Northampton- The publisher of ‘Searchlight’
anti-fascist magazine has received an honorary doctorate from a British
university; his achievements include marrying a former Nazi, criminal
libel on an asylum seeker, and solving a murder that never happened.
The August issue of
Searchlight,
a magazine that styles itself “against fascism and racism” reveals that
its publisher Gerry Gable has recently received an Honorary Doctorate
from the University of Northampton. According to the article, which is
credited to Sonia Gable, this is in recognition of his “defence of
liberal society against the scourges of racism and fascism”.
The article also reveals that the Searchlight Organisation has
published a major new work
Lone wolves: myth or reality? The
pamphlet has its own website, and can be downloaded in Portable
Document Format totally free of charge, with one very minor
qualification:
caveat emptor.
Who is Gerry Gable? Those who know anything about extremists in Britain
and those who monitor them will know the answer to that question, but
he was described concisely by Andrew Billen in the November 17, 1996
edition of the
Observer newspaper as “a conspiracy theorist
who could spot Nazi architecture in a kindergarten sandpit”. His
magazine is also alluded to as
Gable’s Fables, and sometimes
by an even less flattering name. All will be revealed shortly with
irrefutable documentation.
Mr Gable’s obsession with Nazis is so great that he married one, the
former Sonia Hochfelder, his fourth wife and the author of the
aforementioned article in the August issue of his magazine. Another
“former Nazi” associate of his is the man who alludes to him as “my
mate, Gerry”.
Yet another former member of a “Nazi” organisation is the
magazine’s current editor, Nick Lowles; Mr Lowles made that admission
in the January 1999 issue of Searchlight when he was a current member
(and may still be one) of the BNP.
We will not mention here Searchlight’s first “mole” (read
agent
provocateur) Dave Roberts, convicted murderer Charles Hanson,
self-confessed thief Tim Hepple, or fantasist Matthew Collins; we shall
though review briefly the others.
During her student days, Sonia Hochfelder was extremely active in far
right politics, but later had a total change of heart; this is nothing
unusual or shameful of course; Whittaker Chambers and many others of
lesser infamy have performed such an about face, but while Communist
turned Roman Catholic Chambers, and Black Panther turned cook book
author and ice cream rep Bobby Seal, never made any attempt to deny
their antecedents, the future Mrs Gable and her husband did, concocting
an elaborate but nebulous tale of her undercover work deep inside
illegal far right organisations as the reason this former Nazi is now
an “anti-fascist” and magistrate.
To his credit, Nick Lowles has never attempted to weave such a
duplicitous weft about his personal life; as well as Editor of
Searchlight,
Mr Lowles is the author of
Mr Evil, a biography of the
psychopath and murderer David Copeland. This book is well worth
reading, unlike some of the ravings Mr Gable’s magazine has published
over the years.
Ray Hill joined the British Movement as a young man in Leicester, and
was soon in trouble with the law, assaulting a café owner – who
just happened to be Jewish – and then a photographer before departing
hastily for South Africa with his wife and young family. A decade later
he returned after jumping bail and leaving the country on a false
passport, although fortunately for him, there was no attempt made at
extradition. This time it wasn’t violence but credit card fraud that
led to his hasty departure. There can’t be that many people who can
boast of having fled two Continents with the police in hot pursuit; Dr
Mengele perhaps, or as the man from SongFacts calls him, the
Running
Man.
While he was in South Africa and for some time after, Mr Hill had a
nice little sideline in anti-Semitic rhetoric, but in Britain he showed
actions speak louder than words. In the March 25, 1984 edition of the
late and unlamented
News of the World, Mr Hill boasted : “It
all started as a bit of a game - the odd night out attacking a few
Pakis. I even desecrated a synagogue.”
This was after he “came out” as a “mole” read
agent provocateur
who had offered his services to Mr Gable on his return to the UK.
Although he claims now to have regretted his hatemongering, he does not
appear to have gone the whole hog and given the police any details
about these violent acts or this act of criminal damage.
