A racist rant too far? Police investigate Taki the playboy pundit

A racist rant too far? Police investigate Taki the playboy pundit By Sholto Byrnes

Taki Theodoracopoulos once served four months in Pentonville Prison for possession of cocaine. Now the prospect of a two-year stretch in jail looms for the Greek playboy and columnist.

Taki and The Spectator, for which he writes the "High Life" column, are being investigated by Scotland Yard over an article he wrote in the magazine's 11 January edition.

The investigation was triggered by a complaint from Peter Herbert, a lawyer and member of the Metropolitan Police Authority. The Yard's Diversity Directorate will assess whether the piece incites racial hatred and thereby breaks the Public Order Act, for which the maximum sentence is two years.

Even by Taki's standards the piece was extraordinarily offensive. Under the headline "Thoughts on Thuggery" he wrote: "Oh boy, was Enoch – God rest his soul – ever right! Now there's a man who was tough on the causes of crime long before the crime had been Blaired."

Referring to the New Year shootings of two black girls in Birmingham he continued: "Only a moron would not surmise that what politically-correct newspapers refer to as 'disaffected young people' are black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs ... West Indians were allowed to immigrate after the war, multiply like flies, and then the great state apparatus took over the care of their multiplications. The "Rivers of Blood "speech by Enoch was prophetic as well as true, and look what the bullshitters of the time did to the great man."

The article has already caused considerable embarrassment to Boris Johnson, editor of The Spectator and a Tory MP. "It was a terrible thing," said Mr Johnson, who was on holiday the week the article appeared but takes full responsibility for its publication.

"It should never have gone in." Informed of the police investigation, Mr Johnson declined to comment until he heard from Scotland Yard.

Such casual racism is the stock-in-trade of Taki, who is known mainly by his first name. In 1997 he described Puerto Ricans in New York as "a bunch of semi-savages ... fat, squat, ugly, dusky, dirty." In 2001 he called himself a "soi-disant anti-Semite" and has also referred to Kenya as "bongo-bongo land".

Repulsive though such comments are, they are what pass for humour in the Eurotrash plutocratic circles in which Taki mixes. His world skis at Gstaad, goes to the Ascot races – a crowd of "society" figures who are slowly departing for the great gambling tables of the hereafter.

Married to Princess Alexandra Schoenburg, Taki inherited a fortune from his father John and divides his time between a $5m house in New York's Upper East Side and Gstaad, where he recently crashed his car.

His strict treatment at the hands of the local police is what prompted his musings on crime problems in Britain.

His friends and acquaintances are the characters that fill his friend Nigel Dempster's pages. The Daily Mail gossip columnist refers to Taki as the "Greek sportsman", a description he has earned through his past participation in the Davis Cup and captaining of the Greek karate team.

He was close to Gianni Agnelli. His friendship with the Fiat magnate lasted 45 years until his recent death. "K", the Aga Khan, was a friend and he boasts an on-off friendship with Mohamed al-Fayed, English aristocrats, obscure European royalty and any pretty girl who chances across his path.

His interest in right-wing politics comes from his father, and he is proud of the fact that not much thought has gone into his views. "Why make up your own mind when someone else can make up your mind for you?" he has asked.

Along with the Duke of Devonshire and the Earl of Portsmouth he was one of the backers of Neil Hamilton's failed libel bid against Mr Fayed, although he was not best pleased when he later found himself being pursued for Mr Fayed's costs.

Taki is happy to admit, as readers of his Spectator column know, to taking a line so right-wing it borders on the fascist. When building a new house he declared that he would name it "Palazzo Pinochet", after the Chilean dictator. General Franco is another of his heroes.

When Mr Johnson took over the editorship of The Spectator there was speculation that Taki would go, being considered a relic of the magazine's past.

Taki even wrote a column announcing that he had been sacked. Unfortunately for his critics – and he has many even among the Telegraph group, of which The Spectator is a part – he was joking, leading Max Hastings, then editor of the Evening Standard, to remark: "You always know where you are with Taki. Like the Prussians, he is either at your knees or your throat."

One senior Telegraph executive said Taki had no privileged position and that any decision on his future will be "down to Boris".

But Taki has had at least one run-in with Conrad Black, owner of The Spectator. His anti-semite claim so incensed Mr Black that the owner of The Daily Telegraph wrote a two-page letter to his own magazine, condemning Taki.

