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Welcome Information Connoisseurs

Friday, January 30, 2015

Sedevacantist buncombe

On Jan 30, 2015, at 9:48, “S." recommended this sedevacantist web page:
http://www.fathercekada.com/2015/01/28/dr-de-mattei-prescribes-an-anti-sede-tranquilizer/

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Dear S.

Yes, I know the sedevacantist line  — no heretic popes other than questionable Honorarius, until John 23rd. 

My book on usury (Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not — avoided by every sedevacantist publication) shows that there have been popes who derogated (Leo X) and then later abolished (Pius VIII) the Dogmatic law against usury — by abolishing its as a mortal sin and declaring the mortal sin itself as an act “not to be disturbed”! This was heresy. Pope Pius X signed off on this in the 1917 Code of Canon Law (compiled under him and published after his death).

My forthcoming book on the "Occult Renaissance Church of Rome" will offer evidence of the occult popes of Kabbalism.

The sedevacantist thesis was invented by those who seek to maintain ridiculous and in many cases pernicious myths about the pre-Vatican II Church and its popes. It is worse than nonsensical. 

We can’t understand how the post-Conciliar Church came to be unless we investigate the pre-Vatican II popes of sodomy, usury and occult demonism who predate the Enlightenment and arose beginning in the Renaissance.

Sincerely,
Michael Hoffman
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Should Judaics have to pay Reparations for Slavery?

CAVEAT: Be forewarned that in the article below, citations of Judaic and rabbinic references to Moses were mostly for consumption by naive gentiles. Rabbinic Judaism is not a Mosaic religion, as the Victorian scholar Dr. Alexander McCaul, of Kings College London, had already ably demonstrated in his magisterial work,  The Talmud Tested Don’t be hoodwinked! Furthermore, this article neglects to report  in all but a trifling manner   on the actual Judaic traffic in Black slaves. For that suppressed history cf. The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews


Also note the reference toward the end of the article to the haskalah movement. The article does not inform the reader that this was a movement against the Talmud on the part of Judaics influenced by liberal gentiles and Christian missionaries.

Take a moment to ruminate on the words of the much maligned William Lloyd Garrison (below). He spoke as virtually all orthodox believers in the New Testament spoke and thought prior to the advent of the modern Judas Church. Today we have conservative priests and ministers thundering from their pulpits against Islam yet timid as mice when it comes to squeaking a word concerning the ideological heirs of Pharisaic Judaism, who Garrison rightly and courageously termed monsters.” (Note to Bill O’Reilly and Judge Napolitano: it wasn’t the Romans who Garrison was terming “monsters”).

Judah P. Benjamin is widely believed to have been the Rothschilds agent of surveillance over the Confederacy. After the war he deftly landed on his feet among the masonic elite of England, where he obtained a judgeship in that supposed fortress of abolition.

The hidden element in the War Between the States was Freemasonry, which in the North was still reeling from the blows it had received from the Anti-Mason Party, led by luminaries such as John Quincy Adams. Meanwhile, in the South, the most influential masonic Satanist in North America, Albert Pike, was a Confederate general. His Scottish Rite Masonry of Southern Jurisdiction was the most powerful masonic body in the western hemisphere. The post N. B. Forrest-era KKK was crafted along masonic lines, but then the same can be said for Joseph Smiths Mormonism. [For information on Judaics in the Black slave trade and Freemasons in the Civil War cf. Revisionist History newsletters no. 54 and 60 (scroll down the web page to locate these issues)].

Michael Hoffman 

Mr. Hoffman’s research is supported by donations from Truth-seekers.

(The boldface emphasis in the following article is supplied).
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Should Jews Have To Pay Reparations for Slavery?

Looking Back 150 Years, Jewish Record Far From Admirable

Uncivil Behavior? Judah P. Benjamin served as the Confederate Secretary of War.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Uncivil Behavior? Judah P. Benjamin served as the Confederate Secretary of War.

