BNP's fake AFA email is tribute to HOPE not hate's success

Some of our supporters have received an email today purporting to come from a group called "Real AFA" and claiming to "expose" Searchlight's HOPE not hate campaign. The language looks superficially leftwing and anti-BNP but the whole thing is a sham.

Behind it lies the BNP itself. It is full of the same lies that the BNP's chief lie-manufacturer Tony Shell has disgorged time and time again, combined with some nonsense copied from one or two pernicious "green anarchist" publications.

Most of it is not worth giving the time of day. But there is one point we would like to clarify to avoid any possible misunderstanding. The HOPE not hate campaign is not run by Searchlight Educational Trust but by Searchlight Information Services, which is not a charity. Money given to HOPE not hate is spent 100% on the campaign, that is on producing the huge quantity of leaflets, newspapers and other HOPE not hate material that our volunteers will soon be distributing around the country, the HOPE not hate bus tour in the second fortnight of May and the groundbreaking and highly effective online campaign run for us by Blue State Digital. It also includes paying decent remuneration (though no more than that) to a few additional people - trade union members - we have taken on to help our permanent staff ensure we can run the best possible campaign. This money does not benefit from any charitable concessions.

Searchlight Educational Trust is a separate organisation that carries out educational work against racism and in support of community cohesion. Its largest expense is quite properly on the people who carry out that work, just like a school's biggest expense is on its teachers. To try to attack SET because it pays its staff just shows how ignorant the writers of this nonsense are. How do they think educational work gets done?

That this email has been sent out now is proof of how hard we are hitting the BNP at the moment. The BNP' attempt to hijack Jesus came unstuck and they now have the whole of Christianity against them. We exposed a BNP organiser's despicable comments on how there was not a lot of point keeping disabled people alive. We revealed how the BNP, despite its attempt to dress in new clothes, still cultivates links with the most extreme nazis in Europe, most lately by means of the visit by the BNP's deputy leader Simon Darby to Milan, where he was greeted by Nazi salutes. And we have constantly exposed the BNP's fundraising scams.

Our exposés have hit the BNP hard. In London, where the fascist party needs only around 8.5% of the vote to get an MEP elected, the London organiser has admitted that the region has not raised enough money for a full-size leaflet for the mailout to every voter, so will have to make do with an A5 version.

Our campaign is, even at this early stage, so successful that political scientists from the London School of Economics and Trinity College Dublin recently predicted that the BNP is unlikely to win a seat in the European Parliament in June. That is, of course, not to say we can let up in our work even for a moment. The danger of the BNP getting one or more MEPs elected is still very real.

Be warned. There is no such organisation as "Real AFA". The email, while pretending to oppose the BNP, in fact is full of praise for the BNP's effectiveness and professionalism. It is no more than a rather pathetic attempt to silence the most effective anti-BNP campaign this country has seen to date.

And it will backfire on the BNP. Already HOPE not hate has received donations from people who have received the email, seen through its lies and shown what they think of it. If you want to show what you think about the BNP's barefaced lies, you can donate to the HOPE not hate campaign here.

Hope not hate

Racism cuts both ways - Don't let the BNP divide our communities

BNP targets young people in hate drive

It will be “the biggest and most ambitious strategy that this Party has ever undertaken,” promised a British National Party fundraising letter in September. The “Racism Cuts Both Ways” initiative will detail “the crimes against our people – rape, murder and discrimination”.

The conspiracy nuts of the BNP have long claimed that, in the words of party leader Nick Griffin, “the political elite, the media, the police and the courts are covering up an epidemic of racist violence against the long suffering indigenous people of this country”.

For the past two years the BNP has been putting together a list of “the forgotten victims”, researched by Alan Newark, a former left-wing Scottish journalist who defected to the far right many years ago. In an attempt to give the project authority Tony Shell, a “professional systems analyst” and the BNP’s Plymouth organiser, has written two reports “analysing” crime figures to prove the BNP’s thesis. There are lies, damned lies and statistics, and the BNP knows how to use all three.

Now their work has been distilled into a 12-page full colour brochure that will be sent in the first instance to MPs, members of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, London Assembly and House of Lords, and journalists. The BNP admits that most of them will bin it. It is intended as a provocation, “priming the fuses for our main attack”, the direct mailing of it to “large numbers of 18-year-olds, personally”.

The BNP claims to be targeting 18-year-olds because, “not only are these new voters with no loyalties to the old parties, but reaching out to so many young people will send the opposition frantic and guarantee publicity that will magnify our efforts tenfold”.