If the Scotland Yard investigation does find against Taki, Mr Johnson will be expected to sack him. Taki once described himself as "worthless". The question is now whether his editor agrees with him.

"A bunch of semi-savages ... fat, squat, ugly, dusky, dirty and unbelievably loud. They turned Manhattan into Palermo faster than you can say 'spic'."

"Democracy is as likely to come to bongo-bongo land as I am to send a Concorde ticket to my children."

"What politically correct newspapers refer to as 'disaffected young people' are black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs ... West Indians were allowed to immigrate after the war [and] multiply like flies."

"Not that I'm calling Cherie Blair a whore. She couldn't be one even if she wanted to; not good-looking enough."

"She, too, could not make a living from the world's oldest profession because of ugly looks and terrible ankles."

"I'm a family man, a provider, I pay my taxes, I'm white (although always sun-tanned) ... I inherited from my old man ... I employ people, I own a yacht ... you name it, I'm guilty of it."

"In Cool Britannia we don't send the son of a left-wing prick like Straw to jail for dealing [drugs]; we vote him president of the Oxford Union (sic) instead. (Apparently he is as much of a dictator as his father, and just as phony)."

"[They] are, of course, the masters of the direct lie, able to look straight into the camera and tell incredible whoppers that would make Mother Teresa blush. The man [Tony Blair] is pathetic, almost on the level of Bill Clinton, except for the hair."

"Hislop deals in ruining people's lives through falsehoods, half-truths and gossip ... When that court high up in the sky gives the final verdict, the poisoned dwarf will come off second best."

Here's the Jew-hating Taki column:

Rich rewards
Taki
Rougemont

The jet-set is in mourning and, like Electra, it becomes it. Marc Rich has called off his Las Vegas-theme party in St Moritz this weekend, which will force a few Englishmen in the Engadine to commit an unnatural act and pay their own bill. The reason given was the bad publicity and the hounding of the host by the press. The last time Marc Rich called off a party was in Spain, about five or six years ago. His Mossad-trained bodyguards were tipped off that his private jet would be forced down the moment it left Swiss airspace by Yankee F-16s, so he stayed put. No reason was offered back then. Although the US government was out to grab him, Rich had the proverbial ace up his sleeve. By giving lotsa moolah to Israel, he was being fed information by Mossad that even the top brass of the Pentagon weren’t getting. Mossad knew that the snatch was on by listening in on the Americans. They tipped off the fugitive fraudster, a move that eventually made Bill Clinton rich, pun intended.

Last week I wrote in my own ‘Taki’s Top Drawer’ that, as America was not as yet Israel-occupied territory, the 200 million Rich gave to those nice guys, who attack rock-throwing youth with armour-piercing missiles, should not count as philanthropy where America is concerned. To my great annoyance the sentence never appeared. When I rang in an Orlando Furioso mood, I was told by a very polite flunky that ‘we were trying to protect you, this is New York’.

Well, there you have it. Marc Rich I have never met and hope never to. I once went out to dinner following a Norman Mailer book party with a Greek called Olga and Norman’s son, my buddy Michael Mailer, the boxer and film producer, who happened to have an Estee Lauder blonde (common but not too bad) in tow. The blonde thought my girl was from the lower classes because she (Olga) stood up to shake hands with her. She snubbed her throughout the evening. (Actually, she’s a Greek royal.) We went to Elaine’s, and after lotsa boozing, I asked the blonde her name. ‘Daniella Rich’, came the answer. Being well oiled, I told her it was not her fault her father was a Christian-basher who had caused more harm to Broadway and the theatre in general than Bomber Harris had to Dresden. She looked nonplussed. ‘My father hates the theatre, never goes,’ or words to that effect. Then the penny dropped. Papa was not fat Frank Rich of the New York Times. Papa was the crook who was to pull off the impossible: drag the whore Bill Clinton down to his level. But back to the party which never was.

A pretty American girl called Serena Boardman was coming all the way from Noo Yawk for it. When I asked her whether she would go to a party given, say, by John Gotti, the dapper Don, as the Big Bagel tabloids refer to him, she told me it was not the same thing. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Gotti is dumb and in jail; Rich, the far bigger criminal and traitor, is in St Moritz.’ That’s the way it goes, sports fans. The truly big crooks get away with it and go to St Moritz and Gstaad, the little guys go to the big house up the river. And if any of you believe that Rich has not passed money under the table to Bill Clinton, then you should also believe that I’m Monica Lewinsky’s mother.

