Them

by Jon Ronson

  “The JDL get their hands dirty,” said Bo. “They don’t sit behind their desks. I respect that. The ADL don’t care if they are right or wrong. They will take advantage of any situation to make headlines and to put more jingles in their coffers.”

  Bo hammered away some more.

  “The ADL will bite their own,” he said. “Watch out! They are vicious.”

  ♦

  I thought about Bo’s warning as I sat with Gail. She mentioned that the ADL was always on the look-out for turncoat Jews, self-hating Jews, and I was afraid she might consider me to be one of those. I had, much to her bafflement, attempted to defend the honour of suspected anti-Semites to her. It was not a pleasant feeling. I had spent so much of the past few years with enemies of the Jewish people, and the only time I felt fearful and tongue-tied was when I was with my own representatives. I suppose the thing is this: the anti-Semites may possess the irrational and hateful belief that we Jews control the world, but we’ve got something even more potent. We’ve got the resources.

  I did not want to get on the wrong side of the ADL. So I changed the subject. I asked Gail about the Bilderberg Group.

  She chuckled and said, “Oh! They’re just a group of good citizens who like to discuss broad issues such as global economics and emerging markets without anti-Semites trying to break in and cause havoc. The Spotlight just loves its Jewish conspiracy theories. That’s a big one for them. They also believe that putting fluoride in the water softens our brains. And that the weather is controlled by the government. They think those are Jewish conspiracies too!”

  She laughed, to indicate that the Bilderberg conspiracy theories are as crazy as the ones regarding the fluoridation of the water and the control of the weather.

  And then, using almost exactly the same words as Big Jim Tucker had back in Washington, Gail portrayed the events that occurred in Portugal as a battle between good and evil. Except that in her version, the man in the dark glasses behind the tree was not the dangerous one. The evil man was sitting right next to me in my hire car.

  Gail’s point was that Jim didn’t hate Bilderberg, per se. Bilderberg was us – Western liberal global capitalists. What he hated was our way of life. Gail didn’t say it, but I think she felt I had been to a dark place. I had allowed myself to be beguiled by racists, to see our world from their eyes.

  Gail said that of course there was no media cover-up. Why would newspaper editors want to run stories concerning a bunch of dull CEOs sitting around discussing globalization? Who’d be interested in that? Come on, Gail said, David Rockefeller is hardly Michael Jordan.

  She sighed. Then she said, “The Anti-Defamation League is very concerned about code words.”

  ♦

  As I left Gail’s office, my mind flitted manically between the two versions of what had happened in Portugal, attempting to marshal whatever insubstantial facts and partial truths I felt I knew, before finally and comfortably settling on Them against Them, with me doing the driving. My worryingly paradoxical thought process could be summarized thus: Thank God I don’t believe in the secret rulers of the world. Imagine what the secret rulers of the world might do to me if I did.

  ♦

  The following two relevant pieces of information (unmistakable facts which I learnt long after the events) should, I hope, offer some kind of skewed clarity.

  The first is a wire report from the New York Times, dated 12 March 2000:

  Lawyers for the Anti-Defamation League in Denver are appealing a $10.5-million judgement against the organization for defaming a couple the ADL publicly accused of being anti-Semitic. On April 28, a US District Court jury decided the organization had gone too far in accusing an Evergreen, Colo, couple of anti-Semitism.

  The jury concluded those statements were defamatory and ‘not substantially true’.

  The second is a newsletter Colonel Bo Gritz had produced back in 1988, shortly after announcing his candidacy for the office of President of the United States:

  The number of the anti-Christ system is 666, a six within a six within a six. Six sides, six angles, six points. The six-pointed star of Judaism.

  ∨ Them ∧

  6

  There Are Lizards And There Are Lizards

  In a meeting room in a community centre in Vancouver, a blackboard said ‘Strategy’ and leaflets said ‘Bigot Alert’. A coalition of prominent anti-racist organizations shook hands and took their seats, notepads at the ready.

