David Icke is a former footballer and sports presenter who has been one of the world’s leading conspiracy theorists for over twenty years. He believes that an evil agenda is being enacted on the human race by the ‘Babylonian Brotherhood’ – supernatural reptilian overlords.

You know, the obvious stuff.

Icke believes that we are literally living in The Matrix. “We are like droplets of water in an ocean of…awareness. We are ‘individual’ at one level of perception but still part of the infinite whole.” He calls this the Infinite Awareness. Unfortunately for us these malign reptilian overlords are mucking the whole thing up. They project their extra-dimensional consciousness onto elite corporal hosts. The reptilian ‘human-hybrids’ have inveigled every nation and system on Earth, in order to fulfil their dastardly ambitions, where humans will soon be micro-chipped and live as slaves under their One World Government.

(To lighten the mood when trawling through this guff I find it helps to say One World Government in the American movie-trailer voice)

Icke’s politics today are combination of most of the dominant themes of contemporary neo-fascism, mixed in with a smattering of topics culled from the U.S. militia movement, European and Middle Eastern conspiracy theories and most recently (and predictably) Russian State propaganda. In America, for instance, he opposes gun control as a plot by the ‘elite’, which has deliberately orchestrated numerous mass shootings to whip up opposition to guns.

Far-right daily’s such as Veterans today and White Supremacist site Stormfront are teaming with links to Icke’s articles and videos. In fact one cursory search on Veterans Today brings well over a thousand results for David Icke.

Icke is on a mission to educate and free the subjugated masses; he offers hope and freedom from the grip of our Satanic blood-drinking rulers. He assures us that if we can tune into the ‘Truth Vibrations‘ we can rise up as one against the reptilian overlords.

The problem is that these overlords are Jewish.

Well of course they are.

So how does a fascist ideologue incite hatred against Jews to sell-out crowds in Britain and get away with it? It’s the question the UK media has been neglecting or unwilling to answer and is the point of this hastily convened blog. Icke is playing to a sell out crowd in Manchester next week; a city with a large, thriving Jewish community dating back over a hundred years and one that I am a part of.

Yet I seem to have awoken in a world where extreme antisemitic rhetoric and incitement is ignored and deflected because the perpetrator also believes in aliens. A place where belief in ET precludes you from being a bigot. Perhaps we need to be more attentive to Icke when he unironically says ‘it’s time to wake up.’

Icke is in fact selling out stadiums worldwide and has been doing so for years; preaching ancient and modern antisemitic conspiracy theories and inciting his bewitched followers to rise up against these – mostly Hebrew – totalitarian overlords.

Icke is more popular than ever: No other conspiracy theorist sells out to theatres and stadiums worldwide. He is clearly seen by many as simply ‘that bloke on Wogan who said he was the son of God.‘ Perhaps it would be more prudent to go with ‘he’s that Holocaust denier who spreads anti-Jewish hatred and neo-fascist ideology to sold out venues across the world.‘

Not quite as catchy, I know.

We seem to see Icke as a likeable fool rather than the dangerous individual he really is. As Justine Ehrlich pointed out to me.. ‘It’s the kind of crypto-fascism you need to get knee deep in to call, that in part is why it is so dirty.’

And no one is calling it out. If an Imam was publicly heard spouting 10 per cent of Icke’s repetoire the right-wing press would have a field day yet Icke preaches his psychotic malady to full theatres while barely a murmur of protest will be heard from anti-racist organisations and Jewish groups.

Icke is a mere footnote in the incisive and compelling works on conspiracy culture by David Aaronovich (Voodoo Histories) and Jonathan Kay (Among The Truthers). However it is rather telling that he gets more attention in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s excellent work on far-right sects, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and The Politics of Identity. Concerning Icke’s 1994 work The Robots Rebellion ‘(Icke) combines an anti-elitist, ecological and spiritual gospel, the complete battery of far-right conspiracy theories and militia concerns: secret societies, Freemasons, banking and hidden elites, the New World Order, microchip control, extraterrestrials and gun control.‘

The corollary between Neo-Nazism/Fascism and New World Order conspiracism is well documented and was around a long time before David Icke. To see the attraction New World Order conspiracism has for Neo-Nazi groups Goodrick-Clarke writes, ‘By declaring war on a secret ruling elite that enslaves modern people, the conspiracy theorists invoke a lethal projection. The elite is identified as totalitarian, anti-democratic, contemptuous of the people; the people are portrayed as helpless, unsuspecting victims of viscous plots, alien abductions, implantation and all manner of personal violations…. Covert actions, violence, terrorism – all the means the elite stand accused of employing themselves – are permitted to the victims as well so they may exterminate the conspirators and recover their lost autonomy.’