Marc Rich, however, has done us a favour. By bribing everyone and sundry, he managed to expose the side of Clinton so many leftists and liberals refused to see. He also proved what we, soi-disant anti-Semites for daring to protest about soldiers shooting at kids, always knew. The way to Uncle Sam’s heart runs through Tel Aviv and Israeli-occupied territory. Rich and Clinton deserve each other. Both make everyone around them seem bigger.

My friend Taki has gone too far

By Conrad Black - The Spectator.co.uk

Last week’s anti-Israel diatribe by The Spectator’s High Life columnist is almost worthy of Goebbels, says Conrad Black The Spectator’s social writer, Taki Theodoracopulos, has often graciously referred to me as an indulgent proprietor. Our relations have been cordial for 15 years and we have frequently been each other’s guests, have been friendly with each other’s spouses and have many mutual friends. Long before I knew him I was aware of his penchant, sometimes entertaining but sometimes excessive, to denigrate certain ethnic groups, most often the Jews. With such a bonhomous character there is a natural tendency to overlook his lapses of judgment and give him the benefit of the doubt that he is only railing against the prissy hypersensitivities of political correctness. It is hard to imagine that a person with whom you are friendly and have had many memorably agreeable times is a racist who wishes and incites violence against innocent people because of their ethnicity or religion.

Yes, we’re from Mars. But, if you’re thinking of coming, forget it. We don’t like illegal immigrants

I defended Taki when he was attacked by the Mayor of New York for a very insulting column about Puerto Ricans in 1997. His remarks were outrageous but, as the Puerto Ricans did make a mess on Fifth Avenue, they contained a kernel of truth and did not incite violence against Puerto Ricans. Nor are Puerto Ricans under any particular external threat. Nor do they have a history of being savagely oppressed. In the same spirit I defended one of our other writers, William Cash, against the wrath of the entire US film industry in 1994, when he published an article about the leading Jewish figures in that industry which was somewhat insulting but well short of an incitement to racial hatred.

These were not among my most enjoyable moments as a publisher, but it is the duty of a publisher to defend his writers unless they are, for whatever reason, indefensible. Writers, like everyone else, have the right to dislike individuals and whole nationalities and ethnic groups. They have the right to express their dislike if they do so rationally, are not legally defamatory, and if they are within the bounds of civilized taste. Our publications will never be hounded into politically correct avoidance of any forceful opinion touching ethnicity, sectarianism, gender or sexual orientation. To do so would be to accept a muzzle on freedom of expression and to prevent comment on large and interesting aspects of life. My associates and I would shut down our publications rather than submit to such restrictions.

Unfortunately, last week in this magazine, Taki’s reflections were indefensible. He expressed a hatred for Israel and a contempt for the United States and its political institutions that were irrational and an offence to civilized taste. In the process, I am afraid he uttered a blood libel on the Jewish people wherever they may be.

He wrote that the United States had intended to invade French air space to force down fugitive financier Marc Rich’s aeroplane (on orders ultimately from the same commander-in-chief who has now pardoned Rich); that Israeli intelligence knew more of US Air Force activities than the Pentagon did and shared this information with Rich because Israel’s favour had been bought by Rich. For Taki, the United States was not yet ‘Israel-occupied territory’; that is, occupied by ‘those nice guys who attack rock-throwing youth with armour-piercing missiles’. He acknowledged his anti-Semitism but implicitly defined it as ‘daring to protest about soldiers shooting at kids’, and he asserted that ‘the way to Uncle Sam’s heart runs through Tel Aviv and Israeli-occupied territory’.

In both its venomous character and its unfathomable absurdity, this farrago of lies is almost worthy of Goebbels or the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Jews, according to Taki, have suborned the US government, direct that country’s military like a docile attack dog, and glory in the murder of innocent or mischievous children. He presents the universal Jewish ethos as brutish, vulgar, grasping and cunningly wicked.

It is a fearful thing to contemplate that someone with whom I have had such long and cordial relations should use a publication of ours for such malignant purposes, however veiled in his familiar recourse to harmless excess, or even amplified by his frequent and publicly confessed intake of intoxicating substances.

