Calls grow for ban on Vergès

The Jewish Chronicle has reported Searchlight’s campaign to ban the visit of Jacques Vergès to London, where he has been invited to take part in a debate at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

The paper reports that Mike Freer MP, vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, hopes to raise the visit of French-Vietnamese lawyer Jacques Vergès with Home Secretary Theresa May.

Others are adding their voices to the campaign. A spokesperson for the Community Security Trust, which represents and advises the Jewish community on security and antisemitism, said: “It is hard to see how Jacques Vergès’ record of defending Nazis, Holocaust Deniers, mass murderers and terrorists can contribute anything worthwhile to a debate on international justice. This invitation smacks of the kind of attention-seeking sensationalism that can only damage the reputation of an institution like SOAS.”

And Karen Pollock, Chief Executive, Holocaust Educational Trust told Searchlight: “It seems perverse that any prestigious institution would welcome Jacques Vergès, a notorious figure, who over the decades has defended Nazi war criminals and Holocaust deniers with apparent relish – and whose extremely controversial views would surely undermine any serious academic debate.”

More information here

Searchlight

Clarifying the story: a statement from the Dean of Bradford

There have been a lot of claims and counter-claims about the position of the Dean of Bradford in the Atzmon affair so I thought it was best to ask the Dean himself to make the last word. This is a statement he sent me last night and I hope it clarifies his position and answers those people, for their own political reasons, who have accused me of lying and falsifying documents:

Statement from the Dean of Bradford 26 November 2011:

"Mr Gilad Atzmon has posted a statement of mine on his website (http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/hope-not-hate-is-caught-falsifying-documents-again.html) which he has used to accuse Mr Nick Lowles of falsifying documents and spreading lies. I do not support this accusation.

I want to make it clear that I do not regard Mr Lowles as a liar or someone who has falsified documents, and I apologise if in any way this impression has been given by me. I did not in my initial statement quoted on Mr Lowles' blog make a public call for Mr Atzmon's concert to be cancelled, and it was on this basis that I disagreed with the headline over my statement. However, I had indicated elsewhere in a mail seen by Mr Lowles that cancellation would be preferred, since (as I note in my statement quoted by Mr Atzmon) I would have had to have withdrawn the concert if it had been due to happen on church premises due to the controversy involved, and it is this indication which led Mr Lowles to write the headline as he did; although it did not represent my intention it was not an unreasonable action for him to take, and he was engaged in interpretation not falsification.

Mr Atzmon and his supporters believe in his sincerity, and those opposed to him do not. Assessing what Mr Atzmon actually believes is not easy owing to the contested nature of the evidence. What is uncontrovertible is the fact that a lot of people believe that he behaves in a way which is anti-Semitic, flirting with Holocaust denial, and racist: and this behaviour has caused a wide variety of groups to distance themselves from him. As a cathedral we believe in truth, peace and justice for Palestinians and Israelis, of whatever faith (or none); and we will continue to hold to that often uncomfortable position - a position which makes it impossible for us to offer a platform to Mr Atzmon."

Nick Lowles at Hope not hate

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

Dean of Bradford calls for Atzmon's invite to be withdrawn

The Dean of Bradford has added his name to the growing chorus of outrage at the decision of Raise Your Banners to invite antisemite Gilad Atzmon to perform for them in Bradford on Friday. Atzmon flirts with Holocaust Denial, Holocaust Deniers and is an antisemite and as such should have no place on a progressive platform. This is not a question of Palestine and Israel, nor is it an attempt to stifle freedom of speech. It is simply us, as anti-racists, demanding that a racist and antisemite should not be given a platform. The fact that Atzmon, and his supporters in Raise Your Banners, use information obtained from the BNP to attack us should be reason enough to shun him.

Anyway, I will go into this in more detail later but for now I would like to post a comment sent to me by David Ison, the Dean of Bradford:

"The Cathedral authorities were completely unaware of the nature of this musician, and in any case did not invite him. Our premises were hired by Raise your Banners (who have been here before, uncontroversially) who booked for a concert but told us nothing of the nature of the concert of the performers. We were not aware of any issues with this until we were contacted a few weeks ago by the Council for Christians and Jews expressing concern about anti-Semitism in the Cathedral - a concern which we completely share, as the Cathedral is committed as a Christian organisation to truth, justice and equality.

"We do not countenance or give permission for any form of racism or fascism, including anti-Semitism, to be given hospitality at Bradford Cathedral. Having asked for more information about Gilad Atzmon, it has only been in the last few days that we have received clear evidence of the nature of his public statements. In the event, the concert in the Cathedral had already been cancelled due to poor ticket sales; but it seems to be taking place in a smaller venue in Kala Sangam which is not connected with the Cathedral and over which we have no control.

"I am writing to the authorities at Kala Sangam to ensure they are aware of the issues raised by hosting a concert with this musician."

David Ison

Dean of Bradford

Hope not Hate

Far right on rise in Europe, says report

Study by Demos thinktank reveals thousands of self-declared followers of hardline nationalist parties and groups

The far right is on the rise across Europe as a new generation of young, web-based supporters embrace hardline nationalist and anti-immigrant groups, a study has revealed ahead of a meeting of politicians and academics in Brussels to examine the phenomenon.

Research by the British thinktank Demos for the first time examines attitudes among supporters of the far right online. Using advertisements on Facebook group pages, they persuaded more than 10,000 followers of 14 parties and street organisations in 11 countries to fill in detailed questionnaires.

The study reveals a continent-wide spread of hardline nationalist sentiment among the young, mainly men. Deeply cynical about their own governments and the EU, their generalised fear about the future is focused on cultural identity, with immigration – particularly a perceived spread of Islamic influence – a concern.

"We're at a crossroads in European history," said Emine Bozkurt, a Dutch MEP who heads the anti-racism lobby at the European parliament. "In five years' time we will either see an increase in the forces of hatred and division in society, including ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism, or we will be able to fight this horrific tendency."

The report comes just over three months after Anders Breivik, a supporter of hard right groups, shot dead 69 people at youth camp near Oslo. While he was disowned by the parties, police examination of his contacts highlighted the Europe-wide online discussion of anti-immigrant and nationalist ideas.

Data in the study was mainly collected in July and August, before the worsening of the eurozone crisis. The report highlights the prevalence of anti-immigrant feeling, especially suspicion of Muslims. "As antisemitism was a unifying factor for far-right parties in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, Islamophobia has become the unifying factor in the early decades of the 21st century," said Thomas Klau from the European Council on Foreign Relations, who will speak at Monday's conference.

Parties touting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic ideas have spread beyond established strongholds in France, Italy and Austria to the traditionally liberal Netherlands and Scandinavia, and now have significant parliamentary blocs in eight countries. Other nations have seen the rise of nationalist street movements like the English Defence League (EDL). But, experts say, polling booths and demos are only part of the picture: online, a new generation is following these organisations and swapping ideas, particularly through Facebook. For most parties the numbers online are significantly bigger than their formal membership.

The phenomenon is sometimes difficult to pin down given the guises under which such groups operate. At one end are parties like France's National Front, a significant force in the country's politics for 25 years and seen as a realistic challenger in next year's presidential election. At the other are semi-organised street movements like the EDL, which struggles to muster more than a few hundred supporters for occasional demonstrations, or France's Muslim-baiting Bloc Indentitaire, best known for serving a pork-based "identity soup" to homeless people.

Others still take an almost pick-and-mix approach to ideology; a number of the Scandinavian parties which have flourished in recent years combine decidedly left-leaning views on welfare with vehement opposition to all forms of multiculturalism.

Youth, Demos found, was a common factor. Facebook's own advertising tool let Demos crunch data from almost 450,000 supporters of the 14 organisations. Almost two-thirds were aged under 30, against half of Facebook users overall. Threequarters were male, and more likely than average to be unemployed.

The separate anonymous surveys showed a repeated focus on immigration, specifically a perceived threat from Muslim populations. This rose with younger supporters, contrary to most previous surveys which found greater opposition to immigration among older people. An open-ended question about what first drew respondents to the parties saw Islam and immigration listed far more often than economic worries. Answers were sometimes crude – "The foreigners are slowly suffocating our lovely country. They have all these children and raise them so badly," went one from a supporter of the Danish People's Party. Others argued that Islam is simply antithetical to a liberal democracy, a view espoused most vocally by Geert Wilders, the Dutch leader of the Party for Freedom, which only six years after it was founded is the third-biggest force in the country's parliament.

This is a "key point" for the new populist-nationalists, said Matthew Goodwin from Nottingham University, an expert on the far right. "As an appeal to voters, it marks a very significant departure from the old, toxic far-right like the BNP. What some parties are trying to do is frame opposition to immigration in a way that is acceptable to large numbers of people. Voters now are turned off by crude, blatant racism – we know that from a series of surveys and polls.