This is why David Icke is a pin-up for some on the far-right but with his antisemitic ant-globalism he probably has more acolytes on the fringes of the far-left. Either way, he is undoubtedly a dangerous individual.

In The Robots Rebellion he borrowed heavily from Behold a Pale Horse by Bill Cooper – a UFO conspiracist who introduced Icke to The Protocols Of The Elders of Zion. The Protocols are a fabricated antisemitic document used by Czarist Russia to incite pogroms against the Jews in the early 20th century. (Much of Manchester’s Jewish community – including this author’s family – fled those very pogroms and found sanctuary in the city) In Germany, Hitler endorsed the Protocols and weaponised them. It was his Warrant for Genocide. This hideous document is the most malign and destructive conspiracy theory in human history. It was compulsory reading in schools for the Hitler Youth and instrumental in inciting the German people against the Jews. As historian Norman Cohn wrote in his book about the Protocols, “There exists a subterranean world where psychological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and the superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people.”

When asked about the Protocols Icke retorted, “Just because Hitler used the knowledge for negative reasons doesn’t reflect on the knowledge itself.” Indeed when Hitler himself was told beyond all doubt the Protocols were fabricated he responded, ‘Well that proves the Jews wrote it.’

The Robots Rebellion sold out and was reprinted twice. In his next books Icke began to flirt explicitly with Holocaust denial and lost his publishing deal as a result. In And The Truth Shall Set You Free Icke repeated his previous claims that the Protocols were true, and went on to state: “I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War…. They financed Hitler to power in 1933 and made the funds available for his rearmament.”

He described the Nuremberg Trials as a ‘farce’ and went on.. “why do we play a part in suppressing alternative information to the official line of the Second World War? How is it right that while this fierce suppression goes on, free copies of the Spielberg film, Schindler’s List, are given to schools to indoctrinate children with the unchallenged version of events….The “All-Seeing” Jews, however, and their non-Jewish conspirators, use the smokescreen of “anti-Semitism” and the genuine suffering of real Jews to prevent investigation of their sinister activities.”

The internet is extremely thin on Icke’s antisemitism, apparently because no one can be bothered to trawl through his books and videos except the conspiracy theorists themselves. Will Offley has written a page on Public Eye and gathered more quotes from And The Truth Shall Set You Free; they can be found here.

That was back in February 2000 but precious little has been written about him in the intervening years. Since then Icke has immersed himself in anti-Zionist conspiracy theories, much of it from the Middle East, fusing them with old European antisemitic conspiracies of which there is an endless cultural reservoir. These days Icke’s Twitter timeline is heavily consumed by Zionism which he sees as the most malignant and destructive secret society on the planet.

After losing his publishing deal Icke was subsequently sued for defamtion in the US. He learned his lesson and has since avoided the word “Jewish” where possible. Instead; his books, videos and live shows refer to Rothschild Zionists, Kahazar/Sumerians/Ashkenazi or as he puts it in one of his recent texts The Global Conspiracy:- AshkeNAZI. In the same book he attempts to distance himself from his previous claims of a Jewish plot to control the world by saying there is a Jewish plot to control the world.

“I am not saying that there is a ‘Jewish’ plot to control the World. I am saying that their leading families are serious players in the reptilian bloodlines that have infiltrated all peoples and nations with the aim of manipulating themselves into power.”

Most recently Icke appeared on the BBC’s This Week as he embarked on his Wide Awake World Tour. He was asked about 9/11 and shape-shifting Lizards but any links to Neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups were predictably ignored. Loathe as I am to criticise this programme; surely it would be prudent for politically high-brow shows such as This Week to hold Icke accountable for the extreme racial bigotry he propagates to sell-out crowds.

