Mick Hartley

Stephen Pollard in the JC welcomes the banning from entering the UK of “two of the most poisonous hate merchants on the planet”, Cenk Uygur and his nephew Hasan Piker. A reminder of who they are:

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 fng inbred hicks literally doing pogroms”. Piker believes that “any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fing 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.”

His 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”.

Not sorry to see them banned, then. But, as Pollard notes, there’s plenty of outrageously antisemitic bile produced here in the UK which the authorities do nothing about, “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.