Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, is no evil: that is the current left-wing UK Labour government’s attitude toward the spreading of anti-immigrant “disinformation” online. Last week, Liz Kendall, Labour’s Minister for Science, Innovation, and Shutting Everybody Up, warned of an imminent amendment to her party’s Online Safety Act censorship laws as follows:
What prompted Kendall’s move was the riots that broke out in Belfast, in the UK province of Northern Ireland, last week, after a Sudanese Muslim immigrant tried to saw the head off a partially deaf and disabled local man named Stephen Ogilvie. This was immediately after stabbing Ogilvie in the eyes, making him blind as well as deaf now, too. Reports suggest the victim will lose at least one of his eyes.
The message the UK government wanted angry citizens to absorb afterwards was quite clear: don’t riot, and please continue to celebrate diversity. By remarkable coincidence, it turned out the victim’s family shared such sentiments precisely, releasing an emergency statement via police. It warned of how “We have witnessed a lot of false information circulating” online, and pleaded with rioters to stop burning immigrants out of their homes:
To which a substantial proportion of the British public then replied, “Which lying organ of the state wrote that rubbish for you?”
The answer would seem to be that it was probably drafted by a Family Liaison Officer (FLO), a specialist police official assigned to help families cope with sudden criminal tragedies in their lives and, equally as importantly, to control what they then say in public. This can be presented benignly to the family as “You don’t want to say anything stupid and risk jeopardizing the killer’s trial, do you?” but often such declarations are really only verbal crowd control.
Suspect Information
What was the alleged “false information?” The suspect, Hadi Alodid, was in fact a Sudanese asylum seeker, just as social media said. And, as was also claimed online, once arrested and taken to hospital himself, he really did subsequently threaten to kill the workers treating him. And, he really was low-IQ enough to say “I’ve just killed someone, I don’t know if he is dead” after arrest. And, of course, he really did try to cut an innocent man’s head off (here’s the graphic footage to prove it). So, the online “misinformation” was all true.
This is in stark contrast to certain more demonstrable actual misinformation put out by agents of the British state during migrant-related crime cases of late. Following the murder of white teenager Henry Nowak by a Sikh knifeman, for example, local police wanted to put out statements falsely implying Nowak had been the aggressor, and even tried to put out a notice warning people against spreading online “disinformation” during the eventual court case, a statement which could itself have caused a mistrial.
Likewise, during the case of “Sophie of Dundee,” the 12-year-old Scottish girl caught on camera defending herself by brandishing a knife and axe after being harassed by Bulgarian immigrants who implied they wanted to sexually abuse her, Scotland’s First Minister condemned online descriptions of the Romanians as the aggressors as being “deliberate misinformation” from the likes of Elon Musk, designed to “undermine” community cohesion.
Police Scotland similarly released a statement saying the supposedly innocent “Bulgarian couple” had been disgracefully “approached by youths” armed with weapons whilst on a stroll, trying to pin all blame on Sophie. Following a trial last week, the Bulgarians were found guilty after all. So, here, disinformation about migrants was indeed being spread online, but by the police, not the likes of Elon Musk.
Turning a Blind Eye
Admittedly, some things UK citizens end up falling for online really are untrue. Only on Friday, users fell for the line that an Afghan male in the English village of Brierfield had walked up behind an innocent 17-year-old girl in broad daylight and randomly stabbed her in the neck for no apparent reason. How absurd! This was completely false. In fact, he was a Pakistani, not an Afghan.
Or was he? After initially describing him merely as “a 30-year-old man,” official sources described him as being “British-born.” Yes, but only in the sense that Rudyard Kipling had once been “Pakistani-born.” Local Labour Party MP Oliver Ryan wasted no time going on X (the platform is OK whenever they use it) to warn how “I would encourage others commenting to stick to known facts and not exploit for clickbait this already distressing situation for people.”
He then added, “To address speculation, it is my understanding that both the attacker and the victim are Brierfield residents, and British.” This rather covered up the knifeman’s ethnicity. But, ironically, it also covered up the victim’s ethnicity, too, because it later turned out she was also of Pakistani heritage herself, not white as most web-users initially assumed.
Around a full day passed before any of this vital info was formally released to the public, presumably because officials were nervous about admitting the stabber was non-white, thereby creating an information void which was indeed filled by some apparent false speculation, like the thug being an Afghan asylum seeker, or the girl supposedly having cancer, possibly designed to make the case even more tragic or infuriating than it already was. Some of these posts have now been taken down, and replaced with soothing images like these:
Look at the cute, fluffy dog, people. There’s nothing to see here, particularly nothing involving a crime committed by a member of an ethnic minority. Evidently, Liz Kendall’s desired Online Safety Act measures are already in place, then. After all, it could very easily be used to cover up inconvenient testimonies from locals like this and this, which, if true, rather imply woke-neutered Brierfield cops hadn’t been doing their jobs properly.
Police had to issue a “public dispersal order” to force locals to return to their homes after they had massed in a nearby town center, blocking roads and chanting “Save our kids!” — something with clear potential to degenerate into violence.
But if a riot had occurred, whose fault would it really have been? People don’t believe online rumors in a vacuum. Demonstrably having been repeatedly lied to by police and politicians in the past, and with official details relating to ethnicity initially absent, social media users were already pre-primed not to trust the official narrative, making their belief of falsehoods entirely rational.
By blaming social media for UK race riots, the government is treating the symptoms, not the cause. Brits are burning cars and houses not because of social media per se, but because of what they see on social media, which, all too often, is the actual physical reality of the world they live in. Thanks to the continued long-term actions of their treacherous leaders, their world really is now full of disabled people being beheaded and teenage girls getting stabbed in the neck.
Brierfield is only a small village, the nearest sizable town being called Nelson. Appropriate indeed, given that the British state wants its citizens to remain blind in one eye about what is going on all around them. A bit like Stephen Ogilvie now is over in Belfast.