By Richard Kreitner

The Jewish Daily Forward (NY)  January 30, 2015
http://forward.com/articles/213776/should-jews-have-to-pay-reparations-for-slavery/ 
The 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the United States — Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in late January 1865 — comes at an fraught moment in the history of race relations. Considering that black men are being killed by police at the same rate as they were lynched in the era of Jim Crow, it can be depressing to reflect on how many promises of 1865, not to mention 1776, have not yet been fulfilled. But it can also be edifying to probe into some of the lesser-known aspects of the story of how the emancipation of slaves was finally accomplished. The history of the abolitionist movement is of more than antiquarian interest: it should serve to inspire us to finish the job today.
Nobody can argue that the balance of the Jewish record on the question of American slavery and the Civil War is anything but regrettable. If the career of Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin were not enough, the overwhelming complacency of the antebellum Jewish community, even in the North, provides a record sufficiently embarrassing to warrant official acknowledgement — even, perhaps, reparation.
But there were American Jews before the war who risked everything to fight the South’s “peculiar institution.” Familiar with the story of Exodus, they knew it was not actually all that peculiar. Now, 150 years after the end of slavery, when the unfinished work of emancipation and Reconstruction is announced daily in the headlines, it is worth lighting a yahrtzeit candle to those Jews who found in Judaism the imperative to line up, every time, with the oppressed. Before Selma, before socialism, the Jewish abolitionists were the first to map that once-fertile, now neglected terrain: the intersection of the identities of radical, American and Jew.
By the middle of December, 1860, the Union was disintegrating. Abraham Lincoln had won every state in the North and none in the South. South Carolina had just elected delegates to a secession convention and the other Southern states seemed poised to follow. The lame-duck president, James Buchanan, issued a desperate proclamation, “in view of the present distracted and dangerous condition of our country,” declaring January 4th, 1861, a nation day of prayer. He asked that “the People assemble on that day, according to their several forms of worship, to keep it as a solemn Fast.”
On the appointed day, the congregation of B’nei Jeshurun in New York saw Morris Jacob Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi, rise to the bima. “How dare you, in the face of the sanction and protection afforded to slave property in the Ten Commandments–how dare you denounce slaveholding as a sin?” Raphall asked of Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Beecher, brother of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Considering that the Patriarchs themselves owned slaves, Raphall continued, “Does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of blasphemy?
Raphall’s sermon divided American Jews. “I felt exceedingly humbled, I may say outraged, by the sacrilegious words of the Rabbi,” Michael Heilprin, a veteran of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, wrote in the New York Tribune. “Must the stigma of Egyptian principles be fastened on the people of Israel by Israelitish lips themselves?”
In the decades before the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe, there was no organized Jewish community, and thus no identifiably Jewish position on the most burning political question of the day. Surveying the views on slavery of American religious groups in 1853, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society had reported that Jews “deem it their policy to have every one choose whichever side he may deem best to promote his own interest and the welfare of his country…They do not interfere in any discussion which is not material to their religion.”
Yet the report concluded with a sly taunt, implying that the question of slavery was perhaps not as immaterial to Judaism as many of its American adherents preferred to admit. “The objects of so much mean prejudice and unrighteous oppression as the Jews have been for ages,” the report lamented, “surely they, it would seem, more than any other denomination, ought to be the enemies of caste and the friends of universal freedom.”
Jews in the New World participated in slavery at least as fully and profitably as their Gentile neighbors. Jews in New Amsterdam owned slaves within a decade of their 1654 arrival, and their brethren in Newport, Rhode Island, were involved in the slave trade right up until the War of Independence, in which several slaves of the city’s Jews were forced to fight. In the South, being rich enough to own slaves and not owning any “carried it with it social and business disadvantages,” the historian Max Kohler wrote in 1897, while in the North outright abolitionism was discouraged by “business and trade policy,” which “rendered such avowals inexpedient.”
American Jewish leaders of the mid-19th century were concerned, above all, with expediency. The most prominent Jew in the United States, Mordecai Manuel Noah — a former consul to the Kingdom of Tunis and the mercurial incubator of the “Ararat” scheme to resettle world Jewry on an island in the Niagara River–began his career as an opponent of the expansion of slavery. “How can Americans be engaged in this traffic,” he once asked, regarding the slave trade, “men whose birthright is liberty, whose eminent peculiarity is freedom?” But with age Noah became such an outspoken opponent of emancipation that the first-ever black newspaper in America, Freedom’s Journal, was specifically founded to counter Noah’s venom, and William Lloyd Garrison was moved to describe him as a “Shylock” and a “lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross.” When Noah died in 1851, Morris Jacob Raphall delivered the eulogy at his funeral.
The views of Noah’s successors as leaders of the fledgling Jewish community were less demagogic, but just as wishy-washy on the question of slavery. Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia, the first translator of the Tanakh into English and a man whom the Library of Congress has dubbed “the architect of American Jewish life,” agreed with Raphall that slavery was legal according to Jewish law, but cautioned that “our synagogues…are no places for political discussions.” Isaac Mayer Wise, the guiding spirit of Reform Judaism in the United States, refused to condemn slavery as a moral or religious wrong, and when war broke out, Wise wrote an editorial for his influential newspaper, The Israelite, titled, “Silence Our Policy.”
Among those Jews not content with such a policy was Ernestine Rose, a dazzling orator, utopian and freethinker born in Poland — “I was a rebel at the age of five,” she said — who traveled throughout the United States condemning slavery and agitating for women’s rights. Once, in the South, a slaveholder told Rose he would have had her tarred and feathered if she were a man.
During the mini-Civil-War known as “Bleeding Kansas” in the mid-1850s, three Jews accompanied John Brown on his raids against pro-slavery settlers. The archives of the American Jewish Historical Society contain a 1903 letter in which one of them, the Viennese-born August Bondi (another veteran of the 1848 revolution), recalled an exchange between himself and Theodore Wiener during one of the posse’s first attacks. As they followed Brown up a hill to assault a Border Ruffian camp, Bondi wrote, “Wiener puffed like a steamboat, hurrying behind me. I called out to him, ‘Nu, was meinen Sie jetzt.’ [‘Now, what do you think of this?’] His answer, ‘Was soll ich meinen, sof odom muves.’ [‘What shall I think of it? The end of man is death.’]”
Many specifically invoked the Jewish experience itself to argue against slavery. “If anyone, it is the Jew, above all others who should have the most burning and irreconcilable hatred for the ‘peculiar institution’ of the South,” said Bernard Felsenthal of Chicago, later one of the first Zionists in America, who once rejected a job as rabbi in Mobile, Alabama, because it would have required acquiescence to slavery. Gustav Gottheil, another early Zionist, was still in England at the time of Raphall’s remarks, but responded with two sermons quickly published as Moses Versus Slavery. “How can we be silent,” Gottheil asked, when the Torah is invoked to condone an institution of which it is, in fact, “one grand consistent utterance of condemnation”?
One of the most eloquent Jewish denunciations of slavery was delivered rather elliptically: in 1859, an aspiring scholar named Moses Mielziner earned his Ph.D. from the University of Giessen with a dissertation on “Slavery Among the Ancient Hebrews,” which attempted to show that the Israelites had treated their slaves with some degree of decency. The contrast with slavery as brutally practiced in the United States was only implied, but in April of 1861, the month the Civil War began, the American Presbyterian Review published his essay in translation, presumably in response to the debate Raphall had provoked. “No religion and no legislation of ancient times could in its inmost spirit be so decidedly opposed to slavery as was the Mosaic,” Mielziner wrote, “and no people, looking at its own origin, would feel itself more strongly called to the removal of slavery than the people of Israel.” Judaism, in his view, “sharply emphasized the high dignity of man” and “insisted not only upon the highest justice, but also upon the tenderest pity and forbearance, especially towards the necessitous and the unfortunate.” Surely the Jewish people, who had themselves “smarted under the yoke of slavery, and had become a nation only by emancipation,” would be stalwart opponents of “the unnatural state of slavery, by which human nature is degraded.”
The most courageous Jewish response to Raphall’s sermon came neither from Europe nor the North, but from the dais of a synagogue in Baltimore, Maryland, a slave state. Rabbi David Einhorn, born in Bavaria, had fled to the United States in 1851 after the Emperor Franz-Josef closed Einhorn’s shul, fearing the growing Reform movement’s ties to the late revolutionary upheaval. Once in Baltimore, Einhorn quickly rose to prominence, and in deference to his congregation, largely avoided the slavery issue.
But by January, 1861, after Raphall’s inflammatory sermon in New York, Einhorn felt he could no longer keep silent. “The Jew has special cause to be conservative,” Einhorn allowed, noting his audience’s distaste for politics in the pulpit, “and he is doubly and triply so in a country which grants him all the spiritual and material privileges he can wish for.” While sharing the congregation’s “patriotic sentiments” for America, Einhorn said that to allow Jewish law to be “disgraced….and in the holy place!” would be to jeopardize the soul of Judaism itself:
“The spotless morality of the Mosaic principles is our pride and our fame, and our weapon since thousands of years. This weapon we cannot forfeit without pressing a mighty sword into the hands of our foes. This pride and renown, the only one which we possess, we will not and dare not allow ourselves to be robbed of. This would be unscrupulous, prove the greatest triumph of our adversaries and our own destruction, and would be paying too dearly for the fleeting, wavering favor of the moment. Would it not then be justly said, as in fact it has already been done, in consequence of [the Raphall sermon]: Such are the Jews! Where they are oppressed, they boast of the humanity of their religion; but where they are free, their Rabbis declare slavery to have been sanctioned by God.”
For such provocations and others Einhorn was, like Rose, threatened with tarring and feathering. A week after the war began, he and his family exiled themselves to Philadelphia.
Einhorn — a man with much to lose — saw an American Jewish community looking after its own short-term interests, willing to be silent about the oppression of others, frightened into political quiescence. He believed in a morality beyond mere self-preservation: influenced by Haskalah, the German-Jewish enlightenment, Einhorn thought that Jews were a people only insofar as they were united by common ethical beliefs. 