Much more menacing was an article published in the Independent during Icke’s last world tour. The journalist seems to have found the whole thing rather amusing, ‘It is all – largely – entertaining stuff, and clearly highly believable to many.’ Not one word in the article is given to the antisemitism explicit during said entertainment nor was it suggested that anti-vaccination conspiracy theories are inherently dangerous to the lives of children. All this and more was also ignored in a Mail online article published in July 2016.

Steve Mason, formerly of the sublime Beta Band, shows just how cool you can make Icke look. On his record Fight Them Back we hear an excerpt of David Icke talking about ‘reorganising society‘ spliced alongside Tony Blair saying ‘Libya is a goldmine of a country.’ Mason was challenged by one Twitter user at the time…

This is how Icke wins. How an audience at an Icke show will see right-on lefties sitting alongside far-right activists. It’s the conspiracy theory that glues these lost souls together with antisemitism the very marrow in their bones.

Pseudo-intellectual Russell Brand has broadcast several sycophantic conversations with Icke. Chummily discussing the nature of reality, media manipulation, globalisation; Icke is not only normalised, he is exalted as a heroic revolutionary crusader to Brand’s legion of fans; ‘I would concur David that most of us tend to live in a prescribed reality and that freedom is an illusion because freedom exists in such narrow parameters that ultimately we are enslaved by a very manipulative ideology.’ Brand is clearly far too intelligent to ask Icke about his support for Bashar-al-Assad and Vladimir Putin, his anti-abortion, anti-vaccination articles, his climate change denial, his support for the NRA, his conviction that the current migrant wave has purposefully been engineered to eradicate the native cultures of Europe. Russell Brand shows that if you’re ‘right-on’ you can be as racist as Nick Griffin on a particularly racisty day. It seems anything goes if you’re against the system.

Icke’s current world tour began in Australia in July. The Sydney Morning Herald is one of the rare media outlets who gave Icke his due. Ori Golan penned an article explaining what shouldn’t have to be explained… ‘A person who writes such things and makes home videos titled The Lizards and the Jews and Zionism, the cause of World Mayhem*, is not just a nut job; that person is anti-Semitic.’

The Mainstream

Russell Brand lucidly demonstrates how Icke is so successful. Given the populist political climate of the hour, anti-establishment sentiment can propel bizarre fringe beliefs into the mainstream. And Icke does appear in the mainstream. Only recently the video of Eva Bartlett and the degenerate conspiracy theories surrounding the White Helmets in Syria were shared on social media by people with otherwise relatively mainstream beliefs.

Eva Bartlett has appeared on David Icke’s show which Louise Proyect discussed in a recent article “This sort of toxic sludge can be found in a number of Assadist websites that combine 9/11 theories with unending and often ludicrous attempts to smear Syrian rebels as perpetrators of “false flag” incidents, including VoltaireNet, Off-Guardian and Global Research. That they overlap with outright fascist platforms such as Infowars and David Icke’s website should have provoked some soul-searching long ago.”

Icke on Syria:

“Assad is a tyrant oppressing his people! Does anyone really believe that!? The story that we must help the people of Syria is frickin’ bollocks.”

On Hilary Clinton:

“Hilary is another cocaine user (of course) and a lesbian.”

In Icke’s book Global Conspiracy he alleges that Hilary Clinton uses female sex slaves and is turned on by female genital mutilation.

On Jo Cox:

“That dead person is being deified out of all proportion… Today, with her body barely cold, her husband Brendan Cox is tweeting out a Go Fund Me link to his wife’s favourite causes…The White Helmets. The White Helmets are the military propaganda arm of the Allies attempt at regime change by destabilising Syria.”

(Not uncommon discourse in mainstream politics these days)

Icke has published nearly 50 articles in the past six months in support of Vladimir Putin.

Piers Corbyn has appeared several times on David Icke’s nightly radio programme – The Richie Allen Show. Piers, who also publicly shares platforms with Holocaust Deniers seems to have much in common with Icke and is doing his brother no favours at all by validating Icke’s theories. Peter Tatchell, amongst many others, has appeared on the same show.

Richie Allen marked Holocaust Memorial Day 2016 by inviting Holocaust denier Nick Kollerstrom on his show where he stated that 200,000 Jews died in the Holocaust and that there is ‘no trace of any extermination policy, no trace of any scorn or contempt towards for example Jews in the camps, they’re described in a perfectly respectful manner.’

