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(JNS) Rupert Nathan, 63, was arrested in London in August upon arriving home for breakfast with his 11-year-old daughter. Two police officers approached him and said they wanted to question him about some things he had written online.
“I immediately knew what it was all about,” Nathan told JNS on Monday from his London home. Assuming it was “no big deal,” he asked the officers if they could schedule a later appointment in the afternoon.
“My daughter was with me and her mother had arranged to pick her up that afternoon,” he explained. But the officers insisted.
“My daughter was beside herself … she’s very protective of me, given my age. [But] that didn’t matter to them,” Nathan recalled.
He was taken into custody for 12 hours.
“I was fingerprinted, DNA swabbed, photographed. They treated me like a common criminal,” he told JNS.
During his incarceration, no investigators came to question him. It was only around the tenth or eleventh hour that a lawyer came to visit him to explain the situation.
The duty solicitor told him that he was under investigation for a “malicious communications” crime. The arrest, the solicitor believed, was unnecessary given the nature of the alleged crime, but the police wanted to seize and gain access to his mobile phone to find out if he indeed made the alleged remarks.
The phone, Nathan noted, was taken without his consent and was still in police possession.
The comments in question relate to a private conversation Nathan allegedly had on a friend’s Facebook page sometime in June. During this discussion, he allegedly called someone a “kapo” and a “fake rabbi.”
Gabriel Kanter-Webber, a rabbi at Brighton and Hove Progressive synagogue, also known as Adat Shalom Verei’ut, had apparently filed a complaint a couple of weeks earlier. He reported comments to the police and to Nathan’s professional body, the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investment (CISI).
In Nazi Germany, the SS would select certain concentration camp prisoners to serve as overseers, in exchange for preferential treatment. These “kapos” would maintain order among the prisoners, sometimes through harsh measures. Today the term is used by Jews as a close synonym for “traitor.”
In recent years, Nathan related, he has been less active on social media. “But I take exception to accusations of apartheid or genocide [against Israel], which are clearly untrue … I don’t go online to be one of the warriors to initiate an argument. But if I see something that’s wrong and defamatory, well, yes, I will stand up and defend Israel,” he said.
Nathan said that as Kanter-Webber had blocked him on Facebook some time ago, he did not think the rabbi would see his comments.
“I work in financial services, in compliance,” said Nathan, “and he wrote a lengthy complaint to [CISI] accusing me of abuse, antisemitism, sexism and a few other spurious claims that I can only suggest were designed to harm my professional reputation and my life—basically trying to ‘cancel’ me,” he added.
The CISI decided not to take any action, yet the police moved his case forward to the Crown Prosecution Service. Nathan is now waiting to see if the CPS will lay criminal charges against him, which could result in up to two years in prison, a fine, or both. His next bail date is on Dec. 29 at Wembley police station.
‘Two-tier’ justice system?
The United Kingdom has come under criticism recently for its draconian speech laws. Legislation like the Malicious Communications Act 1988 (MCA), the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 amendment (RRHA) and the more recent Online Safety Act 2020 (OSA) make it difficult for Brits to express themselves freely without risking criminal prosecution.
Some have claimed that Britain’s policing of these laws has been more stringent with regard to certain views, constituting a “two-tier” justice system. In addition, there are concerns that subjective, ambiguous clauses in the speech laws may lead to abuse.
One of the most high-profile cases involving these laws was the arrest of journalist and Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson on Nov. 11.
According to the BBC, Pearson was investigated for “incitement to racial hatred” in connection with a deleted tweet from a year ago. She had reposted a photo of police officers standing next to two men holding a flag, mistakenly interpreting it as Palestinian. The BBC cited her as saying: “Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.” After commentators pointed out that this was a celebration of Pakistan Independence Day, she deleted the post.
Police have since dropped all charges, and Pearson has vowed not to rest until laws of “Non-Crime Hate Incidents [are] scrapped altogether.” But in other, low-profile cases the outcome may be actual jail time.
On July 29, three young girls were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event in Southport. Ten others were injured. Axel Rudakubana, 18, born in Cardiff, Wales to immigrant parents from Rwanda, was arrested at the scene and is accused of the murders.
A post on social media falsely claiming that the killer was an asylum seeker on the MI6 watchlist who had arrived in Britain by boat spread like wildfire, and was considered a significant factor in sparking riots throughout the country.
By Aug. 30, 1,280 people had been apprehended, 796 of whom were charged, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
Although most of those convicted had clearly disrupted public order or incited violence online, the line between incitement and opinion—offensive as it might be—in other cases was more difficult to identify.
Jordan Plain, 30, was sentenced to eight months in prison for “racially aggravated intentional harassment.” Judge Guy Kearl of Leeds Crown Court said in his sentencing remarks that Plain had chanted racial slurs at a nationalist rally and imitated Muslims’ manner of prayer “in order to mock their religion.”
This, he said, “was grossly offensive, racist language and behavior which caused alarm and distress to others, in particular Ms Sawo who has had the courage to come to court to tell me and others, including you, how she felt and how she feels. To summarize only, she was scared, anxious, traumatized by your behavior.”
Christopher Taggart, 36, and Rhys McDonald, 34, were jailed for 32 months and 28 months respectively for “publishing written material to stir up racial hatred,” according to Cheshire Police.
