RIP Brian Haw

Report just came in:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13828800

I heard David Icke paid for him to go to Berlin for treatment for his cancer. And odd finish to a consistent and righteous decade of protest. RIP.

consistent and righteous? haw started protesting against sanctions in Iraq, inspired by the mariam appeal, which, it turned out, was diverting money from the oil-for-food campaign to fund its political campaigning. so if Iraqi kids were dying under sanctions, the mariam appeal was part of the problem. don't think haw ever denounced this. he did find time to denounce the US govt for organising 9/11, though, which is why it is not at all surprising that he was backed by icke. he was a crank who was shamelessly indulged by the media.

did not know he was from redditch, though, which probably explains why he found living in a tent on a roundabout appealing. RIP.

I heard David Icke paid for him to go to Berlin for treatment for his cancer

treatment from a nutso quack:

http://gimpyblog.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/brian-haw-and-the-false-cures-of-quackery/

the telegraph obit is well worth a read:

His father had been a sniper in the Reconnaissance Corps during the war and was among the first to enter Bergen-Belsen after its liberation. Afterwards, he worked in a betting office. Twenty years after seeing Bergen-Belsen, he gassed himself in the kitchen at the back of the church. Brian was 13.

as an adult, he joined the merchant navy:

He returned from one voyage to do six months at a college of evangelism in Nottingham, after which he decided to embark on a freelance mission to bring peace to the world.

Northern Ireland during the Troubles was his first port of call. At Christmas 1970 he took himself and his guitar to Belfast, singing carols in the streets round the Shanklin and Falls Roads and handing out white peace balloons in Republican pubs.

Having, by some miracle, survived this adventure, he moved to Essex where he started a removals business, also working part-time as a carpenter. He married Kay, the girl across the road and they later settled on an estate in Redditch, Worcestershire.

But family commitments did not dampen Haw’s missionary zeal and in 1989, powerfully affected by the films of John Pilger, he set off for the killing fields of Cambodia. He stayed there for three months, but when he returned he found that people did not want to hear about it: “My church gave me 10 minutes in a midweek prayer meeting to talk about genocide,” he recalled.

He decided to refocus his crusade closer to home and in the 1990s continued his missionary work by taking disadvantaged local youngsters on family jaunts in his minivan. He was repaid by those he sought to help with bricks through his window and fireworks through the letterbox. When he sent a dossier on his problem neighbours to the CPS, his minivan was smashed up beyond repair.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8585399/Brian-Haw.html