I spotted an interesting story on the Guido Fawkes site that was published on 20th November. It concerns the Paperchase stationery company which bowed to pressure from a Left wing pro-censorship group called ‘Stop Funding Hate’. This group targeted Paperchase because they were advertising in the Daily Mail and became enraged when they were offering two free rolls of wrapping paper to Daily Mail readers. Stop Funding Hate started a social media campaign aimed against Paperchase which caused the company to panic and instead of telling these censorious lunatics to bugger off, bowed to this pressure.
Guido said that it would be both ‘pathetic’ and ‘dangerous’ for Paperchase to cave into the pressure from Stop Funding Hate . I tend to agree with Guido on this. It is never good for companies to start taking notice of small, loud and unrepresentative Leftist groups that have agendas that may be distinctly anti-freedom.
According to Guido, Paperchase appeasing Stop Funding Hate (SFH) has not worked out well, not only has this act of cowardice encouraged SFH to continue to pressure Paperchase and other companies, but it has also caused a backlash against the Paperchase company not from Leftists but from commentators of the centre-right and customers angered at the grovelling behaviour of Paperchase when criticised by the Left.
The Guido site said that Paperchase is going to regret caving in to these leftist censorious whingers by removing their ads from the Daily Mail as they will be taking Paperchase out of the sight of millions of Mail readers and viewers. It’s likely that Paperchase is going find its bottom line hurt by appeasing a small bunch left wing activists and their Twitter based bullies. Although much of the outrage and fuss is about SFH attacking advertisers, this is only their modus operandi, the core values of SFH are based around censoring ideas that they and their political compatriots do not like or approve of.
Because of the furore about SFH and its bullying, I thought I’d do a bit of digging into SFH and the entities that it associates with, of which more detail later on in this admittedly long but necessarily exhaustive piece. First, here’s part of the Guido piece that sparked the furore about Paperchase and which caused me to do a little digging into those involved with and working alongside Stop Funding Hate.
Guido said:
Yet today Paperchase gave in to the SFH nuts and apologised for Saturday’s promotion, promising not to advertise with the Mail again. The tweet has had over a thousand replies, with hundreds of unimpressed customers now threatening to buy their cards in Clintons in protest at Paperchase’s spinelessness.
It is indeed spineless behaviour by Paperchase and it’s going to lose them a large number of customers. Paperchase have also failed to understand that when a company appeases bullies like SFH then it will not stop at merely removing their ads from the Daily Mail. The left will come back for more and make even more demands of the company. If Paperchase had just told SFH and their keyboard warriors to ‘sod off’ then it may have been a live story for a couple of days or maybe a week, but after that nobody, at least nobody sensible, would have given a toss.
It’s probably a good point, bearing the publicity that SFH have managed to garner by their bullying, to have a look at exactly what SFH are and who backs them.
Stop Funding Hate is a group that is publicly backed and promoted by a number of very troubling individuals and organisations, including one that wants negative news reports on Islam censored and replaced with feel good pro-Islam propaganda. These groups include the pro-Islam pro-mass migration group Citizens UK and the mendacious grievance mongering taqiyya artists of the ‘Islamophobia monitors’ Tell Mama.
Citizens UK, is one of the movers and shakers behind the ‘refugees welcome’ campaign in the UK and an organisation which is closely associated with one of Britain’s most extreme mosques the East London Mosque and is a major backer of the Stop Funding Hate group. Citizens UK was also the architect of the Parliamentary ‘Dubs Amendment’ which brought in loads of ‘refugees’ from Calais claiming that they were vulnerable children but which in reality turned out to be adults with beards and crow’s feet.
This group has worked closely with SFH to pressure companies including The Body Shop and Lego to stop them advertising in the Daily Mail or entering into promotional partnerships with the newspaper. According to a report in the UK advertising trade newspaper Campaign from February 2017, SFH and Citizens UK called for the removal of Body Shop advertising from the Daily Mail. The activist assault on Body Shop’s right to choose where they advertise was successful and Citizens UK claimed this campaign against The Body Shop was ‘a huge win for them’.
Campaign magazine said:
Campaign group Stop Funding Hate published a tweet on Wednesday suggesting The Body Shop backed its campaign to stop advertising in newspapers it considers to be promoting bigotry. It said The Body Shop’s decision represents a “huge win” for Citizens UK, which called for action earlier this week.