Richard Kreitner maintains the archive blog “Back Issues” at The Nation
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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

An Auschwitz for Arabs

By Michael Hoffman
www.revisionisthistory.org

The Auschwitz bandwagon has rolled onto our television and Internet screens and newspaper front pages once again. It never actually leaves, so perhaps it is more accurate to say that this week it is more present than usual.

You don’t believe we’re ruled by halacha (Talmudic law)? In that case, how is it that whatever befalls The Holy People of Counterfeit “Israel” is branded the supreme evil of the cosmos, and whatever happens to the eternally skimmed (we the goyim), counts for slightly less than nothing?


You never heard of it, correct? Why is that? It was a torture camp; a death camp paid for in part with American taxpayer money. But you know nothing of it. Israeli allies under Israeli direction killed and tortured the Lebanese in that El Khiam concentration camp. All of the victims were goyim, not Holy People. Now do you understand why El Khiam is unsung and unknown?

El Khiam was liberated by Hezbollah, the people Americans are taught to hate because they are the only formidable armed resistance against Israeli conquest and land theft in the Middle East. Unlike Sunni Saudi Arabia which is allied with the Israelis, Shiite Hezbollah has not cut a deal with the US or the Israelis. This is why Assad in Syria and the government of Iran are attacked and sanctioned -- they are the principal, and practically the only significant allies of Hezbollah.

“Saudi Arabian interests and Israel are almost parallel,” says Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. “He notes the startling alliance of Saudi Arabia and the Jewish state.” (Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2013, p. A11). 

“...the kingdom now supports Islamist rebels in Syria who often fight alongside Qaeda groups like the Nusra Front. The Saudis say they have little choice...they believe they must now back whoever can help them defeat Mr. Assad’s forces and his Iranian allies.” (New York Times, January 5, 2014, p. A10).

Saudi Arabia, which maintains a compact with its clerics who furnish the murderous Wahhabist-Salafist theology which drives ISIS and al-Qaeda, is our precious “ally,” while Hezbollah, Iran and Assad’s Syria we are taught to hate, sanction and prepare to do war with.

We are seeing the makings of another war unfolding this week, which the Israelis are instigating in league with their covert Saudi-based Wahhabist-Salafist Sunni terrorist allies; a war intended to finish off Assad, the protector of the Christian population in Syria, and in Lebanon to “mow the lawn” (an Israeli euphemism for periodic massacres of Arab civilians so as to tame these lesser humans).

Here’s how it’s playing out as we write these words: nine days ago the Israeli military bombed a convoy in Syria’s Golan Heights. The bombs killed five members of Hezbollah, including the son of the group’s former military commander, Imad Mughniyeh, and an Iranian general. The Israeli government justified the unprovoked attack on Syrian land by claiming, on no evidence, that Hezbollah and its Iranian allies “had been building an infrastructure in the Syrian Golan Heights with which to attack Israel.” The NY Times and other controlled media published this alibi without skepticism and without publishing any comment from Syria, Iran or Hezbollah as a counter to it. The Israelis issue the pretext for their violence and all people who think correct" thoughts are obligated to believe it’s true.

Today, Jan. 28, in retaliation for the Israeli attack (although the mainstream media will not patently report it as retaliation), Hezbollah struck an Israeli convoy, with the difference being that whereas the US media published almost no photos of the Israeli attack nine days ago, today graphic and grisly photos of the wounded Israelis and the wreckage of their vehicles are plastered all over the US media.

To summarize, the Israelis launched an unprovoked bombing raid on Syria, killing Hezbollah personnel and an Iranian general. When representatives of those victims fight back, we have the situation today, as decreed by “our” media: “Hezbollah launches attack on Israel.”

One envisions the shaking heads and indignation of all of those millions of Fox News habitués and “American Sniper” movie viewers, who are thinking, “Those damned Arabs are at it again! Go Israel!”

With an Israeli national election weeks away, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was anxious to initiate a tit-for-tat exchange with Hezbollah which he knew the US media would suggest was “an act of Arab terror,” which in turn provides Netanyahu the opportunity to gain more popularity with the generally bloodthirsty Israeli electorate by sparking a war with Lebanon and Syria. 

All this might very well precipitate another genocidal Israeli “lawn mowing” of Lebanese civilians (last witnessed in 2006), and the opportunity to further assist the al-Qaeda connected Nusra front in Syria in finally crushing the Syrian-Christian population’s ally, Assad, and instituting Nusra’s Sharia law in Syria, which Right wing Republicans claim to oppose in the US but support in Syria -- by means of their Israeli-approved goal of overthrowing Assad.

According to a statement on his Facebook page, Russian-Judaic Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, stated that “Israel” should respond to Hezbollah’s retaliation, “in a very harsh and disproportionate manner.” 

We’ll wager that Lieberman’s advocacy of a “disproportionate” attack is a reference to his goal of another massacre of Lebanese. Lieberman’s political ally, Ayelet Shaked, a member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament), spelled it out: “bombing a civilian population is justified when civilians give shelter to evil” (Jewish Daily Forward, Jan. 26, 2015).

“Evil” in this context signifies any goy who raises his head against Israeli occupation and mass murder. 

Israelis have a license to kill Arabs. They can “Auschwitz” them as much as they like, on this, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Michael Hoffman’s counter-intelligence briefings are made by possible by donations from readers. Please donate now to ensure the continuation of this vital public service. Thank you.

Copyright©2015 by Independent History and Research

All Rights Reserved
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Monday, January 19, 2015

An Antidote to Republican Party activist Clint Eastwood

We have an antidote to Republican Party activist Clint Eastwood’s immensely popular and enthralling neocon propaganda film, “American Sniper.”

Our review is titled “A Sheep Dog Tricked into Serving the Wolves.”

It will be published in Revisionist History newsletter no. 76 and mailed to subscribers later this month, but we think Eastwood’s movie is potentially too damaging to our nation’s best interest to count on gaining more newsletter subscribers as a means for getting the review into circulation.

