Return of the antisemitic blood libel

Inside the weird world of Satanic Ritual Abuse activism

Dear subscribers — today’s Scout looks at the bizarre movement to expose Satanic ritual abuse, or SRA. There has never been any evidence to suggest elite paedophiles are kidnapping and torturing children to death in Satanic rituals, but a busy group of activists believe in this baroque conspiracy theory. This article looks at how they have built ties to the far-right in recent years and become viciously antisemitic. If you like it, please share it with your friends and ask them to subscribe. P.S. Scout is on holiday for the next fortnight, see you in August.

A cabal of murderous Satanic paedophiles, just off the M40

Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) activists at Waddesdon Manor, Bucks, in January.

The video starts with a woman striding across a field, sniffing in the winter cold. Her faced is flushed. She’s breathing heavily, looking over her shoulder — she jumps when she spots anyone else. She’s holding up her phone for a Facebook livestream and speaks to her followers. “I can’t even begin to imagine how many children and babies have died on this land,” she murmurs. “And how much blood has been spilled from their little bodies, right here. How long are we going to let it go on for?”

This is one of Britain’s most prominent activists in a movement that believes political leaders secretly perform satanic rituals in which they sexually abuse, torture and murder children. We are withholding her real name for legal reasons: in this article we’ll call her Sarah. On the day of the livestream, Sarah wandered the grounds of Waddesdon Manor, a country pile in Buckinghamshire. It was once owned by Ferdinand de Rothschild, a 19th century banker from the Jewish finance dynasty. Waddesdon has now become the target of antisemitic protest, and the family that once lived there was playing on Sarah’s mind. “We are here to expose the Rothschilds for being reptilians and Satanic,” she said. “This place is used for hunting games of children. It has been for a long time.”

Sarah was doing a recce of Waddesdon ahead of a protest she organised on January 23rd this year. At that rally, a crowd of 50 people turned up to rally against the Rothschild family, which Sarah calls the “most powerful, vile family in the world”. They held hands and listened to prayer chants and discussed secret underground tunnels used to traffic children. And, in addition to lighting incense and listening to hand drums, some of the speakers endorsed the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson and railed against asylum seekers crossing the Channel by boat.

Since the 1980s, there have been waves of panic that a Satan-worshipping cabal atop the British establishment is kidnapping and elaborately murdering children. There has never been a shred of evidence to substantiate such an extraordinary claim, as the journalist Rosie Waterhouse has repeatedly pointed out. However, a small group of dedicated activists is still obsessed with exposing Satanic ritual abuse, or SRA for short. It frequently crops up in conspiracy theorist circles — The Light newspaper, which has a circulation of 200,000, has written about it, warning about a “major centre for devil worship and SRA” under construction in the Scottish Highlands.

I first became interested in this crowd in January, after reading about the Waddesdon protest. Until seeing footage of the event — where the crowd smeared the Rothschilds as child-sacrificing monsters — I didn’t know about the antisemitism of the SRA world. Since then, I’ve been finding out more about how these activists think Jews are not only controlling global affairs, but have somehow set up a sophisticated trafficking operation to source children for their ritualistic murders. It is the redux of the antisemitic blood libel that led to massacres of European Jews in the Middle Ages. This conspiracy theory continues to inspire criminal behaviour. Last year, two SRA campaigners called Wilfred Wong and Anke Hill were jailed for 20 years after kidnapping a child who they claimed was a victim of Satanic abuse.

Thanks to help from a Scout subscriber (an internet sleuth who asked to remain anonymous) we have been investigating this strange movement. On the fringes of the internet, in hyperactive social media channels, a network of activists has coalesced that continues to protest SRA. What we have seen is that the current generation of activist — unlike their predecessors in the 80s and 90s — is both virulently antisemitic and has strong ties to the far-right.

This is interesting to me it looks like two types of conspiracy theorist that were hitherto separate have begun to overlap. Perhaps the popularity of the QAnon movement, which believes that Satanic paedophiles controlling America, is partly to answer for this. And perhaps it’s also due to the circulation of a conspiracy theory advanced by the fantasist David Icke. Bear with me, but he claims the Rothschilds are not just sinister Jews hell-bent on world domination but also a race of lizards with the ability to shape-shift into human form. These creatures take on the form of the most powerful people in the country — like the Queen and Prince Philip — and ritually abuse children in the worst ways imaginable. It is one of the most extreme conspiracy theories out there, and requires a total detachment from reality.

The online shops selling kids

So other than Sarah, who are we dealing with? One of the most active campaigners in this movement is Jane Kelly. We met at a protest by Cheadle Royal hospital in south Manchester. An anti-vaxxer called Simon Parry had been sectioned there for mental health reasons, and a crowd of his followers, thinking Parry had been silenced for telling the truth about Covid jabs, had gathered there to demand his release.

Kelly was in the crowd, and she explained to me an expansive conspiracy theory, claiming that when Tony Blair was prime minister he brought in social care legislation that allowed Jews to exploit the adoption system so they could purchase children and torture them to death. “The paedophile aspect of all this,” Kelly said on a livestream, “is Jewish. They’re all doing it. There’s Jewish money in it.”

Jane Kelly. Her badge calls for the release of Melanie Shaw, an SRA activist convicted of arson and making death threats.

In Kelly’s understanding, Africans and South Asians are sneaking into the UK, where they seek jobs in childcare in order to steal vulnerable kids for their Jewish masters. Black Lives Matter is in on it too — “a front organisation for trafficking”, she calls it — as are “these blooming Arabs”. No doubt Hispanics fit somewhere into the mix, but Kelly has yet to explain how.

