Muslim news site 5Pillars has been ordered to remove or significantly alter a podcast episode featuring an interview with the founder of the far-right group Patriotic Alternative that characterised Jews as wielding “disproportionate” influence across wider society and as people who may “walk among us and look like us” but who are not.
The February episode of Blood Brothers, hosted by 5Pillars UK deputy editor Dilly Hussain, offered a platform to Mark Collett, a former spokesman for the British National Party, who claimed both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition were being controlled like “hand puppets” by an unidentified individual “behind the scenes”.
Media regulator Impress found 5Pillars UK had breached the discrimination clause of the body’s standards code by “encouraging hatred or abuse” toward Jewish people.
Hussain, it ruled, failed to sufficiently challenge Collett’s “antisemitic views”, giving the impression that 5Pillars UK had effectively provided a platform from which to air these views.
Collett can be heard on the episode, entitled “Ethno-nationalism, Western Imperialism and the Zionist Agenda”, saying: “There’s one guy behind the scenes and he’s got a Keir Starmer hand puppet on one hand and he’s got a Rishi Sunak hand puppet on the other. It’s Labour, Tory, but it’s being controlled, all controlled.”
In response, Hussain asks: “Jews?” to which Collett replies: “I would say Zionist control of British politics is at an unprecedented level”.
Elsewhere, Collett claims that “Jewish people and Zionists are massively overrepresented when it comes to those who pass… anti-white and anti-free speech laws” and that “antisemitism is a trick… [used] to silence critics of Zionist or Jewish activity which benefits Jews but is not beneficial to others”.
Turning to “the porn industry, feminism, cultural Marxists, the whole LGBT industry, the anti-racist industry, the Holocaust industry”, he declares “all of these endeavours are controlled or disproportionately controlled by people of Jewish descent, and they are wielded in such a way that they have a negative impact on the white population”.
Collett also characterised some Jews as shapeshifters who purport to be “normal white” people but are not.
“These Zionists are nothing more than Jewish supremacists,” he tells Hussain. “They’ve changed their names, they’ve Anglicised themselves. They walk amongst us and they look like us.”
Using the Jewish Labour MP for Barking and Dagenham, Margaret Hodge, as an example, he says: “People think she’s just a normal white lady. Well, she’s not. Her real name’s not Hodge.”
Hodge, whose maiden name was Oppenheimer, was born to German Jewish refugee parents in the 1930s.
Elsewhere, he appears to suggest that some gay and trans people, and drag queens, wish to promote “sex with children”, saying: “If there is some flamboyant, homosexual drag queen that wants to advocate for sex with children, I don’t think they should have the right to sit in libraries and speak to children.”
Impress found that “the lack of challenge by [Hussain] to the authenticity of [Collett’s] claims enabled the interviewee to encourage hatred or abuse.”
It also highlighted how Hussain at one point used the shorthand “JQ” to refer the so-called “Jewish Question” in conversation with Collett.
“The committee considered that use of this abbreviation, which is widely acknowledged as a 21st Century abbreviation adopted by Neo-Nazi and alt-right movements, had the effect of normalising the phrase and gave the impression of a shared language and perhaps a mutuality or reciprocity between interviewer and interviewee,” it said.
5Pillars told Impress the decision to interview Collett had been “a difficult one that it considered carefully” because the far-right figure was “notorious in the Muslim community due to his anti-Islam rhetoric”.
Ultimately, however, it decided that “most of its [audience] would be interested in what he had to say”.
5Pillars was told it must remove or alter the podcast episode as it breached Impress standards.
