The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), and anti-fascist comrades across the United States join in congratulating Searchlight magazine’s leading figure Gerry Gable on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Gable has been a beacon across the Atlantic Ocean, an uncompromising pillar of virtue, and a model for all of us to emulate. Gerry Gable’s leadership of Searchlight magazine for more than 50 years has brought honor to the British working classes and all people of good will. IREHR remains your true friends and colleagues in this fight for the dignity of all people, and thank Gerry for your work and stalwart character.
From our first moment of publication in November 1982, the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights has relied on Searchlight magazine for information in our article on that Labor Day weekend meeting at Chicago’s Bismarck Hotel of the Holocaust deniers from the Institute for Historical Review. By May 1983, IREHR ran a small ad for Searchlight in our magazine at that time, and noted that “Searchlight is the most informative anti-fascist, anti-racist monthly in the English language.” We noted that we would distribute the magazine in the USA, and I personally remember sending the magazine every month to a news kiosk outside the New York City public library. That August, we published a story about how Holocaust denier David Irving was attacking Searchlight in his Focal Point newsletter. It was “about the best endorsement we can think of,” IREHR wrote.
At that point in time, I did not realize the important role that Gerry Gable had played from the very beginning in building and maintaining this Searchlight institution.
I personally met Gerry Gable in April 1988, on a trip to the British Isles. Gerry drove me around to see the memorial to the 1936 battle with fascists on Cable Street in London, and otherwise gave me the short course on English anti-fascist history. I was working as the research director of the Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR) at the time, and our newsletter and program soon included information on the trans-Atlantic ties of British and American white supremacists. Because of our work with Gerry and Searchlight, we were able to catch Atlanta attorney Sam Dickson meeting British neo-Nazi leader John Tyndall at the airport. And in November 1990, when IREHR board member Dan Levitas was the CDR’s executive director and I was the research director, Gerry Gable came to the United States specifically to speak to a conference CDR held.
Over the decades the relationship between IREHR and Searchlight has remained solid, and our two—way communication has opened up many of the white nationalists worst kept secrets.
In 2014, when Searchlight celebrated its 50th anniversary of producing a monthly magazine, both Devin Burghart and I were invited guests. Today, we congratulate Gerry Gable on the importance of the institution which he has led for all these years, and wish him Happy Birthday on his 80th.
