The woman accused of being first to spread the fake rumours about the Southport killer which sparked nationwide riots has been arrested.
Racist riots spread across the country after misinformation spread on social media claiming the fatal stabbing was carried out by Ali Al-Shakati, believed to be a fictitious name, a Muslim aslyum seeker who was on an MI6 watchlist.
A 55-year-old woman from Chester has now been arrested on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred, and false communication. She remains in police custody.
Chief Superintendent Alison Ross said: ‘We have all seen the violent disorder that has taken place across the UK over the past week, much of which has been fuelled by malicious and inaccurate communications online.
One false statement by a random woman was like a match lighting the powder keg. I kinda always figured the British were less racist than us Americans…
Apple doesn’t fall far.
Apple is racist too?!
Apples are fruit and thus cannot be racist.
Sounds like something a fruit would say.
The only fruits I’ve interacted with were strictly of the plant-bearing type. I have heard nuts say the weirdest things, but that’s expected from the average republican.
Hello fellow gen-xer who remembers when fruit was a gentler version of the other f-word
i think the apple’s rotten right to the core
They INVENTED modern imperialism, first trialling it in the “Irish plantations” starting in the 16th century, long before America’s colonies. If one could go back in time to stop anything…
All roads lead to Rome.
Before that Greece, before that Persia, before that Assyria, before that Babylonia, before that Egypt, before that Sumeria… Sometime before that Cro Magnon Man. The list gets bigger; The Mongols, Timurids and other turkic groups like the Mughals, the Han…
Even specific to the British Isles (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes; then the Vikings; then the Normans (French descendants of Vikings).
In other words all roads don’t lead to Rome, it’s just a thing that humans do.
Edit: Clarity, Grammar, More Pedantry
with the difference that the old romans preferred to integrate other tribes into their empire and raise their living standards to pacify them - and not slaughter them.
Migration was the one big issue that carried Brexit. It made them all forget anything else and blindly believe brexiters, if only there were no more brown people coming into the country.
It was the racist vote.
But besides that, there is racism everywhere. How its dealt with is the difference. I’m personally very glad to see the big counter protests now. They have become too confident to be loud about their hate again and we all have to put them back into their place, making it clear that this is not acceptable.
… Where did you think we got it from? Just look at how the Aussies treated the Aboriginals.
Look at how the <colonists> treated the <indigenous>.
Settle down mate. I’m Australian, and well aware of the mistreatment of Australian aboriginals.
I’m not going to defend the behavior of my forebears, my comment was merely pointing out that this is not a uniquely Australian problem, and that colonisation never goes well for the indigenous.
In prehistory, homo sapiens colonised the entire world and either murdered, massacred, out bred or otherwise displaced competing hominids to the point of their extinction. A pattern repeated the world over ever since. How well are Russians treating Ukranians, or Israelis treating Palestinians ?
How can we dance when our earth is turning? How do we sleep while our beds are burning?
It’s a real mixed bag from what I know. They got rid of slavery much earlier, I don’t think they have the baggage of Jim Crow that US frankly still has. Afaik black people were more accepted in society. But the recent immigration trend changed things and there is real anti Islam sentiment afaik. I’m really not that well versed in it though.
Immigrants always get blamed in troubled times. It’s a story as old as time. If wealth wasn’t so concentrated and everyone had a good job and a nice place and whatever no one would care about migrants.
Yes migrants also get jobs and live in houses but they’re not the underlying cause.
They replaced slavery with indentured servitude.
They didn’t got rid of slavery, they got rid of chattel slavery (with the State paying massive amounts of money to the slave owners) and replaced it with a different kind based on debt.
Just like the idea that Britain isn’t racist, the idea that Britain were the first to end slavery is Image Management Propaganda Bollocks anchored on misrepresenting what actually happens.
Check out the Catholic versus Protestant angle there, always good for a row.
I lived for over a decade in Britain and had both afro-descendant and muslim friends who were discriminated against over there, even before Brexit.
Even I got discriminated against because of being Portuguese (though nowhere are much as they did).
Britain has for long been one of the most rightwing countries in Europe, it’s just that they’re very good at image management and their far right leaders are posh types with upper class education and accents, not slang-using rabble rousing loudmouths with low-class accents.