I wouldn’t suspect Taki of co-ordinating his views with anyone else’s. But his opinions are not greatly more extreme than those of large sections of the British media which habitually apply a double standard when judging the Israelis and Palestinians. Behind the spurious defense of merely seeking justice for the Palestinians, most of the relevant sections of the BBC, Independent, Guardian, Evening Standard and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are rabidly anti-Israel. I doubt that most of the people involved would be hostile to someone merely because that person was Jewish, though some would, but they are almost all, wittingly or not, stoking the inferno of anti-Semitism.

The origins of the Arab–Israeli problem are too complicated for easy summary, but among the points normally overlooked by most of the British media is that the government of the United Kingdom bears a unique responsibility for the problem. It sold the same real estate twice. In the direst moments of the first world war Britain promised the same territory to the Jews and to the Arabs.

Israel, after an unconscionable length of time, and with the exact borders still in dispute, has accepted the principle of two states in the territory it once hoped to occupy itself. The Palestinians have not accepted the right of the state of Israel to survive. They do not accept the Israelis as an indigenous people and still think of them as foreign colonial occupiers like the British, the Turks and the Romans. This and the implosion of Arafat’s authority among his own people, and not the actions of the Israelis, are the sources of the present impasse, and every knowledgeable observer of the Middle East knows it.

The West Bank is now governed by groups of thugs, and Arafat has been afraid to go there for several months. The Palestinian Authority is a brutal dictatorship and one of the most financially corrupt regimes in the world. The PLO has not lived up to any of its significant obligations under the Oslo Accords, including expunging the anti-Israel clauses of the Palestine National Charter. Barak went as far as any Israeli leader could possibly go at Camp David and was rewarded with rejection by Arafat and the unleashing of a new insurrection. Large numbers of Palestinians have been persuaded that glorious eternity awaits them if they manage to die at the hands of the Israelis. Fortified by this belief, mobs of stone-throwers have been pushed forward with snipers interspersed among them and children in the vanguard to take the brunt of the Israeli response. Sharon gave the Muslim leaders plenty of notice of his now famous ten-minute walk on the Temple Mount, and did nothing on it that was disrespectful of Islam or of the Palestinian people. Arafat has declared that he requires an almost unlimited right of return of designated Palestinians, including millions born after the initial departure in 1948, and the demographic inundation of Israel with Arabs. It is as if the UK were asked to receive 60 million people of a foreign nationality with which we had been at war for more than 50 years. Apart from Adolf Eichmann, Israel has never executed anyone, including terrorists — a refreshing contrast to the peremptory executions routinely conducted by the Palestinians and some other neighbouring regimes.

We hear almost nothing of any of this from most of the British media or the Foreign Office. We hear only shrill orchestrated solicitude for the supposed underdog and relentless antagonism against Israel — ostensibly the Israeli government but, inevitably and implicitly, the Jews.

These Jews are the same people whom Pope John Paul II has recognized as ‘not the cousins but the brothers and sisters of all Christians, the chosen people of the Old Testament’, to whom the world should repent, as he did, for millennia of oppression. The Pope’s own record in these matters is exemplary, but he repented for his one billion co-religionists and for the 2,000-year history of the world’s foremost Church.

Israel has many failings, and of course the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis, by the Arab powers who keep them in the camps (breeding grounds for their terrorist cannon fodder), and by the United Nations is a crime in which we are all complicit. Of course the world must put this right.

But we will not put it right by returning to the ancient and evil practice of persecuting the Jewish people, to whom we owe so much for its genius in almost every field and its courage in heroic circumstances for nearly 6,000 years. The Jews, as much as any other people, have shown the world what human bravery and perseverance can achieve. It was pathetic and shaming that many of the distinguished leaders of London’s Jewish community felt the need to tell me last week, after local performances of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, that they hoped that ‘people will realize that Israel doesn’t just quell Palestinian riots’.

All Israel really wants is to be like other countries, to be accepted in the world as a people with dignity and a right to a state. Israel has that right. It is a sophisticated democracy and a society of laws. Those neurotic racists who dispute that right should be forced to come out from behind the skirts of legitimate differences of opinion in Middle Eastern controversies. They should be made to face those who would be their victims.

And those who have assisted them, through lassitude or negligence or malice, should follow the Pope’s inspiring example: they should repent. The Pharisees and hypocrites in the British press should repent their calumnies. A few days after Arafat cavalierly rejected generous concessions from Israel and unleashed his latest bloodbath, the Foreign Secretary was photographed walking hand-in-hand with Arafat and caused Britain to condemn Israel at the United Nations. He should repent and exorcise the institutional bias of his department.

In our publications justice will be done.

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