Therefore, we’re offering it in a pdf file that will be e-mailed for a modest fee of $1.50. The length is 3800 words in ten pages. 

The link to ordering the review is here:

There will be those who will say that an Academy Award-nominated movie directed by a Hollywood legend is not going to be dented by an obscure revisionist journalist in Idaho.

Here’s our view: you keep punching as long as you have the strength to do so and let God decide how and where the punches will land. You keep playing football when you’re down 19-7 with 44 seconds left in the game. 

You dream the impossible dream and you fight the unbeatable odds with the talent and resources God has bequeathed, and on the day that you die you will know that you got in the ring; you were a contender. 

We do the best we can. The rest is up to God.  He's been known to cut some mighty big players down to size. If we don't team with Him, who will? If it's not our responsibility, then whose responsibility is it?

 Michael Hoffman
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Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Persecuted French revisionist: Charlie Hebdo Before and After

Persecuted French revisionist scholar: 
Charlie Hebdo Before and After 

Editors Note: Dr. Robert Faurisson, the courageous octogenarian dean of European revisionists who has been repeatedly beaten, prosecuted, jailed and heavily fined in France for publishing doubts about the authenticity of the sacred relics of Holocaustianity, offers his insights into the situation in France in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris.
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To Michael Hoffman:

These killings in Paris, at the office of Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere – with 20 dead in all, among whom five were Jews – rightly arouse widespread indignation but Jewish organizations have immediately exploited this indignation for their benefit. They forget that, in large part, it’s been under the pressure of international and French-Jewish groups that France has hastily engaged in all sorts of military expeditions causing so many deaths in the Arab-Muslim world. They forget this country’s responsibility for the creation of the bogus "State of Israel" – soon afterwards arming it with nuclear weapons – and in the appalling fate of the Palestinian people since at least 1948; as well as the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu at Sunday’s rally in Paris which was an affront to an entire Arab-Muslim world. Jewish organizations in France live in anger and war; that being the case, how can they be surprised if their adversaries live in anger and war as well?

Such killings may bring to mind a number of murders committed by Jews who subsequently became “heroes” of Jewish history. On February 25, 1994 Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli army physician armed with an assault rifle, shot dead 24 Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron before being subdued and killed there himself. Goldstein's nearby tomb is a pilgrimage site for many Jews.

The hysteria we are witnessing now in France, in this month of January 2015, has a precedent: that of May 1990 and the “profanation of the Carpentras cemetery” when Judaic graves were said to have been vandalized. It was the exploitation of that event that made it possible to intimidate the French parliament into enacting a law called “The Fabius-Gayssot Act” of July 13, 1990 — punishing by a term of imprisonment of from one month to one year and a fine of up to 300,000 francs (45,000 euros), along with several other sanctions — those who dispute “the existence of crimes against humanity” (that is, essentially, crimes against Jews), as defined and punished in 1945-1946 by a body that the winners of the recent war had dared to name the “International Military Tribunal” (three lies in three words) of Nuremberg. This law, totally contrary to the French constitution, came into effect by appearing in the Journal Officiel de la République Française of July 14, 1990, anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. 

It was due to a fabrication on the part of the Socialist president of the French parliament, Jewish millionaire Laurent Fabius, which he conveyed to a national television audience, alleging that a Jewish cadaver in the Carpentras cemetery had been taken out of its grave and impaled through the rectum with a pole —  that the French were stampeded into outrage and indignation which was cleverly exploited: Catholic authorities rang the great bell of Notre-Dame in Paris as a sign of an extraordinary sacrilege having occurred. The Socialist French President François Mitterrand led a march through the center of Paris at the head of the vast crowd of demonstrators. We have now, on January 11, 2015, seen the same scenario repeated in the same place: the Catholic Archbishop having taken the initiative of ringing the Notre-Dame’s bells, and Laurent Fabius, architect of the suppression of the rights of freedom of expression of revisionists in France, in the front rank of the “protesting” dignitaries marching through the streets — our Socialist President François Hollande  together with Netanyahu — all supposedly in the cause of freedom of expression.

Moreover, those Jewish organizations pose as being in support of freedom of opinion and expression but, in reality, what they are demanding is increased repression against “Holocaust denial." Revisionism has made significant progress in recent years here in France, thanks especially to the Internet. Certain Jewish organizations therefore, are working for laws aimed at the censorship of the Internet, of the Ferench-African comedian Dieudonné (who has some 80 legal proceedings pending against him), of the revisionists and of a number of other unbowed men and women.

In conclusion and for want of time, I shall allow myself just three remarks in response to the questions which you sent by e-mail: 1) the name Charlie-Hebdo has, apparently, nothing to do with Charles de Gaulle; it comes, I believe, from the Peanuts character Charlie Brown. 

2) Gayssot is the surname of a former Communist MP and government minister, and the Fabius-Gayssot Act is sometimes called the “Faurisson Law” or “Lex Faurissoniana”; I have lost count of the times I’ve been ordered to pay fines or damages on the grounds of this law; other revisionists have been thrown into prison or, like Vincent Reynouard, a father of nine, will be returning to prison. For my part, I’ve endured ten physical assaults – of which eight took place in France. French police have carried out numerous searches and seizures, or attempted seizures, at my home. These police have often refused to protect me in the presence of threats and danger. 

3)  I hope to be able, before long, to send you an English version of my nine-page article (with illustrations) which I wrote on December 31, 2014. It is entitled: In 70 years, no forensic study proving the existence and operation of the “Nazi gas chambers”! 

I dedicated this study to Professor Ben Zion Dinur (1884-1973), founder of Yad Vashem in 1953, who was forced to resign in 1959 for having preferred scientific history to Judaic memory.

I thank you, dear Michael, and congratulate you on the work you have done over so many years, and in such difficult conditions, for the just cause of historical revisionism.

Robert Faurisson, January 13, 2015
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Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Legal judgment against distributors of Tales of the Holohoax

Here follows the judgment from the “Royal Courts of Justice” London, England, against Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle for distributing our Tales of the Holohoax satire : 3 years and ten months imprisonment for Sheppard, and one year and ten months imprisonment for Whittle, along with the seizure of their printing equipment and computers. The emphasis (in boldface) has been supplied by us, otherwise this is the judgment as it was handed down by this court.


