Amid the torrent of antisemitic hate that has been unleashed since the Hamas massacre on October 7 2023, today brings some rare good news.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has banned two of the most poisonous hate merchants on the planet, Cenk Uygur and his nephew Hasan Piker (it’s striking how often hatred is a family affair), from entering the country.
Uygur and Piker are pundits with large audiences. Uygur has his own show, The Young Turks, (he is Turkish-American) with around 6.6 million subscribers and a total of some 7.4 billion views across its 72,000 video archive. He’s also a regular on online streams such as Piers Morgan’s show. Piker’s Twitch channel has 3 million followers – putting him in the top 5 on the platform. He was given credentialed access to the 2024 Democratic National Convention and 2024 election night coverage stream had 7.5 million viewers.
Last year Piker was banned by Twitch (for all of 24 hours) for "improper handling of terrorist propaganda" after showing a manifesto by Elias Rodriguez, the alleged murderer of a young Jewish couple at the Capital Jewish Museum shooting. He has said that "America deserved 9/11" and called Orthodox Jews “Jewish KKK brigades...just a bunch of f***ng inbred hicks literally doing pogroms”. Piker believes that "any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a f***ing rabid neo-Nazi... You shouldn't even let someone be the f***ing local dog catcher if they've ever exhibited any sort of positive feelings about the state of Israel." And he denies that there was sexual violence during the Hamas massacre of October 7, claiming Israel "polluted the evidence pool". In January he posted that "Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state" and in April he said, “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time."
Hi uncle, Uygur, has hosted former KKK leader David Duke on his YouTube programme and repeatedly uses antisemitic tropes in his criticisms of Israel, such as saying, “It is not antisemitic to say Israel controls Congress” – a claim he has made repeatedly ("Israel controls the American government through donations to 94 per cent of Congress"). In 2024 he said it did not matter whether Biden or Trump won because “Netanyahu is still in charge.” He claims that “the people in power are easy to understand. They’re either corrupt (paid by AIPAC) or afraid they’ll be fired by pro-Israel executives (mainstream media).” He has spread a modern version of the blood libel, claiming that Israel had shot Palestinians seeking aid, deliberately let their bodies decompose for days, and then "let dogs eat them". Uygur has also dismissed the evidence of grooming gangs as “Islamophobic”.
I think it’s safe to assume that most people who don’t support Hamas or have an obsessive hatred of Jews would agree that Uygur and Piker are not the sort of people a country which is serious about protecting its Jewish population – and its own mores more generally - would admit. Indeed, within hours of the bans there was outrage from all the right people – allies of Uygur and Piker. One typical post asserted that, “This is so crazy. Cenk Uygur has also been banned from the UK for criticising the Zionist entity. Wake up. Britain is occupied. We are not free.” (That is of course not the reason for their bans. The idea that Britain bans criticism of Israel would be hilarious if this whole issue wasn’t so serious.)
But there is a deep irony to this welcome decision by the Home Secretary. Because while the views of Uygur and Piker may indeed not be “conducive to the public good” (the basis of their bans), they pale beside statements and sermons which the authorities do nothing about, but which are spread regularly and relentlessly within the UK by Islamists and hate preachers.
There are hundreds of such videos online, posted proudly by mosques. One dossier sent to the police (who of course did nothing in response) includes a sermon in which an imam speaks about punishing “the sins of the Jews” and others which deny or defend the atrocities of October 7. Another imam said Muslims should “terrorise” their enemies. One imam led a prayer for the destruction of Jewish homes: “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.”
Another preached how Zionists plot to “control the world” by manipulating banks, media organisations and regimes. They are in league with the Dajjal (an evil false prophet in Islam, like the Antichrist): “Zionism is like a political party, preparing for the Dajjal to come to rule the world, and their main function is to make sure that all the organs of states across the world and the national and international bodies will be in their hold. They hold the media, they hold all the financial institutions, they control a lot of the political regimes around the world and once they have that they will try to control the world.” The same Imam said in another sermon that Zionists bribe UK politicians to “use their false narrative and fabricated stories to push their agenda.” They are “soldiers of the devil”. Videos of his sermons were then posted on YouTube.
These examples are a tiny fraction of what is out there. And they include only comments by imams. Other rabble rousers and hate merchants are even worse. But not one of any of them has even been criticised by mainstream Muslim bodies, let alone prosecuted for what is surely incitement. So while there is the occasional piece of good news, as today, such news is miniscule in comparison to the tide of hate that grows daily inside the UK.
We are, by our inertia and refusal to tackle the poison that is being spread, watching in real time not only the ever-deeper growth of radical Islam as a serious force within Britain, but also of the ebbing away of the very basis of our Western democratic, liberal society. Banning two lunatics is, in that context, an utter irrelevance.
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