Documents on the Fight to Preserve the Right to Free Speech

Preview of an article in Action Report #14

An Englishman's Note of Concern about the "Community Security Trust" of the Board of Deputies of British Jews

THE BOARD OF DEPUTIES of British Jews, ruling authority of Britain's Jewish community since the 18th Century (see AR#11) has set up, under its defence director Michael Whine, a "registered charity" innocuously christened -- perhaps a misnomer, given that it is a secret Jewish militia -- the Community Security Trust.
It is a two-thousand strong private army, marching and counter-marching beneath the grime-streaked surface of Britain's suburban streets; a force of which bei umgekehrtem Vorzeichen Adolf Hitler's Nazi Brownshirts would have been proud.

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The Community Security Trust first sailed under the name of the Communal Security Organisation (CSO), a kind of Schutz-Staffel (SS) formed as the central bodyguard unit of the Board. On Oct. 25, 1996, the Jewish Chronicle, the British community's largest publication, revealed in a full-page advertisement that the CST had been "recently formed"; one object is to be the "training of Jewish youngsters in self-defence techniques." A news item in the same issue amplified that the CST had been formed to "replace" the CSO. "The CST is not part of the Board," claimed well-known and widely respected leading barrister Eldred Tabachnik, QC, president of the Board, "but we work very closely together."
Indeed: Michael Whine, head honcho of the Board, defence director, and director of its Research Unit, also signs letters on behalf of the CST.
There has been no comment whatever in the columns of Britain's national newspapers on this extraordinary and needless raising of a private army. States Martin Webster, former National Front boss and hence a long-time right-wing critic of the Board's activities, in a widely distributed pamphlet, "This smart manoeuvre, involving the juggling of company names, addresses, directors, assets and legal liabilities will be familiar to those who have experienced the seedier side of commercial life."

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Webster's leaflet reminds people that Britain's Public Order Act specifically prohibits the operation of any "para-military body which is organised and/or trained and/or equipped for the purpose of achieving political objectives by means of physical force" (the Act makes equally illegal any body giving "reasonable apprehension" of being engaged in such activity.)
Webster quotes an interview with one CST officer, who confirmed that the CST was involved in collecting information on groups seen as threatening the safety of the Jewish community.
"The Board of Deputies still deals with the political defence of the community," said this unnamed officer, "but we deal with the 'hands on' stuff." (He also argued: "Our role is to back up the police, who help us train our people and with whom we work very closely.")
Webster sees a link between the activities of Gestapo-type organisations like the CSO and the downfall of British government officials like David Mellor, who courageously and very publicly -- before the lenses of British television newsreel cameras -- tore strips off an Israeli Defence Force general whose soldiers were manhandling unarmed Palestinian children; not many weeks later, Mellor was forced to resign from the British government after hidden microphones and cameras revealed that he was engaged in an extra-marital affair. [Next victim: Robin Cook, Britain's current and no less outspoken foreign secretary?]
The popular British author and Daily Telegraph columnist Auberon Waugh and the respected American writer Noam Chomsky have both expressed their outrage at finding this unofficial British Gestapo-organisation compiling dossiers on them. (Waugh ran into a Board of Deputies of British Jews employee at a health farm; the young lady blurted out to him, "We've got a file on you!")

ALL OF THIS raises matters of serious concern: the Board of Deputies of British Jews openly avows that one of its aims is to further the interests of a foreign state, namely the State of Israel. Victor Ostrovsky, former denizen of the latter's secret service The Mossad, revealed in his memoirs that the organisation had recruited three thousand British Jews as sayanim (Hebrew: auxiliaries), and that these have provided one hundred safe houses in the Greater London region for use by The Mossad agents engaged on their nefarious activities against Britain: Ostrovsky referred particularly to their kidnapping from London of former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who has been held in solitary confinement in Israeli prisons for twelve years for revealing in The Sunday Times that his country was stockpiling nuclear weapons.
On Feb. 2, 1997 The Observer reported in London that the CST, operating from within the headquarters of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, operated a "sophisticated intelligence system collating information on the community's enemies" and that it offered an "investigative service." The CST was claiming, reported the newspaper, to be "a Jewish neighbourhood watch -- with a little bit added."
There was a trenchant response next week in the same newspaper, not from Britain's radical right-wing but from the extreme left, who claimed that they were victims of the Board's less than sophisticated forms of harassment. "This 'little bit added,'" wrote Julia Bard, of the Jewish Socialists' Group, "is the surveillance and harassment of members of the Jewish community itself, especially those on the Left, who take issue with the political positions expressed by the self-proclaimed leaders of the community."
"Many Jews," she continued, "resent the bullying style of the CST." Members of her group and other organisations had been prevented from entering a range of "public" events policed by the CST and its forerunner, the CSO, including a Holocaust commemoration, meetings about Nazi war crimes and an Israeli film festival, on the hollow pretence that they presented a security risk. Neville Nagler, then deputy president of the Board, had explained in a local newspaper that it was the job of the CSO to keep apart "people who have lost relatives in the Holocaust" and "people with a political view."

