Left-Wing Hackers Break into Neo-Nazi Server

Left-wing computer hackers have reportedly broken into the secure server of one of the world’s largest neo-Nazi groups, copying more than 30,000 pieces of data.

Members of the anti-fascist left-wing group Daten-Antifa on Friday, Aug. 29, managed to break the access codes and enter the databank of Blood and Honour (B&H), a neo-Nazi organization that has been banned in Germany since 2000.

“Now some people in the far-right extremist scene are going to get very nervous, including activists from the NPD (Germany’s far-right National Democratic Party),” Guenther Hoffmann from the Center for Democratic Culture told the Frankfurter Rundschau on Saturday.

According to Daten-Antifa, 31,948 pieces of data were collected clandestinely from the B&H server, including 500 from Germany. This indicated that the international network is also used by members of the German neo-Nazi scene, which authorities had previously suspected.

Katharina Koenig from the Action Alliance against the Right in Jena told the Frankfurter Rundschau that evidence had been found that B&H concerts had taken place in Germany and that German extremists had organized far-right concerts abroad.

Koenig said that the new information would be helpful to police, although the data was gathered illegally.

Founded in the UK in the 1980s by punk rock musician Ian Stuart Donaldson, B&H uses mainly music to spread its neo-Nazi ideology across Europe.

The name Blood and Honour stems from the motto of the Hitler Youth: “Blut und Ehre.”

Deutsche Welle
____________________

In an Indymedia US post the "Data Anti-fascists" responsible for the B&H break-in have made the entire contents of the forum available to interested parties: This site is very important for the world-wide neonazi-network. Information about ten thousand users from all over the world, private messages and boards are now public and can be used for anti-facist actions.

http://indymedia.us/en/2008/08/33280.shtml

Nazi collaborator living peacefully in Germany, avoiding arrest

A Lithuanian citizen convicted of collaborating with the Nazis and persecuting Jews during World War II is living peacefully in a small town in Germany.

As a member of the Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian Security Police, Dailide arrested Jews who were trying to escape the Vilna ghetto and handed them over to the Germans. He lied about his wartime activities on his U.S. immigration application after the war, was stripped of his American citizenship in the 1990s, and was ordered deported in 2003 following an investigation and legal proceedings that lasted more than a decade. Dailide fled arrest and settled here in Kirchberg, Saxony, where he has been living ever since.

Dailide is in ninth place on the the Simon Wiesenthal Center's most recent list of the 10 most wanted Nazis. A Vilnius court convicted him of war crimes in a trial that began in 2005, but he has remained free. Last month a high court in Lithuania ruled that he would not go to prison, partly because of his frail health. However, this Haaretz reporter saw him walking around town last week and carrying home his groceries.

Dailide, 87, lives with his wife in a modest apartment at Torstrasse 13, across the street from the town hall. His name is on the mailbox and intercom at the entrance. Dailide's German-born wife, whom he met in 1945 after escaping Lithuania, has relatives in Kirchberg, a town of 7,000 in what was formerly East Germany.

They live on his wife's German pension of 300 euros a month, and the remaining profits from the sale of their house in the U.S. Dailide's American Social Security privileges were revoked.

Dailide's conviction for war crimes relied on documents and testimony concerning a certain October 1941 night, when Dailide arrested 10 Jews who were attempting to escape from the ghetto, and another occasion on which he arrested two Polish Jews. What happened to those he arrested is not known, but it is safe to assume they were murdered along with 94 percent of Lithuanian Jewry, which numbered 220,000 people before the war.

Dailide's name surfaced in documents found in Lithuania's archives, which were examined after the Baltic state won independence. The Vilnius court rejected Dailide's protestations of innocence, and ruled he had lied in his testimony. Despite that, the court refrained from sentencing him to prison, as is permissible by law. The prosecution appealed this leniency, but the appeal was rejected last month. Jewish organizations say this is typical of Lithuania's refusal to punish Nazi collaborators.

Efraim Zuroff, who heads the Wiesenthal Center's Israel office, yesterday called the court's failure to sentence Dailide to prison scandalous, "and attests to the manner in which the Lithuanian government refuses to deal with the past."

Zuroff, who worked steadily to bring Dailide to trial in the U.S. and later in Lithuania, said the case is "a classic example of how a lack of political willingness to contend with the crimes of the past, along with extenuating circumstances stemming from advanced age, are letting Nazi criminals off the hook."

More than a dozen Lithuanian collaborators have been tried, but not one has gone to prison, a fact Zuroff says contributes to rising anti-Semitism in the Baltic country.

'I'm innocent'

Last Wednesday, Dailide opened the door to his apartment and invited this Haaretz correspondent and a local reporter to come in. Dailide's wife, who suffers from Alzheimer's and cancer, was reclining in her bedroom. Taking care of her is one of the reasons Dailide has remained free. He said he uses a tube to feed her.

During our hour-long meeting Dailide exhibited an excellent memory for details, but had trouble concentrating at times. The walls of the darkened apartment are decorated with photos of his family in the U.S. - his two sons live there - and of himself and his wife during the decades they spent in Cleveland, Ohio, and Florida. On the couch were numerous self-help books, a daily newspaper and dictionaries.

Dailide insists he is innocent. The documents used against him are misleading, he contends, based on a colleague's erroneous record in October 1941. In the other case, he had signed an arrest warrant on behalf of a policeman who was illiterate, he said.

He recounted his escape to Germany in 2004, when he was afraid U.S. authorities were going to arrest him. "I took my car, packed a few things and fled the house. I slept in motels and used phone cards to contact my family. A neighbor drove my wife to meet me periodically. A priest from Cleveland contacted a priest in Toronto, who agreed to put me up. I didn't use credit cards, I put our house up for sale, and I managed to cross the border into Canada using my Lithuanian passport. My wife met me in Toronto, and we flew from there to Frankfurt, took a train to Zwickau and arrived in Kirchberg."

Dailide revealed that despite the Lithuanian court's ruling that he undergo a new medical examination following his conviction, he has never been reexamined. "Last year my lawyer in Lithuania received a letter from the court demanding that I come to Lithuania for medical examinations. They noted that the trip would cost about 500 euros. We replied that we do not have the money - and they dispensed with the examination."

All of the information regarding the state of Dailide's health evidently stems from a few check-ups he had at his lawyer's recommendation during the trial in 2005. "Naturally I wanted to be acquitted in the trial, but nobody wants to go to prison in any case," he said.

He claims he suffers from chronic back pain and arthritis, and that he takes medication for high blood pressure.

A spokeswoman for the Lithuanian court said in response: "A medical board that convened for two years ruled that Dailide's state of health does not allow for his incarceration."

She said she would need to check whether the court had refrained from reexamining him. The results of her inquiry had not arrived as of press time.

'Everyone collaborated'

How is it that someone convicted of collaborating with the Nazis can live in Germany?

A German lawyer who specializes in immigration cases explained that the European Union's Nice Treaty gives everyone - even if convicted - the right to choose where to live. The treaty stipulates that Germany can deport an EU citizen only if he or she is causing "significant damage" to the public. Dailide apparently does not meet this criterion.

Dailide's neighbors became familiar with his story six months ago when a local paper ran a photo of the house under the banner "War Criminal in Kirchberg." A store owner in the adjacent building said she was shocked at first, but calmed down after she inquired into the details.

"He didn't shoot anyone, right? So he collaborated, so what? Everyone collaborated in that period," she said.

Haaretz

National conference on September 27th

We are pleased to announce a follow-on conference on September 27th at the Queens Walk Community Centre, Nottingham starting at 11am.

 The purpose of the conference, to which we invite both regional and national organisations, is to have an open discussion about what we do, from now on, to counter the BNP nationally but particularly in the East Midlands region.

 An excellent start has been made in this area as a result of our protest on August 16th. Despite the invocation of the Public Order Act, and some very aggravating difficulties, we managed to have a legal and peaceful protest that was continuous from soon after 9am and remained there until 2:30 pm. At its peak it attracted approx 500 people. A march was held in the middle of the day organised by the Unite Against Fascism group.

 We do not know yet whether the BNP intend to hold another festival in Derbyshire next year. If they do, we hope for your support to stop it with more vigorous campaigning and a greater number of protesters if it actually goes ahead.

 If they don’t, we will still need to do an awful lot of work not only to drive them back from the position they have achieved, with both councillors and members, after 30 years of existence in Amber Valley, but also to stop any further advances of the BNP in the East Midlands area and elsewhere in the country.

 As a result of the protest, we now have a sizeable, very active and optimistic Stop the BNP group in Amber Valley.

 We hope you will join us on the 27th September to discuss how we might do these things. We will be holding a planning meeting on the week-end of 13th-14th September to which we will be inviting sponsors.

 Organisations wishing to sponsor please notify the organisers at the email address nobnpfestival@riseup.net

 Download leaflet for conference from this link

Stop the BNP’s RWB

BNP to honour ‘martyr’ with rally as Asian neighbour gets eight years for manslaughter

The British National Party has said that it will hold a rally in honour of its first claimed martyr, whose Asian killer was jailed for eight years for manslaughter yesterday.