Case No: 2008.04402 B5
2009.04021 B5
2009.04020 B5
2008.04486 B5
2009.00658 B5
Neutral Citation Number: [2010] EWCA Crim 65
HHJ GRANT
2009.04020b5*1
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Date: 29/01/2010

Before:
LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER
MR JUSTICE PENRY-DAVEY
and
MR JUSTICE CRANSTON
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Between:
Regina Respondent
- v -
Simon Guy SHEPPARD and Stephen WHITTLE Appellants
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Mr. A. DAVIES (instructed by Williamsons, Hull) for the Appellant Sheppard
Mrs L. TURNBULL (instructed by Payne & Payne, Hull) for the Appellant Whittle
Mr J. SANIDFORD and Ms. Denise BREEN-LAWTON for the Respondent
Hearing dates: 26 and 27 November 2009
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Judgment
Lord Justice Scott Baker:

1. These two appellants appeal with the leave of the full court against their convictions
for a number of offences relating to racially inflammatory material under the Public
Order Act 1986 (“The 1986 Act”) The Registrar referred their sentence applications to
this court.

2. The history of the proceedings is, in brief, as follows. On 11 July 2008 in the Crown
Court at Leeds before Judge Grant and a jury Whittle was convicted of four counts of
publishing racially inflammatory material (counts 4, 5, 7 and 8). Sheppard was
convicted of 9 counts of publishing racially inflammatory material (counts 4, 5, 7, 8,
9, 12, 13, 14 and 15).

3. They then left the jurisdiction and went to the United States of America where they
claimed asylum. The trial continued in their absence. On 14 July 2005 Whittle was
convicted by a majority of 10 to 1 of one further count of the same offence – count 6
– and Sheppard by a majority of 10 to 1 of two further counts of the same offence –
counts 6 and 10.

4. There were 7 counts in relation to Sheppard on which the jury was unable to agree.
These were:

Counts 1, 2, 17 and 18 – possessing racially inflammatory material.

Counts 3 and 11 – publishing racially inflammatory material.

Count 16 – distributing racially inflammatory material.

5. There was a retrial in Sheppard’s absence and he was convicted of counts 1, 3, 16, 17
and 18. On 8 January 2009 he was found not guilty on the judge’s direction of count
2 and the prosecution did not proceed with count 11.

6. The claim for asylum in the USA was refused and the two appellants were returned to
the jurisdiction. On 10 July 2009 Sheppard was sentenced to a total of 4 years and 10
months imprisonment and Whittle to a total of 2 years and 4 months imprisonment.
Included in those sentences were 4 months consecutive sentences for bail offences.
The Bail Act sentences are not the subject of the present appeals. The judge also
made forfeiture orders under section 143 of the Powers of Criminal Courts
(Sentencing) Act 2000 in respect of which Sheppard seeks an extension of time and
leave to appeal.

7. The broad nature of the prosecution case was that Whittle composed material which
he submitted by e-mail to Sheppard. Sheppard edited the material on his computer
and then uploaded it to a website called heretical.com which was set up by him and
was hosted by a remote server located in Torrance, California. When posted on the
website the material was available for access via the internet by visitors to the
website, including people within the jurisdiction of England and Wales.

8. Count 1 related to the possession by Sheppard on 30 May 2005 of a pamphlet called
Tales of the Holohoax which was found on a search of his home in East Yorkshire. It
was a publication in the form of a comic book, the central theme of which was to cast
doubt on the existence of the Holocaust. The publication also suggested that the
Jewish people had a history of inventing stories of the commission of atrocities
against them and it portrayed the Jewish people in a way that, as was alleged, made it
likely that racial hatred would be stirred up against them if the pamphlet was
distributed. Count 2 contained an allegation in identical terms against Sheppard, but a
year later.

9. Count 3 related to the publication by Sheppard of the Tales of the Holohoax pamphlet
in full on the heretical.com website. There was evidence from a police officer, DC
Brown, who visited the site and downloaded the documents.

10. Counts 4 to 8 related to a number of other articles written by Whittle, edited by
Sheppard and published by Sheppard on the heretical.com website. All the articles
were alleged to contain derogatory remarks about Jewish people and black people.

11. Counts 9 to 15 related to the publication by Sheppard on the heretical.com website of
a number of other documents which were likewise alleged to contain material that
was threatening, abusive or insulting towards various racial groups.

12. Counts 16 related to the distribution by Sheppard of a pamphlet called “Don’t be
Sheeple” which was likewise alleged to be racially inflammatory, count 17 to the
possession by him on 4 July 2008 of a number of copies of that pamphlet and count
18 to the possession by him on the same date of a number of copies of the Tales of the
Holohoax pamphlet.

13. Matters came to light in this way. On 13 August 2004 Professor Klug, a research
fellow with the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of
Economics forwarded to Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, a pamphlet entitled
Tales of the Holohoax which had been sent to her personally. Four days earlier on 9
August 2004 a Mr Whine had written to the Chief Constable of Lancashire
complaining that the same pamphlet had been received by the Blackpool Reform
Synagogue. A similar complaint was made to the Western Division Police
Headquarters. The Crown Prosecution Service was invited to consider prosecuting
the publisher under Part III of the 1986 Act.

14. Sheppard was traced through the publisher’s address printed on the pamphlet. The
Crown Prosecution Service decided that Tales of the Holohoax contained words
which were abusive, insulting and possibly threatening towards a racial group, namely
Jewish people and that further investigations were required to discover the extent of
the publication and distribution. In March 2005 Sheppard was arrested and
interviewed. It became apparent that he operated a number of websites, and
registrations for 15 websites were found in his name at his home address. The
websites had names such as heretical.com; klan.org; nazi.org; and whitepower.co.uk.
During a review of this material it became apparent that Whittle had been writing
articles under the pseudonym of Luke O’Farrell and these were published by
Sheppard on his website heretical.com.

15. Having edited the material, Sheppard posted it to the website in Torrance California.
In order to do this he used a format known as File Transfer Protocol. Once the
material reached the server, the server then converted the format of the material to
HTML which made it available to be accessed on the internet by those visiting the
website, including people within the jurisdiction of England and Wales. Sheppard
had control of the website as far as its contents were concerned. He could upload and
edit material.

16. The appellants do not challenge the jury’s findings that in each of the counts in
respect of which they were convicted the material was racially inflammatory; nor
could they. Rather, the appeal is concerned with issues of law.

17. The appeals against conviction concern only those counts relating to the internet; that
is counts 3 – 15. Indeed the other counts (1, 2, 16, 17 and 18), which concerned
Sheppard only, related to hard copy material. Each of the internet counts of which the
appellants were convicted involved an allegation of publishing racially inflammatory
material contrary to section 19 (1) of the 1986 Act.

18. Section 19 of the 1986 Act provides:
“(1) A person who publishes or distributes written material which
is threatening abusive or insulting is guilty of an offence if –
a) He intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
b) Having regard to all the circumstances, racial hatred is likely to be
stirred up thereby.

(2) In proceedings for an offence under this section it is a
defence for an accused who is not shown to have intended
to stir up racial hatred to prove that he was not aware of the
content of the material and did not suspect, and had no
reason to suspect, that it was threatening, abusive or
insulting.

