find out for themselves if this the level of proof you can provide. But having decried the 'conspiracy mentality' your post manages to embrace its worst aspects.

the contributor above denies Gable has any links to MI5. How unfortunate, then, that he seems not aware (or hopes nobody else is) of the infamous Gable Memorandum reproduced in full below. ...Read and savour, especially the penultimate paragraph...

LONDON WEEKEND TELEVISION

From Gerry Gable
Date 2nd May, 1977
About Agencies
To Julian/Mike Braham/Barry Cox (Please keep these reports secure)

Phil Kelly was a member of the Young Liberals who in the sixties joined what was known as "the Red Guard". Young Liberals like Peter Hain and Peter Hellyer went against the traditional Liberal line and started campaigning along lines more akin to the Radical left. They stood out against the Vietnam War/Apartheid and for the Palestinians against the Israelis. At home they were for direct action on housing and other evils in our society.

In the first place, as I understand it, Kelly was an odd fish in the rather middle class Young Lib circles, he had a strictly working class background.

He was up to his neck in various campaigns in 1967. The Biafra aid set up was one of them. He was also seen frequently during that year at the offices of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. It was suggested that in either late '67 or early '68 he travelled to Cuba and was trained as was "Carlos" during the same period. Certainly Cuba held a Tri-Continental conference at that time involving many third world and Latin American states where Cuba was active in spreading their own brand of revolution. It is suggested that parallel to the conference, an extensive course of training in Guerilla warfare and Espionage took place. If the latter is true, then certainly Cuba's own Secret Service would have been aided by the KGB on the espionage side of the courses. In the early part of 1969 Kelly was seen at the Soviet Trade Mission in London.

I think that around this time he worked on the Hornsey Journal or another paper in that area, then he moved to work in the new radical press - being a familiar face at Black Dwarf/Seven Days and later Time Out. Hellyer and some other Young Liberals got very involved with the Palestinians around this time and in the summer of 1969 Kelly went to Jordan, not, as he told people, to see the refugee camps, schools and medical aid groups, but to a proper Fatah training camp. Members of the Baader Meinhof group also attended these camps and learnt their bombing and killing skills in them. Kelly was taught firearms/explosives and went out on some treks to the Israeli border with Fatah patrols.

Around this time, returning to London, Kelly acted as a cheer leader on several Arab demonstrations in London and during fighting in one of them he was seen to kick a policeman.

But although he seemed firmly in the left camp, a number of odd things about his attitude towards a person he knew to be hostile to the left are rather strange, on several occasions he could have blown the cover of a man who had infiltrated the Palestinians and some left groups. This man ran into him time and time again, including once at a function organised by the Cuban embassy in London. Kelly was seen on Irish Rights marches the night the Ulster office was attacked, medical aid for Vietnam, Portugese meetings and even a demo over Anguilla.

Wherever he worked on left journals he always seem to get into a position [section illegible, but probably "had access to the"] names and addresses of subscribers. Reports from left watchers state that he has been to Cuba, America, East Germany, Jordan and Sofia in Bulgaria for a Peace Conference. In the early seventies he went to work in West Germany and was away for around two years, I understand that he worked as a sports reporter (he was there at the time of the Munich massacre). He also had a German girl friend whose name is either Gerde Jager, or Jaegar, the daughter of a rich lawyer. She is said to be close to SWAPO operations in Western Europe and tied up with something named "Informist"?

Back in Britain Kelly worked at Time Out and was instrumental in introducing Mark Hosenball to stories that are part or even all of the reason for his deportation order. Around Time Out a group of Americans, Kelly, Duncan Campbell (the technology freak), plus Crispin Aubrey and John Berry (not just a former Army signals clerk, but a former member of British Military Intelligence) began to operate.

More than a year ago Kelly started to work for Interpress Services, a press agency of which he appears to be the sole employee in this country.

Even some of the left watchers here thought that this agency was set up at the time of a Third World Conference held in Colombo in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago and that in some way it is connected with the Yugoslav State Press Agency. However our checks reveal that it was set up in Italy in 1968 as a press co-operative and the directors are South Americans and Italians, one of the original people before Kelly at this end was John Rettie - a man I still have to check out but was in some KGB scandal in Moscow some years ago.