Brexit didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Kavernacle just did a very succinct video on this exact topic https://youtu.be/JmA-0it04Wk?feature=shared
It really does feel like that right now, as someone who lives in northern England.
I’m Portuguese, lived almost a decade in The Netherlands and then over a decade in Britain.
It’s funny that after some years in Britain, on my own I reached the exact same conclusions as this guy who is local born and bred.
how was your time in the Netherlands?
Best place I ever lived in: organized without being controlling and oppressive (as you would find in Germanic nations), good quality of life, genuinely moral liberal, good salaries, great work-life balance, with Proportional Vote hence consensus politics and with people who naturally behave in a more egalitarian way (in all senses) than pretty much everywhere else. As I see it socially they’re decades ahead of the UK and Portugal, though they’ve had right-wing neoliberal governments for over a decade now and it shows.
Would’ve gone back recently if it wasn’t for their massive housing bubble making rentals extremely expensive pretty much anywhere in the country.
They do have one thing I really dislike which is Scandinavian levels of personal taxes but with much lower levels of Public Services than most of Europe, probably because their ultra-low taxation for companies results in pretty much the entire budget of the Dutch state being funded from taxation of people so you end up with people paying above European-average taxes and getting below European-average levels of Public Services.
Lol. They’re every bit as racist, if not more so.
WE LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU, DAD
Well you know its much easier to blame the match than have a little bit of self reflection.
I always like to say that the USA kept all the worst parts of British culture. That’s not to say that Americans aren’t decent generally speaking. Just that…idk…imperialistic tendencies, systemic racism, highly stratified social class dynamics, random violence…kinda shitty politics dominated by 2 parties who are centre/right and shifting further right.
deleted by creator
The British Empire was an egalitarian paradise, imo
Edit: I guess I have to add an /s lmao
You thought wrong, most of the world is more racist than the US
“Oh nooo. It wasnt my fault I just mindlessly spread russian lies and hate about brown people. Who would have thought that words can have consequences?!”
What a … I don’t even have a word for so much, idk mindless hate?
its not consequences until it starts affecting her, which in this case did. I hope other people jointly sue her for damages or sth so that at least she has to go to court and pay lawyer fees
I hope other people jointly sue her for damages
Now that would be interesting to see. With a dynamically updating billboard tallying her dues under the title “Hateful spread of online lies cost this woman GBP xxx”
She owes me £30 since one of the rioters stole my wheelie bin, and I’m still annoyed about it. They made a big pile of everyone’s bins at the end of the street and melted them all, twats.
Edit: also the racism is bad too I suppose.
Well, submit a claim. Every pound of pain helps bringing the point home.
Seems to be a great person 🙄 https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bernie_Spofforth
unfortunately these people are more inclined to make kids than the reasonable ones
In hindsight, maybe the police saying nothing didn’t help matters.
The internet exists, and it’s fast. Waiting a few days to say the suspect was British was not the right call. Especially when they’d already said the wonderful phrase “police do not believe the incident to be terror related” which as far as I can tell is code for “the suspect is not white, and Tommy Robinson is already on his way”.
If you create a void of information, somebody will fill it. There were plenty of eyewitnesses going around telling people what happened, and it’s not a far cry from “he was black” to “he was an asylum seeker”. There are bad actors out there, and they will use that void to their advantage.
Like you don’t need to give out personal info, or make stuff up, but a simple “police believe the suspect to be British” might have saved a lot of trouble.
Unfortunately their hands were tied. They don’t release information about minors. That’s just the law. It was determined shortly after by a judge to release the information due to the growing disinformation to quell violence, but the die had already been cast.
The reason they don’t release information is simply because they’re children, and they don’t want idolisation but also harassment to occur.
Same reason why names of mass murder events shouldn’t be released anyway, to prevent the perpetrators from becoming martyrs. They’re just known as “the killer” etc
Now this usually works fine as much as there are arguments for and against, however this event became somewhat a unique case, and an opportunity was found by malicious actors to use it for their own benefit.
After the Reform party gained considerable ground, they now need to keep momentum of having a constant “enemy” and “other” in the public eye, a never ending threat. Fascism 101.
And so, stoking the flames of the current migrant “crisis” if you let slip in certain places that the perpetrator was a migrant Muslim, you hope that the snowball can become an avalanche. And avalanche it did.
