The gatekeepers of information, aware of the power of song to expose their propaganda, have taken preemptive steps to shut down British singer Alison Chabloz. “I’m the only singer in modern British history who’s actually been put in prison for singing songs that nobody was forced to listen to,” says Chabloz.
By Dave Gahary
Uber-talented Alison Chabloz, a UK born-and-bred, 54-year-old mother of one, sat down with The Barnes Review for a two-hour-interview, that traced the route of how she innocently got into the sights of the Zionist censorship machine.
“I started to work for cruise ship companies as a musician,” she began. “From about 2010 I became interested in politics and what was happening in the world—and especially with the ‘Occupy’ and the ‘99%’ movements—and I began to be more active on social media,” she continued. “That was the first time that I came into contact with what we call historical Revisionism. And, at first, I was shocked. Like most everybody else, I believed what has been rammed down our throats since the end of World War II.”
Alison’s studies directed her to a part of the world where many have been led, when attempting to unravel the mysteries of our current conundrum.
“I began to realize that a big part of the problem was the Middle East and Palestine, and the occupation of Palestine by international Zionism, so I began to speak out for the Palestinian cause, and this attracted criticism from a very, very pro-Israel section of the British community … and very, very anti-Muslim.”
Her newfound realizations and outreach drew immediate attention.
“In December 2013—I’d already been on one cruise ship that year—I saw that the French international footballer Nicolas Anelka was in trouble because he’d scored a goal, and in celebration he’d made a quenelle salute,” she explained. “The enemy call it an inversed Nazi salute; it just means basically ‘up yours’ to the Establishment and those powers-who-should-not-be.”
The “quenelle” gesture was created and made famous by Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a black French comedian and political activist. As anything “Nazi” must be immediately and thoroughly condemned by the ruling classes, Jewish leaders, so-called anti-racism groups and French public officials “have sought to ban the gesture due to its perceived subtext of anti-Semitism.”
Alison explained why Anelka made the quenelle salute. “He did that in support of his friend Dieudonné,” she explained. “Dieudonné—he’s been in trouble because he satirized not only Jews and Jewish power, but also the holocaust. He’s had legal troubles because of that.”
When he wasn’t criticizing those who cannot be criticized, he was allowed a stage. “Prior to that,” Alison explained, “he’d had all the accolades. He was a big media star. But he began to realize something was wrong, so he started to use his art—his form of satire—comedy, to expose this.”
Dieudonné exposed Alison to another great, who has recently passed. “From his website, there was a link to Professor Robert Faurisson’s website, and he, of course, was the world’s foremost historical Revisionist scholar. Also, he had lots of problems with the French legal system, which is not the same as our common law system. They have what would be termed as ‘Holocaust Denial’ laws. You’re not allowed to say anything that contradicts the outcome of the Nuremberg Tribunals. And then I simply began to question on social media. But this brought me more trouble.”
“In 2014, I went off to Germany for the cruise contract,” she continued. “I was in Hamburg for six weeks for training. Being the music manager on board, I had a three-month contract on the ship.”
Alison had picked up a fan, but the wrong kind. “My abuser at that time was an organization called Yad B’Yad UK,” explained Alison, “run by a woman who’d been on my back since I began campaigning for the Palestinians.”
Yad B’yad UK was a pro-Israel UK charity registered in November 2003 and removed from the register in January 2007. It appears the organization was reinvented in 2013 “to monitor and help people who have been victims of racial abuse and anti-Semitism through social media platforms,” according to the founder’s pedigree on the Israeli-based online newspaper The Times of Israel’s website. “Her name was Ambrosine Shitrit,” explained Alison, “and she’d found out my place of work and wrote a letter.”
