Dogwash

... do great memes grow.


Doing my tour of the news aggregators, I came upon this item reposted by our old friends Hope not Hate.

Luton’s Remembrance Day service was disrupted when PCC candidate Kevin Carroll allegedly objected to Green Party campaigner Marc Scheimann laying a wreath of white peace poppies.

It’s a tradition Mr Scheimann has carried out for 24 years in memory of his German and British grandfathers who died on opposite sides in World War Two.

The disabled father-of-one was forced to throw himself over the wreath to protect it from a woman demonstrator who attempted to remove it.

He said: “Kevin Carroll waved a clenched fist at me and my four-year-old son and started shouting aggressively.

“He called me a scumbag and said when he was police commissioner he would make sure I went to jail for this.”

A bystander described what happened as “an absolute disgrace. I’ve never experienced anything like it in the 48 years I’ve been going to the Cenotaph.

“It shows no respect for the men who never came back, who gave their lives for our freedom."

Kev Carroll, the reader will recall, is the number two man in the evil English Defence League.  He stood in the pointless PCC elections held last week, something which clearly didn't go down too well with the Righteous press.

So what's afoot?  A look at the original Luton Today article tells us little more.  Though it has apparently been edited since the above extract in response to reader complaints, which is quite telling in itself.  The gist is that Marc Scheimann, a differently-abled member of the Green party and former local councillor, with a small child in tow, attempted to lay a wreath of white poppies at the Cenotaph in Luton. Although Mr Carroll did not intervene physically he is said to have shaken his fist at and verbally abused Mr Scheimann.  Separately, a "drunken woman" attempted to remove the wreath of white poppies, prompting a desperate defensive physical intervention from Mr Scheimann.

Not looking good for Ar Kev then, three days before the election.  Hmm.

A look below the line proves interesting, if hard work given the irritating threaded multipage layout of the comments.  On the whole it's the usual mudslinging between two entrenched groups of regular commenters shouting the same old insults across the no man's land of barbed wire that separates them.  But there is also what makes the comment threads of local newspapers surprisingly valuable: local knowledge and eyewitness reports.  These contributions, of course, are themselves as subject to bias and selectivity as the general yah-boo-suckery but there is often meat to be prised out of them.

Mr Scheimann, we learn, is not universally welcomed at these annual services.  His laying of a wreath of white poppies rather than the more usual red is the source of local resentment.  Whatever the official rhetoric of its sponsor the Peace Pledge Union, the white poppy is viewed by many, rightly in my opinion, as a self-righteous political statement rather than a symbol of remembrance. 

Mr Scheimann is not what he seems. His activities are not popular with the local public, to the extent that the British Legion and the local council have tried to stop him.  He also has wider political axes to grind.

Paul R
10:53 PM on 12/11/2012

"It's a tradition Mr Scheimann has carried out for 24 years."

Really?

So how come he was in Luton on Sunday whining about how Luton Council had banned him from laying a wreath in 2010 at the request of the Royal British Legion?

http://www.luton-dunstable.co.uk/News/Why-Peace-wont-get-a-chance.htm

Seems he likes to make a habit of getting this story in the papers.

Commenter Paul R also digs out some interesting links, for example

• http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=11843
• http://virtualstoa.net/2002/02/17/9811213/
  (Scheimann misspelt Schiemann if you're searching in the page)
• http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=17742

The URLs alone lend weight to the suggestion that Mr Scheimann is not just an ordinary fellow commemorating the deaths of his British and German ancestors in battle, but a hard left political activist with an extremist partisan axe to grind whose behaviour has caused considerable public offence in a sensitive context.  Opposition to him does not stem from Mr Carroll and the EDL alone.

Which leaves us with Mr Carroll. There is no solid suggestion that he did not shake his fist at and expostulate at Mr Scheimann, but it seems clear that Mr Carroll was not the unprovoked source of the disruptive incident. If anything he is guilty of little more than a lack of political nous in the face of provocation.

As to the mysterious "drunken woman" who attempted to take away Mr Scheimann's wreath,

Cpl G
3:46 PM on 13/11/2012

Absolute joke. That gentleman was confronted by many members of the public and asked to remove it. A lady picked it up (I didn't notice her to be drunk) when that chap let go of his boy, snatched the white/green reef back, shouting they are being aggressive and fell to the floor on top of it! Absolute stunt man!! He was there shouting the whole time I was reading the poppy messages. Saying "we can lay what we want" and "I was a councillor which is more than you'll ever be". I do not follow mr Carroll but he did approach the police to ask why this man was allowed to behave in this manner.

Not that any of this stops the meme, once spawned, from escaping intact into the wild. Quite a long way out, in fact.. Why a political comment about Luton has been posted on Yahoo Answers I don't know. But there you go.

In his rather leading Yahoo question Wolfie asks:

And one of his side-kicks attacks a disabled man laying a wreath at the war memorial! Is there no depths to which this vile group of thugs will sink?

Sidekick? No connection has been established or even suggested between Kev Carroll and the "drunken woman" who attempted to remove the wreath. Nor is it suggested that she "attacked" Marc Scheimann, rather that Mr Scheimann attempted to stop her removing the wreath.

But this assertion is now established as accepted truth. Below the line Britpilot90 develops the concept

So he attacked a disabled guy ant threatened him with Jail...

Strictly speaking, "attacked" here can be taken plausibly to mean "verbally abused", and so it would doubtless be defended, but the easy interpretation of "physical assault" lurks in the context, ready to tempt the inattentive.

So then bruiser Kev Carroll of the fascist (or possibly even facist) EDL beat up an innocent disabled man during a co-ordinated stunt at a remembrance ceremony, did he? Typical lying knuckledragging thugs, eh?



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