At 10am on Sunday 29th November 2009, I received a visit from two policemen regarding my activities in running the Seismic Shock blog. [FFS! – why aren’t they in HQ filling in forms about something? Or even kettling protesters? This is really creepy.]. . . A sergeant from the Horsforth Police related to me that he had received complaints via Surrey Police from Rev Sizer and from Dr Anthony McRoy – a lecturer at the Wales Evangelical School of Theology – who both objected to being associated with terrorists and Holocaust deniers.
The sergeant made clear that this was merely an informal chat, in which I agreed to delete my original blog (http://seismicshock.blogspot.com) but maintain my current one (http://seismicshock.wordpress.com). [What powers have they got to tell you to delete a blog? And an “informal chat”? It’s pleasant when you can have informal chats with the police, which I have when someone left my front door open and they came in to check that the house hadn’t been burgled. But if they were coming to speak about my blog I would turn very formal on them.] The policeman related to me that his police force had been in contact with the ICT department my previous place of study, and had looked through my files, and that the head of ICT at my university would like to remind me that I should not be using university property in order to associate individuals with terrorists and Holocaust deniers (I am sure other people use university property to make political comments, but nevermind). [Bloody hell! My work cuts off all access to blogging, reasonably if annoyingly as I can’t even do any posts or comments at lunchtime. I can’t see them using the police as messengers in a matter of internal discipline. So Seismic is being investigated?]
A Christian blogger – “Vee” of LivingJourney, who is based in Australia – linked to my blog as a resource for Christians to learn about anti-Semitism in the Church, including “lots of info on Stephen Sizer and Sabeel”.
Rev Sizer left her this comment:
Dear Vee,
You must take a little more care who you brand as anti-semitic otherwise you too will be receiving a caution from the police as the young former student of Leeds did recently. One more reference to me and you will be reported.
Blessings
Stephen
[That Blessings is so Christian-creepy. I don’t hate the sinner, I hate the sin, as I stoke up the flames.]
Seismic points out that he did not in fact receive a police caution, and anyway would the Australian police leap at the word of the Reverend? I hope they would tell the Pommie dog-collar wearer to can it.
I’m not going to delve through the works of the Rev Stephen Sizer in order to pronounce on his anti-Semitism, but going by his behaviour towards Seismic and his threatening letter to an Australian blogger he is an authoritarian little shit with crappy ideas of what political debate is and one to give his religion a bad name.
Rev Sizer would have been bad enough if he had got lawyers to write letters to Seismic and his service provider in order to shut him up. Getting the police involved and then using them as a threat to shut up other bloggers about his political activities is how a cowardly louse behaves, and it’s outrageous that the police didn’t tell him that that wasn’t their job to harass bloggers.
Seismic seems unsure of his rights in this case. It is evident that this government has extended the powers of the police, the police are taking advantage of it, and getting into the mindset where they poke around blogs for speech and writing crimes. Using the anti-terrorism laws, they have been stopping and searching photographers for taking photographs. Photographers held a mass demonstration against this yesterday.
The political history of this country is of the government extending its powers, the people pushing back. A mass repetition of Seismic's story on all blogs would be one small shove.
I was sorry to see 'seismic' getting such a tough response on Harry's Place - what he said seemed fair enough to me and his encounter with the police sounded extremely stressful.
Posted by: Sarah | 27 January 2010 at 12:06 PM
Seismic Shock the Video is out.
http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/seismic-shock-the-video/
Please do embed it and pass it along to others,
Cheers :)
Posted by: modernity | 28 January 2010 at 09:19 PM