Alison discovered how one person’s vendetta can have tremendous consequences. “I was called into the ship captain’s office on the first day,” she explained, “and I was shown a screenshot of the tweet that I’d sent six months earlier, in response to one of this woman’s tweets saying that in Israel it was terrible because if you wanted to go see a Nativity play at Christmas, you had to carry along a gas mask because of all the Muslim terrorists who were out to do you in. So, I had simply replied saying that, ‘This makes me laugh. Now Israeli Jews suddenly believe in the baby Jesus and the Nativity. Hallelujah, saved at last.’ That’s kind of my form of satire, if you like. Yes, provocative. She put that on her website as an example of anti-Semitism, and this tweet got me sacked from my job on the first day.”
Alison wasn’t just fired; she was humiliated. “They literally kicked me off the ship,” she said. “It was 9 o’clock in the evening. There I was on this dock in Hamburg and had to find my way back.”
Left stranded, she tried to regroup, but she came against a powerful adversary. “I stayed for a few more days and tried to negotiate with the headquarters in Hamburg,” she explained. “But this is the German branch of Costa Cruises … which is the European branch of Carnival Group. Carnival Group is a UK/U.S. plc, and it was run by an American businessman called Micky Arison, who in fact was born in Israel. They have a monopoly on the sea cruise market. They refused to enter into any kind of discussion.”
Alison wasn’t about to let this insult go unanswered. “I did manage to go to the police and report that, because my union at the time—the musicians union—had already tried to vaguely help me,” she explained. “They’d said go to the police. I had reported this woman to police already for this harassment of me. When I got back to Britain I went back to the police and said, ‘Look, this is the woman; she’s had me sacked.’ Police washed their hands of doing anything. They said, ‘Oh yes, but you know, it’s politics and come off social media, use a stage name.’ But nothing concrete; they wouldn’t help me.”
Undeterred, she pushed forward. “I continued to be active online, I continued to learn more about historical Revisionism, and I became more vocal, more indignant, that we’d been lied to for all these decades,” she told this reporter. “In 2015 I got another job on a cruise ship,” she said. “So, I went off on the rivers of Europe, this time with a Swiss company called Uniworld. I didn’t get sacked from that contract; I did the whole season from April to October.”
The smooth sailing would soon lead to rough seas. “In the middle of the contract,” she said, “I had a chance to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.”
Alison explained what that is. “The Edinburgh Arts Festival is one of the longest-running arts festivals in the world,” she explained. “It runs every summer, all August, and around this main festival where all the art forms are represented—books, theater, opera, dancing, comedy—there has grown this ‘fringe festival.’ Pubs and clubs give performers a room, and you can pass the hat around at the end of the concert, and you can advertise. There’s a huge amount of publicity because in August the artist community from London moves to Edinburgh—a month of madness up in Scotland. But that’s where you go if you want to be noticed; that’s where you go if you’re radical and have something to say.”
“I’d already been previous years,” she continued. “I sang my own songs because I’ve been writing my own songs for a number of years, all my life pretty much. And I’d already done a show in 2011—it got good reviews—and in 2015 I had a show called ‘Autumn’s Here.’ Nothing too controversial; political songs, satirical songs, personal songs, songs about swimming.”
Her repertoire had evolved quite a bit and she wanted to be thoroughly honest with the festival organizers. “I’d warned the organizers before signing the contract,” she explained, “ ‘They’re saying that I’m an anti-Semitic holocaust denier. Are you sure that you as the organizer and the venue owner want to be associated with me?’ And there were a few emails back and forward, but the result was, ‘No, Alison, this is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival’.”
Satisfied that her acts would not offend, she proceeded to perform. “In 2015 I went there and did my show,” she said, “and about halfway through I got a phone call from this organizer who’d offered me this very nice venue, saying, ‘Just to let you know Alison, there’s been complaints to the Fringe office. They think that your show should be pulled because they’re saying that you’re an anti-Semitic holocaust denier and people shouldn’t be allowed to go and see your shows, that you shouldn’t be allowed to be performing,’ that I shouldn’t be given a platform at Edinburgh. They said, ‘We’re just informing you about this, but you can finish your run. There’s no problem; we just want to let you know that there have been complaints’.”