Regular readers of this blog will know that there are a large number of legitimate concerns that this blog has raised about the activities and financing of Citizens UK. They are an all round bad egg of an organisation. Citizens UK have run political cover for the East London Mosque, when the mosque has been caught out promoting Islamic hate preachers. They have apparently hoodwinked the Home Office, when now Prime Minister Theresa May was Home Secretary, into taking in the fake ‘children’ of Calais.
Two of the fake ‘child migrants’ pictured by the Daily Mail and who also subjected the fake children to computer image age identification
These individuals were brought into the UK with the assistance of Citizens UK and other groups
They have also had meetings with candidates for political office across the mainstream political spectrum in order to get all of them to sign up to policy positions that Citizens UK wish to promote. These policy positions may benefit Citizens UK and their campaigns, especially their pro-Islam and pro-migration campaigns, but may not be ones that the electorate themselves may wish to choose to support. Citizens UK have also wormed their way into positions of political and policy influence in a number of religious and community groups to such an extent, that in some of these groups criticism of Citizens UK activities has become to a large degree a forbidden topic to discuss. Citizens UK are already a socially and politically destructive group, they should not be allowed to be in a position where they can clamp down on press freedom.
We now move on to the Tell Mama group and its founder Fiyaz Mughal and their support for Stop Funding Hate. I recall that when SFH managed to bully The Body Shop into dropping advertising or promotional co-operation with the Daily Mail, Tell Mama made a great deal of this win for SFH on their social media pages. They actively promoted SFH and this promotion of SFH fits in very well with Tell Mama’s ongoing campaign to force newspapers to stop publishing negative stories about Islam even when these stories are true. Tell Mama have attacked stories in newspapers such as the Mail and The Sun which have been based on surveys showing that a significant minority of Muslims support jihad, legal restrictions on what people can say about Islam and where these surveys show an unwillingness on the part of Muslims to report Islamic extremists to the police. Tell Mama have attacked these surveys as being ‘untrue’ and ‘unrepresentative’ which is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black as Tell Mama have a long and very bad reputation for not telling the truth themselves. It is Tell Mama you may recall, that not only lied about the number of ‘Islamophobic’ attacks following the Islamic murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby but have also promoted obviously and provably fake ‘hijab pulling’ stories as being true. If SFH and Tell Mama are supporting each other then it says a lot about the political motivations of SFH. It seems that both Tell Mama and SFH have a mutual interest in newspapers not reporting negative, but true, stories about the ideology of Islam.
Fiyaz Mughal who as well as the Tell Mama group, has other vehicles, such as Faith Matters, that he uses to get his pro-Islam pro-censorship view across, has been quoted on a Left leaning website, Positive News as stating that negative news coverage ‘maligns whole communities’. However in my view this negative coverage would not be occurring were it not for a very large grain of truth in the stories of jihad, gang rape, welfare exploitation and in some cases sedition, that members of the UK’s Muslim communities and Islamic activists have been involved in.
Fiyaz Mughal the founder of the Tell Mama organisation. This is a group that is increasingly in favour of press censorship
Positive News said:
Fiyaz Mughal, founder of the hate crime prevention charity Tell MAMA, said: “Headlines that are developed to sell papers and that malign whole communities have real and direct impacts. Advertisers need to realise that they are the lifeblood of these papers that are churning out such divisive material. Do they really want to be associated with such actions?”
With regards to a desire to censor news or comment that is politically disagreeable then it’s pretty fair to say that Tell Mama and Stop Funding Hate are but two cheeks or the same highly unpleasant arse. Neither SFH, Tell Mama or Tell Mama’s founder Fiyaz Mughal should be trusted with something as vital to a free society as press freedom or the right of companies and individuals to advertise where they damn well choose.
As we can see, there are definite and publicly acknowledged connections between all three of these groups, Stop Funding Hate, Tell Mama/Faith Matters and Citizens UK. All three of these groups have a political agenda in that they call for the censorship of stories that are critical of either Islam or the policies of multiculturalism and mass migration. All of these groups are dodgy and extremely anti freedom. A little bit of basic research by the companies targeted would have told the likes of Lego, The Body Shop and Paperchase this, which is why for Paperchase and others to cave in to SFH and similar groups like they, did looks like abject cowardice of the highest order. If Paperchase had told SFH to ‘go forth and multiply’ then it might have been newsworthy for a week or so whilst the internet snowflakes frothed for a bit but then it would have died down and no normal person would have taken a blind bit of notice about SFH and their spurious cries of ‘division’ and ‘racism’.
Please click HERE for Part Two
