Owens defended himself in a statement to The Guardian. He said, “I reject the concept of ‘racism’ outright. Caring especially for your own people is the most natural and healthy thing in the world. ‘Racism’ is just an anti-white libel. It’s a weapon of mass psychological abuse devised and wielded to keep white people from thinking and acting in our own interests while our sovereignty and our homelands are taken from us.”
YouTube Removes Channel of UK Extremist Who Used Codewords to Attack Jews, Blacks
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by Shiryn Ghermezian
YouTube app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
YouTube has shut down the channel of a right-wing extremist who has been called “Britain’s most racist YouTuber” for using codewords and euphemisms to verbally attack Jews and Blacks and bypass the video platform’s hate speech policies.
James Owens, 37, from the village of Hixon in Staffordshire, England, escaped censorship by YouTube’s artificial intelligence that monitors hate speech by using expressions such as “people who look white but aren’t” to refer to Jews, the term “negrophilia” when condemning the Black community, and referring to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as “our uncle,” The Times reported. Owens rarely mentioned ethnic minorities by name on his channel called “Tollahvision,” where he referred to himself as the “ayatollah” and hosted discussions featuring antisemitism, racism and conspiracy theories. He also used a fake profile picture and disguised his voice with a fake accent.
“After review, we quickly terminated the ‘Tollahvision’ channel for repeated violations of our hate speech policy, which strictly prohibits content that promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on certain attributes,” said a YouTube spokesperson. “We enforce this policy rigorously and removed over 95,000 videos for violating our hate speech policy in the first three months of 2022.”
Red Flare, an anti-far right group that exposes extremists in Britain, had been tracking content posted by Owens since 2020. The organization released a photo of the white supremacist in late August and revealed that he is also a key figure in the British far-right white nationalist group called Patriotic Alternative (PA).
Owens is a former host of “The Absolute State of Britain” (TASOB) podcast, which is published by the US-based Neo-Nazi outlet The Right Stuff. TASOB previously described itself as “Britain’s most racist podcast” and in one episode of the podcast Owens said, “We’re still fighting Hitler’s war, it’s just a guerrilla war now,” according to Red Flare.
On his own YouTube channel, launched in December 2019, Owens has featured PA organizers and other fascists as guests. Red Flare said the channel had garnered more than 400,000 views before it was terminated by YouTube.
“James Owens is Britain’s most racist YouTuber,” a spokesperson for the group said. “The degree of vitriol, malice, the kind of incandescent rage with which he speaks about ethnic minorities, gay people, Jews, the left, is unique among his peers.”