Keith Brown, a father of eight and friend of the party leader, Nick Griffin, was stabbed to death by his neighbour Habib Khan, a Muslim community leader. A judge said that the dead white man and his skinhead son had both been involved in acts of racial aggression towards the Khan family.

The BNP said that it will hold a rally in Stoke-on-Trent on September 20 to protest about the case and Staffordshire Police’s handling of the long-running neighbours’ dispute. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) announced that it had cleared the force of any blame.

Officers had dealt with more than 100 complaints in five years from the feuding families.

Khan, 49, had been cleared of murder but was found guilty of manslaughter after a jury heard that he stabbed Mr Brown, 52, with a kitchen knife during a row on the pavement.

Judge Simon Tonking said that although Khan was acting in defence of his own son, his action in stabbing Mr Brown went beyond that which was reasonable. Khan had to be punished with “a significant custodial sentence”.

Julia Barker, the mother of Mr Brown’s children, said: “There has been no justice done. We knew it wasn’t going to get done. They are always crying out this racial abuse. They attacked our family. Mr Khan had a panic button put in, Mr Brown didn’t. Both should have been treated equal. When it was our family, nothing was done. The police let our family down as far as I am concerned. Me and the rest of my children will never be able to forget what happened that day. It is a disgrace. He’s got away with it.”

The far Right has portrayed Mr Brown as the “first nationalist victim of Islamic jihad against Great Britain”. Stoke’s BNP councillors shouldered the coffin at his funeral, which is posted on YouTube.

Michael Coleman, a BNP councillor in Stoke, where the far-right party is now placed second only to Labour in the popular vote, said: “We have a man here who has been murdered in the street. It is an outrageous betrayal of justice. Staffordshire Police . . . go softly with ethnic minorities [unlike] the indigenous population. We won’t put up with being treated like this.”

An IPCC investigation released yesterday cleared the force of any blame. Len Jackson, a commissioner, said: “The evidence suggests that on a number of occasions Staffordshire Police attempted to resolve the issues between Mr Brown and Mr Khan. However, no one could have anticipated that this long-running neighbour dispute would have such a tragic outcome.” The Khans were given a panic button after Mr Brown’s teenage son Ashley beat his middle-aged Asian neighbour unconscious.

The police had attempted mediation between the two families but found Mr Brown “immovable”.

The IPCC discovered that the BNP became involved when one of Mr Brown’s friends suggested that a BNP councillor could help with the neighbours’ dispute. The BNP alleged that police had refused to study a homemade DVD offered to them showing a member of Khan’s family kicking Mr Brown’s knee. However, the IPCC said that the DVD only showed a young Asian man apparently making a kicking motion. Mr Brown is off screen, no contact can be seen and, although there is good audio, no sound comes from Mr Brown.

Minutes of that meeting between police and the BNP describe the DVD as showing an argument about the location of a fence and make no mention of any crime.

The Browns claimed that the police ignored incidents where the Khans poisoned their puppy and cut their brake leads, but no records of such complaints were discovered.

Times Online

BNP's fraudulent 'Preston Pals' lie machine steps up production in North-West

The Bamber leaflet - a clear incitement to religious hatred

Parts of the North-West of England, primarily around Lancashire, are being treated to a BNP-produced leaflet that seems to have been penned by the ever-despicable Tony Bamber, the former fundholder for the now defunct Lancaster and Preston branch of the far-right party and a former candidate for the Tulketh ward in Preston in 2006. The leaflet campaign appears to be part of an attempt to get the branch up and running again in time for the Euro-elections.

Bamber, in keeping with the BNP's long-established tradition of jumping on any available bandwagon, formed a fictitious group a couple of years back, which he called the 'Preston Pals', a reference to the company of volunteers from Preston who were eventually formed into 'D' company, 7th Battalion, the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, to fight in World War I.

In the Battle of Bazentin-le-Petit on the Somme in 1916, 200 out of the 250 in the battalion were killed in action and the surviving Pals were then further reduced in number through redistribution to other battalions. A short and bloody history but one of which Preston is rightly proud.

Sadly, while appropriating the Preston Pals name and claiming on his latest leaflet that the current bunch (which is actually the remains of Preston BNP) have taken the name 'in honour' of the Pals, he then goes on to state inaccurately that they became the 5th Battalion, a mistake that shows precisely how much respect he actually has for the Pals.

The Royal British Legion (RBL) has roundly condemned this misappropriation of the name by the BNP, with its spokesman Patrick Leavey saying; '[The Preston Pals] sacrifice should not be besmirched by people engaged in political campaigning for such an ugly cause. We condemn this leaflet, its contents, and those who are disseminating it'.

This is not the only reason for condemning this filth. The leaflet is headed 'the heroin trade - a crime against humanity' and goes on at great length about how Muslims are responsible for the 'heroin trade' in Britain, stating;

'Before the Islamic invasion, it was almost impossible to find heroin in our land.'

Invasion? Isn't that a slightly loaded word and one that seems to encourage religious hatred?

So was it possible to find heroin in Britain before say, the 1960s? Yes, and a little bit of research would show Bamber and the BNP that they are misleading their readers. But before we go on to that, let's get things into perspective.

The very first chart I came across on the internet on doing a search, tells me that deaths from heroin and morphine in England and Wales for 2005 hit a shocking 842 - although that's possibly not quite so shocking when compared to the deaths caused by alcohol and tobacco for the same year, which added up to a staggering 93,127 - none of which, amazingly, the BNP has yet claimed as the responsibility of Muslims, though doubtless they will if we give them enough time.

That the BNP doesn't really care about these tragic deaths is clear from an appalling article written by the party's legal advisor and obvious lunatic Lee Barnes back in March of this year, following criticism from the parents of Rachel Whitear, an addict who died in her bedroom and whose image was used in an acclaimed campaign against drug use. Rachel's parents had objected to the use of her picture to bolster the BNP's warped racist ideas of who holds responsibility for the drug trade. Barnes' response was unequivocal;

'The idea we should treat with reverence the image of their dead junkie daughter is repulsive...the idea we should ask your permission to use the image of your dead junkie daughter is not something we need to do.'

A despicable statement and one that would have had him thrown out of any real political party on the same day that it was made.

However, back to the leaflet and its ridiculous assertion that 'before the Islamic invasion, it was almost impossible to find heroin in our land'.

Strange then, that, at the end of the nineteenth century, the underworld of London - Limehouse, Whitechapel and all the area around its docks which were then riddled with opium dens - was searched during the hunt for the murderer who became known as Jack the Ripper. In fact, around that time and long before, opium dens were found in the dock areas of all major cities, though heroin use around the world has been going on for centuries.

The art of the sweeping statement is not lost on Tony Bamber. His current leaflet states;

'For all intents and purposes, Muslims are exclusively responsible for the heroin trade.'

This will not sit well with those who have, through the course of their work, taken a quick look at the history of the heroin trade only to find that the most enthusuatic traders in opium in the late eighteenth century were the British, who were aggressively exporting it from India and importing it into China, creating, by the mid-1830s, some twelve million addicts.

The Opium Wars were sanctioned by the then British Government purely to achieve their economic and territorial ambitions, which included smuggling huge quantities of opium into China estimated to be 15 tons in 1730, 75 tons in 1773. By the 1820s, 900 tons of opium per year was then exported into China and 1,400 tons per year by March of 1839. The trade from China itself is decreasingly rapidly nowadays thanks largely to the Communist government and its violent suppression of opium growers, which should please the BNP but strangely, doesn't.

Moving nearer to now, there are many people who remember the opium/heroin trade being centered on the so-called Golden Triangle of Burma, Thailand and Laos, and also Vietnam, during the mid-nineties, when rumours abounded of immense slave farms which produced astonishing amounts of opium which was then refined into heroin and transported back to the US with the collusion, it was frequently alleged at the time, of the US military.

Even now, the Golden Crescent of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan is far from the sole producer of heroin. Mexico and Columbia contribute vast amounts as do a number of other South American countries, though the traffic from those tends to be primarily for the US market.

One of the things Bamber forgot to point out on his leaflet was that, up until 2004, Pakistan was considered one of the biggest opium-growing countries. However, the efforts of Pakistan's Anti-Narcotics Force have since reduced the opium growing area by 59%.

Then of course, there is the cutting or dilution of the heroin that reaches these shores. Very little pure heroin gets as far as the consumer and what does, generally kills them - most is diluted with all kinds of crap in the never-ending fight for vaster profits. Ninety percent of that industry takes place here, by home-grown criminals or criminal organisations like the decidedly non-Muslim Mafia. Where heroin is concerned, crime is international and certainly cannot be laid at the feet of any one race or religion, no matter how much the BNP might try to distort reality.

In its desperation to have a go at Muslims, the BNP - as it always has - ignores the facts or only produces half-facts to support its racism, its hatred of Islam, its lies and its fraudulent claims to being a real political party. It is not. It is nothing more than a rabid band of racist buffoons led by a con-man. The likes of Tony Bamber fit right in.

