After months of being hounded online by a small group of hard-line Zionists, I decided yesterday to dedicate a Quenelle gesture to my abusers, one of whom wrote a letter of complaint to EdFringe in a failed attempt to have my show banned. My tweet provoked a flutter of reaction and a request from Breitbart editor-in-chief @RaheemKassam for my email address :
Dear Ms. Chabloz,
I am writing an article after my attention was drawn to your picture making the Quenelle gesture in Edinburgh this weekend. I wondered if you would mind answering a few simple questions on the matter:
1) Why were you giving the Quenelle sign? Do you disagree that it is an anti-Semitic gesture, similar to a Nazi salute?
2) Who was it aimed at, and what point were you trying to make?
3) I have noticed there are some blogs and Twitter accounts that claim you have “denied” the Holocaust? Is that a fair claim, or is it something different? Do you accept the consensus, that 6 million Jews died at the hands of Adolf Hitler and the Germany Nazi Party?
Kind regards,
Raheem Kassam
My reply :
I’m up here in Edinburgh to perform my solo acoustic one-woman show Autumn’s Here. Before accepting and signing up for a month-long run of performances, I had felt obliged to inform the organisers about an online smear-campaign against me which began over a year ago.
This smear campaign includes letters to my employer as well as a host of abusive blog posts and online bullying – behaviour better suited to a primary school playground than to a platform for debate such as Twitter.
Thanks to my transparency regards this situation I was told by one of the festival organisers last week that ‘a member of the public’ had written a letter of complaint to EdFringe in an attempt to get my music show banned. They failed. Miserably. I wrote two mercilessly mocking blog posts about my abusers (here and here). They replied with several more anonymous, exceedingly nasty blogs which have been reported to police.
Ironically, last January following the attack on Charlie Hebdo, this same group of people were avidly waving Je suis Charlie banners and crying out for free speech. However, it would seem that they’re only in favour of free speech when it’s speech they agree with.
As clearly stated in my Quenelle tweet, the gesture is aimed at this group of people: Internet trolls who hide behind a mask of anonymity in order to smear and bully. For the moment, there have been no live protests at the venue I’m playing. It seems my abusers prefer to air their grievances from the cosy comfort of their armchairs. My Quenelle is a massive “Up yours!” aimed at these living examples of double standards and outright idiocy.
One of the main ringleaders in this campaign of abuse against me is Ambrosine Shitrit from London. With over 40 accounts suspended on Twitter for targeted abuse, Shitrit has dedicated her life to complaining about what she perceives to be ‘antisemitism’, targeting individuals and organisations she despises.
There’s little doubt in my mind that Shitrit is the concerned ‘member of the public’ who thought it a bright idea to complain about me to EdFringe. See here and here.
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Coming back to the Quenelle gesture itself, Roger Cukierman, president of the French Jewish Council, CRIF, considers the Quenelle to be an anti-establishment gesture unless it is performed outside a place of worship or memorial to Holocaust victims.
Others – including Shitrit – consider the Quenelle to be antisemitic under any circumstance: a hashtag search on Breitbart reveals that the editorial angle veers towards labelling the Quenelle as “Neo-Nazi”. My Grandfather, Stanley Tyrer – a soldier in the British Army – was killed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe at the age of 23 in 1940. ( Irate at not succeeding in getting my EdFringe show banned, my abusers have again turned their attention to Stanley. Recently, one associate of Shitrit – Andrea Silva Goncalves from Tower Hamlets – publicly stated that Stanley had been sent to a prison camp for deserters. Not content with smearing just me with outright lies, my abusers are now targeting my dead grandfather… )
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France’s most successful comic, Dieudonné, has made the Quenelle gesture his trademark. He even has an Internet TV channel named Quenel+. The restrictive Gayssot-Fabius law in France which effectively outlaws freedom of expression makes it easy for pro-Zionist press outlets to use terms such as “convicted antisemite” with regard to Dieudonné. The UK has no such law and hopefully never will.
‘Holocaust denial’ is another term which is being bandied about a lot these days. Those who point the finger are basically screeching “Witch!”. Nobody denies that the Jews and other groups suffered horrendous atrocities at the hands of the Nazis nor that millions died in camps. It is the method of murder which is under question and if people dug a little deeper into the issue they may discover some interesting facts regards the presumed existence of homicidal Nazi gas chambers.
Indeed, the French Gayssot-Fabius law only came into existence when Professor Robert Faurisson (whose mother, by the way, was a Scot) published his findings on the lack of any physical proof regards homicidal Nazi gas chambers. Faurisson has suffered no less than ten physical assaults by thugs associated with the LDJ (League des Juifs – French equivalent of the JDL, Jewish Defence League) and, like Dieudonné and others, has been punished financially in the French courts for expressing views based on in-depth intellectual and scientific research.
“Did six million really die?” Ernst Zündel published a pamphlet posing the question in 1974 and after two high-profile trials in 1985 and 1988 was eventually sent to solitary confinement for two years in a Canadian jail. Zündel was then extradited to Germany where in 2007 he was finally convicted and jailed for another five years. Like Faurisson, Zündel suffered physical attacks as well as having his home destroyed by a pipe-bomb.
I don’t know the answer to Zündel’s question. With an establishment corrupt to the core and police obfuscation regarding high-profile child abusers ( the Labour peer and former chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Lord Janner, springs to mind ) – is it surprising that so many people are now starting to question official versions of history?
Sadly, as we have seen during another recent smear campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, eloquent debate seems out of the question. Accusations of antisemitism and Holocaust denial are hurled in the direction of anyone associated with the Palestinian plight and those calling for an end to the illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank by Zionists. I like many others hope Corbyn becomes Labour leader and that after so many years we will start to see some real opposition in the House of Commons.
As for the trolls and their tiresome quest of hatred against those who do not share the same opinions, they continue to create new sockpuppet accounts on Twitter in order to implement tried-and-tested tactics of ‘Block and Smear’. No doubt, in the traditional Breibart modus operandum, Raheem Kassam will run a hatchet job which my abusers will tweet to kingdom come. That’s why I decided to blog first. We see conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism all too often in the mainstream press. It needs to stop.
At the same time I’m tempted to offer my heartfelt thanks to Breibart, Kassam and the desperate souls who wish to see me clamped in irons and sent to solitary simply for expressing an opinion. As the old saying goes : all publicity is good, and it’s time more people started standing up to Zionist bullies.
#FreePalestine
Alison Chabloz is performing her one-woman acoustic music show Autumn’s Here at Fingers Piano Bar, Edinburgh every night (except Mondays) at 7.45pm until August 30.