Fighting the BNP from the ground up – Obama-style

Anti-racist groups have learned from success of Obama election campaign, says former mastermind of president's online strategy

The man who masterminded Barack Obama's online strategy during the US president's election campaign said today that anti-racists fighting the British National party had learned from his successful internet plan.

Joe Rospars, who was the chief digital strategist for Obama from 2007 until his inauguration, said the Hope Not Hate campaign to prevent the BNP making a breakthrough later this week was the "best example" of a British organisation applying the principles he had picked up during the US presidential elections.

"We are seeing a genuine community-based organisation with people coming together around a common purpose and – crucially – meeting each other and taking the campaign forward themselves," said Rospars.

Hope Not Hate held its second day of action in Barking and Dagenham in east London , where the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, is standing against Labour's Margaret Hodge, and the far-right party is also hoping to take control of the council. On the campaign's first day, last month, 540 people turned up to deliver more than 90,000 leaflets and today hundreds more gathered from around the capital, including comedian Eddie Izzard and singer Billy Bragg, who staged an impromptu concert.

Izzard said: "I am a Labour supporter – but the message today to those who are opposed to the BNP is to get out and vote."

The BNP had predicted it would create a "political earthquake" at this week's general and local elections, claiming it was on course to win two MPs. But its campaign has been beset by problems, with one of its senior figures arrested on suspicion of plotting to kill Griffinm and growing internal criticism of his leadership.

"This and Stoke remain the BNP's key target areas at the moment, although their campaign does not seem to be cutting through," said Daniel Hodges from Searchlight. "But it will be very tight here on polling day and every vote in both the national local elections will count."

Rospars, who is in London advising the anti-BNP campaign, said part of its success was its ability to translate its online campaign to "on-the-ground community action". "The volunteers that go out and knock on doors and deliver leaflets each weekend are not following a leadership group sitting in a fancy office somewhere; they are the campaign, the core of the organisation." He added: "What we are seeing is a lot of people who even a few weeks ago had never been involved in something like this taking an active part, doing things they would may not have thought they were capable of, and becoming leaders in their own communities."

Nick Lowles, who set up the Hope Not Hate campaign before last year's European elections, travelled to the US to work alongside the Obama campaign. "One of the main lessons we have learned is that the technology on its own does not build a political organisation on the ground."

"This time we have followed up the emails with phone calls and from there we have set up local groups around the country – sometimes just a couple of people sometimes larger – and the result has been the largest political mobilisation of the campaign."

Lowles said it was now crucial to sustain the momentum up to Thursday.

"The challenge for us now is to build on what we have achieved over the last year or so," he said.

Guardian

US facing surge in rightwing extremist and militia groups

• Civil rights report shows 250% rise in extremist patriot groups
• Groups fuelled by economy and media conspiracy theories

The US is facing a surge in anti-government extremist groups and armed militias, driven by deepening hostility on the right to Barack Obama, anger over the economy, and the increasing propagation of conspiracy theories by parts of the mass media such as Fox News.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre, the US's most prominent civil rights group focused on hate organisations, said in a report that extremist "patriot" groups "came roaring back to life" last year as their number jumped nearly 250% to more than 500 with deepening ties to conservative mainstream politics.

The SPLC report, called Rage on the Right, said the rise in extremist groups was "a cause for grave concern" given their propensity to use violence during their heyday in the 90s, most notably with the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. It added that the issues driving support for such groups were increasingly populist and that "signs of growing radicalisation are everywhere".

"Patriot groups have been fuelled by anger over the changing demographics of the country, the soaring public debt, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama that have been branded "socialist" or even "fascist" by his political opponents," the report said.

"Already there are signs of … violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, rightwing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation's first black president. One man from Brockton, Massachusetts – who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites – is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with anti-government, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases."

The report says the patriot movement has "made significant inroads into the conservative political scene" in part driven by a growing view of the US administration "as part of a plot to impose 'one-world government' on liberty-loving Americans".

"The Tea Parties and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism," the report says.

The SPLC notes that the rise comes as part of a deepening disillusionment with government in which just one quarter of Americans think government can be trusted. It said that a recent poll found that the anti-tax Tea Party movement is viewed in more positive terms than the Democratic or Republican parties.

"The signs of growing radicalisation are everywhere. Armed men have come to Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the 'tree of liberty' needs to be 'watered' with 'the blood of tyrants'. The Conservative Political Action Conference held this February was co-sponsored by groups like the John Birch Society, which believes President Eisenhower was a communist agent, and Oath Keepers, a patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps," the SPLC said.

The report says that, unlike during the 1990s, the patriot movement's core ideas are more widely propagated and accepted by prominent politicians and some in the mass media, such as the Fox News presenter Glenn Beck.

"As the movement has exploded, so has the reach of its ideas, aided and abetted by commentators and politicians in the ostensible mainstream," said the report. "Beck, for instance, reinvigorated a key patriot conspiracy theory – the charge that the federal emergency management agency is secretly running concentration camps – before finally 'debunking' it."

How far such language is now part of the mainstream political discourse was confirmed by Politico today, which reported that it had obtained a Republican national committee document detailing plans to raise election funds with "an aggressive campaign capitalising on 'fear' of President Barack Obama" and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism".

In the presentation, the administration is portrayed as "the Evil Empire", and Obama as the Joker in Batman.