The last return made by the co-op shows an annual turn-over of a quarter of a million pounds sterling, although it preceeds Kelly's joining them (at least officially) salaries are shown as only two thousand per annum.

Hosenball, who to my knowledge was always keen to meet any new contacts, told me that he had refused to meet Kelly's contacts in Germany but would say no more. He was also prepared to tell me that the co-op was, as he understood it, set up by some Chilean Christian Democrats who in more recent times dropped out to be replaced by the Iraquis, although no signs of this appear on the company house records. Hosenball is frightened to tell me more about Kelly and it is almost certain that Kelly could blackmail Hosenball to keep silent. Since the Agee/Hosenball expulsion notices were issued, Kelly is often being seen more and more running round organising things. When Hosenball made it clear that he did not wish to be used as political cannon fodder, Kelly wrote an attack on him that appeared in the Leveller, a radical magazine.

This is not all that Kelly has done for the Leveller, he has also produced material on West Germany for them about the trials of the Terrorist groups.

The arrest of Campbell/Berry and Aubrey has caused a civil rights row, but according to my top level security sources, they inform me in the strictest confidence that for about four years Campbell, Berry and Kelly and others have been systematically gathering top level security material. Campbell, who claims to have only an interest in technological matters in as far as the state in involved, had done four years detailed research into the whole structure of the other side of not only our Intelligence services but those of other NATO countries. He has also gone to people who work on top security contracts and started off by asking them about open commercial work their companies do and then gradually asked them for information on top secret work, including that on under-water detection hardware, which he clearly knows is beyond the pale.

Politically it appears that the group have no one political guiding light or line, but Kelly is suspected of being the KGB man who reaps the goodies gathered by people who are possibly as disapproving of the KGB as they are of the CIA. [Two words illegible but probably "Other teams"] like this have been operating in France and Sweden. (Agee has been in contact with the Swedish set up.) The security services feel that once the real nature of this case begins to emerge they expect people like Jonathan Aitken will fade away fast. The security service accepts that a number of decent people have been signed up to support these people on civil rights grounds and they also unofficially accept all the short-comings of the act that they have been held under, but they say they are sure this has gone well beyond the bounds of Press Investigation.

Hosenball, although supposedly having his differences with Kelly, was party to a strange chat between Kelly and Steve Weisman at Granada's Christmas party. They were going through a list of contacts and what Hosenball's reaction would be be if he were asked about them. I could not catch the names but when one name came up all three of them seemed very keen to keep it out of the hearing.

Hosenball got extremely angry with Malcolm Southam of World In Action when asked about a man named Karl Von Metre, thought to be an American living in Paris, and would not talk about him. Hosenball's Paris trips are a mystery.

He told me two years ago that the reasons for his Paris visits were to go through files taken from a Portugese office of an extreme right wing group that used a press agency as a cover. At the time of the army take over in Portugal they had been seized and taken to Paris. However, my own investigation showed that the files were not in Paris at all had had never been taken out of Portugal, so why lie? His contact in Paris is Frederick Laurent, a young man who works for the left wing paper Liberation and who lives in very grand style in a huge Paris apartment.

When Hosenball and Kelly had hold of the Crozier material they were very keen not to check out right wing connections but to trace phone numbers they felt belonged to Secret Service establishments etc. Hosenball also went to Spain, I think to track down one of the people mentioned in the Robert Moss letters, but despite all this research most of what they got was not appearing in print anyway. Kelly was not happy about Searchlight using the documents and I think Hosenball, who had done work for Searchlight on various occasions, felt embarrassed by his attitude.

Kelly's current girl friend is Dorothy Jones who works for the People's Press Service or News Service, a sort of Agitprop outfit. Kelly moved into a house in Hemmingford Road, Islington, some time last winter. He shares it with Richard Fletcher who is on the London Co-op Education Committee, (strong links with East Germany) this is at 104 Hemmingford Road, N7.

I went to the house one dark winter night just after they had moved in. I was with Mark Hosenball and the reason for our visit was to get some more photocopies of the Moss letters.

When we arrived, a man who I thought must Fletcher came to the door. The building is a shop, basement and upper part, it was in a bad state of disrepair and the man was plastering or something like that. He said to Mark "there is a caucus meeting, Phil's up top". Mark told me to hang on and ran upstairs to the top floor. Being a nosey bugger I followed and in the top floor front room were about seven or eight men, no women, all seated on cushions on the floor with no centre light.