The Labour Party

What internal crisis in a major British political party in 2016 could propel David Icke to intervene?

If you said Labour’s antisemitism crisis you win a falafel.

These images are from articles on Icke’s website published in the last year.

Alongside his website The David Icke Forum is a crucible for extreme conspiracy theorists to discuss evil plots and their machinates. Ruth Smeeth, the Labour MP who has received over 25,000 antisemitic and misogynistic messages in the past year, including long explicit death threats from far-left and far-right activists, has several pages of hate dedicated to her on Icke’s rancid forum. (There is a direct corollary between misogyny and racial hatred with female Jewish MP’s suffering far more abuse than their male counterparts) Good and brave people like Ruth Smeeth are feeling the real-life consequences of the cauldron of hatred whipped up by these frenzied maniacs who congregate in the cesspit of Icke’s website.

Live Show

His last tour The Lion Sleeps contains a 25 minute section of explicit antisemitic anti-Zionism, which if you can stomach – not recommended – is available here.

A small portion of the antisemitic images that Icke uses in his live show

His current show promises to be much worse. The trailer for his new show is over ten minutes in length during which he cannily avoids references to otherworldly reptilian phenomena. Only at the end are we briefly shown this image:

All powerful.

Not human.

Malign.

Sound familiar?

This is how Nazis portrayed the Jews; except the rats have become lizards, a new twist on an old theme. These memes and modes of thought don’t just simply vanish.

What’s To Be Done

Make a fuss. Take the man at his word. Take him seriously. He means what he says, he is a doyen of antisemitism and a purveyor of our darkest ideologies. He is a hate preacher.

I’ll defend Icke’s right to say what he wants but cannot defend Jewish community leaders and anti-racist organisations who remain passive in the face of overt antisemitic grandstanding in their community. But this doesn’t just concern Jews. This concerns feminists, ethnic minorities of all persuasions, anti-fascists, anti-racists, Syrians, people who don’t want the memory of Jo Cox sullied and her husband abused, environmentalists, in short: anyone who wants to be a member of the Anti-Stupid Party.

David Icke is performing a sold-out show at The Manchester Apollo on Saturday 14th January followed by a show in Ireland and then a European tour plus two shows in Canada.

I’m currently reading the 2007 book David Icke’s Guide to the Global Conspiracy – or as I’ve come to know it Mein Kampf for Dummies. Whether Icke contravenes hate-speech laws or not is of little concern; I believe good arguments will never chase out bad ones if we refuse to have them. But the line is drawn at incitement. Given that the Global Conspiracy referred to in the title of his book is mostly being enacted by Jews, it’s worth pausing for a moment and taking in the books’ complete title:

The David Icke Guide to The Global Conspiracy: And How To End It.

For now I’ll leave you in the safe, warm hands of Christopher Hitchens speaking in 2007 at the Jewish Literature Festival:

“Antisemitism is a very, very serious cultural danger, and it’s only a fool who thinks that it is a threat only to Jews. Antisemitism is a very, very toxic threat to everything we can decently call ‘civilization’… If someone says they don’t like West Indians, because of their — I don’t know what it might be — their music. Or they don’t like Indians because of the smell of their cooking. Or they don’t like Koreans for their Kimchi — whatever it might be. Every minority and majority in the world has a version of this kind of prejudice.

But, as Freud pointed out, they’ll all sink their differences when it comes to the Jews. And with the Jews it’s not their cooking or their sex lives or any of this, and it’s not just vulgar prejudice about skin color or smell.

It’s a theory.

It’s a paranoid theory that tries to explain quite a lot. It’s fascinated with gold, with secret documents, with missing codices in ancient treaties, with the idea of an invisible and secret government. It’s a very, very, very dangerous, pseudo-intellectual prejudice.”

(The full conversation is available here)

Marlon Solomon – Jan 2017

@supergutman

*The Lizards and the Jews and the Zionists the Cause of World Mayhem… was in fact the Youtube title of a Jon Ronson documentary on David Icke and not a film by David Icke as stated in the essay. Instead David Icke has films called Rothschild Zionists, World War III and the New World Order.