Patriot groups and militias are planning a march on Washington next month ostensibly in defence of the right to carry guns.

Guardian

Five-star treat for BNP...and YOU pay

Griffin: living like a king at the taxpayer's expense

Taxpayers will foot the bill for BNP leader Nick Griffin to enjoy a week of five-star treatment at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

Griffin, elected to the European Parliament on the back of the MPs expenses scandal, is one of just three British MEPs attending in an official capacity. As an MEP he is entitled to claim business class flights for the event, as well as his hotel accommodation and a £300 daily allowance. Griffin has been given a place because he is the only member of the EU environment committee who believes global warming is a hoax.

World leaders including Gordon Brown and Barack Obama will also be attending the summit, which hopes to limit the world's carbon emissions.

The BNP said he was justified in using taxpayers' cash. A party spokesman said: "It's very much in Britain's national interests that at least one politician is willing to question and put under scrutiny what we are all being led to believe by the climate change lobby. Nick and the party believe that the whole global warming industry is a huge con."

Mirror

Of thieves, pseudo-patriots and idiots...

The BNP is always happy to steal a good idea when it sees one. The immensely successful and largely-online Obama election campaign in the US was certainly a good idea and, from the constant stream of online communications (or, in the BNP's case, cheap and nasty begging letters) to the appearance of the Obama campaign website itself, the BNP has nabbed the lot, not even bothering to alter it much beyond adding a Churchill here and a porky nazi pretending to be a statesman over there.

The Barack Obama campaign site

Not the Barack Obama campaign site

The BNP is, as it tells us ad nauseum, the most patriotic party in the known universe. Why then, is it unable to tell when our country's flag is upside-down? The picture below is taken from the BNP's cringeworthy tat-selling arm, Excalibur, now run by and for the appalling Arthur Kemp, white supremacist and former South African spook. The BNP's faux-patriotism is, of course, well-known, and is useful only while some voters are still being taken in by it - but the flag has been on the Excalibur site for months and we're starting to wonder if anybody at the BNP even looks at the Excalibur site, let alone buys the crap that's sold on it.

Oops - the BNP does it again...

Or perhaps the flag is upside-down for a reason. An upside-down Union Jack on the high seas indicates a vessel in distress - perhaps one sold via the market stall of a third-rate political party indicates distress that the accounts are long-overdue again and will yet again incur a whacking great fine from the Electoral Commission.

Giving the BNP air-time

The question of how best to deal with the British National Party raised its head again earlier this week with the news BNP leader Nick Griffin will be asked to appear on Question Time in October.

The arguments for and against the BBC’s decision range from giving the BNP enough rope to hang themselves and starving them and their supporters of the oxygen of publicity; the optimum solution, as always, being a combination of the two.

Groups like Searchlight, Hope Not Hate and Unite Against Fascism work tirelessly on the latter, disrupting BNP activity, squaring up to them and campaigning against them on the doorstep, street-by-street and town-by-town, often at great personal risk - some even receiving death threats from the “democratic” BNP.

Forensic analysis of their policies and line-by-line rebuttals of their lies, however, have been less prevalent, enabling the BNP’s racist propaganda to go virtually unchallenged, though steps are, belatedly, being taken to rectify this. Last month Quilliam, the counter-extremism think tank, published a report cataloguing the BNP’s raft of anti-Islamic smears and quashing them.

The third part of the strategy takes us back to the media, and how best they should cover the BNP. This is probably the most important aspect, with the press in particular conducting many in-depth investigations into the BNP. A recent example of this is News of the World’s exposé of a BNP “family festival” in August which revealed the true face of the BNP.

Among the shocking incidents which took place included gollywogs being thrown onto braziers; people throwing wet sponges at a man in a Barack Obama mask locked in stocks; BNP officers making speeches describing Jadaism and Islam as “cancers”; BNP supporters giving “Sieg Heil” salutes; BNP members threatening an anti-Fascist protester with hammers and axes; skinheads boating of how they’d driven black families out of their villages… the list goes on and on.

The media at its best, but the BBC’s invite to Nick Griffin to take a seat on their flagship news and current affairs programme will be considered by many to be totally unacceptable. The BBC have already given Griffin countless platforms to spout his bile, from Newsnight interviews to radio phone-ins, but Question Time, Question Time, in front of a live studio audience???

Inside Desi

Tea and mugs at the BNP garden party

An English village, a summer festival – what could be more agreeable? But beneath the traditional trappings lies an air of menace.

Showing their true colours - an Obama effigy comes in for a soaking at the RWB

A man wearing Islamic dress and an Osama Bin Laden mask poked his head through wooden stocks and was pelted with sponges for his trouble, while a neighbouring stall did a roaring trade in golliwog mugs and Union flag badges. This was not your average summer fete. A bouncy castle and ice-cream van did little to lighten the mood at the British National Party's festival yesterday.

BNP members, huddled under tarpaulin and shivering in their shorts, appeared less than thrilled by the grey Derbyshire skies and chill breeze that heralded the start of their annual summer gathering.

Listed in the Domesday Book, the sleepy village of Codnor in the Amber Valley district is a former mining community, with a population of just under 5,000. Only 12 miles from Derby and 14 from Nottingham, Codnor (chillingly for those who live there) is regarded by the BNP as "the heart of a rural district whose ancient history and cultural heritage exemplify all that is steadfastly and typically Anglo-Saxon".