Our advice to anyone who receives one of these leaflets is to report it to the police as incitement to religious hatred. I've already done so - if we all do it, we can eventually get the vermin who deliver this rubbish off our streets.

White riot: The week Notting Hill exploded

Police make a tactical withdrawal during
the riots which followed the 1976 Carnival

Today, Notting Hill is one of the nation's most exclusive enclaves, home to the rich, famous and fashionable. But it hasn't always been an oasis of affluence. Fifty years ago this week, it was gripped by the worst racial violence ever seen in Britain. Mark Olden hears the inside story of the riots and their aftermath

As darkness fell and the Notting Hill Carnival drew to a close last Monday, Europe's largest street party descended into mayhem. For more than two hours a mob of around 40 young men fought running battles with police on the streets of west London. The roots of the violence may have been different, but the images of flying bricks and bottles, of broken glass and other debris, evoked memories of 50 years ago.

Back in August 1958, Notting Hill had been seething with violence all summer.

Then, the west London neighbourhood was a place of grimy streets and decrepit, overcrowded tenements, a far cry from the chi-chi neighbourhood it is today. The Saturday before the area finally exploded, nine white youths had embarked on what one of them called a "nigger hunting expedition" around Notting Hill. They were armed with iron bars, blocks of wood, an air pistol and a knife. By the time they'd finished, five black men were in hospital, three in a grave condition.

But it was the following Friday – 29 August 1958 – when the touchpaper was really lit, igniting the worst racial violence Britain had ever seen.

It started with a minor domestic dispute between a black man and his white wife. Majbritt Morrison, a young Swedish woman, was arguing outside Latimer Road Tube station with her Jamaican husband, Raymond, who happened to be a pimp, and also happened to have had his windows smashed recently.

A white crowd soon materialised to defend Majbritt (who didn't want to be defended), and a scuffle broke out between them and some of Raymond's West Indian friends. By the following evening, a 200-strong mob were rampaging through the streets of Notting Hill armed with weapons, including sticks and butcher's knives, shouting "Down with the niggers" and "Go home you black bastards".

Johnny Edgecombe was one of those who just managed to escape. Edgecombe had arrived in Britain from Antigua in 1949, encountering the widespread casual racism which saw landlords turn him away from properties, and pubs refuse him drinks. In 1963 he became embroiled in the Profumo Affair (Edgecombe lived with Christine Keeler), one of the heaviest political sex scandals of the last century. But before then he ran a shebeen in Notting Hill, an illicit club where people would come for a smoke of weed and a drink, in a property belonging to Peter Rachman, the notorious slum landlord.

He was getting his car fixed in Oxford Gardens when he heard the crowd drawing nearer. "There's this mob of white folks, and they're calling for blood," he recalls now. "I thought 'Shit, it's time to get out of here.' I tried to drive out of the area but I hit a red light on Ladbroke Grove. I drove straight through."

PC Geoffrey Golding, in a statement preserved in the National Archives, caught the "extremely hostile mood" of the mob: "They were shouting abusive remarks at us, such as, 'Why are you helping the black bastards, you are a lot of nigger lovers.' A group of white youths shouted 'Come on you fucking coppers if you want to fight.' A shower of bottles were thrown and smashed in the road in front of me...."

Soon the newspapers were carrying graphic accounts of the unrest. "In one street where some of the ugliest fighting has taken place," said The Times, "your correspondent found a group of men in a public house singing 'Ol' Man River' and 'Bye Bye Blackbird' and punctuating the songs with vicious anti-Negro slogans. The men said that their motto was Keep Britain White." In the same report, however, black and white children are described playing together "just after a violent incident in which a coloured man was chased down a street by white youths."

As outsiders poured into the neighbourhood by Tube and bus to watch and encourage white locals violently drive out the recently settled West Indian immigrants, the Daily Mail ran an incendiary piece headlined 'Should We Let Them Keep Coming In?', calling for tighter immigration controls.

After three days of constant rioting, though, the tide finally turned. A group of mostly Jamaicans retaliated by throwing home-made Molotov cocktails on to the baying mob outside their base, the Totobags Café at 9 Blenheim Crescent. As the white crowd backed away, a few of the West Indians gave chase waving machetes and meat cleavers.

Before the West Indian fightback, the police, despite mounting one of the biggest operations of the decade, had struggled to contain the crowds. But now the white gangs had effectively been broken, and within 48 hours an uneasy calm at last settled on Notting Hill. In total, 108 people were arrested, and despite numerous injuries, almost miraculously, nobody was killed.

In their immediate aftermath, the Notting Hill riots sparked worldwide debate. Along with the Suez crisis, they were – according to Colin MacInnes, who fictionalised them in his classic novel Absolute Beginners – a defining event in post-war Britain: the moment when any British claims to moral leadership in the world evaporated.

Ivan Weekes, who'd arrived from Barbados in 1955 and was living in Notting Hill during the riots, believes their impact was more profound than Toxteth, Brixton or any of the major civil disturbances that followed, because: "They shattered the whole concept of [Britain as] the 'mother country'. Those of us who were on the front-line were in psychological no man's land, thinking 'What's next?'"

Exactly half a century on, much of Notting Hill is an exotic playground for bankers, media professionals and celebrities, and a place MacInnes might barely recognise. Estate agents trumpet its cosmopolitan vibe, and the number of residents earning more than £50,000 a year is double the national average. The carnival, founded in a spirit of resistance from the embers of the riots by the black activist Claudia Jones, is a symbol of multicultural Britain.

But what remains of the old Notting Hill and its original inhabitants? How do they see the world 50 years after some of them jeered and attacked their new black neighbours in a forlorn attempt to keep Britain – and Notting Hill – white?

In truth, there have always been two Notting Hills: the affluent south with its gleaming Victorian town houses, and the more deprived north. But when one talks of Notting Hill's original inhabitants, one's really talking about the white working class of Notting Dale.

Its unofficial borders west of Ladbroke Grove's busy main artery, and north of the grandeur of Holland Park, the Dale was first populated by brick makers and pig farmers. By the middle of the 18th century the pigs outnumbered the humans and the infant mortality rate was more than 50 per cent. "In a neighbourhood studded thickly with elegant villas and mansions," reads an article in Charles Dickens's Household Words journal, "[Notting Dale] is a plague spot, scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London." By the 1950s, it was a place of deep tribal loyalties, where everyone seemed to be bound by blood or marriage, and whole families sometimes lived in one or two rooms in crumbling tenements with no bathrooms and outside toilets.

"They talk about the poor of Africa today," says Carol Meehan, 68, who's lived here all her life, "but we had poor like that." So tightly knit was the Dale, that Carol's friend Jean Maggs, also 68, was deemed the product of a mixed marriage: "My dad was from Shepherd's Bush, my mum from Notting Hill."

The Dale of 50 years ago, they recall, was a world of bookies' runners working the street corners, milkmen collecting bets as a sideline, and rag and bone men in horse-drawn carts. It was the weekly wash at Silchester Baths, sugar sandwiches for tea, gas lit streets and smog so thick you could barely see where you were going. You could just tie a piece of string to your door to keep it shut and nothing would get nicked. The fiddles, though, were endlessly inventive. "You'd rob your own gas meter, or cut off pieces of lino to shove in the meter until there was nothing left covering the floor," says Meehan. Illegal gambling and drinking dens, known as spiels and afters, appeared faster than the law could close them down.

When West Indian people arrived into the area, Maggs says, some men saw them as a threat: to their jobs, their housing and their women. To go out with a black man would have been seen as a sacrilege.

Both women were teenagers during the riots. Meehan's dad got arrested (but was cleared after a black man gave evidence for him), while Maggs remembers one of her friends going to the aid of a black man lying bleeding on the street. "She helped bandage him. Her brother went mad and wouldn't talk to her for six months."

To understand one event, locals are fond of saying, you have to understand the 10 events preceding it. And though the argument outside Latimer Road tube is commonly seen as starting the riots, 80-year-old June Grey – who's lived in the Dale 78 years and raised six children there – believes the origins are also rooted in an incident she saw from her window on Bramley Road while waiting for her husband to come home late one night.

"Right opposite my house were two knocking shops [brothels] and people didn't like it," she says. "One day three boys from nearby White City thought they'd do something and threw milk bottles at the windows." It's believed one of the houses belonged to Raymond Morrison. The riots only really then escalated, she says, after the papers started covering them.

But there were also other, more sinister elements at work. As the West Indians had arrived in greater numbers in Notting Hill throughout the Fifties, so the far right had followed. Oswald Mosley's Union Movement leased an office at 47 Kensington Park Road, and Britain's war-time fascist leader held regular, well-attended meetings in the area in 1958. Meanwhile, the White Defence League, in the form of the Nazi Cambridge graduate and former schoolteacher Colin Jordan, also ran its operations from nearby 74 Princedale Road.