Taggart posted on Facebook: “Who’s up for a rally?” McDonald replied: “Need to march on the Daresbury Hotel with torches and pitchforks. Enough is enough.” When asked what the rally was about, Taggart answered: “To get them gone. We don’t want them.” McDonald further posted: “It’s not about immigration it’s about an ideology … it’s about radical Islam.” He later added: “They need to protest at the hotels where these animals are living.”
(Asylum seekers are accommodated in hotels across the United Kingdom as they are unable to work while they wait for their claims to be processed. As of Dec. 31, 2023, the number of undocumented migrants accommodated in hotels was 45,768, according to Home Office statistics.)
Dimitrie Stoica, 25, was jailed for faking a livestream TikTok video in which he appeared to be being chased by “extreme right-wing rioters.” He was sentenced to three months despite claiming it was a “joke.”
Tyler Kay, 26, was imprisoned for 38 months for a post that clearly incited violence. But although Judge Adrienne Lucking recognized his intention to “incite serious violence,” most of her sentencing remarks revolved around his racist views. “I am sure that when you intentionally created the posts you intended that racial hatred would be stirred up by your utterly repulsive, racist and shocking posts that have no place in a civilized society,” she stated.
Laws open to abuse
“Most reasonable people would say that [incitement to violence] is probably a line that a society has to draw,” said Stephen O’Grady, a legal officer with the Free Speech Union, in an interview with JNS on Tuesday.
But offenses of “racial or religious hatred” under the Public Order Act 1986 amendment, enacted in 2006 (RRHA), stir a lot of debate in Britain, he went on to say.
Criticizing a religion is fair game under the law, he stressed, “but with regard to Islam or antisemitism, [how do you know] what is hatred against a race and what is criticism of a religion?”
On the one hand, “those on the far right might have race-based antipathy towards immigrant groups, but they attempt to hide it behind legitimate concerns about the religion; but on the other hand, heavy-handed policing might take what is actually genuine concern about the religion and regard it as being ‘racist’. The whole thing is a minefield,” noted O’Grady.
With regard to the Malicious Communications Act, O’Grady said that it was “originally designed for crank telephone calls, people phoning people up and threatening them down the phone, or heavy-breathing stalker stuff that would put people in real fear of imminent violence.”
However, over time “and particularly in the last decade or so, we’ve seen it being increasingly applied to people’s online communications,” he added.
O’Grady referred to a provision in the bill that treats “grossly offensive” speech as constituting a criminal offense. Since the term is not defined in the law, he continued, its interpretation by the courts is “entirely subjective.”
The FSU legal officer could not speak to whether claims of a “two-tier” justice system had merit, but said that there was a growing public perception that police are heavy-handed against those who criticize Islam and lenient toward those who may sympathize with terrorism, for example with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ever since Oct. 7, 2023, “there’s been a perception that some of the pro-Palestinian marches have gotten out of hand … Hamas is a proscribed organization here, you’re not allowed to promote it, but people are holding placards in which they’re not just standing for Palestinians as people, they’re supporting Hamas as the group, and […] the police are ignoring it,” said O’Grady.
What lawfully constitutes hate depends “purely on the perception of the victim, [without] any objective corroboration,” he continued. The system is easy to abuse, he explained.
The “slightest of complaints” can result in police knocking on your door, with your children at home, and confiscating your phone or computer, he said. This in itself is a “huge issue” for people who work on their computers, he continued. Moreover, “All your neighbors see the police. They see the computer being taken out of your house. They’ll assume the worst, that you’ve got some kind of terrorist or child molester [material]. And the police know this, and the people reporting it to the police know this. So the whole system lacks the safeguards and is wide open to abuse.”
‘A law-abiding citizen’
Nathan said that since his arrest was covered in the U.K. Daily Mail, “I’ve had a number of complete strangers wishing me well and just expressing what a trouble maker and nasty individual [Kanter-Webber] is. I’ve been told of instances where he’s been trolling people, being abusive and just a very unpleasant individual.”
He went on to say that “for someone claiming to be a rabbi—and this is where I was coming from about [him] being a fake rabbi—his behavior online, especially toward his co-religionists, is unbecoming. Rabbis should not behave in this sort of way, by maliciously baiting people, causing arguments, then turn it against them and go out and try and destroy their livelihoods. Such behavior is surely Chillul Hashem,” a desecration of God’s name.
In response to a request for comment, Kanter-Webber replied: “As this relates to criminal proceedings which are ongoing, it would not be appropriate for me to comment at this stage.”
Nathan further remarked that he has great respect for the police but would expect them to “not just protect my right to free speech—especially in private—but focus on people who really are posing a threat, who are saying truly vile things on the streets, who are inciting hatred and glorifying terrorism, rather than persecuting me because I allegedly had an argument with another member of the Jewish community.”
When asked about his plans, Nathan said he had no choice but to “wait and see what happens, what the outcome of this whole situation is. I’m a law-abiding citizen and have never had trouble with the police before.”
“Like a number of friends, I have to question whether there is a future for Jews in Britain. Australia, where I [originally] come from, unfortunately, seems to be in thrall to a lot of this similar activism. I really don’t know where it is safe,” he added.