(3) References in this part to the publication or distribution of
written material are to its publication or distribution to the
public or to a section of the public.”

19. The appellants advance three grounds of appeal. The main one relates to jurisdiction,
the argument being that a publication on the internet is only cognisable in the
jurisdiction where the web server upon which it is hosted is located and since in this
case the location was California the publication falls outside the jurisdiction of
England and Wales. We would add that it is common ground that none of the
material charged by the internet counts is illegal in the United States of America. The
other grounds concern the meaning of “publication” in section 19 and the application
of section 19 to publication on the internet and whether the material published on the
internet was “written material” within the meaning of section 29 of the 1986 Act.
Section 29 provides that “written material” includes any sign or other visible
representation.
Jurisdiction

20. The judge found that the test to be applied was to be found in the case of R v Smith
(Wallace Duncan) (No.4) [2004] 2Cr App R 17, [2004] EWCA Crim 631. That is
that the Crown Court had jurisdiction to try the appellants for their conduct because a
substantial measure of the activities constituting the crime took place in England. He
rejected the appellants’ arguments that the determinative factors were (1) that the act
of publishing took place in California when the format of the material supplied by
Sheppard was converted to allow it to become accessible on the internet, and when it
was accessed by other people clicking on the website; (2) that the act complained of
did not constitute a criminal offence in the United States of America because it was
not only not a criminal act but also specifically protected by the First Amendment to
the American Constitution; and (3) that the wording of section 42 of the 1986 Act was
different from the jurisdictional wording of, for example, the Theft Act 1968 and thus
the Wallace Duncan Smith (No.4) line of authority was not applicable.

21. The judge said in his ruling that the test to be applied was summed up effectively in a
quotation at paragraph 55 of the judgment of Lord Woolf C.J. in Wallace Duncan
Smith (No.4) citing Rose L.J. in Smith (No 1):
“The passage in Treacy v DPP to which Roberts CJ refers is the
celebrated discussion by Lord Diplock of the bounds of comity
and the judgment of La Forest J in Libman contains a most
valuable analysis of the English authorities on the justicability
of crime in the English courts which ends with the following
conclusions:

The English Courts have decisively begun to move away
from definitional obsessions and technical formulations
aimed at finding a single situs of a crime by locating where
the gist of the crime occurred or where it was completed.
Rather, they now appear to seek by an examination of
relevant policies to apply the English criminal law where a
substantial measure of the activities constituting the crime
take place in England, and restricts its application in such
circumstances solely to cases where it can seriously be
argued on a reasonable view that these activities should on
the basis of international comity not be dealt with by another
country.”

22. The judge pointed out that the material complained of was prepared in England and
Wales, was uploaded onto the website from England and Wales and that this must
have been done by Sheppard in the knowledge and with the expectation and intent
that the material should be available to the public or a section of it within the
jurisdiction in England and Wales. He noted there were references to postage for
people living in England and Wales should they wish to have the materials sent to
them by post. Thus it was in the contemplation of Sheppard that people in England
and Wales should have access to the material which he posted on the website.

Further, the material appearing on the computer user’s screen was exactly or
substantially in the same form as it was when it was uploaded by Sheppard. He added
that even if the defence were correct that a novus actus occurred in California at the
point at which the server was utilised (which the judge said he seriously doubted was
the case), use of the server was merely a stage in the transmission of the material
requiring no intervention once the website was activated. Any novus actus could only
be regarded as that of an agent acting on behalf of Sheppard and thus the act in
English law of the principal. It could not, the judge said, be seriously argued on a
reasonable view of all the evidence that the appellants’ activities should, on the basis
of international comity, be dealt with by another country.

23. Mr Sandiford, for the Crown, submits that the judge was correct to rule that the
“substantial measure “test was satisfied for the following reasons:
Sheppard operated and controlled the website from within the jurisdiction;
the material was uploaded, maintained and controlled from within the
jurisdiction;

the material, the subject of counts 4 – 8, was written and edited within the
jurisdiction;

the material the subject of counts 9 – 15 was collated and selected within the
jurisdiction;

Sheppard’s website included a dedicated British page (no other country had
such a page) on the website and offered books for sale with prices and postage
quoted in sterling;

Sheppard’s website and Whittle’s column in which the material the subject to
counts 4 – 9 was published were linked to websites such as that of the British
People’s Party;

E-mail traffic between the appellants revealed their intention to publish the
material on the website within the jurisdiction and they claimed to have done
so in order to satirise political correctness and redress an unbalanced media.

24. There was in our view abundant material to satisfy the “substantial measure” test.
However, Mr Adrian Davies for Sheppard in a submission supported by Mrs Linda
Turnbull for Whittle submits that this is not the correct test and that Wallace Duncan
Smith (No. 4) is of no assistance in determining the issue of jurisdiction in the present
case. Wallace Duncan Smith was convicted of one count of fraudulent trading contrary
to section 458 of the Companies Act 1985 and two counts of obtaining property by
deception contrary to section 15 of the Theft Act 1968. Smith, a Canadian national,
was chairman and managing director of a merchant bank which ceased trading in 1991.
It was subsequently wound up owing its unsecured creditors some £92m. It also
controlled other companies based in Canada, including Wallace Smith Holdings
(WSH). Working from this country and using a group of companies which he
controlled, Smith set up various bogus deals between the merchant bank and WSH
which boosted the size of the merchant bank’s profits. While the dishonest
arrangements were put into operation by Smith in this country, the obtaining of the
money took place outside the jurisdiction when the money was paid into a bank account
in New York.

25. The problem faced by the court in Wallace Duncan Smith (No 4) was a conflict
between the decisions of this court in Smith (No. 1) [1996] 2 CAR 1 and R v Manning
[1999] QB 980. As the Lord Chief Justice observed at paragraph 48, the issue was an
important one and involved the extent to which it was appropriate for the court to
develop the common law as to jurisdiction in order to meet the changing requirements
of society. In the event the court followed Smith (No. 1) and in doing so the Lord
Chief Justice cited from the opinion of Lord Griffiths in Liangsiriprasert v
Government of United States of America (1991) 92 Cr App R 77,90.
“Unfortunately in this Century crime has ceased to be largely
local in origin and effect. Crime is now established on an
international scale and the criminal law must face this new
reality. Their lordships can find nothing in precedent, comity
or good sense that should inhibit the common law from
regarding as justiciable in England inchoate crimes committed
abroad which are intended to result in the commission of
criminal offences in England.”