Despite attracting enthusiastic crowds, Mosley was ultimately humiliated in Notting Hill: losing his deposit when he stood as a candidate for North Kensington in the 1959 general election. Jordan, whose pamphlet entitled Black and White News sold for sixpence (Typical headlines: 'Negroes Lead in VD'; 'Black Gets White Girl'; 'Kings of the Drug Trade''), was an even more marginal figure. A Special Branch report in the National Archives from 1959 states that "in spite of wide publicity", only eight people attended a typical meeting – at which it was contended "that the Jews are the cause of the influx of coloured immigrants".

But some locals, nevertheless, were receptive. "Mosley never got big because of Hitler," said one of his former Notting Dale supporters, in an interview with The Independent shortly before he died. "There wasn't much difference between him and Hitler. He fucking hated everyone. He hated foreigners. Wanted Britain for the British." He paused. "I supported him. We used to hang around them [Mosley's people] because they'd give us money. "

On the third day of the riots, he was arrested on Elgin Crescent shouting abuse at passing blacks. "The riots started off with a false rumour that a black man had raped a white girl. It was just fighting which grew bigger and everyone joined in. We were bored," he said, matter-of-factly.

While much of the old Notting Dale was bulldozed into oblivion in a wave of 1960s slum clearances, shadows of the past remain.

Though the likes of Elle Macpherson, David Cameron and Stella McCartney now live in the area, not everyone in Notting Hill has money. And while it might seem that way, not every traditional boozer has been transformed into a gastro pub, nor has every working men's café been supplanted by a Starbucks or Caffe Nero. In the tatty Kensington Park, formerly known as the KPH, black and white old-timers drink together, whiling away their days in a manner unimaginable 50 years ago. A couple of streets away, on Walmer Road, is the Rugby Club. Founded in 1884 to "benefit the poor of Notting Dale" by a former Rugby School pupil who came here in the spirit of a wide-eyed missionary going to Africa, it's where successive generations of local youths have been kept off the streets, and characters who've been members since their childhoods 50 or 60 years ago still come to play bingo, reminisce and eat their Sunday roasts.

The sociologist Colin Prescod was only 13 when the riots erupted around him. He's lived in the same house in Notting Hill all his life, and his mother, the Trinidadian actress Pearl Prescod, was at the forefront of the anti-racist struggles of the late 1950s alongside the carnival's founder, Claudia Jones. The events of half a century ago, he argues, should not be divorced from their wider context.

"To think that Britain's history is one of only white working class racism towards black people is a nonsense. Race has been one of the key things in the whole of the history that makes Britain 'great'. Racism was at the heart of empire. It was institutionalised by the ruling class," he says.

For the black community, the riots were a watershed. "We lifted after the storm from victimhood to resistance. What happened was that a humiliated community became more militant and said, 'We're here, and we're here in a big way.'" Organisations such as the Coloured People's Progressive Association and the Racial Action Adjustment Society were founded in wake of the riots, and Prescod says, played a significant part in black British history in the 20th century.

This history, he says, is what the new residents and property dealers are buying into when they come to "sophisticated" Notting Hill. "I sometimes feel like some Masai village elder sitting outside my hut watching the new arrivals, wondering if they know anything about what made this area what it is."

"Black and white didn't mix back then," June Grey says. "Now they're our strongest allies. I've got a black son-in-law and he's everything a husband and father should be."

But in many ways, she is exiled from the world she grew up in. "I went to a funeral the other day and they said: 'You're always here.' I said it's because I'm a Notting Hill lady and I show my respects. There aren't many of us left." Her friend Jean Maggs echoes her: "Our betting shops are gone. They've closed most of our cafés and pubs. Someone got very rich on Notting Hill."

Mark Olden is a documentary maker and journalist

Independent

Habib Khan jailed for stabbing BNP neighbour Keith Brown

A Muslim man was jailed for eight years today for killing his BNP activist neighbour after suffering a long-running campaign of racial abuse.

Habib Khan, 50, stabbed 52-year-old Keith Brown with a kitchen knife during a violent row outside his home in Stoke-on-Trent in July last year. Stafford Crown Court was told that Khan and his family had been subjected to "racial hostility" by his neighbours prior to the attack on July 6. Khan, of Uttoxeter Road, Normacot, was cleared by a jury of murdering Mr Brown and instead convicted of manslaughter following a trial in May.

Khan was sentenced to a total of eight years in prison for two charges - one of manslaughter by lack of intent and one of wounding. Judge Simon Tonking ordered that he serve consecutively six-and-a-half years for manslaughter and 18 months for wounding Mr Brown’s son, Ashley Barker.

The court heard that Khan, described as a "mild and calm-mannered family man", had intended to use the knife to threaten Mr Brown, who had hold of one of his sons. Judge Tonking said Khan had acted "in the honest belief that he needed to protect his son" but in doing so had killed Mr Brown.

He said: "It is beyond question that, by acting in the way that he did, Mr Khan killed Mr Brown unlawfully and, whatever their differences, the fact is that Mr Brown lost his life. That is a consequence for which Mr Khan must be punished with a significant custodial sentence."

The court heard that the families’ feud began when Khan put in a planning application to build a new house on his land a few years prior to the incident. Mr Brown objected and when permission was granted and building work began, he "took steps to obstruct it". The situation escalated over the years, with one incident leaving Khan in hospital. The court was told that the Khan family were often subjected to racial abuse and taunting.

Judge Tonking said: "What became obvious as the evidence unfolded, however, is that from time to time, despite denials to the contrary, both Mr Brown and his son Ashley Barker were involved in acts of racial aggression towards members of Mr Khan’s family."

Khan’s defence barrister, Simon Drew, said that police were called on a number of occasions, but often investigations "came to nothing" because of "generous failures by the system".

Speaking outside the court, Stoke-on-Trent BNP members slammed the sentence, which they said did not reflect the severity of the crime. Councillor Michael Coleman said the court case was an example of "liberal politics going on". He criticised Staffordshire Police for "going softly on ethnic minorities" and being hard with "the indigenous population of this island".

Times Online

Evidence of Extremist Infiltration of US Military Grows

The racist skinhead logged on with exciting news: He’d just enlisted in the United States Army.

“Sieg Heil, I will do us proud,” he wrote. It was a June 3 post to AryanWear Forum 14, a neo-Nazi online forum to which “Sobibor’s SS,” who identified himself as a skinhead living in Plantersville, Ala., had belonged since early 2004. (Sobibor was a Nazi death camp in Poland during World War II).

About a month after he announced his enlistment, Sobibor’s SS bragged in another post to Forum 14 that he’d specifically requested and been assigned to MOS, or Military Occupational Specialty, 98D. MOS98D soldiers are in high demand right now. That’s because they’re specially trained in disarming Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) like the infamous roadside bombs that are killing and maiming so many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presumably, a part of learning how to disarm an IED is learning how to make one.

“I have my own reasons for wanting this training but in fear of the government tracing me and me loosing [sic] my clearance I can’t share them here,” Sobibor’s SS informed his fellow neo-Nazis.

One of his earlier posts indicated his reasons serve a darker purpose than defending America: “Once all the Jews are gone the world will start fixing itself.”

Sobibor’s SS included enough biographical details in his various posts to Forum 14 over the years, including that he’s a single father from the small town in southern Alabama, that a military investigator with access to enlistment records for recent months should have little trouble discerning whether the Army is actually teaching a skinhead with genocide on his mind how to be a tactical bomb maker.

But there’s little reason to expect that will happen.

Two years ago, the Intelligence Report revealed that alarming numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist extremists were taking advantage of lowered armed services recruiting standards and lax enforcement of anti-extremist military regulations by infiltrating the U.S. armed forces in order to receive combat training and gain access to weapons and explosives.

Forty members of Congress urged then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to launch a full-scale investigation and implement a zero-tolerance policy toward white supremacists in the military. “Military extremists present an elevated threat to both their fellow service members and the public,” U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, wrote in a separate open letter to Rumsfeld. “We witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today’s racist extremist may become tomorrow’s domestic terrorist.”

But neither Rumsfeld nor his successor, Robert Gates, enacted any sort of systemic investigation or crackdown. Military and Defense Department officials seem to have made no sustained effort to prevent active white supremacists from joining the armed forces, or to weed out those already in uniform.

Furthermore, new evidence is emerging that not only supports the Intelligence Report’s findings, but also indicates the problem may have worsened since the summer of 2006, as enlistment rates continued to plummet, and the military accepted an ever-lower quality of soldier in a time of unpopular war.

First of all, a new FBI report confirms that white supremacist leaders are making a concerted effort to recruit active-duty soldiers and recent combat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment, “White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel Since 9/11,” which was released to law enforcement agencies nationwide: “Sensitive and reliable source reporting indicates supremacist leaders are encouraging followers who lack documented histories of neo-Nazi activity and overt racist insignia such as tattoos to infiltrate the military as ‘ghost skins,’ in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement.”

The FBI report details more than a dozen investigative findings and criminal cases involving Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as well as active-duty personnel engaging in extremist activity in recent years. For example, in September 2006, the leader of the Celtic Knights, a central Texas splinter faction of the Hammerskins, a national racist skinhead organization, planned to obtain firearms and explosives from an active duty Army soldier in Fort Hood, Texas. That soldier, who served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, was a member of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group.