"[These groups are] saying to voters: it's not racist to oppose these groups if you're doing it from the point of view of defending your domestic traditions. This is the reason why people like Geert Wilders have not only attracted a lot of support but have generated allies in the mainstream political establishment and the media."

While the poll shows economics playing a minimal role, analysts believe the eurozone crisis is likely to boost recruitment to anti-EU populist parties which are keen to play up national divisions. "Why do the Austrians, as well as the Germans or the Dutch, constantly have to pay for the bottomless pit of the southern European countries?" asked Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the Freedom Party of Austria, once led by the late Jörg Haider. Such parties have well over doubled their MPs around western Europe in a decade. "What we have seen over the past five years is the emergence of parties in countries which were traditionally seen as immune to the trend – the Sweden Democrats, the True Finns, the resurgence of support for the radical right in the Netherlands, and our own experience with the EDL," said Goodwin.

The phenomenon was now far beyond a mere protest vote, he said, with many supporters expressing worries about national identity thus far largely ignored by mainstream parties.

Gavan Titley, an expert on the politics of racism in Europe and co-author of the recent book The Crises of Multiculturalism, said these mainstream politicians had another responsibility for the rise of the new groups, by too readily adopting casual Islamophobia.

"The language and attitudes of many mainstream parties across Europe during the 'war on terror', especially in its early years, laid the groundwork for much of the language and justifications that these groups are now using around the whole idea of defending liberal values – from gender to freedom of speech," he said.

"Racist strategies constantly adapt to political conditions, and seek new sets of values, language and arguments to make claims to political legitimacy. Over the past decade, Muslim populations around Europe, whatever their backgrounds, have been represented as the enemy within or at least as legitimately under suspicion. It is this very mainstream political repertoire that newer movements have appropriated."

Jamie Bartlett of Demos, the principal author of the report, said it was vital to track the spread of such attitudes among the new generation of online activists far more numerous than formal membership of such parties. "There are hundreds of thousands of them across Europe. They are disillusioned with mainstream politics and European political institutions and worried about the erosion of their cultural and national identity, and are turning to populist movements, who they feel speak to these concerns.

"These activists are largely out of sight of mainstream politicians, but they are motivated, active, and growing in size. Politicians across the continent need to sit up, listen and respond."
Voting trends

As a political party, having tens of thousands of online supporters is one thing but translating these into actual votes can be quite another. However, the Demos survey found that 67% of the Facebook fans of the nationalist-populist groups which put up candidates – some are street movements only – said they had voted for them at the most recent election.

Further analysis found that female supporters were more likely to turn support into a vote, as were those who were employed.

Observer

Claudia Dalgleish

Just been sent this screen grab.

Claudia Dalgleish, the ever vocal girlfriend of London BNP organiser Steve Squire is never short of something to say, most of it unpleasant.

Dalgleish aka Claudia Bryan originates from South Africa and is a good friend of the BNP's resident fruit loop Claire Khaw. Khaw was the lovely lady who said such pearls of wisdom as "The first half of Hitler's career was a roaring success. Hitler was a successful revolutionary and credit should be given where it is due"

It seems Dalgleish has turned her hand this time to a spot of anti-semitism.

For those that are unaware WPWW stands for "White Power World Wide". 1488 is frequently used by neo nazis as it refers to "The Fourteen Words" slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children" The slogan was first used by David Lane, a member of the white separatist organization The Order. The Order was an organization active in the USA between 1983 and 1984 and is probably best known for the 1984 murder of radio talk show host Alan Berg.

The 88 in 1488 is used among Neo-Nazis, H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, so 88 is taken to stand for HH which in turn means Heil Hitler.

Wonder what the BNP's token Jewish councillor Pat Richardson makes of this ?

HOPE not Hate

BNP leader Nick Griffin to be mocked at Pride London, tomorrow

British National Party leader Nick Griffin will be satirised and mocked at London's Gay Pride parade, tomorrow

British National Party leader Nick Griffin will be satirised and mocked at London's Gay Pride parade, tomorrow. Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell will march at the front of the parade with a placard featuring a doctored image of Nick Griffin with blue eye shadow, red lipstick and pink swastika earrings, captioned with the words: 'Nick Griffin, Queen of Fascism. Homophobe. No to BNP.'

Tatchell is a Patron of Pride London and helped organise Britain's first ever Gay Pride march in 1972. Speaking to PinkPaper.com, he said: "Griffin and the BNP are tin-pot fascists who deserve to be mocked and ridiculed. I'm satirising Griffin to debunk his grand political pretensions and to skewer his claim to respectability and legitimacy. He's a joke and my placard reflects that.

"Griffin has a long history of homophobia. His party is notorious for its racism, anti-Semitism, holocaust denial and Islamophobia. A disturbing number of past and present BNP members have criminal convictions for violence," he added. "The BNP has fought previous general elections on a pledge to outlaw homosexuality, jail gay people and to bring back Section 28. It has described AIDS as 'nature taking revenge' on gay men."

Pink Paper

A proudly diverse nation

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Daniel Pitt. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

Britain is a land built by migrants. After all, there was no one inhabiting these islands 50,000 years ago, and for most of human history there were no international borders. The emergence of the modern British nation state and the advent of a global economy brought with it the movement of capital in search of profit and the movement of people in search of work. Britain, home of the industrial revolution, saw successive waves of immigration from the 19th century onwards. It was driven by the needs of capitalists to find an adequate supply of workers. However, from the beginning, the capitalist class also grasped that the migration of cheap labour into the country provided them with a ready mechanism for dividing working people.. This was not automatic; it depended on an invented common identity of Britishness, which offered a false sense of solidarity between workers and bosses, while dividing native born from “foreign workers”. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the treatment of Irish workers who came to Britain in the 19th century to work on the canals and railways. They were forced to leave their homes—much like Roma people in Slovakia today—because of impoverishment or oppression, and usually both.

Our rulers have always tried to sow divisions among workers but there is a powerful history of class solidarity.The next time you walk down a canal towpath or ride a train think of the thousands of Irish labourers—the navvies—who died building the infrastructure of the industrial revolution, housed in the most squalid living conditions imaginable. Textile mill bosses also imported Irish workers. Initially this was often to use them as strikebreakers. In situations of sharpened competition in the labour market among low-skilled workers, it is not difficult to see how tensions arose. Karl Marx observed the process and got straight to the heart of the matter: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps… The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standards of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his own country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.” Marx went on to explain how this antagonism was kept alive by “the press, the pulpit and the comic papers” in much the same way that the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express do today, with their relentless attacks on migrants and Muslims. But there was another process cutting aganist the divisions between workers. The bringing together of workers in the factory system created a need for unity against the common enemy exploiting their labour. Despite the best efforts of the capitalists to stoke racism, the impulse to class solidarity was often stronger. Many leading members of the Chartists, Britain’s first mass workers’ movement in the mid 19th century, came from the ranks of Irish labourers. Class fighters such as Feargus O’Connor and James Bronterre O’Brien led British workers into struggle, as did other “foreign” workers like the black Chartist organiser William Cuffay. Unfortunately the Chartists were defeated, and racist ideas were able to fester.

The New Unionism of the 1880s brought a new wave of Irish activists into politics. Ireland was officially part of Britain at this time so there was no issue of immigration controls—it was the availability of work not controls that adjusted the flow. At the end of the 19th century millions of Jews from the economically undeveloped parts of eastern Europe fled poverty and persecution. State-sponsored anti-semitic pogroms killed thousands of Jews in Russia and Poland. Three million largely poor Jews migrated to the US and perhaps a quarter of a million to Britain. Ruling class figures responded with racism. Tory MP William Evans Gordon said in parliament in 1902, “Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders.” This racism paved the way for the Aliens Act of 1905, the first to limit immigration and which defined some groups of migrants as “undesirable”. It made it easier for racists to argue that Jewish people were a problem in British society - however, Jewish workers came together with other sections of the working class. In the 1930s fascist attempts to turn “native” Britons against Jews were defeated on the streets. The long economic boom after the Second World War saw capitalists respond to increasing demand for labour by again looking to workers from overseas.

This time they looked further afield in the British Empire—to the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent—for workers to plug the shortages in areas such as public transport and the hospitals. Black people soon found that the land of opportunity was also a land of racism. Some landlords and pubs in places like London and Birmingham put up signs saying, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. But socialists and trade unionists organised reception committees to welcome the new workers and to help them settle in. However there was no automatic unity among the oppressed. Some established migrants, who had become assimilated into British society, came to view more recent immigrants as outsiders, and at times as a threat.