Kelly has a busy schedule. Last month, she went to Birmingham to demonstrate outside a university conference on social services, and then to Croydon Council, south London. There, she accused academics and council staff of building underground tunnels big enough to fit in trains to carry children across the country. “We know about your online shops selling children,” she yelled in Croydon. “We know about the SRA going on with the politicians and the sickos and the Illuminati. They all need babies to sacrifice, children to hang upside down on crosses. You can’t hide this shit anymore!” It need hardly be said that the SRA activists have never provided any proof for the tunnels, the trains and the online shops that sell children.

Part of this network is Angie New, a campaigner from Liverpool, who has protested in defence of Tommy Robinson. New has filmed herself following South Asian men in the street and mocking them with crude accents, and railed against asylum seekers crossing the Channel, who she calls “rapists and paedophiles and scumbags coming off these boats unchecked”. Her friend, the pseudonymous activist Tinky Bell (real name unknown), has posed with James Goddard, the former regional organiser of Patriotic Alternative, a white nationalist organisation. 

Tinky Bell, real name unknown, posing with James Goddard, formerly of Patriotic Alternative. Nigel Marcham, an anti-migrant influencer whose online alias is Little Veteran, is on the left.

There’s also Wayne Fox, who appeared at the Waddesdon Manor protest to praise Tommy Robinson. “Israel is behind this,” he said on a livestream recently. “Israel is funding this. Israel! Think about that. They’re the ones — the Jews!”  Brian Stovell, a member of the far-right British Democratic Party, a successor to the BNP, is part of the scene too. As is Lee Garrett, who has foamed against the “Jewish overtake of the world”, adding: “The whole aspect of the Jewish culture, I don’t like.”

What makes the SRA activists especially concerning are their attempts to “rescue” — for which read “kidnap” — children who they believe are in the clutches of Satanic paedophiles. In November 2020, a group of middle-aged SRA activists, thinking an eight-year-old boy was being abused, abducted him from his foster carer in Anglesey, Wales. Wilfred Wong, a former human rights lawyer, and his accomplice Anke Hill, a vet, struck as the carer and the child drove back to their house after the school run. Wong held a knife to the carer’s throat as Hill snatched the boy from the car and bundled him into a waiting vehicle hired by Janet Stevenson, and her husband Edward. Two accomplices acted as lookouts on nearby bridges as the hire car sped away. They had planned to spirit the child out of the country and had even sourced a passport for the journey, but were arrested 150 miles away in Northamptonshire. The child was safely recovered and the kidnap gang imprisoned.

Wilfred Wong, now serving a 22-year prison sentence.

Hardcore SRA activists, claiming Wong and his team have been unfairly jailed, have turned him into a martyr. Paul Rouke, a born-again Christian, prayed outside the prison where Wong is serving his 22-year sentence. Worryingly, some followers have expressed an interest in “saving” more kids. Kelly, on a livestream broadcast this month, described connecting a private detective to a fellow SRA campaigner to “get a little child rescued”. On other videos, she has discussed buying land to bring kidnapped children. Scout understands that Kelly’s comments have been passed to the police.

In the end, Sarah never made it to the Waddesdon Manor rally. She was arrested by Thames Valley Police on suspicion of conspiracy to murder members of the Rothschild family. She was not charged, and last week the police confirmed no further action will be taken against her. Sarah is currently on bail with another police force. Sarah says she was abused, at one time or another, by Ted Heath, Leon Britton, Greville Janner, Prince Philip, and the Queen. She claims to have been electrocuted, burnt, suffocated, starved, drugged, buried alive and tortured with hot pokers. 

“When I made the decision to expose the Rothschilds, I got attacked by reptilians in my dream state,” she said on a Facebook video. “Fortunately, me being me, and having the background and abilities I have, I know how to fight them off.”

In 2015, parents in the north London neighbourhood of Hampstead were accused of abusing children at a local school. When I worked at The Times, I spoke to some of the parents whose lives had been turned upside down by SRA activists — they became worried to leave the house, installing security cameras and trying in vain to get videos that called them murderers and paedophiles taken offline. These videos alleged the most insane things: that parents were purchasing babies online and having them sent in DHL packages to Hampstead so they could be tortured and sacrificed. The lesson I learned is that extremists don’t need to belong to a structured group or even be particularly organised to ruin people’s lives.

The originator of the Hampstead hoax, Abraham Christie, spoke of “Talmudic Satanic sodomites”, and the activist Patrick Cullinane claimed Jews control the courts. Sabine McNeill, who was jailed for nine years in 2019 after stalking and harassing the Hampstead parents, shared videos about “Jewish Kabbalistic Occult Ritual Child Murder”.

A blogger who tracked the Hampstead conspiracy theory says antisemitism forms an important part of the SRA world today. The blogger, who went by the nom de guerre El Coyote, says many of the SRA activists draw their inspiration from the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, an early 20th century conspiracy text. “This tract is one source of the modern fantasy of the idea that Jews are at the helm of an elaborate secret hierarchy which either already rules or intends to rule the world,” they explain. 

They added:

“SRA is little more than a twisted variant on the blood libel myth, complete with mysterious rituals, tortured children, consumption of blood, murder, and an astonishing ability to conduct all these terrible acts without ever getting caught. Many people who believe in SRA would be shocked to hear that they’re actually perpetuating a medieval racial slander, and I’m sure would deny any shred of antisemitism, but scratch the stories deep enough, and that’s what you’ll generally find. Those people who push SRA most strongly have often ‘graduated’ to more overt antisemitic tropes, as it seems the further down that rabbit-hole one goes, the more SRA’s true nature is revealed.”