“Looking ahead, current and former military personnel belonging to white supremacist extremist organizations who experience frustration at the inability of these organizations to achieve their goals may choose to found new, more operationally minded and operationally capable groups,” the report concludes. “The military training veterans bring to the movement and their potential to pass this training on to others can increase the ability of lone offenders to carry out violence from the movement’s fringes.”

Currently, 46 members of the white supremacist social networking website Newsaxon.com identity themselves as active-duty military personnel. Six of these individuals are members of “White Military Men,” a New Saxon sub-group.

Earlier this year, the founder of White Military Men identified himself in his New Saxon account as “Lance Corporal Burton” of the 2nd Battalion Fox Company Pit 2097, from Florida, according to a master’s thesis by graduate student Matthew Kennard. Under his “About Me” section, Burton writes: “Love to shoot my M16A2 service rifle effectively at the Hachies (Iraqis),” and, “Love to watch things blow up (Hachies House).”

As part of his thesis research, Kennard, at the time a student at Columbia University’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, also monitored claims of active-duty military service earlier this year on the neo-Nazi online forum Blood and Honour, where “88Soldier88” posted this message on Feb. 18: “I am in the ARMY right now. I work in the Detainee Holding Area [in Iraq]. … I am in this until 2013. I am in the infantry but want to go to SF [Special Forces]. Hopefully the training will prepare me for what I hope is to come.”

One of the Blood and Honour members claiming to be an active-duty soldier taking part in combat operations in Iraq identified himself to Kennard as Jacob Berg. He did not disclose his rank or branch of service. “There are actually a lot more ‘skinheads,’ ‘nazis,’ white supremacists now [in the military] than there has been in a long time,” Berg wrote in an E-mail exchange with Kennard. “Us racists are actually getting into the military a lot now because if we don’t every one who already is [in the military] will take pity on killing sand niggers. Yes I have killed women, yes I have killed children and yes I have killed older people. But the biggest reason I’m so proud of my kills is because by killing a brown many white people will live to see a new dawn.”

The Army is currently investigating war crimes allegations leveled against Iraq combat veteran and active-duty Army soldier Kenneth Eastridge, 24, who is facing trial for the December 2007 murder of a fellow serviceman. After Eastridge was arrested for that killing, National Public Radio publicized his MySpace page, which showed Eastridge displaying a tattoo of SS lightning bolts, a common neo-Nazi insignia.

Another member of Eastridge’s company recently told Army investigators that Eastridge used a stolen AK-47 to fire indiscriminately at Iraqi civilians from his moving Humvee on the streets of Baghdad. “The military is to some extent desperate to get people to fight, soldiers who are not fit, mentally and physically sick, but they continue to send them,” Eastridge’s attorney told Kennard. “Having a tattoo was the least [of Eastridge’s] concerns.”

As part of the research for his thesis, “The New Nazi Army: How the U.S. military is allowing the far right to join its ranks,” Kennard used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain from the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division investigative reports concerning white supremacist activity in 2006 and 2007. They show that Army commanders repeatedly terminated investigations of suspected extremist activity in the military despite strong evidence it was occurring. This evidence was often provided by regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which are made up of FBI and state and local law enforcement officials.

For example, one CID report details a 2006 investigation of a suspected member of the Hammerskins, a multi-state racist skinhead gang, who was stationed at Fort Hood, a large Army base in central Texas. According to the report, there was “probable cause” to believe that the soldier “had participated in a white extremist meeting and also provided a military technical manual 31-210, Improvised Munitions Handbook, to the leader of a white extremist group in order to assist in the planning and execution of future attacks on various targets.”

The report shows that agents only interviewed the subject once, in November 2006, before Fort Hood higher-ups called off the investigation that December.

Another report, also from 2006, covers an investigation of another Fort Hood soldier who was posting messages on Stormfront, a major white supremacist website. One CID investigator expresses his frustration at the muddled process for dealing with extremists. “We need to discuss the review process,” he writes. “I’m not doing my job here. Needs to get fixed.”

A third CID report, regarding a 2007 investigation, notes the termination of an investigation of a soldier at Fort Richardson, Alaska, who was reportedly the leader and chief recruiter for the Alaska Front, a white supremacist group. According to the report, the investigation was halted because the solider was “mobilized to Camp Shelby, MS in preparation for deployment to Iraq.”

Hatewatch

Plot to Assassinate Obama? White Supremacists are Worried

As news of a possible assassination plot against Sen. Barack Obama broke on Monday and Tuesday, white supremacists reacted overwhelmingly with suspicion that they were being set up by the federal government to take the fall.

Reports from Denver indicate that the three men arrested in the supposed plot on Sunday — Tharin Gartrell, Nathan D. Johnson and Shawn Adolf — may have been linked to a “white supremacy group,” possibly racist skinheads. One of the men was reportedly wearing a swastika ring when arrested, and one was said to be linked to a motorcycle gang called the Sons of Silence. The Southern Poverty Law Center has no evidence linking the gang or any of the three men to white supremacism.

 “Seems more like an attempt by ZOG to assassinate us,” wrote “DAglaff Wolfing” on Stormfront.org, the most important white supremacist Web forum, referring to the “Zionist Occupation Government” — white supremacist lingo for the federal government. Added “Ravening Wolf” in the same thread: “It wouldn’t surprise me if these people are jews [sic], or dumb patsies, involved in yet another false-flag Mossad operation … in order to conjure up yet more anti-gun legislation.”

 “I completely predicted that they would do this,” “AZDane” wrote on Stormfront. “If Obama IS assassinated, it will be the gov’t doing it and we’ll take the blame. Like always.”

 Many of those posting derided those arrested because police also found quantities of methamphetamine. (“Besides,” wrote one, “real white men wouldn’t have been stopped from completing their mission, whatever it may be. These people were fools.”) But they kept coming back to the idea of a government plot.

 “It sounds like concocted BS,” wrote “General1812.” “Seriously, plots that are this serious don’t come to the surface so easily. The government law enforcement [agencies] may be expecting Obama to win, and so are getting ready to conduct a preemptive strike against WNist [white nationalist] organizations.”

 Or, as “Alida302” put it in the Stormfront thread: “Sound like a bunch of wannabe small timers to me. They need to make sure that [Obama’s] black ass is protected. His death would bring down a s**tstorm of hell upon all of us.”

 Earlier, long before the Democratic convention opened in Denver, many white supremacists were arguing that an Obama victory could actually be good for their movement. They predicted that such a victory would shock white Americans, drive millions of them into white supremacist groups and, ultimately, lead to a race war that would finally result in the much hoped-for final Aryan victory.

HateWatch

Victim is punched after row over BNP

A fight erupted between two men after an argument about the British National Party, Swindon Magistrates’ Court heard. Philip Owen, 42, from Albion Street in the town centre, pleaded guilty to hitting Sean Enwright at a Swindon working men’s club on June 6 last year.

 The actual bodily harm charge came about after Owen had been talking about the BNP to his friends when he asked Mr Enwright, a former military man, if he would join the group. He did not like the content of the conversation so Mr Enwright, 59, said the Second World War was meant to stop people behaving in the way Owen was acting.

 Owen saw red, saying “I’m going to hurt you,” before attacking him. Mr Enwright suffered a cut to his left ear and was unable to remember how he got to the Great Western Hospital when he regained consciousness.

 Owen, who has a history of ABH incidents on his record stretching back to 1983, did not make any comment to police during his first interview. But he later pleaded guilty to the charge.

 “You hit him and he is a lot older than you,” said Judge Simon Cooper. “You were fired up and shouldn’t have allowed yourself to punch him. But there were no serious injuries and there has been no record of violence for 15 years. I believe this was an isolated incident.”

 CCTV footage captured the incident unfolding, although the judge said viewing the tape would not expand on the facts of the case.

 Owen apologised for the incident and for wasting the courts’ time. He was given a 12-month community order, which will be supervised for the first nine months, in a conflict resolution programme. He also will carry out 100 hours of community service in unpaid work. Owen was ordered to pay £200 in compensation for the injury and suffering to Mr Enwright and £60 court costs. It will be paid in two instalments over the next two months.

Swindon Advertiser

Nazi Archives Documented in Powerful Portfolio by Photographer Richard Ehrlich

Richard Ehrlich’s photographs of the Holocaust Archives

More than half a century has passed since the Holocaust — enough time to digest a plethora of scholarship, museum exhibitions, monuments, documentaries and artistic reckonings — but still not enough time to understand. Into this mix, we can now add Richard Ehrlich’s photographs. His portfolio of the Holocaust Archives at the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen illustrates the Nazi bureaucracy with images at once artistic and chilling.

Created in two visits in 2007, Ehrlich’s portfolio contains 52 color, digital images. The complete portfolio is already in a number of public collections, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaisme in Paris; the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; and the Special Collections of the UCLA Young Research Library.