Alison performed her show, comfortable that all was copacetic. “That evening, after my show, I went out,” she recounted. “It was a lovely, sunny evening on the main drag in Edinburgh called Princes Street … and I made a quenelle salute and got a passerby to take a photograph of me.”
Alison placed the photo on her Twitter account, the online social networking service that allows users to post and interact with messages called “tweets.”
“At that time, I had a very small Twitter account, because my abuser, this Mrs. Shitrit woman, worked with her cronies to have my Twitter accounts shut down,” explained Alison. “So, I’d already lost two. On the second account I had over a thousand followers—still a small following—but I’d lost that Twitter account before going to Edinburgh, which made it more difficult for me to do my own public relations. So I only had about 120 followers when I posted this quenelle salute on Twitter.”
She couldn’t have known that that innocent picture would lead to a world of trouble. “Two days later,” Alison explained, “this Jewish association, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, posted this photograph on their blog saying, ‘Anti-Semitic Singer Reported to Police for Her Quenelle Salute.’ A day later the same article was in The Times of Israel. There was no mention of any names on this tweet; it was just a photograph of me saying, ‘You tried to get my show banned, you failed, quenelle, up yours.’ It was a victory for me after having been sacked from my job a year earlier. I was allowed to perform at this radical arts festival.”
“That’s when it all began,” she continued. “That was the headline: ‘British Police Confirm Complaint Against Woman.’ So the press had used that. This woman had complained about my photo on Twitter, not addressed to her—she must’ve had to seek it out herself—and that was the headline. And that’s when my troubles began with the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism.”
Some of the trouble Alison experienced came from a “troll.” Not the kind that hide under bridges, but a more modern version.
On the Internet, a troll is someone who starts fights to anger others by sowing discord using inflammatory postings, to prevent any rational discourse. “And they have different tactics,” she explained about the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA). “They are less honest than Mrs. Shitrit, who did use her real name. This CAA used a system of baiting and entrapment via anonymous Twitter trolls.”
“From September 2015,” Alison explained, “I was trolled by principally two anonymous accounts: one going by the name of Bedlam Jones and the other going by the name of Nemo Nemo 50. At first, I tried to discuss things with them, to have a debate, but it was impossible, so they were blocked. But they would come onto my timeline via different accounts and interfere in my other interactions.”
“Everything that I did,” Alison continued, “every gig that I played, every venue, every open mic, every folk night that I advertised on Twitter, they would be there saying, ‘Why are you allowing this repulsive anti-Semitic, holocaust-denying woman in your pub?’ And this went on and on and on. I also was receiving anonymous posts [mail] sent to me at my address, sent to ‘Mrs. Holocaust Denier.’ The police said, ‘Okay, we’ll investigate’.”
She even received several death threats, with one saying, “Be careful somebody doesn’t push you in front of a train.”
“I had a lovely comment the other day via Facebook Messenger from an Australian saying that he’d hoped I’d get brutally raped in jail,” said Alison.
To get away from the insanity the CAA was bringing to her doorstep, Alison took a little trip to gather her thoughts. “I went traveling for a little while at the beginning of 2016,” she explained, “and I ended up in Switzerland in the spring and I wrote five songs. The first of these songs, which was just a couple of lyrics at the beginning, was called ‘Nemo’s Anti-Semitic Universe.’ It was a dedication to this troll Nemo who would not leave me alone, who would not stop targeting my professional life, who would not stop targeting the gigs that I played.”
Around the same time, she made an acquaintance with someone well-known to TBR readers. “I came into contact with a gentleman who goes by the name of Gerard Menuhin,” she explained. “He’s the author of a wonderful book called Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil. And he’s not only written this wonderful book of non-fiction—which goes through all the lies that we’ve been taught—he also writes poetry, and he sent me the lyrics of a poem called Tell Me More Lies. I set that to music, I finished my first composition, ‘Nemo’s Anti-Semitic Universe,’ and I wrote three more songs. One called ‘Haavara,’ about the Transfer Agreement between the Third Reich and the Zionist Jews, which led to 60,000 German Jews being transported out of Germany—with their goods—into Palestine. I also wrote a parody of an old musical on the shabbos goy … called ‘Kosher Brother.’ And the fifth song that I wrote—I wanted to write a song about holocaust survivors, oxymoronic holocaust survivors—so I wrote a song called ‘Survivors’.”
