Why is Icke attacking SAFF?

When Sabine McNeill received a nine-year sentence for stalking four families and violating a restraining order on six occasions, we predicted fallout as the Satan-hunting conspiraloon world went ape-shit. And lo, we were not disappointed.

Barely two weeks after the sentence was handed down, Jamie Busby, a staff author on DavidIcke.com, launched a frontal attack on S.A.F.F., the Sub-culture Alternatives Freedom Foundation. For many years, the S.A.F.F. website has provided an encyclopædic collection of evidence debunking Satanic panics and witch-hunts. It’s the go-to resource for anybody looking for material to counter myth with fact.

Busby’s article, titled “Satanic Ritual Abuse deniers protecting Paedophiles”, trots out the usual bunkum, but first comes the veiled threat.

They also have a Director called Tony Rhodes who can be contacted via email, I will link the email address later too. I expect many who read this to feel compelled to contact them. 

Subtle, no?

Then come the puerile insults:

TIP – Wear sunglasses when visiting their website, the colour scheme and brightness is horrific, I’d rather look directly at the sun.  And it looks like a 5 year old designed it. 

This seems just a tiny bit ironic coming from the person who illustrates his own article with this nightmare inducer:

Busby argues that by providing evidence that claims of SRA have never once been proven true, S.A.F.F. is defending “the entirety of the paedophile elite that we KNOW operate worldwide”. Holy begging the question, Batman!

His claim that S.A.F.F. “protects paedophiles” is ludicrous. On the S.A.F.F. site one can find material which exposed early cases of Christian church-related child abuse—material which initially was met with outrage and disbelief, but was later shown to be true.

The issue of abuse by clerics, whether in the Roman Catholic church, the Church of England, or other Christian denominations, has been in the news so often in the past two decades that it’s easy to forget that at one time, these revelations were so shocking and distressing that they were generally disbelieved. S.A.F.F. was one of the organisations pushing this issue into public view. Hardly the actions one might expect of “paedophile protectors”.

Why now?

The timing of this attack strikes us as curious.

S.A.F.F. has been around for many years, so what provoked Busby to attack them now? Could it be, as suggested on Twitter, that the timing is at least partially linked to the outcome of Sabine’s trial?

Something we found very curious during the early days of the Hampstead SRA hoax was that while the hoax was being frantically promoted by Sabine McNeill, Belinda McKenzie, and Charlotte Ward, the Big Kahuna on the British conspiracy scene, David Icke himself, was conspicuous by his absence.

We can only speculate as to why this might have been, but it seems odd. After all, the material churned out by Ella Draper and Abraham Christie seemed custom-made to appeal to Icke and his followers. Certainly, the Icke Forum discussion group, which would eventually run to over 1,000 pages, was a beehive of activity for many months.

But Icke himself never put forth an opinion, even though the extraordinary claims which two children were forced to make would have lent credence to some pretty fundamental conspiraloon beliefs.

We’ve heard it suggested that both Icke and Brian Gerrish were aware from the inception of the hoax that it was a fraud, and that neither wanted anything to do with it. Certainly, we do know that while both Gerrish and Bill Maloney were in contact with Abe and Ella as early as September 2014, both declined to touch the Hampstead material until well after Sabine had engineered the release of the videos onto the internet in early 2015.

How did they know it was a fraud? One possible explanation is that they knew because they’d been involved in the planning of the hoax.

However, we heard during Sabine’s trial that according to evidence found on her computer, Sabine was correct in asserting that she had only become involved in the case in November 2014.

This has forced us to revise our opinion that the entire case was cooked up by Belinda, Sabine, Abraham, and Ella many months earlier. Given the evidence heard in court, it now appears that the original collusion was between Abraham and Ella, and that they had contacted Gerrish and Maloney independently, prior to returning to the UK from Morocco.

But if Icke was not involved in planning or executing the Hampstead hoax, it certainly ought to have interested him. As a man in the business of peddling conspiracies, the more outrageous the better, the premise of two pretty blond British children making allegations of some sort of ritual abuse (they never mentioned the word “Satan” or “Satanic”) by “elites” in Hampstead should have seemed right up his street.

So if Icke wasn’t interested while the hoax was in its heyday, what’s with the sudden attack on S.A.F.F., a site which has existed for years without appearing to attract much attention from Icke or his flying monkeys?

Perhaps it’s as simple as this: although Icke had no wish to embroil himself in the Hampstead hoax, which was at its core a custody battle turned terribly toxic, the long prison term which Sabine received has sent out shockwaves, to which Icke and his lackeys must be exquisitely sensitive.

Like any businessman who can sense when the core premise of his product is under threat, Icke understands that seeing a key promoter of the SRA myth receive a stiff prison sentence is no laughing matter. And the best defence, especially when one’s livelihood is at stake, is a strong offence. After all, those conspiracy theories aren’t going to push themselves.