  A leading racist was about to land in Canada on a speaking tour. TV and radio stations were vying to secure chat-show bookings. There would be celebrity appearances, meet-and-greet the fans sessions and high-profile book signings.

  This was, the coalition felt, an unusual and disquieting turn of events. The media do not, as a rule, scramble to book racists for celebrity appearances. But this was an unusual racist.

  ♦

  “Above all,” began the chair, “David Icke represents a political threat. His writings are anti-Semitic. David Icke states that the global elite, the Illuminati who dominate every aspect of our lives, are genetically descended from an extraterrestrial race of reptiles who came to earth some time ago in the form of humans, who are capable of changing their shape, who engage in ritual child sacrifice, who drink blood…”

  The coalition shook their heads wearily. In terms of code words, they had now heard it all.

  “What is this crap, this metaphorically hidden language?” said a member of Anti-Racist Action, a visiting scientist from Somalia. “Who is a lizard? It’s bullshit. Bullshit! As a human being you have to use proper language.”

  “What do these words imply?” I asked him.

  “What do you think they imply?” he replied. “Lizards? Reptiles? Cockroaches? Amphibians? They imply hatred. Racist hatred.”

  “Do you think that when David Icke says lizards he means Jews?” I asked.

  “Of course!” he said. “What is lizard? What is amphibian? It is a pile of rubbish. Why he’s using those terminologies such as lizards? This vile language. Vile bullshit. I’m totally culturally shocked.”

  “So,” said the chair, “what are we going to do about this?”

  ♦

  Wheels had already been set in motion. The Canadian Hate Crimes Unit had been alerted. So had the media. The coalition had also written to ex-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to inform him that David Icke was accusing him of being a reptilian child-sacrificing paedophile. But so far, to their bafflement, Brian Mulroney had declined to initiate legal action.

  Indeed, every individual accused of reptilian paedophilia by David Icke had so far failed to sue, including Bob Hope, George Bush, George Bush Jr, Ted Heath, the Rothschild family, Boxcar Willie, the Queen of England, the Queen Mother, Prince Philip, Kris Kristofferson, Al Gore, and the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group.

  ♦

  “Why do you think that is?” David Icke had asked me when I interviewed him about this matter in London. Then he turned to my notepad and thundered, “Come on, Ted Heath! Sue me if you’ve got nothing to hide! Come on, George Bush! I’m ready! Sue me! I’m naming names! Come on, Jon? Why are they refusing to sue me?”

  There was a silence.

  “Because they are twelve-foot lizards?” I suggested, smally.

  “Yes!” said David. “Exactly!”

  ♦

  “Keep in mind that this is not a meeting to debate what David Icke stands for,” announced the chair in Vancouver. “This is a meeting for people who are opposed to David Icke’s presence in the community. I would like to know if any people here consider themselves supporters of David Icke?”

  There was a silence.

  “I…uh…haven’t made up my mind yet,” said a man in a beige jacket whom nobody recognized. “I don’t know what David Icke stands for. I have been fighting Nazis for twenty years, but sometimes it is difficult to tell who the Nazis are.”

  This man was unshaven. His blond hair was long and lank. Anti-racists shared qui
et glances. Strictly speaking this man had – by failing to have made up his mind – contravened the stated rule. This meeting was for people who had made up their minds. But the tacit consensus was not, at this stage, to demand his removal from the room.

  “David Icke is opposed to community values,” explained the chair patiently. “The purpose of this meeting is to organize against David Icke. If that is not your purpose you might want to reconsider whether this is a meeting you want to be at.”

  A beat allowed this thought to linger, and then the subject was changed.

  “He’s clearly out to act as a conduit to the patriot movement,” said Tony from the British Columbia Socialist Caucus, “the far-right anti-Semitic racist militia movement.”

  It was at this moment that the stranger in the beige jacket made a startling announcement.

