Mob Rule

“There was this knock on the door – it was a bit late and I did wonder who might be calling at that time of night – but I opened it to see and wham, I got punched in the face. It was so bloody hard and unexpected that I collapsed onto the hallway floor,” thirty six year old Barry Dixler told BBC’s Newsnight, describing the bizarre, apparently unmotivated attack he was on the receiving end of last week. “I didn’t get a good look at the geezer – he was wearing a hoodie to hide his face and legged it immediately. But I did hear him mutter ‘Murdering scum’ as he hit me. Which is ridiculous, as I‘ve never killed anyone!” The attack on the North London data entry clerk is just one of scores of similar assaults, up and down the UK, all carried out by unidentified masked or hooded assailants giving no clue as to their motivation, other than to utter a few words along the lines of: ‘murderer’, ‘bullying bastard’, ‘hatemonger’ and similar. In addition to these doorstep attacks, a number of other, apparently unconnected, people have reported similar apparently unmotivated attacks by hooded or masked assailants on the street or in public places. An apprentice pipe wrencher form Redditch, for instance, found himself knocked off of his feet and given a kicking by a hoodie-wearing attacker on his High Street, while a Sunderland bank teller found herself slapped around the face by a similar assailant outside of her local Aldi store. Once again, the mystery attackers spat out similar words as to those used in the doorstep attacks.

The first clue as to a possible motivation for these assaults came when twenty eight year old office worker Ronnie Addenbone found himself confronted by a hoodie-wearing figure as he left a Neasden pub. “As I came out, he was just there, blocking my way,” he recalled, speaking to his local newspaper. “Before I could say anything, he kicked me in balls, it was agony As I went down, clutching at my crown jewels, I heard him say something like, ‘Not so hard without your keyboard, eh?’ Then he ran off, leaving me there screaming in pain!” The ‘keyboard’ comment was immediately seized upon by investigators. “It suggested some kind of internet connection,” explains Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief Inspector Eric Candless, who has been spearheading the investigation. “Further analysis of the victims revealed that they all had Twitter accounts and had all participated in posting and re-posting negative information, much of it untrue, about one Al Jixmann, a pornographer and noted black director, who had been accused of plagiarism – an individual who subsequently took their own life. At last, we had a motive, but were no closer to identifying who was behind the attacks.” Hard on the heels of this breakthrough, someone claiming to represent those behind the campaign of beatings anonymously contacted the Daily Norks to claim responsibility.

“These campaigns of online bullying, using social media to form virtual lynch mobs to pile onto individuals who haven’t actually been proven to have actually committed any kind of crime have been tolerated for far too long,” they told the newspaper. “We’re a group of concerned citizens who have had enough. Damn it, a man has been driven to suicide by these bastards over an utterly trivial matter – I mean, porn films all look the bloody same, how can anyone say that one is ripping off another?” As for how they had identified individuals from their accounts, the source claimed that it had been simple. “Most of these cocks use their own picture on their profiles,” they said. “Not only that, but they include so many biographical details in both profiles and posts that it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to identify them.” Many have criticised the police for having taken so long to link the attacks to the online mob, particularly as a parallel campaign against the high profile perpetrators of the online witch hunt was simultaneously taking place.

“I had a bloody mob of people outside my house waving placards saying stuff like ‘Murdering Bitch’, shouting obscenities at me through megaphones, all day, every day for a week,” complained Daily Excess columnist and one of the main instigators of the social media campaign against Jixmann, Carol Malcotter. “They followed me everywhere I went, it was absolute Hell, completely humiliating and an outrageous invasion of my privacy! This sort of mob bullying just shouldn’t be allowed – particularly when all I ever did was to express an opinion!” Professor Simon Smutt, however, Britain’s leading authority on pornography and Chair of the Department of Pornographic and Erotic studies at Lugnutt College, East Cambridge University, feels that the whole campaign against Jixmann was motivated by racism. “In the first place, it is untrue that his latest film plagiarised his rival Dick Weller’s work,” opines the academic. “It was clearly a satirical commentary upon the way in which Weller and the wider porn industry characterises black performers, from a black perspective.”

Moreover, according to Smutt, the whole campaign against Jixmann was instigated by a shadowy organisation founded and run by a discredited fellow academic. “The ‘Centre For Pornographic Standards in Adult Entertainment’, which seems to see itself as some kind of moral guardian for the world of filth, is simply a vehicle for Dr David Starkers to pursue his ridiculous ideas of racial purity in erotica,” he says. “He believes that it should be a vehicle for white dominance, with black performers in purely subservient roles – always depicted as being dominated, never the dominatrix. So, what offended him about Jixmann wasn’t alleged plagiarism, but instead that he was a black man in a position of authority over white performers, a black man directing white men and women in simulated sex. For Starkers, this was unbearable, so he set out to discredit Jixmann. With, as we have seen, tragic consequences.” Smutt, nevertheless, still doesn’t agree with the actions of those targeting the perpetrators of the campaign against Jixmann. “It just sends the message that bullying is acceptable as long as the targets are ‘bad people’,” he muses. “But the truth is that those who drove Jixmann to his death will never learn, regardless of the repercussions that befall them. They are utterly conscience-free and able to self-justify all of their heinous actions. It’s pointless stooping to their level as these bullies will always find a way to stoop lower themselves.”