Theresa May’s 2015 Order Cites Alleged Quotes That a Major Newspaper Now Acknowledges Were Inaccurate or DistortedNews from Institute for Historical Review
January 2018 (Updated)
Weber speaking at the April 2015
‘London Forum’ Meeting
Mark Weber, an American historian and director of the Institute for Historical Review, was banned from Britain in April 2015 by order of Theresa May, who is now the country’s Prime Minister. The decision to ban him was “taken personally” by May while she was serving as Home Secretary, Britain’s Home Office has acknowledged.
As justification for the ban, her order cites three statements allegedly made by Weber, as reported in a sensational article in Britain’s Mail on Sundaynewspaper. After the exclusion order was issued, the paper publicly acknowledged that the first of the three statements attributed to Weber was never made by him, and that a portion of the second statement was likewise not by him.
Moreover, the second and third statements cited in the order are distortions of remarks Weber had made at a “London Forum” meeting on April 11, 2015 – as he explained in a letter to the Home Office of Jan. 9, 2018. (Full text below). That letter is a response to a Home Office letter to Weber of Dec. 22, 2017, and a Home Office file letter of April 29, 2015. (Facsimiles below.)
Theresa May
Home Secretary in 2015, and now Prime Minister
The text of Weber’s address, titled “The Danger and Challenge of Jewish-Zionist Power,” is posted on the IHR website, along with an audio recording. A video of the talk is posted on YouTube.
The “London Forum” gathering, which drew an audience of more than a hundred, received extensive but hostile coverage in major British newspapers, as well as by Jewish news services. Although media reports called the event a gathering of “Holocaust deniers,” in fact not a single one of the speakers at the meeting spoke about the Holocaust, or said anything that could be considered “Holocaust denial.”
London’s Metropolitan Police Force looked into the talks by Weber and the other speakers, and decided that what they said “does not reach the threshold for a criminal investigation,” the London Daily Express reported. The news that Weber and the other speakers “would go unpunished provoked outrage in the Jewish community,” the Express also noted. A spokesman for the “Campaign Against Anti-Semitism” organization, the paper reported, said that the “speakers should have been barred from the UK.”
“The decision to ban me from the UK,” says Weber, “was based on inaccurate, untrue or distorted claims from a sensational and hostile second-hand report. British authorities made no effort to check the accuracy of the statements cited to justify this ‘McCarthyite’ ban.”
“If authorities in, say, Russia or Poland or China, were to ban peaceful UK citizens from entering those countries on the basis of similarly sensational and inaccurate reports,” Weber adds, “British politicians and media commentators would understandably protest and voice their outrage.”
The current government of Prime Minister Theresa May is one of the most ardently pro-Zionist in British history. In a speech on Nov. 4, 2017, for example, she praised and defended the notorious Balfour Declaration of 1917, by which Britain pledged to support the Zionist campaign to establish a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine. That Declaration is widely regarded as a blatant betrayal by Britain of its often-proclaimed devotion to the principles of democracy and self-determination.
In April and May 2015 Weber persistently urged the Mail on Sunday to correct at least the most egregious errors about him in its report on the “London Forum” meeting. After exchanges of e-mail messages by Weber with the paper’s managing editor, John Wellington, and a face-to-face talk with Peter Sheridan, the paper’s correspondent in California, the Mail on Sunday in late May or early June 2015 added a “correction” footnote to its posted report that acknowledged that it had inaccurately attributed at least two quotations to Weber — quotations that were cited in the UK ban against him.
Mark Weber is director of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an independent educational and publishing center that works to promote peace, understanding and justice through greater public awareness of the past, and especially socially-politically relevant aspects of modern history. It is recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) public interest, educational, not-for-profit enterprise. Founded in 1978, the IHR is non-partisan, non-ideological, and non-sectarian. Its offices are in Orange County, southern California.
Mark Weber holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in history. In 1988 he testified for five days in Toronto District Court as a recognized expert on Germany’s World War II Jewish policy.
Weber first learned that he was banned from the UK on Sept. 23, 2017, at the international airport of Madrid, Spain, as he was about to board a flight to London’s Heathrow airport for a lay-over of a few hours before getting a connecting flight to return home to California. He was obliged to pay hundreds of dollars to arrange belated alternative flights back to the US.
After his return home, Weber wrote letters to relevant British agencies, including the Home Office, to learn more about the ban. It was not until January 4, 2018, that he received letters from the Home Office explaining just how and on what basis he had been barred from entering the UK.
The UK government routinely bans visitors “if their presence would not be conducive to the public good.” Although British authorities will not say just who is on its list of “excluded” persons, it is known that Edward Snowden, Martha Stewart, Louis Farrakhan, Pamela Geller, Michael Savage and Geert Wilders are among those who have been banned.