26. Lord Woolf went on to point out that Liangsiriprasert was applied in Sansom & ors
(1991) 92 Cr App R 115 in a judgment delivered by Taylor LJ. Sansom was another
conspiracy case and Lord Woolf could see no distinction in relation to the principles
of jurisdiction between conspiracy and obtaining by deception.

27. We have to consider whether there is any basis for not applying in the present case the
“substantial measure” principle for establishing jurisdiction as enunciated by the Lord
Chief Justice in Wallace Duncan Smith (No.4). The starting point seems to us to be
the terms of the 1986 Act. Mr Sandiford points out that sections 18, 19 and 23
contain a comprehensive scheme to restrict the public dissemination of written
material intended or likely to stir up racial hatred. Section 18 covers display of such
written material, section 19 publication and distribution and section 23 possession. In
the interpretation section of the Act, section 29 “written material” is described as
including any sign or any visible representation. Whilst in 1986 the world-wide web
was a thing of the future and computers were in their infancy it seems to us clear that
“written material” is plainly wide enough to cover the material disseminated by the
website in the present case. The judge took the same view. He said that what was on
the computer screen was first of all in writing or written and secondly that the
electronically stored data which is transmitted also comes within the definition of
written material because it is written material stored in another form. He drew a
comparison with opening and closing a book; when the book is open you can see the
writing; when it is closed you cannot.

28. The judge was referred to Hansard. Both the appellants and the Crown sought to rely
on it. The appellants argue that Hansard makes clear that no consideration was given,
when the Bill was debated, to the internet. The Crown argue that the debate illustrates
Parliament’s intention was to ensure that “written material” in Part III of the 1986 Act
was wide enough to cover new forms of communication so that racist organisations
and others could not advance the type of argument being put forward in the present
case.

29. For our part we think that the meaning of “written material” as interpreted by section
29 is sufficiently clear to cover the present case without recourse to Hansard. The
word “includes” in section 29 is plainly intended to widen the scope of the expression.
We reject Mrs Turnbull’s submission that the written material has to be in visible,
comprehensible form with some degree of permanence. We also reject the
submission that any assistance is to be obtained from the Obscene Publications Act
1959 which, as originally drafted, was not wide enough to embrace electronic
publication.

30. Mr Davies draws our attention to the Sexual Offences Act 2003 where Parliament has
legislated to criminalise certain categories of conduct regardless of where the offences
are committed and whether or not the conduct is illegal in the country in which it is
committed. He submits that the absence of any provisions similar to sections 47 – 50
of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 in the 1986 Act in a clear pointer limiting its extent
to England and Wales.

31. Section 42 of the 1986 Act provides that the provisions of the Act extend to England
and Wales save for some limited exceptions that mainly relate to Scotland and
Northern Ireland. We do not think it assists in taking the present case outside the
jurisdiction principle in Wallace Duncan Smith (No 4). We agree with the judge that
section 42 is not a restriction of jurisdiction to England and Wales, rather it sets out
the limitations imposed by the statute as to its extent within England and Wales. It
sets out the extent to which the Act applies within England and Wales. It is not
determinative of the jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

32. The position seems to us to be as follows. The conduct the relevant provisions of the
Act seek to prevent is the dissemination of material intended or likely to stir up racial
hatred. In the present case under section 19 we are concerned with publication of
such material, to which we shall come in a moment. The reality is that, as expressed
by the judge, almost everything in this case related to this country. This is where the
appellants operated one in Preston, the other in Hull; this is where the material was
generated, edited, uploaded and controlled. The material was aimed primarily at the
British public. The only “foreign” element was that the website was hosted by a
server in Torrance California and, as the judge observed, the use of the server was
merely a stage in the transmission of the material.

33. What is the test for jurisdiction if it is not as set out in Wallace Duncan Smith (No.4)?
Mr Davies submitted that there were essentially 3 jurisprudential theories at to
publications on the internet. The first is that a publication is only cognisable in the
jurisdiction where the web server upon which it is hosted is situated - the country of
origin theory. The second is that publication on the internet is cognisable in any
jurisdiction in which it can be down-loaded – the country of destination theory. The
third is that while a publication is always cognisable in the jurisdiction where the web
server upon which it is hosted is situated, it is also cognisable in a jurisdiction at
which the publication is targeted – the directing and targeting theory. Since we have
come to the clear conclusion that the jurisdiction is governed by the substantial
measure principle enunciated by this court in Wallace Duncan Smith (No.4) it is
unnecessary for us to explore any of these three theories or the effect of applying
them to the facts of this case. It seems to us that the substantial measure test not only
accords with the purpose of the relevant provisions of the 1985 Act it also reflects the
practicalities of the present case.

Publication
34. Before us Mr Davies put publication at the forefront of his argument submitting that
if, as he contended was the case, there was no publication that was the end of the case.
His argument is that one cannot have a publication without a publishee (or rather
sufficient publishees) to constitute a section of the public as required by section 19 (3)
of the 1986 Act. The judge noted that the only direct evidence of there being a
publishee was that of the police officer, DC Brown, and that in one sense he was a
self-publishee. In our view, however, the judge put it correctly when he said that
what the Crown had to show was that there was publication to the public or a section
of the public in that the material was generally accessible to all or available to or was
placed before or offered to the public and that that could be proved by the evidence of
one or more witnesses. This accords with the definition of publish and publication in
the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. As Kennedy L.J. put it in R v Perrin [2002] EWCA
Crim 747, a case under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, at paragraph 22 “the
publication relied on in this case is the making available of preview material to any
viewer who may chose to access it …” 

The material in the present case was
available to the public despite the fact that the evidence went no further than
establishing that one police constable downloaded it. It is also to be noted that the
natural meaning of publication, as applied by the judge gives effect to the two distinct
offences under section 19 of publication and distribution of racially inflammatory
material. It also fits neatly with the scheme of Part III of the 1986 Act which creates a
comprehensive range of offences in respect of racially inflammatory written material
namely section 18 – displaying, section 19 – publishing or distributing and section 23
– possession with a view to the material being displayed published distributed etc.
35. The point that there cannot be publication without a publishee is in our judgment
fundamentally misconceived. It is based on an irrelevant comparison with the law of
libel. Libel is a tort or civil wrong where it is necessary for the claimant to prove that
the words complained of were published of him and were defamatory of him. Nor
does criminal libel assist, for reading out socially inflammatory words will amount to
an offence under section 18 (1). Further, the offences of displaying, distributing or
publishing racially inflammatory written material do not require proof that anybody
actually read or heard the material.