Some British people of Irish backgrounds could be among the most antagonistic towards Black people, seeing their own “whiteness” as making them superior to African-Caribbeans. Post-war Britain’s open door policy wasn’t to last as the boom ebbed and turn into crisis towards the end 1960s. The Tory politician Enoch Powell who had once implored Jamaicans and others to come to find work in the “mother country”, now scapegoated black and Asian immigrants for the mounting problems faced by a British economy in decline. This was even though many so-called immigrants were in fact born in the country. The 1971 Immigration Act brought a shuddering halt to “primary” immigration to Britain. Future migrants would be the dependants of those already here and not new workers. But the rising racism, especially in the mid 1970s, led to a powerful anti-racist response that reached a crescendo with the formation of the Anti Nazi League (ANL). The ANL drove the predecessors of the Nazi British National Party (BNP), the National Front, off our streets. Today asylum seekers, living in forced destitution, are blamed for “ruining areas” and bringing crime. Or in the case of “economic migrants”, like those from new European Union countries in eastern Europe like the Irish before them, lowering wages.

It can sometimes appear easier to kick the “foreign” worker next to you, especially during times of low class struggle, such as after the defeat of the Chartists in the 19th century. Equally however, during times of rising struggle, divisions are overcome time and time again. A key task of socialists today is to harness that class solidarity to fight both against the bosses and in defence of the rights of all working people, regardless of spurious notions of nation and race. Socialists must act as “tribunes of the oppressed”, as the Russian revolutionary Lenin put it. We must oppose all racism and bigotry. Today that means standing up against Islamophobia and racism, and breaking the back of the organisations these twin poisons are breeding, the Nazi BNP and the English Defence League.

Islamophobia and antisemitism

There is some violent prejudice against Muslims in Britain today. But is there a more subtle insistence that they're really foreign?

The great thing about being in Dubai last week was being a foreigner once more. It's how I spent much of my childhood, how I grew up, and how I feel most at home; but it brings professional rewards as well as personal pleasures. I was for the first time in my conscious life in an environment where the most important thing about Muslims was not that they were Muslims. It gave me a moment of sudden awareness, like waking in a log cabin without electricity when all the background hum and tension of electric motors that you never normally hear is suddenly audible by its absence.

The people I was hanging out, and sometimes drinking, with were Muslim intellectuals whom I know and like in England. They're not in any way discriminated against in this country, as far as I can tell: their lives are not impeded by the kind of people who think that Muslims are a problem to be solved. The kind of crude and open prejudice that flourishes online – and go and look at comments on the Telegraph website, or the videos of Pat Condell, if you want to know what I mean – is very rare in liberal circles, and when we catch ourselves at it, we feel guilty.

But there is a more subtle and general sort of prejudice which holds that Condell is not an extremist outcast. Richard Dawkins, for example, has praised Condell, and used to sell his videos on his website, which reminds of the way that Oswald Mosley remained a member in good standing of the English upper classes until the outbreak of the second world war, despite his views on Jews.

What I realised in Dubai was that in England today Muslims can't escape being Muslims, any more than Jews in England in the 20s or 30s could escape being Jewish. They can't just be unremarkable, as Jews in England can be now.

In Dubai, or neighbouring Sharjah, being a Muslim did not matter in the same way. Obviously, people made a huge amount of fuss about Islam. But when you're in a room full of Muslim academics and students arguing about culture, or censorship, or why there is so little science in the Arab world, the arguments themselves make one thing wholly plain. Neither side is more Muslim than the other. None of the flaws of the Islamic world are essential or intrinsic to it. They may be widespread, and in some cases quite horrible. But they're all cultural and not just religious.

I don't mean by this that all the bad bits are cultural and all the good bits religious. That's both false and simplistic. Cultures can be both good and bad and both are still authentically Islamic. But the whole idea of an "essential" or "true" way of being Muslim makes little sense when looked at historically, no matter how important, indeed indispensable, that style of argument is between Muslims. The same is of course true about "real" Christianity, or, for that matter, "real" atheism.

We don't have any real difficulty accepting this about Christians in this country. Except for a few noisy bigots, it's accepted that nice, good Christians are just as Christian as nasty and vile ones: that Jesus would be just as much at home among the Quakers as in Ian Paisley's congregation; in fact most Guardian readers believe that he would like the Quakers more. Certainly this is true about Jews. No one really believes that Lionel Blue is less Jewish than the chief rabbi (unless the chief rabbi does).

But with Muslims, in Britain today, there is a feeling that the civilised, funny, clever ones aren't really proper Muslims at all. And don't think that these civilised, funny, clever people people don't notice it.

This is subtle and pervasive – more of a smell than a substance – and I'm not sure whether it's a very diluted version of the stench that comes off Condell or Robert Spencer or something essentially different. Either way, it is a smell of which I spend most of my life unaware, and Muslims notice much more often. I shall try to flare my nostrils a little more often.

Andrew Brown's Blog

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

Galliano sacked over racist rant

Shamed designer John Galliano has been sacked by fashion giant Christian Dior — after Oscar winner Natalie Portman today declared she was appalled at his racist rants.

Natalie — who is the face of a perfume made by Dior — slammed Galliano and said she would have nothing more to do with him. The Israeli-born beauty, 29, spoke out after we revealed shocking footage of Galliano declaring his love of Hitler and suggesting two women should be GASSED.

Christian Dior Chief Executive Sidney Toledano today said in a statement: "I very firmly condemn what was said by John Galliano, which totally contradicts the values which have always been defended by Christian Dior."

Galliano was suspended by the label last week after he was arrested for allegedly launching a vicious verbal attack on two people at the same Paris cafe where the video was filmed. The footage showed him directing vile abuse at two French and Italian customers. He told them: "People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed. I love Hitler."

A woman is then heard asking him if he had a problem. He added: "With you. You're ugly."

Asked where he was from, he said: "Your arsehole."

Natalie — who won best actress at the Academy Awards for Black Swan — said in a statement: "I am deeply shocked and disgusted by the video of John Galliano's comments that surfaced today. In light of this video, and as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr Galliano in any way. I hope at the very least, these terrible comments remind us to reflect and act upon combating these still-existing prejudices that are the opposite of all that is beautiful."

Last Thursday Galliano allegedly insulted Geraldine Bloch, 35, and threatened to kill her pal Philippe Virgitti, 41, in La Perle Bar.

Galliano, 50, turned up at a police station in the French capital today to deny all the charges against him and declared: "I'm no racist."

Ms Bloch has told cops he called her a "dirty Jew face".

None of those allegedly targeted by Galliano is Jewish.

Galliano, who was brought up in South London, has launched a counter-claim for defamation against Miss Bloch and Mr Virgitti.

A Paris detective said of the case: "The accused has insisted that he is not a racist, and certainly not anti-Semitic. On the contrary, he is taking legal action against his accusers."

Galliano's lawyer, Stephane Zerbib, has insisted the video has no value and that Galliano has never been anti-Semitic while working at Dior.

Sun

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

Hate crime figures published for the first time

Graffiti at a Manchester synagogue - 700 anti-Semitic crimes were reported

Hate crime figures for England, Wales and Northern Ireland have been published for the first time.

In 2009 a total of 52,028 crimes were recorded in which the offence was motivated by prejudice. Victims were targeted because of race, religious belief, sexual orientation, disability or transgender issues. Chief Constable Stephen Otter of police chiefs' body Acpo said: "By publishing this data...we hope to encourage victims and witnesses to come forward."

The vast majority were targeted because of their race - 43,426 (up from 39,300), and the others were classified as sexual orientation - 4,805; religion/faith - 2,083; disability - 1,402 and transgender - 312. An Acpo spokesman said 703 crimes were anti-Semitic.

Mr Otter, Acpo's lead for equality, diversity and human rights, said: "Hate crimes cause a great deal of harm among victims and communities. Publication of the data underlines the commitment of the police service to tackle hate crime, build confidence and encourage victims to come forward so that under-reporting is reduced."

Although data was not collated nationally before 2009, Acpo says it believes there has been a rise in all five types of hate crime.

Professor John Grieve CBE, independent chair of the government's Hate Crime Advisory Group, welcomed the data and said: "It represents a significant step forward in our understanding of the nature and extent of hate crime in England, Wales and Northern Ireland."

Prof Grieve, a former deputy assistant commissioner with the Metropolitan Police who set up a racial and violent crime task force at Scotland Yard, said: "The UK is amongst world leaders in the way that it responds to hate crime, but there is still much work to do. One of the greatest challenges is to reduce the under-reporting of hate crime. We welcome the government's commitment to increase reporting and we will be examining this data in the forthcoming months and years to better understand the extent of crime and to challenge where performance does not meet the high standards that the public rightly demands of the criminal justice agencies."

