Let's play Spot the BNP member!

Click on image to see it full-size

Every now and again, the comments sections to our posts come up with something just as interesting as the post itself, and this happened yesterday.

One of our eagle-eyed readers had been over to David Irving's site and has come up with a real doozie. Just in case you don't know, Irving is the discredited historian who brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 1996. The case was a disaster for him, with the judge ruling, among other things, that Irving had 'for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence'. Irving is a Holocaust denier (though he attempted to recant on that position during the libel hearing), as well as an antisemite and racist, and has for years associated with far-right extremists who promote neo-Nazism, not the least of which is BNP leader Nick Griffin.

On a visit to Austria in 2005, Irving was apprehended, tried and eventually convicted of 'glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party', which is a crime in Austria under the Verbotsgesetz* law. He served a prison sentence from February to December 2006 on the charges.

Nick Griffin and David Irving were invited to speak at a forum on 'free speech' at the Oxford Union on 26 November 2007. The debate took place after Oxford Union members voted in favour of it, but was vigorously disrupted by protesters.

Griffin has repeatedly claimed that the squeaky-clean new BNP is no longer a Holocaust-denying, antisemitic party packed with neo-nazis, which doesn't quite work when you attempt to speak in a debate with the likes of David Irving. Nor does it work when it's discovered that some of your most prominent people attend Irving's garden parties, particularly those that sell tripe like Irving's tedious tome 'Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich' that was 'snapped up' for a mere £125. Quite why anyone would pay such an enormous sum of money for a book written by the likes of Irving is beyond me. It seems to be beyond Publishers Weekly too, who wrote of it;

'This is a repellent book, and not only because of its subject. Irving (Goering) has been increasingly under fire for exploiting seemingly indefatigable research to distort history. In the book in hand, he uses enough pejoratives to sustain the illusion of objectivity regarding Hitler's propaganda chief, yet suggests that the admittedly bad man had a cause not entirely bad in itself. Nazi brutality is almost always retaliation for the plots of international Jewry and the criminality of domestic Jews. Even the books notoriously burned are "decadent and anti-German." The term Redakteur (editor) "to Goebbels' sensitive ear had a Jewish ring." Protesters in Saarbrucken are "a clamoring ragbag of communists, Jews, freemasons and disgruntled emigres." There is always, in Irving's own words, a "Jewish problem" that Goebbels struggles to solve. Much of the book, heavily indebted to the self-serving Goebbels diaries, is in such a vein. There seems always to be an agenda to Irving's documentation, and the language of camouflaged admiration suffuses his pages amidst his ritual scolding of the Nazis for their excesses. The real insidiousness of the biography is that its formidable documentation will gain it acceptance as history.'

The post on Irving's site that describes the garden party also has a couple of revealing comments by the man himself;

'Steve drives Jessica to Burnham station, as she wants to return to London (for the ghastly Notting Hill Gate carnival: Black-rap-crap all day. She'll grow out of it)'

'Devon, the last refuge for the White English from scoundrels.'

Clearly Irving hasn't changed much over the years, remaining antisemitic and racist. All the more shocking (though not entirely surprising) then to see that this garden party was attended by a couple of prominent members of the BNP, Julian Leppert and Jonathan Bowden.

Click on image to see it full-size

Leppert is the famed BNP postie whose car registration is NAZI. Leppert was the BNP’s candidate for mayor of London in 2004 and is currently the councillor for Hainault ward on Redbridge Council. Back in January 2007 Leppert attended a conference in London where he sat through anti-Jewish tirades from a close confidante of David Irving and from one of the leaders of the Islamic Party of Britain. His only other claim to fame is that he once described fellow councillor Lawrence Rustem, a man of mixed race, as having been allowed into the BNP because he is 'only half a wog'.

Bowden resigned back in July 2007 in a major huff following an attack on him by the Covert Undercover Nuisance Tactics blog (run by one of Griffin's chums, Tommy Williams), during which he was accused of being a paedophile. The attack was obviously in retaliation for his support of leadership-challenger Chris Jackson in the then-recent BNP leadership challenge. Bowden appears to have made up with the party now and seems to be back in the fold despite his cracklingly good resignation letter from August 2007;

'I am sick and tired of the human scum and vermin which proliferate in such shallows waters. To be accused of being a child abuser is amongst the lowest thing that can possibly be imagined. To even refute such allegations from criminal psychopaths like these is beneath one’s dignity...I will seek to have police action carried out against this vile Internet site [Covert], but I also intend to resign as cultural officer, advisory council member and member of the BNP. I do not wish to associate - even tangentially - with such low-grade lycanthropes and psychotic criminals. Williams [Griffin-ally Tommy Williams], I gather, is a convicted drug dealer and career criminal with a string of convictions.'

Griffin's desperate attempts to portray the BNP as having moved well away from its antisemitic and nazi ancestry looks hollow when two of his finest are attending events at the invitation of one of the best-known antisemitic nazi-lovers in the country. But will he take any action against them? Leppert is definitely in the party and we're assured that Bowden is, too. If Griffin is adamant about the party's shift away from its ignoble past, presumably he'll take action against these two reprobates.

Would you bet your shirt on it?

* Verbotsgesetz

Our readers have spotted three definite BNP members in the pictures and possibly one former member. See who you can spot and let us know via the comments section to this post. :-)