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U.S. proves to be no safe haven for anti-Jewish writer, publisher
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Stephen Whittle to be deported to UK.
Two men convicted of disseminating hate speech in Britain have been ordered back to England after being held in Santa Ana City Jail for the last 11 months.
Stephen Whittle and Simon Sheppard arrived at LAX last July, thinking they’d find asylum in the U.S., where such laws are less stringent. Instead, they have been held in jail after a federal immigration judge denied them asylum and put them on a slow track back to Britain, according to a Los Angeles Times report.
An Orthodox Jewish media outlet, VosIzNeias.com, reports that Whittle is "a racist writer who fled to the United States seeking asylum."
The VIN report continues: The two sought asylum under America's free speech protections, claiming they were being persecuted for their anti-Semitic views. But an immigration judge has now ordered the pair, who have been in custody since their arrival in the US, be deported to the UK.
"We thought they'd hold us for a day or so," Sheppard said through a Plexiglas window in a jail interview with a Los Angeles Times reporter. "We couldn't see how they wouldn't grant us asylum. The things we supposedly had done in Britain aren't illegal in America."
US legal expert Alex Rojas told the Evening Post that it was very difficult for people from the UK to get political asylum in America, VIN reported.
He said: "You have to establish a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality or membership of a particular social group or political opinion."
Sheppard and Whittle were convicted in England for a string of essays and other published material on Sheppard's heretical.com website, which uses a server based in Torrance. Sheppard was convicted on 11 counts, Whittle on five. In January, Sheppard was retried in absentia and convicted on five more charges, according to the Times story.
Their online entries follow the well-traveled path of other nationalist polemicists, with particular emphasis on decrying the influence and power of Jews in the world, Times reporter Dana Parsons wrote.
More articles by Alex Murashko at LA Church & State Examiner.
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