The work was first publicly exhibited at American Jewish Committee’s Annual Meeting in May 2008, where it was viewed by over 1,000 people, including members of Congress, foreign dignitaries and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. The portfolio will next be exhibited at the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, California from August 26–30, 2008, where it will be co-sponsored by AJC Los Angeles and the German Consulate and German Information Center. Says Seth Brysk, Executive Director, AJC Los Angeles, “I am pleased the relationship with Rick will continue in Los Angeles.” A free, public opening reception is set for Tuesday, August 26 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., where Christian Stocks, Consul General of Germany, will speak.

The portfolio will also be included in the exhibition “Of Life and Loss,” opening October 26, 2008 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Jewish Federation of Santa Barbara. Additional exhibitions are planned at Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum; the University at Buffalo Art Gallery, State University of New York; and the Musée du Judaisme in Paris. Éditions de La Martinière will publish the portfolio in book form.

The Holocaust Archives at the International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen

With archives of some 50 million documents, the International Tracing Service (ITS) has played an important role in historical research, family reunification, refugee services, and in tracing the fates of countless individuals. Although it has been active since 1943, the ITS has maintained a low profile, in consideration of the privacy of the more than 17.5 million people in its Central Name Index. Occupying six buildings — including a former SS barracks — in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the ITS archives contain more than 16 miles of records and artifacts that reveal, with excruciating exactitude, the Nazi campaign to murder millions and eradicate European Jewry and other minorities.

Having read a short article about the ITS in the International Herald Tribune, Richard Ehrlich, a surgeon with a growing reputation as a photographer, pulled out all stops to gain access to the Bad Arolsen collection. When his initial request was denied, he explains, “I called anyone who might have influence and finally found a sympathetic official in the State Department.” In two visits totaling seven days in June and September 2007, Ehrlich completed this compelling portfolio. In bringing these images to the public forum, Ehrlich recreates his own shocking and ultimately numbing encounter with the “banality of evil.”

Through Ehrlich’s lens, we see the obsessive mentality of the Nazi bureaucracy—countless aisles of catalog drawers, towering stacks of paperwork, row upon row of file folders. At a time of resurging Holocaust denial, these folders, storage boxes and ledgers — the normally mundane paraphernalia of record keeping — provide painful and irrefutable evidence of history’s most unimaginable crime.

The records in the ITS archives were collected from a number of sources, including the Gestapo, ghettos, prison camps and every agency of Nazi authority. Among the many individual documents depicted in the portfolio are the original Schindler’s list, a transport order to Bergen Belsen including Anne Frank’s name, and an invitation from Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich to a brunch meeting to discuss “a total solution to the Jewish question in Europe.” Through Ehrlich’s photographs, we can read entries in the Buchenwald prisoner logs and death book, study the Nazis’ elaborate system for coding prisoners in charts and maps, read of a precise, every-two-minute shooting Himmler ordered in honor of Hitler’s birthday, and view medical records that count the lice removed from prisoners.

Richard Ehrlich’s interest in photography began as a child growing up in the northern suburbs of New York City. He postponed photography for almost 40 years to build a surgical practice in Los Angeles, limiting his picture taking to a visual record of his work in the operating room. Seven years ago, he renewed his devotion to photography and soon received acclaim for his work. California painter Tony Berlant describes Ehrlich’s photography as “…technically precise, yet soaringly evocative in content.”

Working in series that focus primarily on natural landscapes, architecture and his world travels, Ehrlich has created a substantial body of work. Wherever he directs his lens, Ehrlich’s keen eye elicits a resonant sense of place, as may be seen in his portrayal of his local turf, Homage to Rothko: Malibu Skies. Ehrlich’s photographs have been acquired by many museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Denver Art Museum. He is represented by a number of prestigious galleries, including Bonni Benrubi, New York City; Fay Gold, Atlanta; Weston, Carmel, CA; and Craig Krull, Santa Monica. Richard Ehrlich’s photographs of I.M. Pei’s Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center were published in 2007, and Nazraeli Press has published a volume of his images, Namibia: The Forbidden Zone (2007). Nazraeli will publish Ehrlich’s The Body as Art: The Art of the Body in 2009.

artdaily

Loyalist helps BNP spread race hate message

A Belfast-based loyalist night defended his decision to link up with the extremist BNP.

Former Orangeman James Dowson, who runs Midas Consultancy, told Sunday Life that he had “no problem” providing senior members of the right-wing party with management training and marketing skills. Scots-born Dowson, who is also a hardline anti-abortion campaigner, has been responsible for helping the BNP send letters to businesses throughout the UK in a bid to raise cash.

The loyalist, who makes regular trips to Northern Ireland, helped mastermind the party’s ‘Truth Truck’ campaign [see here and here], which included lorries visiting towns in England to spread the BNP’s ‘nationalist message’. And Dowson, who admitted coming from a “loyalist background”, claimed the BNP’s message would soon be coming to Northern Ireland.

He said: “I specialise in a business pool which includes Belfast and Scotland and I’m proud to describe myself as a loyalist and a unionist. A wide range of organisations come to us because we provide management training and marketing skills. When the BNP contacted us, I had no option but to work with them — it was an exciting business proposal. I understand the truth truck could soon be on its way to Northern Ireland, but that’s nothing to do with me.”

Added Dowson: “The BNP are not an illegal organisation so why shouldn’t I work with them? I don’t think their members are involved in criminal activity. I have worked in Northern Ireland for a long time, but not for any proscribed organisations. The BNP is not a proscribed organisation. It would be wrong for me to pontificate about the views of the BNP and I honestly can’t think of anyone I wouldn’t work with.”

The link between the BNP and Dowson caused concern among anti-racism campaigners in the province. Said one campaigner: “Dowson’s marketing plan is nothing more than a begging letter. The BNP is in very serious financial trouble and this is how they think they can get money. The BNP may not be illegal, but they articulate views which clearly motivate people to commit very serious attacks on minorities.”

Sunday Life revealed last year how Northern Ireland’s only Chinese politician slammed the BNP’s latest attempt at a recruitment drive in the province. The right-wing party published a leaflet — entitled ‘What Now for Northern Ireland?’ — claiming the province was on its way to a “multi-cultural hellhole” and that towns here had become “dumping-grounds” for migrants.

But Alliance MLA Anna Lo said she was “disgusted” by the BNP's intolerant language — and said the party was wasting its time in Northern Ireland “because people are not racist here”.

She added: “There is an element of inciting hatred. There is no attraction in Northern Ireland for this type of politics and I would discourage this party from coming over here. We have always had good race relations in Northern Ireland. There may be the odd incident, but that does not represent the majority of people here.”

In 2006, the BNP’s leader Nick Griffin was cleared by a court of stirring up racial hatred — a move that prompted then-chancellor Gordon Brown to consider changing Britain's race laws.

Belfast Telegraph

Psycho's fury at racist brother

Soccer legend Stuart Pearce was stunned to discover his brother is a member of the far-right British National Party. The England Under-21 manager immediately confronted older brother Dennis after The People broke the shock news. A source close to Pearce, 46, said: "Stuart's not happy about it at all. He had no idea."

 Dennis's close links to the BNP emerged after an exclusive People report last week. We revealed that Stuart, England captain John Terry and other stars, were angry at being used in a video promoting the racist party. Dennis, 56, admitted last night: "Stuart rang me and asked if I was a member of the BNP. He was shocked when I told him I was. He didn't know before. We have this rule never to talk politics in the family."

 Former Nottingham Forest and West Ham player Pearce - dubbed Psycho for his bone-crunching tackles - did not even know his brother stood for election as a BNP candidate this year. But Dennis was happy to talk to us about his right wing views and boast of his friendship with BNP leader Nick Griffin.

 He said: "I back the BNP's manifesto completely. The country is full up. There's too many people here. It's time to shut the door on immigrants. Immigration isn't helping crime rates drop, that's for sure. I served in the Army. It was about fighting communism, because communists stopped freedom of speech. I'm fighting for the same with the BNP. This is a Christian country. Islam is not compatible with this country."

 Dennis is a passionate campaigner for the BNP. He stood unsuccessfully for the party at the London Assembly elections in May and hopes to be a general election candidate.

 Recently he was at the BNP's Red, White and Blue rally with Griffin. He said: "I've met Nick about half-a-dozen times. At Red, White and Blue I complimented him on the hog roast. He'd brought a pig from his farm for us to eat. His wife Jackie cooked us a roast dinner."

 Stuart, Dennis and their brother Ray grew up in North London. Dennis went on: "Stuart and I are very close and I see him regularly. I've always supported his football career and I'm proud of what he's achieved. I've been to his house in Wiltshire to see him and his wife many times. The last time I saw him was at a concert by The Police in Hyde Park a few months ago. It was a great day out."

 The former engineer lives with his wife and two of his three children in Brent, North West London. He was in the Territorial Army, as a colour sergeant in the Royal Green Jackets.

One soldier who served with him said: "Quite a few of us feel he has brought disgrace on the regiment. We are disgusted by his drift into right wing politics. Dennis used to be in charge of a very multi-racial platoon and seemed comfortable with the ethnic mix. So no one can understand why he got mixed up with the BNP."

 In a brief statement through the FA - which campaigns to kick racism out of football - former Manchester City boss Pearce said: "My brother's views are his own and do not in any way reflect mine."

