Over the years I’ve taken somewhat of a keen interest in the activities of the bunch of highly censorious Leftists from the group ‘Stop Funding Hate’ (SFH). I first got alerted to them by two particular pieces of information. The first was seeing them promoted on social media by a group of ‘Islamophobia’ grievance mongers and the second was a 2017 article on the Guido Fawkes site outlining how SFH had managed to persuade the Paperchase company, which at the time had a chain of stationery supply shops, to stop advertising with the Daily Mail. Following on from the Guido story in particular, there was an outcry about SFH’s tactics and their derogatory affect on freedom of speech with, according to the BBC, SFH’s campaign against the Daily Mail and Paperchase’s ‘cowardice’, coming from commentators such as Julia Hartley-Brewer and Piers Morgan. You can find previous articles from this blog about SFH at the bottom of this article.
The more I dug into this Stop Funding Hate organisation the more alarmed I became. My initial cause for alarm was that this clearly anti-free speech entity was being promoted by communalist grievance mongers but the more I looked at SFH, its personnel, its origin story, its tactics and its aims, the more concerned I became. I saw SFH as one of those organisations that set themselves up as moral arbiters who arrogantly assumed that they had the right to decide what media content other Britons should consume, a view that in my opinion is not compatible with concepts of freedom of speech. Some of those who were behind SFH’s foundation quite obviously had a political animus against Britain’s relatively popular low and mid market newspapers and in particular a profound dislike of the political views that some of those newspapers expressed. Their tactics of threatening advertisers with a left wing boycott if they continue to advertise in papers SFH consider unfavourably, look and seem an awful lot like bullying to me.
As I said earlier, SFH like to paint themselves as the ‘good guys’, the people who will stand up to ‘racism’ in the press or against the ‘demonisation’ of migrants or against others who go against similar Establishment Left narratives. But they are not a group on the side of the angels, they are dedicated censors and a small group of self appointed ones at that. They’ve also made some pretty bad decisions on which causes to back, such as when they decided that Mermaids, a highly controversial gender identity youth organisation which has attracted a vast amount of justified criticism, was worthy of their support. That SFH chose to do this at a time when Mermaids’ operational connections to a disgraced gender identity clinic for minors, The Tavistock, were the subject of public debate, shows us that they not only have an inability to ‘read the political room’ but are all too willing to put political ideology well ahead of well founded concerns about matters such as probity and child safeguarding.
Bad decisions on the part of SFH abound. It’s not just their bad decision to set themselves up as self appointed censors or their decision to support the child sterilisers and child mutilation fans of Mermaids that show this group as dodgy, but also their decision to employ someone who turned out to be a massive anti-Semite who has praised the genocidal Islamic group Hamas.
On the 18th July Guido Fawkes said:
A leading organiser of Stop Funding Hate, the group who arranged an advertising boycott of GB News, has a history of sharing “anti-Semitic” content online. According to The Telegraph, Amanda Morris, a community organiser for Stop Funding Hate, expressed sympathy for Hamas and repeated the controversial slogan “From the River to the Sea”. The Campaign Against Antisemitism said it was hard to square these anti-Semitic “red flags” with Stop Funding Hate’s aims.
I agree with the Campaign Against Antisemitism on this matter, hiring this person does not sit well with SFH’s claims to be against racism and prejudice. Judging by pictures of Amanda Morris that have been published in the media it is likely that Ms Morris is a convert to Islam which makes me wonder whether she was some sort of diversity hire picked for her identity rather than anything else? Maybe because Ms Morris identifies as Muslim SFH didn’t look too closely at her politics or try to ascertain whether she was a supporter of the sort of groups, such as Hamas, that Adolf Hitler might have approved of?
This is deliciously embarrassing for this odious SFH group, especially as they’ve gone out on a limb to be seen to call out Jew hatred in the past . Whilst I’ve little doubt that some members of the increasingly unhinged middle class metro Left will try to make excuses for SFH, just as they made excuses for Huw Edwards, this latest embarrassment for SFH is now so big that all of us, even those who are less politically engaged and interested than us political anoraks, can now see how hollow are the claims of SFH that they are on the moral and ethical side. Maybe the exposure of SFH’s decision to employ, in a relatively prominent position, a woman who supports Hamas, will be beneficial to those who may in the future find themselves targeted by the bullies of SFH because potential victims of SFH can now point to disgraceful conduct of SFH before telling SFH to ‘go forth and multiply’. SFH have been revealed to everyone as a bunch of two faced tossers and that reduces their perceived power immensely.
Links to previous articles on the subject of the Stop Funding Hate group.
Background to the Stop Funding Hate Group. Part One. Giving in to censorious cranks is never a good idea
Background to the Stop Funding Hate Group. Part Two. SFH’s people, background and connections.
SFH support the gender groomers of Mermaids.
Baroness Fox of Buckley sticks the boot into SFH in the House of Lords chamber.
https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2023/05/26/well-said-your-ladyship/
Stop Funding Hate supporting ‘drag queen story time’
SFH attack GB News even prior to the station’s launch
Can’t fault you here F211.
I always think that groups like SFH and “Hope not Hate” etc. live up to their “shop-front” claims in the manner that the DDR did and the DPRNK still do live up to theirs.
It seems that the higher the moral tone the lower the actual ethics.
Thank you. I agree with you in that the names chosen by these lefty groups such as those you mention are often at odds to what they actually are.
They always adopt misleading names, as deliberate ruses to hoodwink the gullible, the Islingtonista middle-class morons, who look no deeper than the veneer on the gold-plated turds these organisations invariably are.
In their eyes, it may be a shit sandwich, but look instead at the artisan wholemeal bread covering the filling.
Agree there. Maybe the best approach is to look at what the group calls itself and then reverse the meaning of the name. For example: SFH could be called ‘my hate for Jews is exempt’, Hope Not Hate should be Hate Not Hope and Antifa should be known as ‘The Approved type of fascist’
I missed out the idiot coloured-haired, snot-hanger-nose-ringed, “students” studying for useless degrees, egged on by their equally useless invariably Marxist, toxic “lecturers” who’ll latch onto any loony trend.
Before going any further on this I would urge anyone not averse to having a peep on Facebook to look at the lengthy rules and guidelines for posts and comments on the SFH supporters’ group. How could one possibly say anything at all there?
https://www.facebook.com/groups/269492197223935/?ref=share
Wow. Just had a look there. Apart from the section on illegal content which is a reasonable restriction to have, the rules as a whole seem to be set up to preclude open discussion. It’s almost as if SFH don’t want their views challenged in any way not even from those who might be ostensibly on their side.