BBC

Neo-Nazis No Longer? Marine Le Pen Tones Down France's Far Right

The father of the French far-right National Front Party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a famously Holocaust-minimizing (he called the Nazi occupation of France "not particularly inhumane"), anti-immigrant and anti-European Union leader, is teetering toward retirement. But not before the National Front has yet another phoenix-like return from sworn obsolescence.

Political commentators throughout the middle of the last decade promised that the tough immigration policies of President Nicholas Sarkozy (at times so aggressive they seem pulled directly from the playbook of the extreme right) would siphon off voters from the right-wing margins and bring them under the umbrella of the center-right mainstream. Indeed, Sarkozy's controversial anti-burqa law (and fines that have already gone into affect) is believed to be meant to appease the rabid right wing. But while many far-right voters supported Sarkozy in the last elections, in the regional elections last month, the National Front surged ahead in the French rural areas, dampening any talk of their imminent demise.

Part of that success may be because the National Front has spent the last few years regrouping, reconsidering its position, and gently maneuvering a newer, younger, and, frankly, more beautiful face into the limelight. That new face belongs to Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie, and an elected member of the European Union Parliament for the last six years. "[S]he is widely expected to succeed Jean-Marie Le Pen as leader of the National Front, the persistent far-right party preaching French purity and exceptionalism, opposing immigration and the European Union, and which she wants to bring into the media age. More and more, she is the face of the party in television debates and national campaigning," The New York Times wrote last week. "She sees herself as having a destiny now, if not one so lofty as that of the party's emblem, Joan of Arc, chosen by Mr. Le Pen as a symbol of French sanctity and resistance to invaders."

In fact, Marine Le Pen, 41, has been jockeying for position behind her father for some years now, softening the image of the National Front with support for gay rights, women's rights, and, perhaps more surprisingly, given the history of the National Front, an outstretched hand to the Jewish community. (Whether they shake back is another story.)

As Anton Pelinka, professor of political science and nationalism studies at the Central European University in Budapest, and director of the Institute of Conflict Research in Vienna, told me a few years ago, "Europe has to be much more careful [than the United States] with respect to right-wing extremism, and for that reason, right-wing extremists claim to be something else - they claim to be much more moderate than they are in reality."

About five years ago, Marine began outspokenly condemning attacks on Jews by North African youth. "The French Jewish community, who are increasingly victims of attacks by Islamic radicals, should be able to turn to us for support," she told the Jerusalem Report in January 2005. It was a way of distancing herself from the other potential heir apparent to the head of the National Front, Bruno Gollnisch, a man who openly questioned the numbers of dead in the Holocaust - a means of minimizing the tragedy.

Marine also petitioned to march with the Jewish community of France after Ilan Halimi, a young Sephardi mobile phone salesman, was tortured and murdered by a rogue band of Muslim immigrants in January 2006. At first she was turned down, but some months later she marched alongside mainstream politicians in protest of the murder.

Le Pen's pushing back against the image of anti-Semitism - the British press has reported that Marine was furious with her father for his continued anti-Semitic outbursts - has been a smart move politically. Marine Le Pen knows well that the taint of anti-Semitism can roll back progress for a far-right party. "To be openly anti-Semitic," Anton Pelinka, the Austrian political scientist said, "even in Austria, could be the end of a political career" because of Europe's brutal 20th century history of the Holocaust. It has certainly marginalized her father – and by extension herself. She calls herself a victim of "collateral damage," from fallout around her father and her party's anti-Semitic statements.

Le Pen fille, has also spoken openly against both the hijab, or veil, and the burqa; she often makes what might be called a feminist argument for extreme right-wing politics - even though the far right has roots in conservative gender roles and Marine Le Pen herself - twice divorced and a working woman - is not particularly traditional. Of Muslim immigrants, "They have to adapt to our values," Marine Le Pen told me when I met her in the spring of 2006. We were at the headquarters of the National Front, in a suburb of Paris. "But our Republic must not adapt itself to Islam. Because some values do exist which are, effectively, contrary or opposite to ours. Equality between men and women is non-negotiable." She continued, "There are dozens of countries in the world that apply Sharia. But us, we will not change. You like it, or you don't like it. But you cannot [for example] attack a gay man because he is gay. Those, those are the values of France."

It is the traditional expression of National Front xenophobia on the one hand, and totally mainstream, on the other. Who on the left would argue against the point about gay men? Or equality between the sexes? That said, the context, purposefully, makes many uneasy. But that is the savvy oratory of the younger Le Pen.

"In France," Le Pen said, speaking in rapid French made husky by years of smoking, "our republic, our schools are facing pressure from radical and Islamist organizations. Teachers find it more and more difficult in some places to talk about the Holocaust. They can no longer evoke Darwin. Seriously! We cannot learn English. Because English is the language of imperialism. It is against this that we are fighting and that we accuse the French political class of having left this...to develop. To have done nothing to preserve our Republic and to firmly reaffirm the principles of the French Republic."

Knowing how the far right is perceived in French politics - in other words, badly, at best - Marine has continued to work to better her image. It particularly galled Le Pen the younger, a lawyer by training, as she watched the encroachment of then-interior minister and now-President Nicholas Sarkozy onto the traditional territory of the National Front. "We were the first to raise the alarm on globalization and its consequences," Le Pen told me. "We were the only ones to put in the center of the debate the problem of immigration by saying that the big influx of migrants was going to be the problem of the 21st century," she complained. "Some in the political class are looking to take over the branches of this debate for electoral reasons...I think they are saying the same thing we are saying to prevent us from saying it."

In 2006, Marine Le Pen launched a remake of her identity: by presenting, French style, a book, "A Contre Flots" - Against the Tide - and revealing, Oprah style, a weight loss and a new, more glamorous appearance. She is slim and nearly 6 feet tall. When we met she wore jeans and a filmy silk shirt. It is very unusual for a French politician to be so casually dressed when she meets with a journalist. Politicians are a class of people who favor well-tailored suits.

Marine Le Pen is seen as a softer alternative to the old guard of the far right. But there are those who question her Islamophobia, masked as feminism, and her attempts to modernize what has always been a bogeyman at the margins of French society. As Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right in France and a researcher at the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégique, told me a few weeks after I met Madame Le Pen: "People on the far right say Europe is no longer Europe, it is becoming something new, colonized by Islam and the values of Islam. This is a massive fear, not only on the extreme right, but among average people. This gives fuel to the extreme right." Marine Le Pen draws on that fear, normalizes it, and channels it as she jockeys for position at the helm of the National Front.

Sarah Wildman at Politics Daily

BNP under fire as veterans challenge claims made by 85-year-old ‘war hero’ supporter

Bob Head, far right, on a BNP poster. Look closely at those medals.

The BNP are facing embarrassing questions over the authenticity of a D-Day veteran featured on their website pledging his support and acting as a ­recruiting sergeant

Bob Head, 85, who describes himself as a hero and Normandy veteran, issued a statement last week calling on his “fellow patriots” to “fight against the destruction of our beloved Britain”. But since then apparent inaccuracies in Mr Head’s account of his involvement in the Second World War have come to light.

Last night the BNP were accused by anti-fascism campaigners and Second World War veterans’ associations of using the British armed forces to promote their own extremist politics, and of duping the public in advance of the General Election. Despite repeated requests, the far-right party refused to answer any questions about Mr Head’s wartime career, or to allow him to be interviewed.

The Sunday Herald repeatedly asked BNP communications officers to put us in touch with Mr Head. However, the party – despite promoting him online and putting him on posters as part of their election campaign – refused to put us in contact. Nick Griffin, the party’s leader, also refused to answer any questions about Mr Head’s military claims.

The questions are about:

Mr Head’s service

In his message of support to the BNP, Mr Head says he was “attached to the 51st Highland Division” and that “at just 20 years old I was involved in the Normandy invasion”. But there is confusion over the precise nature of Mr Head’s role in D-Day, and whether he took part in the initial invasion or arrived in France some time later. The 51st Highland Division only landed in France in the second wave of fighting in Normandy, after D-Day.

Mr Head also claims his division took part in Operation Market Garden, which included the attempt to take the Rhine bridges at Arnhem. But this was not the case: the 51st division was not involved.

George Batts, the national secretary of the Normandy Veterans Association, said the BNP should be “treated with the contempt they deserve” if untruths had been told about Mr Head’s role.

Mr Batts, 89, said: “A few of my fellow veterans had seen Mr Head on the BNP website and asked me if I knew of him, as they had never heard of him. There are thousands of veterans but it is odd that not one person remembers him or knows who he is. If he does exist, he is an idiot and he will not get much support from any Normandy veterans I know. I really would rather not see this kind of thing from one of our own. We could all now be tarred with the same brush.”