[Here we reproduce the lyrics of one of Alison’s songs so that you have an idea of what she’s saying.—Ed.]
Lyrics to ‘Haavara’
Haavara, the Transfer Agreement
Contract signed in 1933
Haavara, the Transfer Agreement
Contract signed in 1933
Haavara, between two parties
Hitler’s Third Reich and Zionist Jews
A pact meant to thwart boycott by
World Jewry of all German goods
Paltreu and Leumi bankers
Took care of all transactions
Haavara, it suited both parties
Homeland for the Jews in Palestine
Haavara, but not all were Chosen
Only Zionists, both wealthy and strong
Selection was not down to chance
Non-Zionist rebels sent to camps
The rest remained in the ghettos
Khazar Ashkenazim
Haavara, the ships sailed to Haifa
Tens of thousands were to make the voyage
Marhaban, how would they be welcomed?
Native Arabs were soon overwhelmed
By 1948 we saw
Creation of The Jewish state
For this the shame is on England
The Balfour Declaration
Haavara, the Transfer Agreement
Led to Nakba for Semitic tribes
Haavara, their land was stolen
Outright breach of Article 49
The olive groves burned and destroyed
Whole villages were massacred
Through endless bloodshed and violence
Deir Yassin we remember
Haavara, an unknown chapter
Public knowledge is as rare as gold
Haavara, brushed under the carpet
Awkward facts remained in silence, untold
Then one day not so long ago
Truth spoken by Ken Livingstone
The media is lying
Edwin Black is denying
Hashoah, eight decades later
Ethnic cleansing, occupation and war
Hasbara, the West Bank and Gaza
Concentration camps and refugees
The intifada must go on
Let freedom fighters take up arms
And bring back their belonging
The key to freedom is dawning
The Transfer Agreement refers to the seven-year collaboration between the Nazis and Jews in Palestine, whose desires dovetailed: The Zionist Jews in Palestine wanted all Jews to emigrate there and the Nazis wanted all Jews out of Germany. They signed a transfer agreement known as “Haavara,” which sanctioned the transfer of Jews and all their capital from Germany to Palestine.
Alison thought her songs could find an audience, and she returned to the Fringe. “I went to Edinburgh with these songs,” she explained. “I had two venues interested. The first was pulled when the Jewish owner of the venue got wind of who I was, but for the second one I had a signed contract. I advertised. I got four nights, I think, in a nice venue in Edinburgh. And at that time, it wasn’t a free gig; I was going to sell tickets. I had very little time to advertise, but I started to advertise. I put the date and the venue and the link to buy tickets on Twitter.”
In what was becoming an ugly pattern, bad news was on its way. “Ten minutes later the organizer telephoned me to say, ‘I’m very sorry, Alison, but your show is too political for the Edinburgh Fringe. You’re going to have to either change your program or else, we’re sorry, you can’t perform’.”
She was shocked. “It took this Campaign Against Anti-Semitism 10 minutes, I don’t know, some phone call saying, ‘You can’t have this woman appearing on stage. She’s an anti-Semitic holocaust denier, and if you do, we’ll apply pressure on your organization.’ I was ‘too fringe for the Fringe’—this was the line I used.”
Although the CAA was doing its best to ruin her livelihood, Alison still had an audience. “I did manage to perform in September at a nationalist meeting called the London Forum,” she explained, “where I received a standing ovation, which was very nice. And by that time, I had collected—I don’t know—3,500 Twitter followers. I was well supported on Twitter and doing a lot of influencing. I knew that people were reporting me to police for my songs and for my social media posts, but I hadn’t heard anything. The police were supposed to be investigating the stuff that had been sent to me. The police also said that they would look into this Edinburgh Fringe incident, that they would be investigating who was behind these anonymous troll accounts.”