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"Many of those excluded have been told that they are 'on file'," reported the British Sunday newspaper. "On what basis they are on file and who verifies that the information is [correct is] impossible to find out."
IT IS PROBABLE that the CSO's rapid shedding of its skin and re-emergence as the CST became necessary after David Irving launched his Data Protection Act investigation of the Board and its subsidiary agencies; visited by investigators of the Data Protection Agency on Jan. 15, 1997, Michael Whine, who is also the Operations Director of the Community Security Trust, pleaded to the government official, ex-police officer Charles Nixon, that the CST had been established only recently. "They are currently determining their computing requirements," learned investigator Nixon. (The CST has since then properly registered its database with the government agency).
On the face of it the body has been created to combat anti-Semitism and racism, both laudable aims; it also exists to "protect and defend" the Jewish community, and here it does indeed appear to sail perilously close to the Public Order Act of 1936 which this community itself called into being to crush Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirt army before the war.
The CST, so it boasts in whole-page advertisements placed in Jewish community newspapers, is "comprised of trained volunteers, supported by a team of full time professionals, and supervised by a Trustees and Advisory Board." Among the "invaluable services" which the CST provides are "physical security advice and training." The CST boasts that it provides security volunteers at communal events, assists the police and "most importantly," is active in "monitoring the community's enemies, especially those advocating anti-Semitism and racism." The advertisements advertise twenty-four hour hotlines in London, Manchester, Glasgow, and Leeds.
Sir Paul Condon, the unloved commissioner of London's metropolitan police force, has publicly praised the CST, writing: "There is no other country of which I am aware that has such a sophisticated, developed, and disciplined community-based security organisation. Be proud of it and nurture it."
Critics have asked how this squares with the oath by every new constable to "uphold the law without fear or favour, showing malice or ill-will towards none." In combating "anti-Semitism and racism", the police are, paradoxically, treading on the wrong side of the law: Unlike the publication of "threatening, insulting or abusive matter intended or likely to incite racial hatred," which is an offence under section 19 of the Public Order Act, holding illegal or racist opinions, however reprehensible, is not illegal in Britain, even now. Freedom of opinion still rules supreme (in theory at least).
On other occasions when groups have wanted to set up violent vigilante groups to "monitor" and "combat" views hostile to their own, more enlightened police commanders have suggested they bring their energies and resources into Britain's properly constituted Special Constabulary.
To Condon's staff this might seem like a declaration of bankruptcy, an admission of the impotence of London's regular police force. But his assistant commissioner David Veness haut in die gleiche Kerbe as the Germans say: "If the Community Security Trust didn't exist," he writes, "we would have to invent something very much like it." Perhaps he had his tongue in his cheek in writing such an ambiguous remark.
Concerned about this ugly excrescence on the face of the law-abiding British society, David Irving wrote to Police Commissioner Condon, demanding an investigation.

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  • EVERY subject now has the statutory right under the Data Protection Act, 1984, to give the Board of Deputies and the Community Security Trust forty days' notice in writing to provide copies of all data maintained by the Board on them, and to require the Board to make such corrections as the subject concerned may require.
    Subjects who suspect that they are being victimised should write in the first instance by Recorded Mail to the Research Unit, Board of Deputies of British Jews (and/or Community Security Trust) marking their letter for the attention of Michael Whine, Director, Research Unit, Commonwealth House, 1 - 19 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1NF. If the Board refuses to give satisfaction within forty days, the subject should then complain in writing to the     Registrar of the Data Protection Agency, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF; the agency has statutory powers to search and seize databases in the event of non compliance with the Act.
© Focal Point 1998 write to David Irving