  “I have been in the militia movement of the United States for four years,” he said, “and I only ever met one racist there.”

  The action that followed this declaration was swift and lethal.

  “I think at this point it may be unproductive if you continue to remain in the room,” said the chair. He enunciated every word.

  The militiaman looked shaken by this rapid response.

  “If you…uh…want to rule me out, fine,” he stammered, “but I just wanted to see if I could do anything to help.”

  “I think that people are uncomfortable with you sitting at the meeting.”

  “I came to hear what David Icke was about and whether I could help,” he said. “Could I just ask two questions?”

  “But this isn’t a debate,” smiled the Chair.

  “OK. OK. I’ll go. But could I just ask – ”

  “Please, no.”

  “I’m gone,” he said. “I’m gone.”

  And he left.

  ♦

  A break was called. Informal suggestions were thrown around over cigarettes in the car park by the younger and more rebellious activists. Someone offered to launch a physical attack on David Icke at his hotel.

  I suspected a giant misunderstanding was in danger of spiralling out of control. Knowing what I did about David Icke’s past – specifically his startling announcement on the Terry Wogan chat show on BBC1 in 1991 that he was the Son of God – I guessed that when he said that twelve-foot lizards secretly ruled the world, he really was referring to lizards. But what did I know? The code words did seem to be increasingly abstruse. I elected to remain an impartial observer to the unfolding events in Vancouver in the hope that some clarity might develop in the days ahead.

  ♦

  Wogan.

  The blue comedian Jim Davidson was the top of the bill that night (this was prime-time BBC1, the autumn of 1991) but most of the viewers had tuned in to see Terry Wogan’s first guest.

  There had been rumours in the tabloids all week that something unexpected had happened to David Icke, the popular BBC sports personality, once a professional football player, now the host of Grandstand and a household name. The tabloids said that David Icke had started wearing only turquoise, that he was predicting cataclysmic flooding and earthquakes – and he was claiming to be the Son of God.

  I had watched a videotape of this broadcast before leaving London for Vancouver. It was startling to see how David Icke looked, how haggard and exhausted and terribly nervous – so unlike the genial BBC soccer and snooker correspondent the British public had come to feel so comfortable with – and dressed from head to toe in a turquoise shell suit (turquoise being a conduit of positive energy) as he stepped out onto the stage.

  “Why you?” asked Wogan with an incredulity that reflected the mood of the land. “Why have you been chosen?”

  “People would have said the same thing to Jesus,” he replied. “Who the heck are you? You’re a carpenter’s son.”

  “When might we expect tidal waves, eruptions and earthquakes?” asked Wogan.

  “They will certainly happen this year,” said David.

  This conversation took place amid howls of laughter from the studio audience.

  “Why should we believe you?” said Wogan.

  “I’m saying that these things are going to happen this year,” said David, “so we’ll see, won’t we?”

  “And what will happen to you if they don’t happen?” asked Wogan.

  “They will happen,” said David.

  He said this with such ferocity, such conviction, that the audience stopped laughing for a moment. However wise and modern we are, this kind of thing can still shake us up. You could feel it sweep across the television studio, sweep across the land, a stirring of some primordial paranoia. Could David Icke actually be a soothsayer? At that moment, I think the nation looked to Terry Wogan for guidance. How would he respond? Which way would this go?

  “The best way of removing negativity is to laugh and be joyous, Terry,” said David. “So I’m glad that there’s been so much laughter in the audience tonight.”

  There was a small silence.

  “But they’re laughing at you,” said Wogan. “They’re not laughing with you.”

  There was a gasp, followed by rapturous applause.

  ♦

  So the Canadian coalition was unaware of the moment that David Icke’s career had crashed so dramatically in Britain. Had they known, would they have felt differently about the reasons why he said that giant lizards secretly ruled the world?

  Furthermore, the coalition seemed to have disregarded the fact that many of the lizard-people Icke had publicly named and shamed were not Jewish.