The "Red, White and Blue" festival was billed as a family event. In this case the "family" extended beyond mum, dad and a couple of sticky-fingered children. One cousin from out of town was missing: a US white supremacist was banned from entering Britain for the festival last week. But others had rallied and speeches were scheduled from Roberto Fiore, leader of the Italian far-right Forza Nuova and a friend of the BNP leader, Nick Griffin.

And, of course, there were members of the BNP "family" from closer to home. "It is nice to speak to people from different countries who share our views," said Dave Clarke, 56, who has attended the event for the past five years. Like many at the festival, Mr Clarke wore his political allegiance on his chest: a T-shirt bearing the St George's Cross and a row of BNP stickers decorating the brim of his hat.

Most who attended yesterday came with their children, and in this Mr Clarke was no exception. He brought his 16-year-old daughter, Rebecca, hoping she would "learn about her culture and heritage, things that are being forgotten".

Along with family, British culture and heritage were high on the agenda. When Mr Griffin picked up the microphone in the "Political Tent", it was not to speak of the party's political future but about researching his family's history. He encouraged others to do the same.

Numerous posters celebrated British soldiers who fought in the First and Second World Wars, while in one corner of the field a group of white wooden crosses commemorated "people who have died as a result of anti-white violence". It was one of many surreal touches in an event that both fascinated and appalled in its apparent normality: a Ford Ka was up for grabs in a raffle, while a coconut shy featured images of Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown, offering festival-goers the chance to "knock a traitor off the stick".

Amid makeshift cafés selling tea and cakes sat marquees run by local BNP branches. At the Manchester stall, "Then and Now" displays contrasted photographs of white 1960s schoolboys with modern schools in the city's multicultural Moss Side area, beside slogans claiming that schools have been "dumbed down" to meet the needs of immigrants.

Media entry was tightly controlled. All but the most like-minded journalists, myself included, were assigned two minders; some publications were denied access altogether.

Things were getting a little ugly on the other side of the iron gates and thick hedgerows – not to mention countless security guards and policemen – that separated BNP members from about 1,500 anti-fascist protesters. The Derbyshire force put the cost of policing this year's protest at some £500,000, and reported a score of arrests as demonstrators hurled missiles, including eggs and flour, in frustration at being unable to get to the BNP members. Many had travelled to Codnor with groups such as Stop the BNP, Unite Against Fascism and the Trades Union Congress.

"We know they have a hardcore neo-Nazi membership, but in holding events like this they are trying to secure new members," said 43-year-old Dean Ryan, from London. "We're here to remind those people that this is not just a fun day out. I'm planning to protest peacefully, but I've seen the BNP be violent and as far as I'm concerned self-defence is no offence."

Snippets of chants from the protesters drifted across the site. Refrains such as "What shall we do with the BNP? What shall we do with the BNP? String them up like Mussolini" created a sense of unease, although the voices were frequently drowned out by the constant whirring of a police helicopter circling overhead.

The BNP professed itself happy with the way the day had turned out. "We've chosen a very secure site here," said Mr Griffin. "We're tucked away, so we're not in people's faces. It is discreet. We haven't done much marketing this year, but I'd say we've got more than last year."

The people who live nearby were considerably less happy. For them, the gathering had been as much of a nuisance as they had predicted. With roads closed and hundreds of protesters chanting, local residents do not look forward to the festival, which has been held in the town for the past three years.

Kevin Grant, 50, who lives less than a mile from the festival site, viewed the whole thing as an irritant: "Last year I was called a neo-Nazi by protesters, and I don't even vote for the BNP. This year we've been told to stay in our houses all day."

Independent

Holocaust museum security guard shot and killed in Washington

A suspected white supremacist opened fire inside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington today, killing a security guard who stopped him in the entrance before being wounded by return gunfire.

The museum that commemorates the victims of genocide in the second world war became the scene of bloodshed and panic today, when an elderly man suspected of writing racist anti-Semitic internet tracts entered the building brandishing a rifle and opened fire on two guards who confronted him.

The killing of security guard Stephen Johns, whose quick action officials credited with saving perhaps dozens of lives, came just five days after Barack Obama visited the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany and implored the world never to forget those who perished in the Holocaust.

"I am shocked and saddened by today's shooting at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum," Obama said in a statement. "This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms. No American institution is more important to this effort than the Holocaust museum, and no act of violence will diminish our determination to honour those who were lost by building a more peaceful and tolerant world."

"The security guards performed exceptionally well and exactly as they were supposed to," Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty told reporters. "In these days and times you never know when someone is going to grab a gun and use it in an inappropriate way."

Washington Police Chief Cathy Lanier said the gunman appeared to have acted alone, though the FBI was investigating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism.

Police officials suspected James Von Brunn in the shooting and found his car blocks from the museum. Von Brunn, 89, was in critical condition at a Washington hospital tonight. On a racist, anti-Semitic website purportedly written by Von Brunn, he says he was a lieutenant in the US navy during the second world war and lived in Maryland, about two hours away from Washington, and worked as an artist.

In 1983 Von Brunn was convicted of attempting to kidnap members of the US federal reserve board. At the time, police said Von Brunn wanted to take the members hostage because of high interest rates and the nation's economic difficulties. On the website, Von Brunn blames his six-year imprisonment on "a Jew judge" and "Negro jury".