Mr Batts served with the Royal Engineers and landed in France on D-Day in June 1944. He said no “decent, legitimate party” would knowingly deceive the public over such an important event. “The best thing we can do is ignore both Mr Head and the BNP,” he added.

Mr Head’s medals

A photograph of Mr Head on the BNP website, which is also being used on billboard posters, shows him wearing nine medals. However, doubts have been raised about the way they are being worn. Military historians claim the top three medals are recognised as from the Second World War. However, there is confusion about the provenance of the lower set and how he is wearing them.

Maurice Cousins, a researcher for the campaign group Nothing British, which opposes the BNP, was one of a number of critics of the party who raised concern about the medals. James Bethell, director of Nothing British, added his voice to the concerns. “Time and time again the BNP seeks to hijack the memory of our military values and fallen heroes to promote their racist and extremist agenda,” he said. “Veterans up and down the country are revolted by the BNP’s tactics.

“No self-respecting soldier who fought the Nazis would lend their name to a party which promotes racism, homophobia, misogyny and anti-semitism. Griffin should sack any BNP member who masquerades with medals they do not deserve.”

Mr Head’s commander

Mr Head’s online message of support says he was “under the command of the legendary General Bernard Montgomery, or Monty as he was affectionately known”. However, General Montgomery was the overall British commander of the 21st Army Group. The 51st Highland Division was commanded firstly by Major-General Charles Bullen-Smith and then by Maj-Gen Tom Rennie.

Referring to concerns about Mr Head, Diana M Henderson, research director of the Scots At War Trust, said: “To be honest, the whole thing is just a bit sad. Many veterans are still here today and will no doubt be disappointed by this. But most will just shake their heads – after all, they were actually there.”

The source of Mr Head’s words

Last week, another Second World War veteran, Kenneth Riley, appealed for people to sign up to the Hope Not Hate campaign, which fights against the BNP and their policies. Hope Not Hate claim that, within hours, some of Mr Riley’s words were put into the mouth of Mr Head.

Such phrases as “Today, the war isn’t being fought on the battlefield – but in the ballot box” and “If I had my health I would be out there with them. But I can’t – so I’m writing to ask you to volunteer for me” appear in both of the men’s statements.

A statement on the Hope Not Hate website said Mr Riley was “furious when he was told that the BNP had taken his own words … and used them in a fundraising email”. It continued: “Ken fought the Nazis … He continues to fight the Nazis, in the guise of the BNP, today.”

After refusing to offer any information about Mr Head’s record and refusing the Sunday Herald the right to interview him, Paul Golding, communications officer for the BNP, said: “Unfortunately Mr Head is approaching 90 years old and I think it would be unfair on him to pester him with media interviews.”

Sunday Herald

Anne Karpf: Anti-Semitism is at the limits of irony

Racism against Jews is on the rise, but some of it masquerades as comedy, and that makes it complex to address

Is the closed season on Jews over? Are English Jews facing rising levels of violence and abuse? Anthony Julius certainly thinks so. The lawyer, best known for representing the late Diana, Princess of Wales in her divorce, but also the author of a book on T S Eliot and anti-Semitism, has written a capacious history of anti-Semitism in England, Trials of the Diaspora, out next week. In it he expresses his "provisional judgement" that the situation facing Anglo-Jewry "is quite bad, and might get worse".

Coincidentally, the report on anti-semitic incidents in 2009 by the Community Security Trust (CST), was published last week. At first view, it makes alarming reading, and seems to confirm Julius's worst fears. CST recorded 924 anti-Semitic incidents in 2009, the highest annual total since it began recording such incidents in 1984, and - after two years of falling numbers - an increase of 69 per cent from 2008.

But peer closely and the picture is more complicated. The main reason for the surge, CST noted, was the unprecedented number of anti-Semitic incidents recorded in January and February 2009, during and after the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Of course, this is no reason to rejoice: if someone is trying to thump you, the fact that they're screaming that it's revenge for what Israel is doing in Gaza isn't going to make you feel a whole lot better. It didn't help that during Israel's 2006 war with Lebanon, the Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: "I believe that this is a war that is fought by all the Jews." If the Israeli government (wrongly) elides Israel with all Jews, it's hardly surprising if anti-Semites do too.

These days you rarely hear the kind of unthinking middle-class anti-Semitism current in, say, 1961, the year in which An Education, the film based on Lynn Barber's memoir, was set. Philip French, in The Observer, wondered if the real-life counterpart of the headteacher (Emma Thompson), given to sneering rants about the Jews killing Jesus, would have been really so strident. Yet only a few years earlier, a teacher in my primary school declared one week that all Jews were rich, and the next that the Jews killed Jesus. (My Holocaust survivor parents, angry but also anxious, wrote anonymously to the headteacher. By the following week, the teacher was gone.)

If anti-Semitism of this kind seems to have disappeared altogether, we live in postmodern times where some of what looks like anti-Semitism isn't, but, conversely, some of what doesn't look like anti-Semitism in fact is. Consider the "philo-Semitism", for instance, of Michael Gove and Julie Burchill ("the Jews are my favourites"; "Jews do things so well"). Burchill's philo-Semitism is a form of anti-Semitism, I'd suggest, because it bunches all Jews together, as though we were a single, uniform entity. The idea that all Jews are wonderful is little different from all Jews being hateful: in both cases Jews are stripped of individual characteristics, and are nothing except Jewish - a view to which most racists happily subscribe. If Burchill, as is rumoured, converts to Judaism, she'll discover that some Jews are nice and others not - rather like the rest of the human race.

Today racism, it seems, can be ironic. I've heard of campuses where non-Jewish students josh their Jewish friends with comments like: "Stop hoarding the milk, you Jew." Is this too close to the bone, or is it fatally unsatirical to take offence? Some young Jews find it amusing, yet recognise that such playing with stereotypes can only be done between consenting adults - close friends with licence to shock one another.

It is also, they recognise, a dangerous game which, under the guise of playfulness, might also allow the venting of real prejudice. How far is it from Tottenham supporters calling themselves the Yid Army, to Chelsea fans chanting "Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz", as they do when the teams meet? Some non-Jewish Tottenham fans argue that, on the contrary, their happy embrace of the "Yiddo" label is a way of neutralising anti-Semitism.

But there are limits to irony. Last Monday, a new page opened on Facebook, called "Hi, I'm a Jew. I don't care about COD [Call of Duty, a video game mostly played by boys] or Periods, I just want your gold". By Thursday it had 3,040 fans, peddling the hoariest stereotypes of money-grabbing, wealth and noses. Another Facebook page is called "Racist Jokes". This includes such gems - hold on to your hats - as "What's the difference between a pizza and a Jew? A pizza doesn't scream when you put it in the oven", and "What's the difference between a Jew and a boy scout? The boy scout came back from the camp.'

That some of these postings are poorly spelt and written is no reassurance. There's bravado here, of course: teenagers thinking it's cool to be outlandish, following in a long tradition of crudely anti-Semitic jokes charted by Julius. These latest, though, are amplified by the internet's reach and anonymity, which not only allows you to reinvent your own identity but see other people's as equally fictitious.

Those young Jews who have protested have, of course, been accused of lacking a sense of humour (though one young Jew expressed disgust about "Racist Jokes" by commenting: "The person who made it is probs a fucking Paki who needs to go back to their own country"). Yet when a Jewish teenager directly confronted friends who'd signed up to the pages, they apologised and professed themselves ashamed. They'd made no connection between cyber anti-Semitism and the feelings of real, embodied Jews.

Modern anti-Semitism is a complex phenomenon, but Anthony Julius, for all his often thoughtful analysis, ultimately falls back on the elision of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and the notion that the Zionist is the Jew by another name. Perhaps the best way of countering such reductionism is to reverse it: the BNP's Nick Griffin and the Polish MEP Michael Kaminski have shown that neo-Nazi anti-Semitic sentiments and support for Israel are quite compatible.

We should never be complacent about anti-Semitism, but neither should we allow some Jews to exaggerate it, regard it as inevitable, use it to try and delegitimise criticism of Israel or see it as an altogether different kind of animal from other more socially accepted kinds of racism such as Islamophobia. Those who hate are rarely so discriminating.

Anne Karpf is the author of a family memoir, The War After: Living with the Holocaust (Faber Finds) and co-editor of A Time to Speak Out: Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (Verso)

IoS

We are still in the shadow of the Holocaust

Anti-Semitism is on the rise, which makes memorial day all the more vital, says Michael Gove

This Wednesday we remember the greatest crime ever inflicted by man against his fellow man. Holocaust Memorial Day allows us to reflect on the bleakest chapter in the history of the 20th century. And there is a special urgency in the call to remember this year, of all years - because the shadow of the Holocaust continues to fall over the world today.