  I had felt a similar sense of bafflement when Gail at the ADL had told me that ‘Bilderberg’ was a code word for Jews. (Again, very few of the Bilderbergers who had whisked past me into the gates of the Caesar Park were Jewish.) One would presume that this would pretty much disqualify them from being, by anyone’s reckoning, a Jewish conspiracy.

  Why did nobody consider this important enough to bring it up?

  Surprisingly, the only group I discovered that had addressed this complex issue head-on was Combat 18, Britain’s fearsome neo-Nazi outfit. They recently published a fact-file entitled ‘What Is ZOG?’ It reads:

  ZOG is Zionist Occupied Government. Not all the controllers of ZOG are Jews. ZOG is ‘Zionist’ because their agenda seeks to realize their conviction that they are the ‘Chosen People’. Their aim is to be the Masters of the World.

  So there’s the answer. In the absence of statistical substantiation, you need to put words in inverted commas. The Jews are metaphors now. You no longer need to be Jewish to be a Jew.

  This is how things now stand: the Anti-Defamation League are searching for code words that have replaced the word ‘Jew’; and for the anti-Semites the word ‘Jew’ has become code for non-Jews who meet in secret rooms, just as the anti-Semitic tracts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the Protocols of Zion and Henry Ford’s The International Jew, for instance – portrayed the Jews.

  So perhaps David Icke did mean Jews when he said lizards. There were, in fact, two pieces of compelling evidence that support this view:

  1. Combat 18 had once attended a David Icke lecture in London and had given him a glowing review in their newsletter:

  Icke spoke of ‘the sheep’ and how ZOG, sorry, the Illuminati, uses them for its own ends. He is always clever enough not to mention what all these people have in common. (Salt beef sandwich anyone?)

  So the anti-racist left was not alone in believing that when David Icke said lizards he meant Jews. But David had been mortified by Combat 18’s enthusiastic critique, coming as it did from Britain’s most menacing neo-Nazi unit. His response was to accuse Combat 18 of being a ‘front for the sinister Anti-Defamation League’. He wrote:

  The United States arm of Mossad – the Israeli Rothschild secret service – the ADL has been operating in Britain since 1991. Their role is to brand as anti-Semitic anyone who’s getting close to the truth. What better way to discredit an investigator than to have Combat 18 praise him?<
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  2. Buried somewhere in the middle of David Icke’s hundreds of thousands of published words is a short paean to the Protocols of Zion – the absurd nineteenth-century Tsarist forgery proclaiming to be the minutes of a meeting of the Jewish secret rulers of the world:

  Protocol 9: The weapons in our hands are limitless ambition, burning greediness, merciless vengeance, hatred and malice. It is from us that all-engulfing terror proceeds…We will not give (the people of the world) peace until they openly acknowledge our international Super-Government.

  It is incredible that this document, which portrays my people as cackling villains from a Saturday matinee, formed the template for contemporary anti-Semitism. It is so obviously a fake. Even if some of us do possess ‘limitless ambition, burning greediness, merciless vengeance, hatred and malice’ (and I know I do), we’d never come right out and admit it to our peer group. There are appearances to uphold.

  But then David Icke has declared that the Protocols of Zion is evidence not of a Jewish plot, but of a reptilian plot of Illuminati lizards. And nobody would be concerned about David Icke if it wasn’t for the fact that his career is now a global sensation; that he lectures to packed houses all over the world, riveting his audiences for six hours at a time with extraordinary revelations; and that pop stars and movie stars request private audiences, with both P.W. Botha and Winnie Mandela happy to declare themselves fans. Indeed, in terms of the size of his following, he is the most influential racist on the lecture circuit – if, that is, he is a racist.

  ♦

  The airport.

  Two Canadian immigration officers discreetly scanned the queue at passport control. They were holding clipboards. One turned to the other and murmured, “That’s him.”