After the shooting, about 2,000 stunned visitors fled onto the pavement outside and police established a wide perimeter around the museum, snarling traffic across downtown Washington. The museum, a US government body, lies within blocks of the White House, the US capitol building and several major monuments, along a heavily policed corridor of government office buildings.

Eyewitnesses standing outside the police cordon reported hearing about four to six gunshots just inside the entryway to the museum, near the x-ray machine and magnetometer visitors must walk through to enter.

David Unruh, 66, from Wichita, Kansas, said he was in the lobby when he heard shots and somebody yell "hit the floor". He was roughly 30 feet from where the shots were fired. He, his wife and two grandsons dropped to the floor and a man shielded them. "We were scared to death," he said. He said the evacuation was orderly but people were visibly upset.

"You feel pretty secure," he said. "You've gone through security. You don't expect that to happen at a place like this. It's a place of dignity and respect."

The shooting was the third in the US in recent weeks that appear to have been motivated by political hatred. Last week a man opened fire outside an Army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing one soldier and wounding another. Late last month, an anti-abortion extremist killed Kansas physician George Tiller at his church.

Guardian

Voters must hear the truth about the BNP before it's too late

There is nothing British about suggesting to a black child who was born in Britain and loves this country that he's not welcome here, writes Tim Montgomerie.

I have long believed that the best way to defeat the British National Party and other extremist groups was to deny them the oxygen of publicity. That belief was shaken when I talked to two people in Salisbury cathedral after Sunday morning worship. We were having a pleasant conversation about the state of the nation and they suddenly mentioned that they'd be voting BNP. My jaw dropped.

It quickly became clear that they had no idea what the BNP really stood for. They said that they liked its patriotism and opposition to political sleaze. They wanted to register a protest vote. I asked if they knew about the Nazi ideology that many BNP activists followed. I asked if they knew about the party's preference for an all-white Britain. They didn't. They were horrified and promised to find a different vehicle for their protest vote.

The no-oxygen strategy was successful only when the route to publicity was more or less monopolised by a few TV channels and national newspapers. Without any attention from the mainstream media, and because Conservative governments pursued firm immigration policies in the 1980s and 1990s, support for racist parties declined.

It's different today. The most popular political party website in Britain is owned by the BNP. Its most watched YouTube videos receive many times more views than any videos put out by David Cameron. The ether is buzzing with pictures of Gap-style line-ups of young BNP supporters attempting to normalise their party's brand. Without a hint of embarrassment their leader, Nick Griffin, even talks about learning the lessons from Barack Obama's online campaigning.

This use of the internet has contributed to a comeback by the party. It has been winning council contests and, helped by the introduction of proportional representation, it won a seat on the Greater London Authority. Now, most experts expect the PR electoral system to help them win seats in the European Parliament on June 4. If victories are achieved, it will be the biggest story of the election and Britain will no longer be able to proudly say it has kept fascists out of high office. The BNP will have a new platform – funded generously by European taxpayers. Support for the extremists has grown because of failures by the Labour Government on jobs, welfare, housing and immigration. Its support has also grown because of cosmetic change. The skinheads and boots are gone. Suits are in.

But by not contesting the ground we are giving them a walk-over on the critical playing fields of the internet. That's why I'm supporting a new online campaign to expose the party's true beliefs. The Left already have websites that target the BNP. NothingBritish.com is the first attempt by the centre-Right to offer a critique. It's a very focused campaign at present, but we hope it will grow into a very substantial resource that will ensure all moderate opinion shuns the BNP.

There will be those who argue that this campaign gives the racists the attention they crave. However, they already have got the attention. The BNP wants to define itself. It's vital that decent, mainstream Britons define it instead – before it's too late.

The main difference between the BNP and other parties is their determination to deport, one way or another, the non-white population of the UK. Most Britons want to reassert control of our borders. They want fairer allocation of housing. They want more jobs. The BNP wants you to think it shares those aspirations. But they are not the party's core motivation, which is still a belief in a largely all-white Britain.

There is nothing British about suggesting to a black child who was born in Britain and loves this country that he's not welcome here. There's nothing British about the BNP's core beliefs.

Tim Montgomerie is part of the NothingBritish.com campaign against the BNP.

Telegraph

Britain ready for black PM, study finds

Barack Obama outside 10 Downing Street last year

Extensive report on British and American racial attitudes shows two countries in close alignment

The most extensive comparison of British and American racial attitudes over the last 50 years has found a softening of prejudice, creating the conditions necessary for a black prime minister to emerge in the UK.

A joint study conducted by Harvard and Manchester universities has found a "deepening tide of tolerance" in the attitudes of both Americans and Britons.

Ed Fieldhouse, the study's co-author and executive director of Manchester's Institute for Social Change, said: "The good news is that in terms of the underlying attitudes of the majority, Britain is in the same place as the United States. Whether it is willingness to work for a black boss or to welcome a non-white person into the family, majority British opinion – just like majority American opinion – is gradually getting more tolerant."

The project's team includes the Guardian's Tom Clark and the American academic Robert Putnam, whose book Bowling Alone catalogued the decrease in American civic engagement and the benefits of "social capital" or social networks to both individuals and communities.