Mass murder is still deployed as a political tool by tyrants, from Burma to Zimbabwe. Racism is returning to the streets of Europe, from St Petersburg to Antwerp. And, hard though it is to credit after the horrors of the last century, anti-Semitism is creeping back into the corridors of power.

We know that Nazi ideology still has the power to motivate evil men. From the Swedish fascist who tried to acquire the "Arbeit macht frei" sign which hung over the gates of Auschwitz, to the British fascists of the BNP, there is an ominous resurgence of extremist activity visible across our Continent. It is because we face a new fascist threat, and because the extremism of the BNP is mirrored in the equally toxic ideology of anti-Semitic groups such as Islam4Uk and Hizb-ut Tahrir, that we need, all of us, to make an additional effort to remember how the Holocaust started. And where it ended.

The history of the Holocaust is the history of a society which blamed the Jews for its miseries, sought to push them to the margins and then sought, literally, to make them vanish from sight. In our time we can see the same trends returning. The calls for boycotts of Jewish thinkers at Israeli universities, the rise in anti-Semitic incidents on our streets, the inflamed rhetoric of vilification which culminates in the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call to wipe Israel off the map, are all connected.

As the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, has so presciently pointed out, anti-Semitism is a virus which mutates. Originally it was the Jewish people's religious identity which came under attack, and the Church led a programme of forced conversion. Then, as society replaced religion with science as a source of authority, anti-Semitism mutated so that the Jewish people came under attack on racial grounds. Now it is Jewish identity expressed through the right of Israel to self-determination which is the focus of anti-Semitism. Israel, like any state, makes mistakes. Sometimes grievous ones. But many of Israel's enemies now risk repeating one of the greatest errors of history by infusing anti-Semitism with a new and toxic vibrancy. We see it in some of those who have attached themselves to recent anti-war campaigns, with Britons marching through the streets of London declaring "We are all Hezbollah now" even though Hezbollah is a fascist organisation whose leader is a Holocaust-denier who believes the Jews are "grandsons of apes and pigs". And we also see the apparent mainstreaming of anti-Semitism in comments such as those of a former ambassador who recently objected to the composition of the Iraq inquiry team because two of its members were Jewish.

When prejudice is unleashed in this way we are all affected. As the chief rabbi has pointed out, what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. The Nazis targeted gay men and women, Roma, the disabled and Christians of conscience. The BNP are, similarly, as homophobic, Islamophobic and plain, downright racist as they are anti-Semitic.

History teaches us many lessons, if we are willing to pay attention. And one of the most profound is that the best guide to the health of a society has always been how secure its Jewish community feels. Throughout history the freest societies, from 17th-century Holland to 20th-century England, have been those in which Jewish people have felt safest. And over the ages the surest sign that a country is moving away from liberalism has been a growing prejudice towards the Jewish community, whether Vienna a hundred years ago, Germany in the thirties or Russia in the last decade.

It is because that lesson of history is so important that Holocaust Memorial Day is so crucial. And it is because we must ensure the next generation learns those lessons that the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust is so vital. The Trust provides the tools for schools to communicate the lessons of the Holocaust – so that young people can understand the consequences of allowing prejudice to grow. The Trust provides schools with books, maps, images and artefacts from the past as well as a Bafta award-winning production containing the testimonies of survivors. And two students from every school in the country are given the chance to visit Auschwitz and see the site of mankind's most terrible atrocity with their own eyes.

As the survivors of the Holocaust grow older and we face losing their vivid living testimonies, so the risk of forgetting grows stronger, and with it the risk of repeating history's mistakes. That is why the Holocaust Educational Trust's work has never been more necessary, the lessons of history never more relevant and the act of commemoration never more important. Whatever else may divide politicians, the lesson of the last century is that the resurgence of anti-Semitism requires us all to unite against this most poisonous of prejudices.

Telegraph

US Neo-Nazi Lure Youth with Free Music Downloads

Another con-trick to promote anti-Semitism and white supremacy

American neo-Nazis are using deceptive free music downloads to lure youth and college students into anti-Semitism, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of the B’Nai Brith organization. It said the new tactics specifically target high school and college students through advertisements in school newspapers.

“While the hate mongers have used stealth tactics before, now they are taking it to the next level by attempting to trick unsuspecting students into logging onto sites that appear harmless, but in reality are promoting music with a white supremacist message,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.

A scheme for free music downloads was advertised in newspapers by Montana resident Kevin McGuire, who operates the Victory Forever racist website. McGuire tricked the school papers by changing his site when he placed ads offering music by independent artists, but after the ads were published, he returned the site to its usual white supremacist format.

The Victory Forever site claims to disseminate “white resistance” music as widely as possible and to “recruit vast minions of white youth to become soldiers in the war for white racial survival.” Its current site features a video of a diatribe against alleged Jewish control of mass media. McGuire also maintains a related website called “Fetch the Rope” that makes available racist CDs, swastika stickers and T-shirts for purchase at prices “cheap enough to hand out to the neighborhood kids.”

Last month, another neo-Nazi placed an advertisement in the student newspaper of Northern Kentucky University promoting Resistance Records, the group’s racist music label, and the music of white power bands.

Arutz Sheva

Twisted History

When an article of mine looking at the role of African, Caribbean and South Asian troops in the British army during the two World Wars was published on Remembrance Sunday, some people criticised me for “re-writing history in favour of the BME community.

So I thought I’d see what the BNP had to say on the subject, by way of comparison. To be totally honest, I hoped to find ammunition for another article like my original “They’re taking our Spitfires!” After all, making your political opponents look ridiculous is often a good way to defeat them.

Of course I didn’t expect to find anything about non-white troops fighting for Britain in the two World Wars; but I was surprised to find nothing about the white British troops in those wars either. There’s a picture of Churchill on the home page, but no profile – though figures of legend such as Hereward the Wake get one – and he’s not one of the “British Giants”. The section on defending us from invasion has a Spitfire picture, but while there’s an article on Boudicca, there’s no Battle of Britain.

Potteries historians note there’s no RJ Mitchell, nor James Brindley and Josiah Wedgwood. I guess Wedgwood’s politics were wrong, as social and political reformers are notable by their absence. Whole political movements are missing too – nothing on the Chartists or Suffragettes, and for a party supposedly all for the working class, no mention of the Levellers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs or the Jarrow Marchers.

Art and literature are clearly for wimps – Shakespeare gets a mention but not Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot or the Bronte sisters; no Wordsworth or Tennyson, and no sign of Dr Johnson (another snub to Staffordshire!). There’s a serious lack of the “Christian heritage” the BNP claim to defend too, but lengthy articles full of glossy illustrations on the “Gods of the Ancient Britons” and Anglo-Saxon gods. No Quakers, no Methodists – all that social reform and concern for justice and the poor must be totally the wrong values for the BNP!

And I thought that was about it – a version of history ending with the British Empire at its height full of the sort of uplifting stories of powerful men taught when a quarter of the globe was coloured pink – a sort of “Boys Own Yarns” meets “1066 and all that”. The makings of a witty little item, perhaps.

But it’s not that simple, and not actually funny at all when you look a bit deeper.

On every page of this site, there’s a flyer for a book called “March of the Titans” by Arthur Kemp. If you click on this, you can buy the book via the BNP’s merchandising site, or you can read it on line. If you do so, you’ll find the whole of human history twisted to support the following:

“revealed in this work is the one true cause of the rise and fall of the world’s greatest empires – that all civilizations rise and fall according to their racial homogeneity and nothing else – a nation can survive wars, defeats, natural catastrophes, but not racial dissolution”.

Arthur Kemp moved to Britain from a murky past in South Africa in 1996 and is responsible for writing the BNP’s education and training manuals and the content of their website. He also runs the party’s merchandising arm, Excalibur.

If you are under any doubts at all about the ideology still at the heart of the BNP, you’ll find it within the pages of Kemp’s book, in all its ugliness. Note that this isn’t just a link among many other links – it’s an integral part of the BNP’s history section. Some items on the main site are lifted straight from it – “British Genius” is simply Kemp’s list of clever white folks with the non-Brits cut out.

Still, it might not have done the BNP’s reputation much good to include Kemp’s analysis of the Second World War, where sympathies seem to be very much with the Third Reich. He’s full of praise for Nazi science and medicine, and their banning of vivisection, but draws a discreet veil over the issue of how such “progress” was made with the frequent use of unwilling human “guinea pigs”. Here are a few extracts on what Kemp calls the “Second Great Brothers’ War”.