 Our source added: "Stuart is very keen to stress that his brother's beliefs are not what he is all about. He wants to distance himself completely."

The People

BNP's Eddy Butler for the boot?

A rumour has just popped up that Griffin-loyalist and the BNP's third-rate 'election guru' Eddy Butler is about to get the heave-ho from the ailing BNP. Not for being crap at his job - that was clear when he attacked Colin Auty's leadership challenge as a 'joke' - but allegedly for playing away at the Red, White and Blue, the bad boy.

More as soon as we get it...

The Nazis, the Jewish banker, and the battle for two priceless Picassos

Picasso's Le Moulin de la Galette

The paintings are not only priceless, but they have been among the star attractions at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the city's equally renowned Guggenheim Museum for more than four decades. Both are early Picassos painted at the beginning of the 20th century – before the two world wars that would engulf Europe and ultimately lead to the current blockbuster of a legal battle.

One of the canvases is Le Moulin de la Galette, a Picasso painted in 1900 that, unlike the artist's later works, appears to ape the French Impressionists with its colourful depiction of dancing couples in fin de siècle top hats and flowing dresses at a lamp-lit venue somewhere in or near Paris. The other is Boy Leading A Horse, painted just six years later. This work, sparsely executed in tones of black, grey and brown, already betrays the radically different sculptured style that was later to become Picasso's hallmark.

Before Adolf Hitler was swept to power in Germany, the two Picassos belonged to one of the leading figures in a German Jewish community that had once played a key role in giving both the country and its capital, Berlin, a reputation as a centre of intellectual excellence.

The paintings were owned by Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a prominent German-Jewish banker and art collector and a descendant of the composer Felix Mendelssohn and Moses Mendelssohn, one of Germany's early 19th-century philosophers during its Age of Enlightenment. The family's restored residence in central Berlin, where a private bank was founded more than 200 years ago, is today a tourist attraction.

Now, some 63 years after that Jewish community was systematically annihilated by the Nazis and their henchmen, its surviving heirs have launched what promises to be a spectacular legal battle to have the works returned.

The Mendelssohn-Bartholdy heirs are all German and Swedish citizens of Jewish ancestry. The dispute is intriguing because they are demanding that the Picassos be returned by American museums where powerful figures such as Ronald S Lauder – the Estée Lauder cosmetics heir, art collector and World Jewish Congress President – wield considerable influence.

Because of his position and his role as honorary chairman of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Mr Lauder was instrumental in drawing up the so-called "Washington Declaration" under which 44 countries signed an agreement on the restitution of artworks that disappeared or were sold off during the Nazi era.

Yet Mr Lauder has declined to comment on the current dispute. Instead of discussing the issue with the heirs, the MoMA and Guggenheim museums have flatly rejected the claims. Lawyers for the two galleries have applied to the New York District Court, asking it to declare that they are the rightful owners of the paintings. An official hearing is expected this autumn.

So is Mr Lauder about to be hoist by his own petard? Julius Schoeps thinks he will be. The 66-year-old Potsdam historian is a descendant of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and, along with his lawyer, John Byrne, is spearheading the battle to have the paintings returned to 26 descendents. He agrees with Mr Lauder's description of wrongfully appropriated paintings as "the last prisoners of war".

Mr Schoeps knew nothing of his ancestor's enthusiasm for art until five years ago, when he was visited by a Canadian van Gogh expert. She told him that his great uncle, Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, once owned an extensive collection of paintings that included five Picassos, eight van Goghs and works by Rousseau, Monet and Renoir.

After conducting some research, Mr Schoeps established that his great uncle's first wife, who was Jewish, had been friendly with the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, who had helped the couple build up an impressive private collection. But in 1933, a few months after Hitler came to power, the banker was dismissed from all his public positions and his assets began to dwindle.

In the spring of that year, he began sending his paintings abroad. The five Picassos landed in Basel, where the art dealer Justin Thannhauser took charge of them. The next year the banker told him he was ready to sell for a good price. The five paintings were entered on Thannhauser's books on 31 August 1935 along with 200 other paintings, which suggests that they were not actually bought on that day.

Boy Leading A Horse was bought for a "reasonable price" by William S Paley, the American founder of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1936. Paley later became a member of the MoMA board and in 1964 he presented the painting to the museum as a gift. Apparently, he was not informed who the original owner was.

Thannhauser presented Le Moulin de la Galette to the Guggenheim in 1963, declaring that he had obtained the work from Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in "ca 1935". But the real circumstances under which he acquired the five Picassos is one of the key questions in the current dispute. There is no documentation showing that Thannhauser bought them. Mr Schoeps assumes that the art dealer was in debt and simply stole the paintings.

Mendelssohn-Bartholdy died in Berlin in May 1935, aged 59 – reputedly after being attacked by a Nazi thug. But three months before his death he declared in his will that his second, non-Jewish, wife, Elsa, should be his heir and that after her death the inheritance should pass on to the banker's four sisters. The declaration included a hand-written insert which stated that Elsa Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had already received the banker's paintings as a "wedding gift".

Mr Schoeps argues that the insert indicates that the whole arrangement was a "persecution agreement" – a typical legal device used at the time to ensure that artworks were kept out of Nazi hands. He insists that it provides proof that the banker sold his works under duress from the Nazis – the key issue in the current legal battle.

By contrast, the New York museums claim that as a widow, Elsa would have been the rightful owner of all the paintings since their marriage in 1927 and that as a result the works were sold by an Aryan who was not subject to any Nazi persecution. The museums' lawyers also maintain that the family was dominated by protestants such as Elsa, who "mitigated the impact of Nazi anti-Semitism" on the banker.

Mr Schoeps regards this last assertion as a "cynical claim". He is convinced that like many other German-Jews in the early 1930s, his great uncle sent his pictures to Switzerland in order to fund an eventual escape. He maintains that he would never have sold the paintings if the Nazis had not taken power and that his great uncle fitted the Nazi cliché of a "moneyed" Jew. "Justice is our main concern. After all this time we would like clarification," he insists.

Independent

Beware “the Lure of Rome”: BNP writer says Catholics are the “Anti-Christ” and “Satanic”

“There can be no fellowship with Rome: for once the Protestant Church is entangled in the web there is no escape, for sudden destruction will come upon it. Jesus came to give life, but Antichrist Rome administers the kiss of death ... There must be no compromise with Rome, and no appearance of compromise”

- BNP activist and writer Colin Farquhar

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Hexapla. 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.

The Kiss of Death

In our fourth article on anti-Catholic bigotry within the BNP, we expose the rancid anti-Catholic article, The Death Kiss of Rome on the Protestant Church, written by BNP activist Colin Farquhar. The BNP does well to hide its anti-Catholic bigots in the sectarian closet. But, every so often those bigots manage to prise open the closet’s door in order to propagate their message of sectarian hate fused with extreme race-based nationalism. Before we carry on, our previous articles on BNP anti-Catholicism are below:

BNP accuses Catholics of “heresy” and “blasphemy”

The Whore of Revelation and the BNP speaker who wants to destroy Catholics

BNP candidate in anti-Catholic claims: the indefatigable Alan Girvan strikes again!

Colin Farquhar pops up every so often in the letters section of the Northern Echo newspaper to tell readers of the benefits of a BNP-ruled Britain (only to be rebuked by other readers for his political propaganda. See link). But, Colin Farquhar does not tell readers that he, along with a fair number of BNP members, harbour a distinct anti-Catholic streak. Indeed, Colin Farquhar is quite notable for his anti-Catholic activism. Back in 2002, Colin Farquhar personally hosted the anti-Catholic preacher Pastor Frank W. Dowsett of The Covenant Vision Ministry in his tour of Britain.

The whore of Babylon

In highly emotive and polemical language, BNP writer Colin Farquhar provides a perverted reading of the Bible’s Book of Revelation when he condemns the Catholic faith as the fabled whore of Babylon or as he puts it, “the harlot Mother Church of Rome”. This provides Colin Farquhar with the justification to denounce aspects of Catholic belief as “totally false” and a “sham”.

Catholics kill and torture Protestants

Unfortunately, history can be a political tool, malleable in the hands of extremists and bigots. Indeed, BNP writer Colin Farquhar shows this is the case: he reifies Christian history by compressing it into a dubious sectarian metanarrative that transposes Catholics as the historical persecutors of their Protestant counterparts:

“When we remember the origins of this church, from as far back as the tower of Babel in Babylon; and the countless idolatrous and blasphemous satellite churches of Rome; and those millions of Protestants that have been tortured and slaughtered by this same church, is there need to say more?”