The authors have analysed all available polling from the two countries, including 50-year Gallup series and the poll series British Social Attitudes. They have been able to show that since the 1980s the proportion of whites who admit to discomfort at the idea of a black person marrying into the family has been falling in both nations by around two percentage points each year. In the UK, since the 80s, the percentage of people who object to a black boss has fallen by half from 20% to 10% – a similar decrease to that in America. Last week, Tidjane Thiam was appointed the first black chief executive of the Prudential financial service company.

Though there is little polling on attitudes to black politicians available in the UK, researchers point to an increase in the number of Americans saying they are willing to vote for a black candidate – from 53% in 1967 to 94% today. Given the pattern of change is similar in the UK and US on other variables, the reports' authors argue that the UK may now be ready for a black prime minister.

But the study also bears out the fears of senior British figures including Trevor Phillips, the chair of the equalities and human rights commission, that the lack of routes into politics for black British candidates still means the UK lags behind America in the number of black and ethnic-minority politicians.

Putnam said that the UK had not yet gone through either of the two steps Barack Obama referred to as the Moses and Joshua generation, the Moses generation being black politicians representing black areas, and the Joshua generation being black politicians serving non-black areas.

Putnam said: "Change is taking a similar form on both sides of the Atlantic: exactly as in the US, the generation of Britons uncomfortable with non-whites in positions of power or intimacy is gradually dying off, and being replaced by its more tolerant offspring.

"It is fair to add, however, that the smaller minority population in the UK, as well as the much shallower pool of black politicians and the more centralised political recruitment paths, still tends to work against black representation in Britain."

Obama was elected in the wake of a sustained rise in the number of black elected officials in the US that can be traced back over several decades.

Though the report shows some improvement in minority participation in local politics in the UK, with the total number roughly doubling since the "very low level of the 80s", the authors show this to have stagnated recently.

They conclude: "Its recent failure to grow has less to do with racial prejudice than the fading fortunes of Labour. Non-whites are six times better represented among that party's councillors than among than the Conservatives, and the pattern in all recent local elections has been for Labour to lose seats."

Guardian

Obama online team hired to help fight BNP

The firm behind President Barack Obama's online election campaign have been signed up to help anti-racists take on the British National party in the European parliament elections in June.

Blue State Digital (BSD), which used the latest internet technology to mobilise millions of people behind Obama, has been employed to help create a grassroots network across the UK as part of the campaign to stop the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, becoming the far-right party's first MEP.

The firm began work last week and has already signed up thousands of supporters and donors. As part of the first stage of its campaign BSD and an anti-fascist magazine, Searchlight, has sent thousands of emails asking each recipients to forward it to five friends and make a small donation. The software means campaigners can then track who opens the emails, where they are sent and what happens when they arrive at the other end - tailoring future emails to groups and individuals

"The crucial thing about this campaign is that everybody is given a task so they become activists with a stake in what we are doing," said Nick Lowles, who is leading the Hope not Hate drive. "The software allows us to tailor emails to different groups and get information out there to hundreds of thousands of people. We have had more small individual donations in the past two weeks than we have had in three or four years and the technology is already allowing us to build a vibrant, bottom-up activist movement."

The BNP is standing candidates across the country in the European elections and analysts believe they could be on the verge of an important breakthrough.

Guardian

Harman warns of BNP Euro victory

The far-right British National Party could win its first seat in the European Parliament by claiming just 8% of the vote, Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman will warn.

Ms Harman is expected to say it would be "shameful" for the UK to elect a BNP MEP in the June 4 polls, just months after the US elected Barack Obama as its first black president. She will warn that Labour's analysis of recent council elections shows the BNP winning and coming second in seats traditionally held by all three main parties from the North West and North East to the Midlands, London, Yorkshire and Essex.

Speaking to the Progressive London conference, Ms Harman is expected to promise that Labour will use the 2009 European Parliament elections to "draw a line in the sand" against the advance of the BNP, which she denounced as "a party of racial hatred".

The proportional representation voting system used for Euro-elections increases the BNP's chances of winning a seat, she will warn.

"In the North West, where Nick Griffin, the BNP chairman, is standing, Searchlight estimates they only need about 8% of the vote to break through into the European Parliament," Ms Harman is expected to say. "That would be shameful for Britain just as the US shows the way forward by electing an inclusive, progressive president."

And she will add: "The BNP threat cannot be ignored. A new Labour analysis of council elections shows that even where they are not winning they are coming second in areas which are Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory-held. Their poison is spreading. They are winning and coming second in the North West, the North East, the Midlands and London - from Yorkshire to Essex.

"Labour will, with a vigorous door-to-door campaign, not allow the BNP to peddle their pernicious lies that people have been 'abandoned by Labour'. It is Labour on the doorstep which will show this to be false and the run-up to elections on June 4 will be seized as an important opportunity to do this."

Ananova

Barking madness

Political controversy based on race – and fake facts – is still being stirred up by the BNP in east London

According to some, race-based politics will soon be over. The battle has been won and we can all go home.

Boris Johnson was one of the first to see it coming. Writing back in October, the London mayor declared: "If Barack Hussein Obama is successful next month, then we could even see the beginning of the end of race-based politics, with all the grievance culture and special interest groups and political correctness that come with it."

As an unhappy target and an unwilling associate of such race-based politics, you can understand why he would hope this to be so. Unfortunately, nobody has got round to telling the British National party about it.