All the while the leaders such as Farage can claim innocence with very particular wording to wriggle out of any scrutiny.
The police cannot be going around releasing information the otherwise wouldn’t do just to stop dipshits online. There’s a reason they don’t release this information right away.
Let’s say there’s an investigation and somebody is murdered and in the course of the investigation for some reason the police think that you might be the murderer. They arrest you, and you provide DNA and it proves that you are innocent. I am sure you would not want your information released to the public in advance of a conviction.
This isn’t just a hypothetical either there has been plenty of cases where innocent people have been accused of a crime, and then exonerated, but by that point the damage to their reputation has already been done even though they did literally nothing wrong. The police have to confirm that the person they have in custody is the right person before they release info to the public. Also if the person is a kid there are even more protections in place.
While I agree about releasing identifying information. A quick release of, “we have a suspect, they are not an immigrant.” right after that first night would go a long way.
Not super relevant, but don’t they apparently have more info on the Jack the Ripper killings that they still won’t release? Makes me think the “right away” is on a geological time scale
If it helps… ACAB.
Not some. Not a handful. All of them.
This isn’t a personal attack. There are systems in place to ensure that shitty behavior is protected while good behavior is punished or made a edge case. Until the rot is fixed, cops cannot be a force of good.
Well she has a . . . what’s the opposite of “kindly” . . . face.
callous?
Mmm hmmm mm hmmm. Yes, but more . . . ehhh what’s the word. Malevolent.
Kindly and callous both start with the correct sound…
Yeah, she looks like a removed. That’s where we were going with this, right?
No, that’s sexist. We don’t need that to rag on her. It’s clear we have enough material to move forward without that.
She’s a cunt
Backpfeifengesicht?
Good. That shitbag should be held accountable for all the harm she caused.
I love watching these diseased imperialists desperately try and excuse their population showing their true colors. First it was musky moo who used X, now it’s this stupid blonde lady, who is next? Actual politicians who have been chanting for racial violence for years? God I hope the whole stupid island implodes lmao
I’m just enjoying watching the conservative party eat themselves alive. They are all trying to out racist each other, while at the same time condemning the racists for being racist. It’s pretty spectacular mental gymnastics, they should win a medal.
They should win a padded room and a lifetime prescription for lorazepam
No need to be a dick about it, plenty of nice people live here.
This has Lynndie England vibes. Sure, culpable. But not the person pulling the strings.
Woman looks like she would tear your heart out with a spoon.
Yay another win for not having such a backward, archaic law like Free Speech ©®™
Edit - Christ on a bike, my most misread comment yet lol
I don’t think free speech covers actual lies, and misinformation.
Individualist ideas of freedom and rights are not as useful to a functioning society as collective freedom and rights.
Freedom to incite a violent attack against a marginalized group isn’t a useful kind of freedom.
Individualists seem not to get this idea.
Your rights end where my rights begin, and conversely, my rights end where yours begin.
While I agree that this is a win overall, even in the US there are limits to free speech; you can’t falsely yell fire in a crowded theatre, threaten an individual with bodily harm, or incite others to do so, without any risk of repercussion.
Unless you’re a Republican of course in which case you can do all of those things.
“…and when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.”
Should I be allowed to feed rabid folks misinformation to encourage them to murder you and your family, with no repercussions? Yes or no, please no long winded diatribes.
Ali Al-Shakati was the suspect, he was an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year and was on an MI6 watch list. If this is true, then all hell is about to break loose.
That sounds like she’s repeating a rumor; she even says that it might not be true. Is this illegal in the UK?
“Ali Al-Shakati was the suspect, he was an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year…” Does not read like restating a rumor
Also, she can’t provide any source where she heard that rumor, almost certainly because she just made it up herself and just threw in the “if true” bit to avoid being held responsible
She says she read it on another post and reposted it, adding in the “if this is true”. She deleted her tweet later on and said that people should’ve been doing their own fact-checking, a comment I found a bit rich considering that she didn’t fact-check before making her own post.
The UK doesn’t have the same freedom of speech as the US, no 1st ammendment. So it very well could be illegal there, Idk.
She should’ve checked before spreading hateful lies then, will not lose sleep over this.
