A Most Worthy Contempt

Thirty years ago this evening, I was in contempt of Parliament, not only that, five days later an entire issue of Hansard was published just for me. Few people have ever been afforded that honour. So how did this come about?

On November 28, 1993, a courier turned up with a parcel for me. At 8.30 on a Sunday morning? Yeah right. I should have twigged because I saw another character walking outside the house but I went down, opened the door, and as I went to sign for it, the fake courier grabbed me in a headlock, then I was being attacked by two others who pounded my arms with hammers. Mallets actually, but they felt like hammers. I say I should have twigged, but the truth is if I knew my enemies to be evil, I didn’t think they would be so stupid.

After the attackers had fled, I managed somehow to stagger back to my garret apartment and dial 999 using my elbows rather than my hands which could hardly move. By the time I had done so, the police were coming up the stairs; the assault had been witnessed by neighbours, including my ground floor neighbour who died in 2004.

I was put in an ambulance and taken to Lewisham Hospital where I was given morphine and X-rayed. No broken bones were found, although in September 1996, after experiencing acute back pain, I was X-rayed again and told I had two ossified fractured vertebrae in my lower back, clearly the result of that attack.

I spent only one night in hospital but being in an incredibly weakened state I contracted an opportunistic infection that left me virtually unable to move much less walk for several days. I was still very weak when I attended that meeting at the Palace Of Westminster to serve a writ on Gerry Gable. If you have not heard of this odious individual, he is or was the publisher of Searchlight, the self-styled anti-fascist magazine. He has a whole website devoted to him and his organisation. And I do not mean his website, I mean the one I set up in 2001.

Serving a writ at Parliament is a form of contempt; I knew this at the time and did so in order to generate publicity. I was successful in a small way.

So why did I sue Gable? It wasn’t simply that he had libelled me in his hate sheet. Although I can’t prove it I have no doubt that he hired or at best put up those thugs who attacked me. Sadly, I was far from the only person so targeted about that time.  In the West Country, Mark Cotterill was the victim of a potentially fatal attack. He managed to fight off his attackers, who were arrested, but fearing for his life after another attempt, Cotterill fled to the United States and the charges against them were dropped. Gable showed himself in his true colours by slandering him to High Heaven, accusing him of being the perpetrator rather than the victim.

An attempt was also made to attack my colleague Mark Taha, but fortunately he was not at home at the time.

Having never served a libel writ before, I nearly screwed up my claim but eventually I got it sorted out, issued another one shortly, and ended up suing not only Gable, his magazine and his printer, but his distributor and a number of bookshops. Eventually, the case was settled to my satisfaction, including my financial satisfaction. A number of bookshops refused to stock Searchlight after that, including one that issued a public notice to that effect.

Mark Taha went on to sue Gable as well, so did the late Morris Riley, and he actually obtained a judgment against him. One person not strictly within Gable’s orbit was Jeremy Corbyn, who without naming either me or Mark branded us terrorists in the House Of Commons for suing bookshops. Corbyn has since gone on to refuse to brand Hamas terrorists, so that speaks volumes for his judgment.

As for Gable, the latest information I have on him is that he is now suffering from dementia. Considering he has been insane since at least October 1987 when he spun the Jewish Chronicle a tall tale about solving a murder that never happened, his condition cannot be said to have deteriorated much.