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'Forthright' opinions play down Holocaust
Rob Preece looks at the two men whose internet publications sparked a five-year police investigation and raised serious questions about the parameters of free speech online
THE SATIRIST
SIMON Sheppard appears to crave controversy but insists that he is just a forthright Yorkshireman.
The 51-year-old, from Selby, was expelled from the British National Party after he was first arrested for distributing race-hate material in June 1999.
He was tried at Hull Crown Court the following year, and jailed for nine months, but resumed publishing offensive pamphlets and articles on his release.
When police arrested him in connection with further race-hate offences in 2005 and 2006 it became clear that he still harboured extreme views on race, gender and sexuality.
Sheppard's first trial heard that he refused to be questioned by a female police officer, claiming "she was a crook and had stolen a man's job".
In one police interview he claimed a cartoon called Tales Of The Holohoax was a "light-hearted look at the Holocaust" before going on to describe the late American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell as a "great man". Sheppard claims accounts of the Holocaust are "exaggerated" and has described the diary kept by Jewish girl Anne Frank during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands as "evil".
On his website Sheppard describes himself as a "mad scientist" and outlines his brief career as a music technician, during which he claims to have worked with a host of high-
profile artists.
He is believed to have helped set up a website called Redwatch, which encourages internet users to intimidate anti-fascists, and was defended at his trials by a barrister who had previously represented the controversial revisionist historian David Irving.
Sheppard's name appears in a "White Nationalist Roll of Honour" published online by the far-Right organisation Aryan Unity.
During his first trial Sheppard told the jury he was the target of a "political prosecution".
Sheppard denied hating Jews and black people and claimed he was on trial for "incitement to ridicule" because his website's "satirical" articles included "politically incorrect" words.
"You don't seem to appreciate that you can have humour without malice," he told prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford.
"You can't blame a Jewish person for being a Jew, you can't blame a black person for being black and you can't blame a Yorkshireman for being forthright, which I am."
Long hair and beard hide skinhead values
THE COLUMNIST
WITH long hair and a bushy beard, Stephen Whittle bears little similarity to the neo-Nazi skinhead usually associated with spreading racial hatred.
But Whittle's sneering contempt for Jews, black people and other ethnic minorities was evident in more than 100 articles he wrote as a "columnist" for Simon Sheppard's website.
The 42-year-old York University graduate hid behind the pseudonym Luke O'Farrell to write columns with headlines such as "Diversity = Death", "Make Niggers History" and "Dumb Niggers, Gloating Jews".
Whittle had never been cautioned or arrested by police until April 2006, when officers raided his home in Preston, Lancashire, and seized computer equipment containing more than 300
emails sent between he and Sheppard.
Jurors heard extracts from the emails, including one Whittle sent to Sheppard on February 23, 2005, asking for his involvement to be kept secret. He wrote: "I would prefer to do it as Luke O'Farrell or anonymously; I've attracted much attention here already and I don't want any more."
In the email, Whittle mentioned topics that he wished to write about, adding that he "would love to lay into a few things" like feminism and Islam.
During the first trial, prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford picked out five Whittle articles on the website, written between March 2005 and January 2006.
He said the use of several terms in one article was "at the very least, abusive and insulting to black people and Jewish people".
It also abused Chinese and Indian people, claiming that "it's better to be poor and racially healthy than rich and racially diseased", the court heard.
"Mr Whittle goes on to express his view that the white race cannot survive in the company of other races," Mr Sandiford said.
He told the jury: "You may think that Mr Whittle is not terribly original in raking up old ideas of anti-semitism.
"You can see he is raking up old ideas from Adolf Hitler, who he quotes."
Whittle told the court he had read Sheppard's website during the 1990s, but he only began writing for it in 2005.
He said he had no editorial control over the website, although he made Sheppard aware of spelling mistakes, and had never written articles for any other website.
He said he wrote for "open-minded people, people who are interested in the topics that I wanted to raise".Sickening history treated as humour
THE PROPAGANDA
FROM cartoons and caricatures to posters and prose, Simon Sheppard used a wide range of media in his attempt to convert others to his way of thinking.
Two juries were asked to wade through bulky files containing examples of the far-right literature Sheppard posted on his website and delivered door to door in Yorkshire.
They included the 16-page pamphlet with cartoons called Tales of the Holohoax.
Jonathan Sandiford, prosecuting, said: "The generally accepted history of the Holocaust is treated as a matter for humorous discussion; the accounts of people who survived that event are held up for ridicule and contempt.
"It is clearly abusive and insulting to suggest that the Jews have made up and are sustaining what would be the largest fraud in history for their own gain."
As well as publishing more than 100 articles by Stephen Whittle, Sheppard's website featured a number of potentially offensive items by other authors.
These included a propaganda article produced in in the 1960s by the leader of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell.
Mr Sandiford said Rockwell's article The Swastika was intended "to stir up racial hatred against Jews and blacks".
The court heard that one article on Sheppard's website made the "insulting suggestion" that the Auschwitz concentration camp was actually a holiday retreat.
Jurors were also asked to consider an article which included sickening photographs of hanged Hungarian Jews dating back to the Second World War.
Fugitives fled to US and sought asylum
THE ESCAPE
SHEPPARD and Whittle claimed the articles they published on the internet raised legitimate arguments about problems caused by immigration.
On hearing they had been convicted of race-hate crimes, however, they jumped bail, travelled 5,300 miles and applied to be allowed to stay in a foreign country.
Their ironic journey began at Leeds Crown Court on July 11 last year, when Judge Rodney Grant gave them bail despite a jury having found them guilty of some of the counts on the indictment.
They were due to return to court three days later while jurors deliberated over further charges, but they failed to show up.
Unbeknown to police, court officials, the Crown Prosecution Service or even their own counsel, Sheppard and Whittle had claimed asylum in the United States.
The pair had travelled from Yorkshire to Holyhead, on Anglesey; taken a ferry to the Irish port Dun Laoghaire; headed to Shannon by bus; and caught a direct Aer Lingus flight to Los Angeles.
They claimed political asylum on their arrival at Los Angeles Airport, insisting they had been subjected to "a three-year campaign of legal harassment by the governing British Labour Party, culminating in an unprecedented prosecution and subsequent conviction".
They were detained by the US Immigration Naturalisation Service and have spent six months in a California detention centre awaiting an asylum hearing.
Two months later, the British courts received papers from the pair's legal teams, applying for leave to appeal against their convictions.
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