Dunkirk – HITLER LETS BRITISH ESCAPE

By 26 May – 16 days into the campaign – the Allied army in the north was trapped along a coastal enclave next to the town of Dunkirk. For reasons which have never been explained (the most common belief is that Hitler wanted to let the British escape so as to facilitate a peace with them at a later stage) the German panzers were deliberately stopped outside the town.

So it was that when Winston Churchill became prime minister of Britain on 10 May 1940, his first act the next day was to announce that German cities would be targeted for bombing attacks. The same month the first German cities were bombed by British aircraft. The German air force however avoided bombing British cities, concentrating on the strategically more important airfields and ports, launching the first of these major raids during August 1940.

The Blitz STARTS IN RESPONSE TO BRITISH AIR RAIDS

In the interim, British bombers had been raiding German cities for almost four months: finally, after a bombing raid on Berlin itself, Hitler authorized the Luftwaffe to start bombing British cities in return.

Nazi atrocities are given a sinister positive gloss: note the phrases “granted euthanasia” and “mercy killings” for the murder of disabled people.

In all, some 5,000 retarded and deformed children were granted euthanasia by the German government before the end of the war – with each case being individually reviewed by a specially appointed committee. The policy of administering euthanasia to retarded and deformed children was then also extended to incurably insane adults. Thanks to the German habit of keeping meticulous records, the exact number of incurably insane adults granted euthanasia is known: 70,273. Although the adult euthanasia project was conducted in secret, it was impossible to conceal such things from the German public, and by 1941, news of the mercy killings had been leaked. Growing public pressure on the Nazi government forced the abandonment of the program in that year.

The Concentration Camps

Nazi Germany is however most known for its concentration camps, and particularly those in which large numbers of emaciated and dead prisoners were discovered at the end of the war, and which have become synonymous with any image of that era. The first concentration camps were set up soon after the Nazis came to power, with the best known being Dachau, which is situated to the north of Munich.

These camps were in fact large prisons, and the prisoners were sentenced by civil courts to fixed terms of imprisonment which depended upon the crime committed. These crimes could be overtly political – membership or activism in the banned Communist Party was common – but was also extended to all other crimes, including conventional criminal activities such as theft or robbery. Eventually homosexuals were also interned: although this would only occur quite a while later.

All things said, to have been a Jew in Nazi Germany could not have been a pleasant experience: but, as the over 4.3 million claims against the post war German state from Jews who suffered as a result of this persecution, (by 1998 the German state had paid out over $50 billion in reparations), certainly far fewer died than what is most often claimed. Increasingly, all the evidence urges a complete revision of this aspect of the history of World War Two.

The effect of the Jewish factor was a primary reason for the outbreak of the war and lay behind much of the Allies’ double standards when reacting to German and Soviet aggression at the beginning of the war.

So much for Griffin’s claim to have left the bad old days of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism behind him; this book so keenly promoted by the BNP also says:

The well known Jewish propensity for business and the ability to accumulate vast amounts of money – a phenomena well known to this day – was the source of much original anti-Jewish feeling.

Whether by deliberate plan or accident, the situation has arisen whereby Jews have ended up dominating the mass media forms of both the USA, and to a slightly smaller extent, of Western Europe. The ownership of the mass media by a small group of Jews is well documented and full details are easily obtainable on the Internet. Given the long association between Jews and assorted left-wing causes, varying from hard-core Communism to all manner of pro-Black activities, it is therefore not surprising that the mass media then also mirrors an uniformly pro-non-White message in its portrayal of current events and opinion. This Jewish domination of the mass media means that what is generally construed as ‘public opinion’ is in fact always presented in a way which is as sympathetic as possible to Jewish interests.

This Jewish domination of the media can, and does, have serious consequences, so vividly illustrated by the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.. These events were triggered exclusively by the unflagging US support given to Israel against the Palestinians. The fact that the USA – and much of the West – continues to support Israel at any cost – including the deaths of thousands of its own citizens – is the surest evidence yet of the power of the Jewish lobby in both the mass media (which generates ‘public opinion’) and of the Jewish lobby’s famed control over the US government, and to a lesser extent, the governments of Western Europe.

Note particularly the claim that “These events were triggered exclusively by the unflagging US support given to Israel against the Palestinians”. Consider for a moment what our local BNP councillors might have to say if such a comment was made by, say, a Muslim student union officer…

And in case you think it’s just the Jews Kemp despises, here are a few words about Christianity, from the people who are telling us they are the true defenders of the faith:

The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.

So it was that Christianity came to be the dominant religion of Europe – the first religion to convert by mass murder. The original White religion had never tried to convert followers upon pain of death, and had never waged a war in its name – and as such it was psychologically unprepared to do battle with a Middle Eastern religion which engendered a genocidal fanaticism amongst its followers. Once the Christians had run out of pagans to kill, they turned upon themselves in a violent and bloody fratricidal conflict which saw the Church split and the various protagonists kill each other in a crazed blood lust.

I ’m an agnostic, and my point here is not to defend Christianity, or for that matter Judaism or British strategy in World War Two; it’s to highlight the BNP’s hypocrisy. Their enthusiasm for our “Christian” heritage and sudden keenness to see it promoted in schools is surely exposed here as just another means to divide “us” from “them”.

Remember that this book was written by one of Nick Griffin’s right-hand men, who strongly influences party ideology. The new website might look pretty flashy, but it’s just a new set of sheep’s clothing for the same very dangerous wolf.

Pits'n'Pots - The Radical Press

EasyJet apologises for trivialising the Holocaust in in-flight magazine

Berlin's Field of Stelae Holocaust Memorial which
commemorates the six million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide

EasyJet yesterday withdrew all copies of its in-flight magazine after it published pictures of designer-clad models posing in Berlin's Field of Stelae Holocaust Memorial which commemorates the six million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide. After Jewish campaigners accused the airline of 'trivialising the genocidal massacre of Jews', easyJet withdrew all copies - estimated at 250,000 - and issued a 'profuse apology'.

Labour MP Denis MacShane, who heads the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, said: 'This is further evidence of the banalisation of anti-Semitism.'

The Field of Stelae Memorial is a 19,000 square metre site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or 'stelae' arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. It is designed to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. It is run by the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which said it does not permit commercial shoots and 'grants permission only to projects which are related to the memorial, the Holocaust or some aspect of commemoration'. The Foundation Memorial said it will be contacting the airline 'in order to clarify the circumstances of the photo shoot'.

A spokesman for easyJet said it 'profusely apologises to anyone who may be offended by the inappropriate fashion photo shoot at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin featured in this month's issue of the in-flight magazine.

'The magazine is produced by INK, an external publishing house, and easyJet were not aware of the images until they appeared in print. As a consequence we are now reviewing our relationship with the publisher and are withdrawing this month's issue from all flights.'

The airline said it was 'appalled by this insensitive and inconsiderate photo- shoot, the aim of which was to highlight some of Berlin's iconic landmarks and certainly no offence was meant'. The memorial, which cost £22million, was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, 60 years after the end of the Second World War.

Daily Mail

Kaminski admits wearing 'fascist' symbol

Michal KaminskI, the Polish MEP at the centre of the controversy over David Cameron’s European alliances has admitted he wore the symbol of a totalitarion group, claims he had previously denied.

In an interview with the JC, Mr Kaminski was asked if he had ever said he was proud to wear the Chrobry Sword [pictured, left], the symbol of the National Radical Camp (ONR). Formed in 1934, the extreme rightwing, nationalist ONR- Falanga was largely a student movement, but practised violent anti-Semitism including attacks on Jewish students, buildings and businesses, organised boycotts of Jewish businesses and attacks on left wing groups. The group used the medieval symbol of the Mieczyk Chrobrego – the Chrobry sword. Mr KaminskI categorically denied knowledge of wearing the Chrobry sword symbol.

He told the JC: “No, I never wear it. I don’t even know which symbol you are referring to.”

But Mr KaminskI later issued a clarification, where he admitted he had worn the badge. He said: "I did wear the sword, which was used around a millennia ago to crown Polish Kings, on my lapel on occasions. After 1989 it was used as one of the symbols of the Christian National Union and many Conservative politicians would wear it, including politicians now in the Civic Platform.

“In recent years it has been taken as a symbol by the Far Right. Although it is not the same, there are similarities with how the BNP in Britain has taken the Union Jack as their symbol. When I felt the symbol started having this meaning I stopped wearing it and I asked the rest of my party to stop too.”

He added: “I acknowledge that it is possible that my pronunciation was unclear, so I am happy to clarify his position on this controversial symbol."

JC

BNP blames Zionists for EDL

BNP leader Nick Griffin has claimed that the English Defence League is being manipulated and directed by Zionists to create a race war on the streets of Britain. Trying to distance the BNP from any potential problem, Griffin and his deputy Simon Darby have set out in a audio message their position on the hooligan-based group.