Speaking about the prospect of Obama's election, its leader, Nick Griffin, said: "The core impact on the millions of third worlders is that if you have a third worlder there... they will see the most powerful job in the world has gone to a black man that means that there is nothing that a black man can't do which is unfortunate because the black men and women who aren't very clever and I am not saying that's all of them, but some of them aren't very clever...

"The moment they can't get promoted because they're not actually very clever, they will think 'well I'm being held back, I'm being discriminated against' and they have already got a chip on their shoulder because of all the stuff about slavery... and so they see one of theirs who can make it to the top of America but think 'well I can't make it to the top of this branch of Jewsons and I am being discriminated against' and instead of one chip they get a second chip so there will be trouble.

"And some of them, when they have got a chip on their shoulder, well they can't take it out, they don't want to work anyway, so they find a white kid on the street and they beat the hell out of them... and the result of Barack Obama being at the top is that it will strengthen that, it will make them feel more confident, more pushy, more resentful if they don't get their own way. So it will just add a bit of a tweak to what is in fact a one-way, low-level race war."

In order to give it a tweak of its own, the BNP have been busy distributing a leaflet called Racism cuts both ways to schools, businesses and homes across the country.

Daubed with blood-red splashes and dodgy case studies, it is everything you would expect a BNP leaflet to be.

However, since then they have suffered the public humiliation of their membership list being leaked and the public realisation that their numbers, if not their support, are remarkably small.

But despite this setback, the BNP are determined to let their low-level war carry on. In order to take a look at it in operation, I took a journey to the east London borough of Barking and Dagenham. The borough, which is the BNP's stronghold in southern England, now has 12 BNP councillors.

Inside the chamber last week, there was little sign of an end to race-based politics. Barking's BNP group leader began by calling for the immediate resignation of the council leader for allowing immigration into the borough, before shouting "Nazi" at him across the chamber. Another BNP councillor refused to apologise for having likened sex education to paedophilia, before launching into a lengthy rant about immigrants, which got him removed from the chamber.

Other vital matters raised by Barking BNP have included the supply of Halal meat to schools (they think it shouldn't be) and the plight of the "native minority" in the "Labour borough of Ealing" (it's a Conservative borough and there's no "native" minority).

Outside of the chamber and the BNP's Richard Barnbrook has also been fighting hard, spreading mistruths about knife crime in Dagenham and making time-wasting "complaints" about non-existent bullying in City Hall.

But beyond these passing rows, the long-term effect of the BNP's low-level war in London has been the kind of small but often paralysing disruption that I saw in Barking last week. And as long as London politicians continue to be distracted into squabbling about Halal meat and Barnbrook's dyslexia, the real meat of their work is being put to one side.

So while it is convenient for some to herald Obama's victory as a sign of the beginning of the end of race-based politics, in areas where BNP support is rising, a debilitating battle continues every day.

Adam Bienkov
Comment is Free

White rage: The rednecks out to kill Obama

When millions watched Barack Obama give his history-making victory speech in Grant Park on election night, one thing stood out starkly – the bulletproof screen surrounding him. But just how serious is the threat of assassination to the President-elect?

Shawn Adolf and his cousin Tharin Gartrell fancied that 28 August, 2008 would be a good day for the next president of the United States to die. They had the guns – Gartrell was later caught with a Ruger Model M77 Mark II bolt-action rifle with an attached scope and bipod, and a Remington Model 721, also with a scope. They were believers in a radical white supremacist ideology that gave them the motivation they needed to risk their own lives, if necessary, to prevent a black man from entering the Oval Office. (Or, as a friend reported Adolf as saying: "No nigger should ever live in the White House.")

And they had at least the outlines of a plan. They checked into the downtown Denver hotel where they believed Barack Obama was staying, and talked about the ways they could try to gun down the Democratic nominee on the day he was due to accept his party's nomination at an outdoor sports arena before an adoring crowd of more than 70,000 people.

Like many assassins before them, both the successful ones and the idle fantasists, Adolf and Gartrell took their inspiration from popular culture. They considered hiding a rifle inside a hollowed out television camera – an idea they borrowed from the Kevin Costner-Whitney Houston vehicle The Bodyguard. (It is also similar to the way al-Qa'eda operatives posing as a news crew assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, on 9 September, 2001, but it is far from clear whether Adolf and Gartrell had any notion of this.)

They toyed with the idea of hitting Obama from as far away as 750 yards, using one of their high-powered rifles; according to their friend Nathan Johnson, who may or may not have been part of the plot, they had in mind the conspiracy theory that President Kennedy was not shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, but rather by professional assassins stationed on the "grassy knoll" above Dallas's Dealey Plaza.

None of these plans was ever remotely realistic, however. Adolf and Gartrell may have had some fearsome weaponry, and a vague affiliation with a white supremacist biker gang called the Sons of Silence, which disavowed them the moment they were arrested. But they were also rank amateurs living in a crystal methamphetamine-induced haze of paranoia and race hatred. (One can't help thinking Adolf's name went to his head, at least a little, as he fingered the swastika ring on his finger.) They had no clue how to circumvent the security surrounding Obama – prosecutors who examined their plans laughed them off as ludicrously naïve. And they couldn't even figure out what every half-interested member of the press corps knew, that Obama was not staying at the Hyatt Regency, the temporary HQ of the Democratic National Committee, but at a different hotel altogether.