“About three weeks after the London Forum,” she continued, “the middle of October, my Twitter account was suspended, and a week after that I had a letter from the police saying they were very sorry, but they couldn’t find anything with this investigation.”
It was November 2016, and what came next was something she never could have predicted. “A week after getting this letter there was a knock on the door,” she explained, “and I was the one being arrested on a charge of harassment, for a completely irrelevant person who had also been trolling me on Twitter. … It was early evening, 6 p.m. maybe.”
The police arrested her, interviewed her, and then released her on bail. “I went to the police station the next day and spent six hours locked in a cell, whilst police went back to my house and seized my laptop, which they held for almost a year,” she explained. “I was bailed the next day,” she said, “and told that I was under investigation for alleged harassment of two women, including Mrs. Shitrit, the person who’d managed to get me sacked from my job, and for distributing ‘racist’ material via my songs under the Public Order Act.”
The Public Order Act 1986 addresses a number of what are called “public order offenses.” “Now those charges have all been dropped,” she explained. “There’s a clause within the Public Order Act which exempts theatrical performance and satire, so they couldn’t get me under that particular law.”
“I was put on bail,” she continued, “and told that I couldn’t contact these people who’d accused me of harassing them, when in fact it was the opposite that was true; I wasn’t writing to anybody’s employers or that kind of thing. I was just trying to do my own thing and make a living out of music. A week after that I received a summons from Westminster Magistrates’ Court for my song ‘Survivors’.”
Although the CAA came after Alison of their own accord, they soon had the UK legal authority carrying their water. “This was a private prosecution by CAA chairman Gideon Falter under the Communications Act, but eventually that charge also had to be dropped because I was in Switzerland when I uploaded the video. But now the Crown has taken over, adding more charges for three of my songs deemed to be grossly offensive.”
Alison detailed how the CAA’s vendetta has altered her life. “There have been 10 hearings,” she explained, “and I’ve been on bail now since December 2016 with increasing restrictions on my liberty. I’ve since been found guilty of causing gross offense by my uploading [songs] to YouTube. I have to observe a strict curfew. My accusers requested a curfew for my bail conditions, thinking that I would have to declare myself homeless and then they would be able to put me in prison.”
During one of these hearings, the Crown tightened the screws. “I was arrested—again—in October 2017 during one of my court hearings,” she explained, “taken to Charing Cross police station, then thrown in the back of a freezing police van and driven up to Derbyshire where I spent two nights in a cell. The interview I gave to police resulted in one charge dropped and one charge being added to the Crown’s existing charges for Malicious Communications, for another song.”
She pointed out the nonsensical nature of the verdict. “Gross offense—there’s no legal definition,” she explained. “This means that anybody can go and say, ‘Yes, I was grossly offended. These people need to be brought to justice.’ And a gross offense for one person isn’t going to be the case for another person.”
They even played her songs in court. “It was quite surreal,” she said. “You can hear the applause from the standing ovation I received at the end. So, if there’d been anything remotely grossly offensive, one would imagine that there’d have at least been an ‘Ooh’ or an ‘Ahh’ from the audience, but no, all you can hear is laughter and applause and cheering.”
Her trials are not without conflicts of interest. “There’s been one judge recused,” she said. “She was found out to be a friend of Israel. The second judge appeared to be fair, but the judgment lacks depth. He says, ‘Oh, yes, the songs are grossly offensive,’ but he fails to explain how he’s come to that conclusion, because my songs are clearly satirical. The object of satire is to ridicule the people that you’re talking about. So, if these targets of satire then claim to be offended, well, that means that we can’t use satire anymore. Clearly my songs are satirical. These are issues that must be legitimate targets for satire, because if they want to quash opinion and debate on these issues, then they clearly do have something to hide.”