Written Material
36. The appellants’ third ground of appeal contends that even if there was publication and
the English court has jurisdiction, any publication was not of written material. We
have covered most of the appellants’ arguments on this point when dealing with the
issue of jurisdiction and explained why in our view the contention is misconceived.
For completeness we should say that we are not persuaded by Mr Davies’ eiusdem
generis argument which is that “written material” should be limited to something akin
to a sign. What section 29 says is that “written material” includes any sign or other
visible representation and in our view those words are sufficiently wide to include
articles in electronic form.
37. In our judgment there is no merit in any of the appellants’ grounds of appeal against
conviction.

Sentence
38. The question is whether the sentences of 4 years for Sheppard and 2 years for
Whittle were either wrong in principle or manifestly excessive. There is no error in
principle; what we need to look at is the totality of the criminal conduct of each
appellant. There is no appeal against the consecutive sentences of 4 months in each
case for the offences under the Bail Act. Sheppard had to be sentenced for a total of
16 offences, 3 of which were for possession, 1 for distributing and the remainder for
publishing, racially offensive material. Whittle had to be sentenced for 5 offences, all
for publishing racially offensive material. The judge structured his sentence in the
case of Sheppard in this way. For counts 1 and 3 which took place between March
2005 and April 2006 12 months imprisonment concurrent; for counts 4 to 10 and 12
to 15 which all involved setting up, running and editing the website heretical.com 2ó
years imprisonment concurrent with each other but consecutive to the 12 months; and
for counts 16 to 18, which were committed on bail in the summer of 2007, 12 months
concurrent with each other but consecutive to the other groups of sentences. Whittle
received concurrent sentences for each of the 5 offences involving publication on
heretical.com of articles of which he was the author.

39. The maximum penalty for each of these offences was 7 years imprisonment.
Sheppard has a previous conviction for 2 similar offences in 2000 under sections 19
and 23 of the 1986 Act for which he received a sentence of 9 months imprisonment.
The judge in passing sentence said he had rarely seen or read and had to consider
material that was so abusive and insulting in its content toward racial groups within
society in this country. We agree with that assessment; this was truly pernicious
material. The judge rightly drew attention to its potential for social harm. He
observed that by using a server in the United States the appellants thought they had
found a way to circumvent English law. We regard the need to deter others as an
important element of sentencing in cases of this kind.

40. Mr Davies submits that Sheppard’s sentence is manifestly excessive when measured
against the sentences passed on El Faisal [2004] EWCA Crim 343 (12 months ) and
more particularly Abu Hamza [2006] EWCA Crim 2918 (21 months). It is trite to say
no two cases are the same.

41. The judge having presided over the two trials was well placed to assess the criminality
of each appellant. That said, however, the point that has most impressed us is that
there is no evidence of how many people saw the material or of the consequences of
their having seen it, although we do know that there was several thousand “hits” or
visits to heretical.com per day. There was no evidence of any individual having been
corrupted, albeit we appreciate such evidence would unlikely to be forthcoming.
Clearly a substantial sentence was called for in the case of Sheppard because he was a
repeat offender and the offences spanned a not inconsiderable period as well as being
repeated whilst on bail. In our judgment each of the constituent elements of
Sheppard’s sentence was amply justified but we think 4 years in total was too long.
We think the right sentence would have been 3 years and accordingly we grant
leave to appeal against sentence and we achieve that result by reducing the sentences
on counts 4 to 10 and 12 to 15 from 2 years to 18 months. All the other sentences
will remain as before. 

As to Whittle, his involvement was less than that of Sheppard
and over a shorter period. He had no previous convictions. On the other had he was
the “brains” behind the construction of the offensive material which he fed to
Sheppard. We grant leave in his case too and the concurrent sentences of 2 years will
be reduced to 18 months. Accordingly, after taking into account the sentences for the
Bail Act offences, which are not the subject of appeal, the total sentence to be served
by Sheppard is 3 years and 10 months and Whittle 1 year and 10 months. We grant
leave to appeal against sentence and vary the sentences to that extent. Credit is in
each case given for the 23 days spent on remand.

Forfeiture
42. The judge made a forfeiture order against Sheppard under section 143 (1) (a) and (b)
of the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000 (“the 2000 Act”) with
respect to items of office equipment and computers belonging to him. This aspect of
his appeal against sentence requires an extension of time and leave to appeal. For
reasons we shall explain we do not think there is any merit in the forfeiture appeal and
we refuse both an extension of time and leave to appeal.

43. There was, unfortunately, no transcript of the judge’s ruling on forfeiture but in the
event it was possible to overcome this problem by playing us in court a tape of the
judge’s judgment. This was very helpfully transcribed by the shorthand writer who
provided a transcript to the court shortly after the conclusion of the hearing.
44. The judge first referred to section 143 of the 2000 Act which provides:
“Where a person is convicted of an offence and the court by or
before which he is convicted is satisfied that any property
which has been lawfully seized from him or which was in his
possession or under his control at the time when he was
apprehended for the offence or when a summons in respect of it
was issued  a) has been used for the purpose of committing or facilitating commission
of any offence or b) was intended by him to be used for that purpose,
The court may (subject to sub-section (5) below) make an order under this
section in respect of that property.” Subsection (5) provides:
“In considering whether to make an order under this section in
respect of any property, a court shall have regard –
(a) to the value of the property; and
(b) to the likely financial and other effects on the offender of the making of
the order (taken together with any other order that the court
contemplates making).”

45. The court had prepared a schedule. There was agreement about the forfeiture of some
items; others were in dispute. There were two categories of disputed items, office
equipment and computer equipment. The main thrust of Mr Davies’ argument on
behalf of Sheppard before the judge was that he had a legitimate publishing business
by which he earned a living and that loss of the items sought by the Crown to be
forfeited would put him in a precarious financial situation.

46. The judge concluded that the computers had clearly been used for legitimate purposes
but that they had also been used and were intended to be used by Sheppard for
committing or facilitating the commission of offences. The judge did not consider the
forfeiture of these items would constitute excessive punishment.

47. As to office equipment, the judge again said he had in mind section 143 (5). He
referred to the additional argument that there was no evidence this equipment was
used for the production of any of the hard copies that were distributed. The judge said
he was entitled to draw the inference that the office equipment in question was, if not
used for the commission or facilitating of offences, intended to be used for such
purpose. He said he was entitled to draw this interference because of Sheppard’s
determination and persistence in publishing material of this nature. He had of course
a previous conviction for similar offences and committed further offences whilst on
bail. We cannot fault the judge’s reasoning or his decision. The transcript identifies
by number the various items to be forfeited by Sheppard and it is unnecessary for us
to repeat them.

Conclusion
48. (1) The appeals against conviction are dismissed.
(2) Leave to appeal against sentence is granted and the appeals against sentence are
allowed to the limited extent indicated.
(3) Leave to appeal against the forfeiture order imposed on Sheppard and an extension of time for doing so is refused.
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