In February 2000, Mr Hill appeared at the High Court along with his
mate Gerry where the two of them and the holding company Searchlight
Magazine Limited defended – and lost – a libel action brought by
Derbyshire accountant and former serviceman Morris Riley. [A scan of
the order on judgment can be found
here and
here]. Mr Gable
did not mention this at the time, but in September 2001, after Mr
Riley’s premature death, he wrote in his magazine:
"Strangely, Jones seems to think that Searchlight paid out £9,000
to somebody over a libel action. That's news to me, but I am only the
publisher. Perhaps he is getting confused over a case brought by a
character called Morris Riley, which ended up with him several thousand
pounds worse off and dropping dead from a heart attack a few months
later."
This is reminiscent of the man who boasted to a friend that he had
finished runner up in a boxing match.
Let us now turn our attention to Mr Gable’s free pamphlet about lone
wolves. It mentions here David Copeland, and points out that Mr Gable
contributed to a
Panorama programme on the case, which is
true.
Panorama has put out some excellent programmes
including a recent one on the great PPI rip off; not so excellent was
the one that he “researched”. According to the
Radio Times,
Maggie's
Militant Tendency, was screened by BBC Television at 8.10pm on
January 30, 1984. The BBC ended up shelling out damages and costs
estimated at a quarter of a million pounds.
Mr Gable does not appear to have slipped up in his commentary for BBC
Television re David Copeland, but in December 2009, when he and Sonia
were interviewed by John Gulliver of the
Camden New Journal,
he told a whopper; it was his “intelligence” if not Mr Gable himself
that had brought Copeland to justice, rather than a workmate of the
terrorist who had identified him from CCTV during a police appeal.
There is no mention of this in either the Nick Lowles biography
Mr
Evil nor
Lone wolves: myth or reality? but in the
latter, Mr Gable has repeated his biggest and most persistent lie, one
that he can’t stop repeating, except, curiously, to the police.
In the 1960s, before he authored the libellous
Gable Memorandum
but after his conviction for burglary artifice at the home of (then
respectable) historian David Irving, Mr Gable claims to have brought to
justice a gang (actually two gangs) of synagogue arsonists. In the
version related here, he has watered down the lie somewhat, so that
“One attack on a theological college in Stamford Hill left one student
dead and another with serious spinal injuries...The theological college
attack was never investigated by the police but the killer was
unofficially identified as an NSM activist”.
Bah, humbug! In October 1987, Mr Gable told the
Jewish Chronicle that
he personally had brought the arsonists to book, in his own words: "I
stood in the burnt-out shell of that yeshiva at four in the morning and
made a private vow to get the people who'd done that".
As recently as 2008, Mr Gable instructed his solicitors that this was
indeed the case, after threats from the British Nazi leader Colin
Jordan to sue him for defamation. By that time, Mr Jordan was both very
old and not in the best of health, and he died in April the following
year, whereupon the
Guardian commissioned Mr Gable to write
his obituary, in which he repeated this same grotesque lie which was
rubber stamped by the
Guardian until it was forced by the
Press Complaints Commission to publish a retraction.
Later in the year, Mr Gable was forced to admit to a senior New
Scotland Yard detective that he knew nothing about this (accidental)
fire, which contrary to his facile assertions was of course
investigated thoroughly at the time, a fact that was confirmed by the
local MP. For the record, the person who “inspired” the other fires –
in which no one was killed – was Jordan’s fanatically anti-Jewish
ex-wife (without his knowledge). The maiden name of Françoise
Jordan was Dior; she was the niece of the famous designer; it is this
which probably accounts for the sensitivity of the House of Dior to the
drunken rant of John Galliano which came to light earlier this year.
One final example should be given of Mr Gable’s technique from his new
publication. He alludes herein to Roberto Fiore as “a convicted Italian
terrorist”, just prior to which he hints that a Mr John Gaster died “in
mysterious circumstances in 1998”. Elsewhere, he has been less guarded
in his statements, and has in fact accused Mr Fiore of murdering both
John Gaster and another elderly “right winger”. This begs the question,
if Mr Fiore is such a dangerous terrorist and a double murderer, why
did he serve as a Member of Parliament in his native Italy from May
2008 till June 2009, and why is he still active in politics?
Mr Gable’s report makes a number of recommendations; it goes without
saying that on the evidence presented here, anything he recommends,
indeed anything he says, should be taken with a grain of salt, or maybe
a boulder, a fact that, sadly, no one at the University of Northampton
seems to have realised.
. 