They were a mixed age group. I didn't recognise any of them and they did not seem to know me. Kelly looked at me staring in over Hosenball's shoulder and leapt up and pushed us out of the room. He said to Mark in a low voice "Why did you bring him here?" and Mark waffled on about not being able to contact him in advance and I needed the letters that very night as Searchlight was going to press on the next day. Kelly took us to the basement and produced the papers and then ushered us out as quickly as possible.

I have now given the names I have acquired to be checked out by British/French security services, especially the French and German connections and the South American stuff is being checked by Geoffrey Stewart-Smith's institute. He has strong CIA links. I may try somebody in the Israeli Foreign Office that I know for some checks on Kelly. It is now a time of waiting for feed-back and also further checks here.

I have attached a number of documents including a transcript of Kelly's interview with World in Action. It goes without saying that I would like this kept strictly secret.

January 1988 (p.2) & March 1988 was when Searchlight smeared anarchist squatters there as fascist. Given you can't credibly deny that either, is your new line going to be they were fascists?

Either way, now you're in a hole, keep on digging: the earth will be richer for your permanent presence there..

the only 'reflection' you are, is of a cracked disinformation record: back to the drawing board for you...

Those following this debate (which ground to a halt when I cited chapter and verse above) might be interested to know that Notes From the Borderland issue 10 has just published the definitive account of this dispute. The main site www.borderland.co.uk has (free) a detailed time-line, and introduction to the article. Our additional site www.borderlandmagazine.co.uk is where you can buy the whole thing from

Most of the comments or criticisms of this article are nonsense and nitpicking. As a former member of the Executive of Anti-Fascist Action, from 1985-90, I can state without any doubt that Searchlight sought to destroy the organisation at the behest of MI5 and Special Branch because of the involvement in it of Red Action primarily, who were supporters of Irish Republicanism.

The primary means by which they achieved this was the false story that Class War anarchists were conspiring in their Stop the City protests with the National Front to target Jewish businessmen. Class War was suspended from membership and a Committee of Inquiry was set up. Despite repeatedly writing to them for evidence Searchlight produced nothing whatsoever. Because of course there wasn't any.

I suspect the politics of HnH are not dissimilar to Searchlight's but, and that is the major criticism of the article, it has to be seen other than via Larry's personal prism. Does the split signal a more healthier approach in terms of not e.g. trading information on the left for state titbits? The fact that individuals have done things in the past which one deprecates is irrelevant. It's what they do now and to be honest the malevolent little scorpion at the centre of Searchlight is Gable and his wife.

HnH seems to be a continuation of Searchligh's bourgeois anti-fascism but I detect it is slightly more open (Searchlight never printed criticism, even from CARF, who had a section for years in it as to why they were leaving, still less from the dozens of Black organisations who Searchlight attacked, insulted and in the case of one meeting, assaulted).

I wrote an article over 20 years ago for Palestine Solidarity campaign newsletter 'Searchlight - Undermining the Anti-Fascists' the link to which is below.

Oh and one other point. According to Demi Moore the CST (Community Security Trust) a Zionist goon squad is anti-fascist. So anti-fascist that they have looked the other way while EDL members participated in the Zionist demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in support of the murder of 9 activists on the Mavi Marmara. they work closely with the Metropolitan and Greater Manchester Police. They are a group with multi-million pounds in assets. They use ex-Israel security and most recently helped protect the meeting of Avigdor Lieberman whilst targetting Jewish anti-Zionists.

The one thing they are NOT is anti-fascist and being bankrolled by Gerald Ronson, who is on the far-right (Herut) makes that likely to continue.

 https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-DwJUnaW0sMMjBjYTk4ZTYtMzhmYS00ZmNiLWExMDMtYzVjZGQ1OTRlN2Ey

Mr Greenstein, your comments are welcome. We will in time place a link to your article on the NFB site

Having co-authored the article, I can assure you it is far more broad-ranging than Larry's "prism".

As regards criticism, probably due to the altered power relations, Searchlight now does allow critics, at least on their web-site. Hope Not Hate does not.

There are many similarities between the two, as well as important differences. The article is fully substantiated, not least by many internal documents.