“The Crown has tried to isolate lyrics from each song without looking at the whole situation,” she continued, “without looking at all the background to what went on before I was charged with these offenses.”
Alison is sanguine the truth will prevail. “However, on my side is the fact that these two men—these trolls, ‘Bedlam’ and ‘Nemo’—they have both been outed in court as being closely connected to the CAA,” she explained. “One of them was a Crown witness, Mr. Falter’s second-in-command. His name is Stephen Silverman. And this ‘Nemo’ is a Jewish journalist by the name of Stephen Mark Applebaum. He writes film reviews and op-eds for The Jewish Chronicle in the UK. They’re still at it on Twitter.”
The CAA, Alison explained, is a non-profit. “The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is supposed to be a charity,” she explained, “and charities are supposed to help people, but they are not helping people. They are bringing about prosecutions in order to impose a de facto holocaust denial law. So anybody now who makes any kind of jokey remark about the holocaust on Twitter, on social media, risks being prosecuted under this same law, which was a law that dates back almost a century, which was for obscene letters, then obscene phone calls. It wasn’t designed for the Internet.”
The truth about the holocaust, she believes, differs greatly from the official narrative. “They were all rumors—propaganda rumors—set up by the Soviets, then spread by the British on the orders of our powers-who-should-not-be in order to make the losers look worse,” she said.
The endgame of the CAA and their ilk is clear to Alison. “They want to silence me,” she explained. “They know that my songs are an effective way of getting to the heart of these holocaust myths. They want to set in stone this holocaust business, that nobody has the right to question it. It’s become a religion, as previously the church imposed religious belief on students. You had to sign a declaration that you believed in an almighty God before being accepted as a scholar into universities. You have to believe in the holocaust; otherwise you won’t get a job, you won’t be accepted in your local community, you won’t even be allowed to have a social life—or you have to apologize and grovel. Maybe then you can get some kind of job, but they’ll still never let you forget it. They want to make you into a nonperson, hence the censorship of my work. They need to make me look bad and prevent people from looking at my work.”
Alison shed some light on the Crown’s conclusions. “The prosecution goes so far as to say that [my songs] are ‘carefully composed and crafted’,” she explained. “Yes, they are, and I use Jewish melodies, but so what? There are plenty of examples where Christian music has been used for parodies. I’m grossly offended by what I see and hear on the BBC all the time and on television or in the newspaper. But I’m not going to start stamping my foot. These people, they can have their freedom of speech, but that means freedom of speech must be available for everybody or otherwise we’re not living in a democracy, we’re living in an anarcho-tyrannical police state, a real Orwellian dystopia.”
“If we don’t have free speech then we have nothing,” explained Alison, “and the fact that this is happening in Britain today is very, very concerning. That’s why they are clamping down to this extent and making other people afraid from speaking out.”
Alison addressed how the holocaust plays such a huge part in her ongoing persecution. “You have to believe the creed,” she explained. “It’s a religion. And if you don’t believe, then you’re a heretic, and you must be burned at the stake—crucified. If not physically terminated—because I don’t think it’s in our enemy’s interests to make us appear the victim—but you are a heretic, and they will execute you socially and professionally.”*
NOTE:This reporter contacted CAA for comment, but they declined by stating: “We regret that due to limited resources we cannot assist with uncommissioned freelance requests.”
When pressed to explain what “uncommissioned freelance requests” were, they stated: “We simply cannot spare the time to assist with the many requests we receive from bloggers and freelance journalists who are not commissioned or accredited by reputable news outlets.”
I replied: “OK, so you’re saying that you’re inundated with media requests from disreputable ‘bloggers and freelance journalists’? Are you including me in that group?”
CAA failed to elaborate.
UPDATE: For more current information about Alison Chabloz and her upcoming appeal, as well as active links for donations, see her website at AlisonChabloz.com.