Colin Farquhar goes on to condemn his fellow Protestant believers who fail to give countenance to his rather scurrilous reading of western Europe’s fraught history of Catholic-Protestant relations:

“However, in defiance of historical fact, Protestants continue to succumb to the Lure of Rome”

The European Union: an evil Catholic plot against the UK and Protestantism

How does Colin Farquhar’s ‘historical fact’ play out? Like his fellow BNP writer and activist, Alan O’Reilly, Colin Farquhar claims that the European Union is an evil Catholic plot to destroy Britain and the Protestant faith:

“An up-to-date example of the attraction of evil is the fascination of our leaders with Europe and their willingness to sacrifice the independence and self-sufficiency of our great nation as they lust for power in the forthcoming Superstate of Europe ... As our politicians are transfixed with the political manifestation of Rome, that of Europe, so our church leaders are enchanted with the ecclesiastical manifestation, the Roman Catholic Church. This great edifice of unimaginable wealth, pomp and splendour has caused so many of our church leaders to capitulate to the grandeur and influence of this mighty satanic institution. What power and authority could be theirs if only they bow the knee to Papa”

Of course Colin, of course. Do keep up the good work; you chaps in the BNP are doing a sterling job.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is a Catholic agent in service of the anti-Christ

Colin Farquhar’s ‘historical fact’ also plays itself out in a different way. Perniciously, Colin Farquhar’s conspirital pen drubs the collective leadership of the Protestant faith as irredeemable traitors:

“Today we are experiencing a similar betrayal by the leaders of our Protestant Churches. Not only are they willing to come under the authority of Rome but they move heaven and earth to take as many with them as they can. The Reformers and great Christian leaders of the past identified the Roman Church as the Church of Antichrist. Antichrist they believed was to be found in the succession of Popes. The term ‘anti’ in this sense meaning ‘another’. The Popes therefore, each in turn were Antichrist, or in other words Another-Christ”

But, BNP writer Colin Farquhar reserves especial venom for the admirable head of the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams:

“Haven’t we just witnessed this crawling to Rome of our present Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams? He just the other week in his attempt to promote ecumenical relations knelt before the Pope and kissed the ring on his hand as the Cardinals present chuckled with delight at their moment of triumph. There was the representative of the Protestant Church of Great Britain submitting himself in subservience to the Antichrist. What shameful behaviour: if ever a man deserves to be removed from office, it is he. The treachery of such an act is unbelievable considering how his predecessor Archbishop Cranmer was burnt at the stake at the hands of this same church. Where were the voices of condemnation within the Protestant Church, and the calls for his resignation for this and other issues that have brought disgrace on the church and dishonour to the Lord?”

Anti-sectarianism is evil! The “curse” of ecumenism

It is clear that BNP writer Colin Farquhar, without a doubt, burns Archbishop Rowan Williams at the metaphorical stake. This is the fate of those brave individuals who attempt to cross the bridge of sectarian difference and apathy. This is the process of what is known as ‘ecumenism’. And, it is something that Colin Farquhar, tout court sectarian extremist, loathes. In the most strident terms, Colin Farquhar denounces attempts to reconcile sectarian difference as yet another wicked Catholic trick to debase Protestantism:

“In my youth .. union with other denominations was inconceivable ... Yet the process of ecumenism is centuries old and no surprise to the Roman church, for this baby was conceived in the Vatican. It is part of the Jesuit Counter-Reformation plot to cause the downfall of the Protestant church and to bring the whole world under the domain of the Pope. For the Reformation was such a deadly blow to the apostate ‘Mother Church’ of Rome”

Thus, for Colin Farquhar anti-sectarianism is a “curse”. Based on this twisted logic, hate must be, conversely, a blessing. This perhaps explains why Colin Farquhar, and others like him, are members of the BNP. After all, the BNP rejoices in its own form of race-based anti-ecumenism to which it can add an anti-Catholic component. The wicked have truly inherited the earth.

Convert those wayward satanic Catholics

It is only the chosen few like Colin Farquhar who are endowed with racially-privileged spiritual insight. The Catholics are heathens whose lost souls must be prayed for. As Colin Farquhar concludes in his childish article:

“Let us be faithful witnesses toward Catholic people and others that are carried along by deceitful and deadly satanic organisations and institutions. Let us be diligent in prayer that God will be merciful toward them that the light of the gospel might shine in their lives and dispel all darkness and falsehood. Let us warn them especially regarding the deceitfulness, error and darkness of the Antichrist Roman Catholic Church; and those organisations such as the World Council of Churches and Churches Together that seek to bring about unity with this Satanic institution”

Conclusion

Colin Farquhar’s sectarianism is little more than an exercise in unapologetic hate. Should he be condemned, refuted or pitied? I leave it to the reader to answer this question. But, regardless of who you are - Catholic or Protestant, Christian or non-Christian, believer or atheist - we must all make the stand against fascism, racism and sectarianism. This is our common truth that binds us all irrespective of our backgrounds. It is only through our individual and collective apathy that the BNP can succeed. And, we should never let this happen.

¡No Pasarán!

Caption competition: Griffin at the RWB

 

Christ, when will he ever shut up?

Caption competition. The BNP's disastrous Red, White and Blue security-fest has provided us with a number of articles, some excitement and a lot of laughs over the past couple of weeks but the world is generally returning to normal and it's time for us to get back to reality and carry on doing our bit to get rid of this rubbishy party and its increasingly loathed leader. But let's leave with a laugh and find some decent captions for the picture above which shows Nick Griifin boring the troops and Alan Warner looking like he's wishing he'd never invited the BNP to within a hundred miles of his house.

Let's have your captions for the pic (normal rules apply - let's try not to be too obscene but we realise we may be asking too much there) and we might even be able to get a prize together for the winner. Go for it!

Letter in today's Guardian re' RWB

I was one of 30 people - from the 500-strong gathering of anti-BNP protesters - allowed within Derbyshire constabulary's 1.5-mile "official protest area". Tightly controlled under sections 14 and 14a of the Public Order Act and under constant surveillance, we marched up Denby Lane to the Bungalow, the hilltop site of the BNP's "Red, White, and Blue festival" (Czech far-right party activist to address BNP, August 16).

 Heavily flanked by police, the half-mile walk was uneventful. My arthritis slowed me down somewhat (I'm 66). A police helicopter clattered overhead, and after passing the Bungalow we reached a grass verge, where some protesters were interviewed by the local press. After 10 minutes we walked back down the hill, again past the Bungalow; "festival security" filmed us from the gateway, and further down a few vehicle drivers, irritated by being slowed up, treated us to some foul language, while four middle-aged men at a pub jeered at us to "get a job", before we rejoined the main demonstration.

 At no point did my wife and I, our comrades from Stoke-on-Trent or most of the hundreds at this protest see stones thrown, or arrests made. Indeed the assistant chief constable of Derbyshire said our behaviour was "impeccable". But what media reports there have been about the demonstrations focused only on disorderly events, and missed the fact that the vast majority of people taking part in marches of this type are law-abiding citizens, most with jobs and responsibilities, who worry about the rise of far-right politics in Britain, and in Europe.

 I fear that this type of reporting may discourage many people from attending such events, as does the constant surveillance filming by police units.

 My father, Charles Edward Honeysett, 1899-1982, served on the western front in 1918, spoke at open-air meetings and demonstrated against fascism in the 1930s, and had to serve Britain for six more years after being called up in 1939; for his sacrifice alone I have no alternative but to continue joining with all those good people with social consciences, and try to raise awareness of the ignorance, divisiveness and racism behind the BNP's "mask of respectability".

 Jon Honeysett
 Stoke-on-Trent

Guardian

Residents want BNP festival to stay away

Residents in Codnor have said they do not want the British National Party's annual festival to take place in the area again next year after a weekend of disruption.

Hundreds of people marched from Codnor to protest against the event causing road closures and residents say they were verbally abused by party members as they drove to the festival.

John Lumsden of Codnor Denby Lane said: "We had some verbal abuse from BNP members as they drove past but I don't think they'll be back here next year. Despite what the party says about the attendance we only counted 75 cars in the car park on Saturday. If they do try and hold the event here again the residents will do what they did before, object to it and try to stop it taking place."

A retired couple on Codnor Denby Lane who did not wish to be named said they did not want the festival to return to the area next year.

The woman said:"We'd rather it wasn't here next year. The BNP seem to have come out of it all a lot better than the protesters but we don't agree with fascism and would rather the festival take place somewhere else."

Becky Williams, from Notts Stop the BNP, said: "The BNP has chosen for another year to hold the festival in an area where it is not wanted. The people who live in this area are intimidated by the narrow views of the party, they don't represent the views of the majority of the people. It isn't what they want for their families."

Mark Longden, from Unite Against Fascism, said: "The views of the BNP are not credible, they encourage racism and hate and stand for fascist values. It's not right they have been allowed to get a base anywhere which attributes them credibility."

Labour MP for Amber Valley Judy Mallaber said she agreed with the group's right to a peaceful protest.

However on Friday British National Party leader Nick Griffin told The News that the party was grateful for the support of people in the local area that enabled them to stage the event.

Mr Griffin said: "We're very grateful to Alan for letting us hold the event here. We're looking at a number of sites potentially for next year and haven't decided where we want to go but this is a very central location, very convenient, the local people are very supportive and helpful so we may be back, we'll see. The Labour party and its supporters are quite entitled to demonstrate and we are entitled to be here with our families enjoying ourselves as well."

Ripley and Heanor News