Four days before Obama's acceptance speech, Gartrell was pulled over for drunk-driving in the Denver suburb ' of Aurora after a patrol officer spotted his rented Dodge Ram truck swerving erratically, and the whole plot, such as it was, fell apart almost instantly. Certainly, the officer found plenty inside the truck to sound alarm bells – the two high-powered rifles, a silencer, a bulletproof vest, camouflage clothing, and three fake identification cards. But it was also clear that Gartrell was high on meth as well as drunk. The truck contained enough drug-making equipment to be considered a mobile meth lab.

Gartrell ratted out Johnson and Adolf almost as soon as he was taken in and photographed for his singularly striking mugshot. (With his bleached blonde hair, heavy silver earrings and pierced lip, he looks like the neo-Nazi from central casting.) Johnson was in the room at the Hyatt Regency, and wasted no time in talking himself – insisting he had no idea about any assassination plot while almost simultaneously telling the world Adolf was planning to "go down in a blaze of glory" and take Obama with him.

Adolf was a tougher proposition, the only one of the three with a serious criminal record, including burglary, forgery, drugs and weapons raps. At the time of his arrest he was wanted on eight outstanding charges and had recently skipped out on a $1 million bail payment. He was staying at a different hotel in the Denver suburbs. When the police arrived, he jumped out of his sixth-floor room on to the roof of the hotel kitchen four floors below, then jumped again to the ground, breaking his ankle as he landed. He didn't make it far. He, too, was found to be high on meth. When asked why he was wearing a bulletproof vest, he said he was convinced someone wanted to kill him.

We will no doubt learn more colourful details about the trio of would-be assassins when their trial begins this week. Intriguingly, though, they are being prosecuted on drugs and weapons charges only. Their prosecutor, Troy Eid, has said he is absolutely confident the "meth heads", as he calls them, never posed a risk to Obama or anyone else.

Not everyone is happy with this decision. After all, marginal people have hatched assassination plots before, and sometimes succeeded – one thinks of John Hinckley hitting President Reagan in 1981. And Barack Obama was never just another presidential contender; as the first African American to come even close to the highest political office on the planet, in a country whose history is spattered with the blood of racial animus, he is, by common consent, a target several orders of magnitude more tempting than the average for an extremist fringe of kooks, crazies, anti-government militia types, Ku Klux Klan members and other white race warriors, all of whom tend to be unforgiving in their ideological fervour, not to mention armed to the teeth.

He was granted 24-hour Secret Service protection just a few months into his campaign, in May 2007, after his friend and fellow Illinois senator, Dick Durbin, raised the alarm on his behalf. (Usually candidates receive that protection far later in the election cycle, after they have their party primaries sewn up.) We don't know exactly how hard the Secret Service has had to work on his behalf, although we do know that two men from the old confederate South – one from North Carolina, the other from Florida – were arrested and charged with making threatening statements against him in July. We know that effigies of Obama being lynched, or sliced through the head with a hatchet, have popped up periodically around the country – one on the campus of the University of Kentucky, another in Orange County, California in the run-up to Halloween.

We also know that Obama's supporters have been almost maniacal in their desire to prevent him sharing the tragic fate of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. On a couple of occasions during primary season, when security ' guards at Obama campaign events stopped searching people's bags because of the backlog of people trying to get in, sympathetic reporters, bloggers and ordinary members of the public complained as loudly as they knew how. Likewise, when someone at a Sarah Palin rally in Clearwater, Florida in early October reacted to a mention of Obama's name by shouting "kill him!", there was such a clamour on the internet that the Secret Service made a rare public announcement saying it was launching an official investigation.

How much of a risk of assassination does Obama face? The most immediate, comfortable answer to that is: not much. The Secret Service has vastly improved its procedures and protocols since the spate of political assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s. No president would now be allowed to drive at a snail's pace in an open-top car through the centre of a major city, as John Kennedy did in Dallas on 22 November, 1963. The sheer numbers of Secret Service members assigned to presidential protection has increased dramatically since the attempt on Reagan's life – we don't have exact figures on how much, but we do know that when one unhinged man toyed with the idea of tossing a grenade at President Bush in Atlanta in 2005, he never got remotely close enough to give it a real try.

The more worrying answer is that Obama will almost certainly inspire a large number of assassination plots because of the colour of his skin, and that it only takes one of them to be blessed with luck, proper organisation and a little official incompetence to pose a serious threat. When asked how much of a risk he faces, he has acknowledged that the color of his skin will be a problem for some people. And he knows that Colin Powell, the only other African American of significant stature in recent times to consider a run at the White House, decided not to pursue the presidency in part because his wife, Alma, feared for his safety.

"There's not any question he's under more threat than most politicians," said Mark Potok, one of America's leading researchers into hate groups who edits a monthly Intelligence Report for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. "I think we are seeing a kind of perfect storm of conditions that might well help white supremacist movements grow, and grow rapidly.

"We have changing demographics, and the Census Bureau projection that whites will lose their majority status in America by 2040. We have the tanking economy, and now... a black man in the White House. This makes some Americans feel they are losing their world – the sense that the country their forefathers built is slipping away from them."

The number of racist hate groups tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Centre has grown by almost 50 per cent during the Bush administration years, from about 600 in 2000 to almost 900 now. In contrast to the 1990s, when the "angry white man" phenomenon fuelled the militia movement and led to the white-supremacist inspired Oklahoma City bombing, much of this new growth has been triggered by virulent hostility to immigrants pouring in from Mexico.

