At last, the whole truth has come to light. Speaking on Monday at a Conservative Friends of Israel event attended by over 800 people and over 200 Parliamentarians, British Prime Minister Theresa May said that she had banned me from entering the UK because “Islamophobia” is just as harmful as anti-Semitism.
This is an extraordinary statement for May to make, when we know that according to documents released under Britain’s duty of candor, a good part of the reason why I was banned was because of my support for Israel.
An unnamed Foreign and Commonwealth Office official wrote in a May 7, 2013 letter: “We do have concerns with some of the reasoning in the sub,” that is, the “subject profiles” that had been prepared on my colleague Robert Spencer, who was also banned, and me, “particularly citing pro-Israeli views.”
The official explained that “pro-Israeli views (and also support for waterboarding) apply to a large number of Americans, including former presidents.
“If, for instance, Geller and Spencer were to request details of their exclusion under FOI/DPA or other mechanism, that being pro-Israeli is cited as a reason may be problematic and they could argue publically [sic] that their exclusion is on the basis of their support for Israel.”
To avoid this, the writer advised “removing references to being pro-Israel from the main body of the sub, as this is not grounds for exclusion.”
Presumably this advice was followed, as there is little in our pro-Israeli views in all this material, but my “subject profile” still says: “She strongly supports Israel and is an ardent Zionist.”
And also: “Pamela Geller’s outspoken support for Israel may also attract pro-Palestinian groups to attend, further complicating the policing operation on the ground and making it harder to keep opposing groups apart.”
The writer noted that being pro-Israel was not grounds for exclusion, but clearly it was part of the Home Office’s reasoning, or this letter would not have had to have been written. And now May has the brazen gall to equate Islamophobia with anti-Semitism in justifying why I was banned from the country, despite the fact that anti-Semitic hate crimes are far more common than anti-Muslim ones, and Jews present no terror threat.
Meanwhile, in the documents we received, all references to the identities of those who asked that we be banned have been blacked out.
Henry Ripley, writing “for the Treasury Solicitor,” explained to our lawyers that “the documents provided have been redacted to remove references to information which is not relevant to the claims.”
No, clearly the documents were redacted to conceal who was behind the ban and what their motives were, and to conceal the conspiratorial nature of the exclusion.
But their black marker missed one reference, revealing that one of the groups complaining about us was Faith Matters.
Faith Matters was founded by a Muslim man named Fiyaz Mughal, who also heads up Tell Mama UK, a group dedicated to tracking “Islamophobia.”
Tell Mama lost government funding in June 2013 after making false claims of waves of attacks “Islamophobic incidents”. The group has also threatened to sue Breitbart London Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam for highlighting this, and continues to spend its time and money attacking reformist Muslims and apostates.
The Home Secretary assured the discredited Mughal that all decisions to exclude me from the country were based on sound evidence. Yet the documents also show that the British government, in deciding to ban me from the country, relied on “evidence” from Islamic propaganda hate sites such as Loonwatch and Islamophobia Today. How are the wild defamations of such sites sound evidence? In many of the documents, they didn’t even spell our names correctly, or get our birth dates correct. Is that sound evidence?
They had teams of people working, spending untold amounts of money researching us, and they couldn’t even get these basic facts right.
“The government,” one document says, “is clear that it opposes extremism in all forms.” And now May has echoed that claim in saying that I was banned because “Islamophobia” is just as bad as anti-Semitism. But there is no truth to that equation.
How ridiculous Theresa May has become, tying herself into knots at the behest of their would-be executioners. There is no doubt that she will eventually regret taking the course that she and her colleagues have so recklessly chosen for Britain – but by then it will almost certainly be too late.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.
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