The fundraising appeal aims to raise £78,750 to finance the campaign, including £22,000 to print an initial 200,000 brochures and £45,000 for postage. With this they intend to mail out 10,000 brochures to “each key town and city in every one of the BNP’s 12 regions”.

Postage of £45,000 would only pay for around 120,000 brochures sent out individually. But the campaign will also be promoted by a “nationwide Truth Tour” using the “truth truck”, better known as the lie lorry, acquired after the party’s last big fundraising effort. It will start in Scotland and work its way south over one month.

The brochures will be distributed in schools where the BNP has enough activists, Simon Darby, the BNP’s press officer, told a journalist. Most school students are under 18, suggesting that the BNP will be very happy to hand it out to younger, less politically experienced, teenagers who might be more easily taken in by the glossy but viciously hate-filled publication.

The brochure is at pains to claim that the “injustices” inflicted on the “majority community” are “in no way the fault of immigrants themselves”, but caused by “the attitude of the ruling political elite”. But articles on “racist murder” and rape impart the opposite message. The page about “racist grooming” is especially disgraceful and clearly intended to incite race hate.

“All ethnic groups contain paedophiles” it states, “… But in most communities these sickos operate alone, ashamed of what they do. One community, however, is different. Wherever there are large numbers of young Muslim men, groups of them team up to lure girls – often as young as twelve or thirteen – into a nightmare world of sexual abuse, rape, beatings, drug addiction and prostitution. Some of these perverts are recently arrived ‘asylum seekers’, others come from settled immigrant communities and were born in Britain.

“But what all the Muslim sex gangs have in common – on top of their religion, with its low status for women – is that they never target girls from their own community. The vast majority of the victims are white, although Sikh, Hindu and West Indian girls are also targeted.” Note the attempt to show that the BNP has sympathy with BME communities that it perceives as more accepted by its target white audience.

Searchlight says

The BNP’s decision to target school children in its latest campaign is both predictable and despicable. Over the past few years the fascist party has launched Mothers Against Paedophiles in Keighley and Mothers Against Knives in London (hijacking a genuine campaign) and on both occasions it has been exposed and rejected. However, there can be no room for complacency and Searchlight will be preparing counter material to expose the lies the BNP is peddling.

Teachers’ view

Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, the largest UK teachers’ union:

“Action must be taken to prevent the BNP peddling this vile propaganda which, as always, is designed to promote division and intolerance. The fact that they are planning to ambush children, young people and parents at school gates demonstrates that there is no level to which they are not prepared to sink to peddle their hateful message.

“This demonstrates that the NASUWT was absolutely right to press the Government to include the activities of the BNP and far right in the guidance it has issued recently to schools on tackling extremism and that the Department for Children, Schools and Families was right to do so. The NASUWT will expect the Government to scrutinise any report the BNP produces and seek to bring the full weight of the law to bear to prevent its distribution and prosecute those involved in its production.”

White history month

At the same time as launching this poison, the BNP is promoting what it calls “white history month”. In the past the BNP has objected to “black history month”, which is celebrated in Britain every October. Now the fascist party has changed tack and trying to make out that it has no objection to black history month but white people should have their own equivalent.

This is all part of the BNP’s agenda of making out that “indigenous” white Britons are oppressed, second class citizens in their own country. Black history month started in the USA in 1926 because black history had largely been ignored. At that time, most representation of blacks in history books only referred to them as slaves or descendants of slaves.

Even now in Britain the history of black civilisations and the achievements of individual black people receive far less attention than white history. Hence the need for black history month, to redress the balance.

A “white history month” is in no way the same thing. White people in Britain are not discriminated against because they are white, they are not victims because they are white. White history month is purely and simply an attempt to promote a BNP myth.

The BNP has said it will distributed over 10,000 white history month leaflets in schools, universities and colleges. It intends to email and post material to head teachers, student groups, campus unions, scouts and brownie groups and other organisations involved with young people to promote this insidious campaign.

The BNP’s London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook is being roped in to help. The BNP says it will put on a white history month exhibition at City Hall and at pubs across the country.

The BNP’s lie lorry will tour Britain “meeting activists and campaign teams in towns, cities and universities”, presumably promoting white history month alongside the Racism Cuts Both Ways initiative. The two certainly go together.

And users of Facebook, Bebo, Myspace and other social networking sites should look out for the BNP spreading its propaganda there.

Report incidents of BNP activity

Please tell us if you come across any BNP activity to promote Racism Cuts Both Ways or white history month, especially in schools or other educational institutions, social networking sites or anywhere else. Email us here.

Racism cuts both ways