The crap put out by David Icke on his website and videos about alleged elite paedophile conspiracies has managed to screw up an awful lot of people’s thinking, including kids’, as Gil recently reminded us (Jan 31, 2013 @ 02:53:24 in response to The spirit of free expression lives on).
Oddly, it looks as though Gil might want to sue me for damages, as it is just conceivable I was the one who got David Icke obsessed with paedos in the first place.
This would have been way back in about 1973, a year or so before PIE was formed. At that time, believe it or not, Icke and I were colleagues when we were both journalists with the Leicester Mercury. That was long before he went bonkers and starting calling himself the Son of God. In those days he was a perfectly ordinary sports reporter, joining the paper after a promising career as a professional footballer was ended prematurely by arthritis.
He and I had nothing particular in common, though, so we were not friends: the sports guys tended to go their own way. But he would certainly have been aware of me gradually “coming out” in the office as a BL: I plastered my typewriter (no computers in those days!) and other bits of my desk space with photos of young boys. If anyone asked me about this, I’d just say they were kids I thought were attractive and sexy.
My immediate boss, who was gay, seemed entirely relaxed about this. I think he fancied me, actually, and liked me being around: I was in my twenties then and tended to attract quite a lot of interest, male and female. Most of my colleagues, too, were more curious than hostile, and one of them, a nice young girl reporter, was moved to experiment with an unusual attempt at seduction. She was good-looking, but knowing my fixation on boys she sensibly decided she had to “adjust” her feminine appearance somewhat to get my attention. At an office fancy dress party she dressed up as a cub scout and came on to me!  A lovely gesture, and one I much appreciated even if the disguise was not quite convincing enough to give me the hots for her. The fact that this happened very publicly, at an office party, will however probably convince you, dear readers, that David Icke was indeed aware of my sexuality. In an office environment of just a few dozen reporters and sub-editors, he could hardly not have been.
Anyway, in 1974, or thereabouts, Icke went his way, moving on to what was then BRMB Radio in Birmingham, and I moved on to become a press officer at the Open University. Three years later, in 1977, I would be all over the media in my capacity as Chair of the Paedophile Information Exchange.
But that was very small beer in public exposure terms compared to the fame that would be achieved by David Icke. He was destined to become a household name as a TV personality and even, after that, as a political party leader. After success in radio and TV in the Midlands, he became a presenter of the BBC’s flagship sports programme, Grandstand, for many years in the 1980s. Towards the end of the 80s his interests became more political. He involved himself with the Green Party from 1988 to 1991. The party had no formal leader, but he rose to become one of its four principal representatives.
So far, so mainstream. Icke had earned his success as a talented presenter and speaker.
But about 1990 it all began to go horribly wrong. He has written about feeling a strange “magnetic force” while standing in a newsagent’s. He later consulted a psychic, who told him he had been “sent to heal the earth”. In 1991 he would hold a press conference, announcing himself as the son of God. Unsurprisingly, there was immense public ridicule. As a broadcaster and political leader he was finished. But after staying out of public life for a while, he began writing, and developed a following as a conspiracy theorist –  a genre which has since developed huge popularity.
He has claimed that human beings originated in a breeding program run by a race of reptilians from outer space. Reptilian humanoids control humanity via a global elite. Many prominent figures are reptilian, including former U.S. president George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth II.
All this might just seem harmlessly loopy but apparently many people take it seriously. Dig a little deeper and his ideas take a very sinister turn. He says these reptilians use human fear, guilt, and aggression as energy. They encourage wars and genocide which “create highly charged negative energy”. Satanic paedophilia is particularly useful, in this scheme of things. Icke writes on his website: “These people are possessed by sheer evil and thus express sheer evil. This is why paedophilia is so fundamentally connected to Satanism…Satanic ritual ensures the total possession of the ‘vehicle’ and paedophilia expresses that possession to allow the possessing entity to feed off the child’s life-force during sexual abuse…”
Even this can be dismissed as just plain silly, but when his ideas move from the abstract to the particular, with accusations levelled at individuals who can suffer serious damage – as Gil says happened in his own case – it is no laughing matter. It becomes especially unfunny when Icke links to others who are making wild allegations of their own, sometimes from positions of greater credibility. Note, for instance, that Icke’s website is now quoting Tom Watson MP, who claims to have evidence of an elite paedophile ring linked to Downing Street. This would be bad enough if it is just speculative nonsense, as I think is probably the case, but Icke quotes (accurately: I checked) from Watson’s website: Watson said that after speaking out about paedophilia “many more ordinary people have contacted me about suspicions they have had of a wider wrongdoing – in some cases so heinous it made me cry. They have talked of psychopaths marking children with Stanley knifes to show ‘ownership’…”
We can live easily enough with mad stories about reptiles from outer space. “Suspicions” about Stanley knifes, i.e. wild, unsupported rumours, are quite another matter, whether from Icke, or Watson, or “Satanic abuse” Valerie Sinason and her psychotic clients.