Open letter to the editor of BLINK

UPDATE: BLINK's editor Lester Holloway and I exchanged a few emails yesterday over this. I'm giving him until the end of today to respond to something, then will post about it.

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I just sent this email to Lester Holloway, the editor of this racist internet magazine:

Dear Mr Holloway,

Last March you promised me a right of reply to a piece published on your website.

This promise was made after I telephoned your office, as described here.

I now claim that right of reply, in the light of one of your recent campaigns. I will keep it brief, and would be grateful if you publish it in full and with the same degree of prominence as the piece that covered your rally.

I am reproducing this mail in its entirety on my blog.

Copy is under this text.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Risdon.


On March 30th 2006, BLINK published a piece written by Shirin Aguiar-Holloway titled "A sea of white faces". Unable even to get the name of the event she was reporting correct, referring to it as the "Freedom March" instead of the "March for Free Expression", Ms Holloway wrote: "The 200-odd protesters who gathered in Trafalgar Square on Saturday were nearly all white.

Just about the only non-white face was an Iranian man who carried a placard with the Danish cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban."

That this was untrue is beside the point. Judging the merits of an event or an argument on the grounds of race alone is as straightforward an example of racism as it is possible to find. Dr Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when people would be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. BLINK does not seem to share that dream. It might indeed have been possible to criticise the characters of those involved in the Free Expression rally, but you made no attempt to do so. You did, however, give uncritical space to mention of a counter protest and quoted the spokesman of this event, Ismaeel-Haneef Hijazi, in uncritical terms.

Mr Hijazi has just refused to endorse this statement, during a discussion on my blog at the following address:

http://freebornjohn.blogspot.com/2007/09/mainstream-islam.html

"any tradition that can today accept slavery under any circumstances, that accepts the rape of slave women, however that might be phrased, and advocates or accepts sex with under age girls - which is always rape - is abhorrent."

In other words, your devotion to anti-white racism has made you side with a man who will not condemn slavery, the rape of slave women and the rape of girls as young as nine years of age. Yet you were unable to endorse the following statement of principle that underlay the Free Expression rally:

"The strength and survival of free society and the advance of human knowledge depend on the free exchange of ideas. All ideas are capable of giving offence, and some of the most powerful ideas in human history, such as those of Galileo and Darwin, have given profound religious offence in their time. The free exchange of ideas depends on freedom of expression and this includes the right to criticise and mock. We assert and uphold the right of freedom of expression and call on our elected representatives to do the same. We abhor the fact that people throughout the world live under mortal threat simply for expressing ideas and we call on our elected representatives to protect them from attack and not to give comfort to the forces of intolerance that besiege them."

Your devotion to perpetuating racial division, and your commitment to anti-white bias regardless of any other circumstances, disqualify you utterly from making pronouncements on the alleged racism of any other person.

That includes Boris Johnson who, whatever he may or may not have said in the past, has never campaigned for racial division, nor displayed complete and unrelenting racism, in the way that your organisation does.