Peter Ettedgui said Farage, now aged 61, had repeatedly told him “Hitler was right” and “gas them” when they were teenagers at Dulwich College, in London.
“One of the most vivid memories of my school life is Farage repeatedly coming up to me and, knowing that I was Jewish, saying Hitler was right and 'gas ‘em’, and that was frequently followed by a ‘sssss’, you know, kind of imitating the sound of escaping gas.”
The BBC has spoken to two former pupils who say they remember Farage personally targeting Peter Ettedgui.
Jean-Pierre Lihou said: “I remember him specifically talking about ‘do go home, Hitler was right’, singing ‘Gas Them All’ and all of these absolutely antisemitic comments directed straight at Peter.”
Another former pupil, Martin Rosell, who is now chair of the Liberal Democrats in Salisbury, also corroborated the antisemitism claims, claiming Farage used to “mutter something like ‘Jew’ under his breath” when Mr Ettedgui answered a question in class.
Even the people defending him acknowledge the stories are at least partly true:
Some former Dulwich College pupils say they do not recognise the picture that has been painted of Farage or the allegations of racism against him […] Patrick Neylan, who was in the year below Farage at Dulwich College, told the BBC there was some singing of songs that he would not be proud of now.
Always the ones you least suspect, eh?
EDIT: Missed the original source for this, which is in the Guardian.
I saw this bald pasty fat brit in his late 50’s scroll on his phone in the bar the other day, I don’t know what the app was but it looked like Twitter or some other single column doom scroller, and I was sitting so I could just peruse his feed, and I did for anthropological reasons.
What I saw sank my spirits completely and I think that we are fucked. If his feed is what “normal” people see on their feeds, they are being so systematically programmed to be outraged at immigrants and to praise right wing extremism that I felt like I was caught in a 1984 mid-indoctrination session.
I knew it was like this, but it was a different thing seeing someone get brain washed in real time.
Encouraging thing to remember here is that hardly anyone uses Twitter, so the bloke you saw at the pub was probably an outlier.
The discouraging thing is that a lot of elite tastemakers and trendsetters do use Twitter, so they’re the ones getting their brains cooked. Even Farage is an example of this: he didn’t use to talk about mass deportations!
The problem is, that unfortunately you’re wrong. I think it’s like top 4 in terms of global traffic, above LinkedIn and TikTok. I wish you were right, and it did die off, but the stats don’t back that up.
https://www.similarweb.com/website/x.com/#ranking
According to Ofcom, Twitter is sixth for social media and dropping.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/online-research/online-nation/2024/online-nation-2024-report.pdf?v=386238
Good to see it dropping, but 22m visitors is huge. Until it’s below 5m, its a big problem.
80% bots
This may be true, but I believe it’s still only a small proportion of the population (both can be true!) and a still smaller proportion that spend any length of time on there.
22m is roughly a third of the population. More if you discount kids. Brexit was won on 17m. It is a significant part of the population even if you don’t want it to be.
Fair point on usage time, hopefully that will play an increasing part of it’s diminishing impact, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
@frankPodmore @tomiant all the journalists are still on there which is why they’re so obsessed with immigration too.
And as far as I know, Labour / UKGov still only have accounts on X/Facebook/Threads. So again, all their (already useless) PR department feedback is going to be far right bots.
I agree completely: the government still being on there is a huge problem. They need to abandon it ASAP.