And surprise, surprise – it’s all the fault of the Zionists. Griffin explains how he initially thought the EDL was a State-sponsored honey trap to embarrass the BNP but now he doesn’t believe that even they would do that. In fact, he argues, there are far more sinister forces at work.

It is Simon Darby who begins to point the light on those behind the EDL. “It’s been set up by a powerful organisation,” he tells his leader. “People with the power to manipulate, who are used to manipulating and have the organisational structure, the facility and the financial clout to promote it.”

“Let’s spell it out shall we,” Griffin responds.

Darby laughs, nervously. “Who’s going to do the spelling?”

Obviously not him that's for sure!

“I’m going to spell it out,” his leader adds pompously. He goes on to pin the blame on those responsible.

“Spelling it out in simple terms – you look at the owners at the Daily Express, the Daily Star and their interests. This is a Neo-Con operation. This is a Zionist false flag operation, designed to create a real clash of civilisations right here on our streets between Islam and the rest of us.”

He rants and raves a bit more, before adding: “I’ve no doubt that this is something designed to spark physical clashes between Muslim communities en bloc and the people who are coming in to hold a demonstration. They are out of it. The people who are going to get it in the neck, who are going to get the blame when it all goes wrong, are ordinary white working class communities. The people behind this are pushing for a low level civil war.”

From railing against the support given to the EDL from the Daily Star, he concludes that the real agenda of these Zionists is a civil war on the streets of Britain and “nuke” Arab countries in the Middle East.

Now while Griffin is right to be alarmed and even outraged at the support the Daily Star is giving to the EDL – something we shall be taking up very shortly – his conclusions contain traditional nazi anti-Semitism. Suddenly the actions of one newspaper owner – if indeed it has reached that level – suddenly becomes an international Zionist conspiracy. The actions of a single British newspaper suddenly becomes the work of a "powerful organisation" who are "used to manipulating" and hell bent on a world war.

The Jewish community in Britain is totally alarmed and appalled at the rise of the EDL and the potential conflict it might cause. They are appalled because they have a proud history of opposing racism and fascism. But even if you look at it from a self-interest perspective there is no sense. Why would British Jews want race war on the streets as that would ultimately only lead to increased support for extremist groups – on all sides – and so increased terrorism for which the Jewish community would be a target.

As for the Daily Star I think it simply running an anti-Muslim campaign with an ‘English Nationalist’ agenda. Its support for the EDL follows the platform it has given over the last couple of years to the English Democrats, of which the Star’s TV critic Gary Bushell is a leading member.

Griffin is scared, though not necessarily for the reasons he gives in the interview. The EDL, backed by the Daily Star, is gaining momentum and the BNP could lose out. The hooligans following the EDL are increasingly voicing their contempt for the BNP, believing the fascist party is more interested in good jobs in Brussels rather than defending the white race back home. There is now talk of the EDL turning itself into a political party and the BNP is getting left behind.

And I have to be sceptical over Griffin’s concern for a civil war on the streets. The Oldham riots were triggered by a gang of white men running down a street attacking Asians and their property. At the next BNP meeting, attended by Griffin, these men were given a standing ovation.

If Griffin was serious about opposing the EDL then he would immediately expel any BNP member associated with it. And he could start with booting out a BNP candidate in a forthcoming council by-election in the West Midlands who attended a recent EDL protest!

Hope not hate

The BNP’s real concern is race, not Islam

Here’s what I said in a recent piece for eGov monitor that is causing a lot of fuss in certain quarters:

"There are a number of factors involved in the rise of the BNP as an electoral force, and I do not think that a sudden conversion of large numbers of white Britons to hardline racist sentiment is one of them. The question of Islam is one factor. Recently, I have been accused by the usual suspects of not bothering to properly examine the BNP’s anti-Islamic rhetoric because I don’t take anti-Muslim bigotry seriously enough or don’t really care about it. At worst, it has been implied that I am an anti-Muslim bigot myself or, to use the catchphrase, an ‘Islamophobe’.

This approach indicates a complete failure in understanding of the true nature of the BNP’s anti-Islam campaign, and the fact that writers who are supposedly anti-fascist should choose to attack a report aimed at exposing racism is disappointing to say the least. The reality is that Griffin and co don’t really care about Islam. Griffin may be an odious figure, but he’s not a complete idiot, and he knows very well that Britain is not on the verge of turning into an Islamic State.

Following his strategy for making the BNP electable, Griffin has tried to steer the party towards populist issues, picking up on fears and resentment among the electorate in an attempt to use such issues as a Trojan horse for his underlying racist agenda. The truth is that the BNP hates Muslims because they are predominantly brown skinned. In ‘white nationalist’ ideology, everything ultimately boils down to an obsession with race."

Just to clarify for those who seem to think the babbling of Bob Pitt and iENGAGE should have made me change my position, let me reemphasise the fact that I still stand by it. I have written on this topic on a number of occasions so I feel no need to ‘justify’ myself, but for ease of understanding, here’s how I see it:

Imagine you’re a ‘white nationalist’ leader who has spent his entire ‘political’ career in the wilderness. You’ve tried and tried to make white people see the ‘evils’ of ‘race mixing’ and the hidden hand of ‘the Jew’, but have had no success. Finally, you realise that the only way to get any chance of power is to tone down the rhetoric and rebrand yourself as a populist nationalist. In order to shake off the ‘fascist’ label and thereby to hopefully win votes you decide to start using words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ instead of writing about your love of the SS and talking about using ‘well-directed boots and fists’. In order to appeal to white Britons who are worried about the effects of immigration but who are not ideologically racist, you stop talking about ‘racial purity’ and start talking about ‘identity’ instead.

This doesn’t get you very far and you really need an ‘issue’ around which to campaign. Nothing is forthcoming but then comes 9/11 and then 7/7. You note the rise in hostility towards Muslims and you also notice that on a parallel track a hatred for asylum seekers is becoming more common. Now, you’ve decided that the only way to get power and to ‘ethnically cleanse’ Britain through a process of mass deportation of non-white citizens is to appear more moderate and in touch with ordinary people’s concerns. So, with the rise of anti-Muslim feeling, you decide to jump on the bandwagon.

“But,” your old comrades say, “the Jew is the real enemy, not Muslims.” You try to reassure them that the new tactics are the only way forward and that for now the anti-Semitism needs to go back into the closet. After all, you tell them, “The proper enemy to any political movement isn’t necessarily the most evil and the worst. The proper enemy is the one we can most easily defeat.” You go on to tell these fellow ‘white nationalists’ that “there is a piece of plain realpolitik that those who attack the BNP stance on Islam should also take into account,” which is that:

“They are perilously close to entrenching themselves in political dead ground from which there can be no escape. Instead of working to take advantage of the biggest crisis that the genocidal multi-culti ‘experiment’ has ever faced, they are in danger of turning themselves into a despised, powerless and doomed cartoon caricature - a composite of Tokyo Rose, Lord Haw Haw and Jane Fonda. Truly, they are living examples of the old adage that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then as farce.”

You find some success with this approach, and you also note how successful anti-Islam campaigning is turning out for other neo-fascists on the Continent who have had a similar ‘conversion’ to ‘moderation’. For tactical reasons, you bite the bullet and reach out to Jews - “They can’t call me a Nazi then,” you think, “plus, they control the media anyway so I may as well try to please them.” In addition to this, you think, by adopting a superifically pro-Jewish stance you can also make use of the very language that has haunted you all your life - ‘anti-Semite’, ‘Jew hater’, ‘fascist’, ‘Nazi’ - and throw it at Muslims. After all, who could think that you’re the bad guy when you’re sticking up for the Jews and defending Western civilisation against those who would destroy it?

You continue to lead a dual campaign. On the one hand, you appear largely obsessed with Islam and ridding Britain of Muslims, but on the other, you maintain your true racial beliefs. The fact is, you are still ‘wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples’. You see Muslims and asylum seekers as easy targets to begin with. With them, you can talk about culture and tax payers’ money being wasted. You don’t have to try to explain your ideologically racist worldview which revolves around beliefs about a well planned conspiracy by ‘international Jewry’ to destroy the white race through immigration and the promotion of race mixing.

Through this strategy you eventually find yourself elected as an MEP. Many white people who are not ideological racists or fascists have bought into your anti-Islam message. Many of these people are unaware of the fact that you want to start by deporting Muslims and then move on to deporting all non-white people from Britain. And lots more of them know about your past but think you’ve changed: “Look at the website, look at the magazines, it’s not about race any more,” they say.

The funny thing is, it’s not just your voters who think that. Even some left-wing and Muslim writers start to believe it, too.

Edmund Standing writing at Harry's Place