It is entirely possible, though, that the emphasis will change now that Obama is about to enter the White House. Certainly, the neo-Nazi movement senses an opportunity: to judge by the endless chatter on far-right websites, they see a President Obama as the best recruiting tool they've had in years. "Obama will be a signal, a clear signal for millions of our people," the former Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader and erstwhile candidate for governor, David Duke, wrote earlier this year in an essay he called A Black Flag for White America. "Obama is like that new big dark spot on your arm that finally sends you to the doctor for some real medicine. ... Obama is the pain that let's [sic] your body know that something is dreadfully wrong... Millions of European Americans will inevitably react with new awareness of their heritage and the need for them to defend and advance it."

That logic suggests the far right is not, in fact, itching to pull the trigger on Obama. Except that we are hardly dealing with rational people. The neo-Nazi magazine National Socialist wrote a cover story in September purporting to debunk the "myth" that Obama might be assassinated. But the cover also showed a photograph of the candidate in the crosshairs of a rifle (altered to look like a swastika) under the headline: "Kill this NIGGER?" And the piece went on to suggest that Obama, backed by Communists and Jews, planned to commit genocide against working white people.

Likewise, the "imperial wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, an Indiana railway worker who calls himself Ray Larsen, denied any intent to attack Obama when interviewed on television a few months ago. But he added: "If that man is elected president, he'll be shot sure as hell."

If that doesn't have the Secret Service worried, it should. Some security experts have already started drafting memos with ideas on how to keep Obama better protected using state-of-the-art technology – for example, hand-held TeraHertz scanners that would-be assassins could not spot. Martin Dudziak, a Virginia-based security specialist who has worked on counter-terrorism issues, pointed out glumly that it is unusually difficult to profile would-be attackers. As he put it in a memo drafted in October: "There are frankly and very unfortunately, a lot of people in the USA who have deep-rooted 'phobic' hatred of an African American... being president. We should not try to deny this sombre reality."

If the inept Denver plot was not warning enough, news of another planned anti-Obama assault broke at the end of last month with the arrest of two White Power advocates in Tennessee. Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman didn't appear to be any more competent than Adolf and Gartrell. They had grand schemes to kill more than 100 African Americans, and fantasised about killing Obama dressed in white dinner jackets and top hats, but they couldn't so much as rob a house – they gave up on their intended target after spotting a guard dog out back and got picked up after shooting out the windows in a church.

Still, they had some serious weapons: a sawn-off shotgun, high-powered rifles and a couple of handguns. And Cowart appears to have been a founding member of a hate group called the Supreme White Alliance. While their dreams of killing Obama might have been fanciful, some of their other plans might not. "They might well have shot up a black high school, or hurt a group of black children," Potok said.

And it is entirely conceivable that other, more competent criminals will follow them. Obama may not have appeared remotely daunted when he delivered his victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park on election night, but it is worth remembering that he was also speaking behind a bulletproof glass shield. Such precautions, one suspects, will be the rule rather than the exception over the next four or eight years.

"There is a boiling rage just beneath the surface," Potok added. "We're talking about a minority, clearly, of whites. It's hard to say how large that group of people is. But I think this represents the beginning of a real white backlash in a certain quarter of the population."

Independent

FBI foil neo-Nazi plot to assassinate Barack Obama and kill another 101 black Americans

A plot to kill Barack Obama and 101 other black Americans was foiled yesterday.

Federal agents said two neo-Nazis were being held over a plan to rob a gun store and target a predominantly black high school in Tennessee.

The pair intended to shoot 88 African-Americans and decapitate another 14, said Jim Cavanaugh, of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.

Obama was their final target, Cavanaugh added. 'They said that would be their last, final act - that they would attempt to kill Senator Obama.

Neo-Nazis: Daniel Cowart (left) and Paul Schlesselman, seen posing with guns on their Myspace pages, have been charged over a plot to assassinate Barack Obama and 101 other black Americans

'They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying.'

The planned bloodbath was unveiled in court records unsealed last night.

Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tennessee, and Paul Schlesselman 18, of West Helena, Arkansas, have been charged with possessing an unregistered firearm, conspiring to steal firearms and threatening a candidate for president.

More charges are possible, Mr Cavanaugh added.

Agents said the skinheads did not identify the school by name. Officers seized a rifle, a sawn- off shotgun and three pistols from the pair who, officials said, were preparing to steal more firearms.

Anti-racism campaigners said the number 88 is used by white supremacists as an abbreviation for Heil Hitler as H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

The figure 14 represents a slogan consisting of that many words, coined by American white supremacist leader David Lane, who is serving a 190-year jail sentence.

The plot was similar to one uncovered during the Democratic party convention in Denver last month. Then, three white supremacists were arrested after being found with a sniper rifle and being high on drugs.

Later FBI agents and the Secret Service decided not to charge them after coming to the conclusion they did not pose a real threat.

Plot: U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was on the hit list of 102 black Americans to be killed in a murder spree in Tennessee

The latest plot came to light with just a week to go in the race to be the next President of the United States.

Senator Obama fiercely criticised Republican candidate John McCain in a 'closing argument' as little more than a clone of George Bush. Both candidates were in Ohio, seen as a crucial state in the election next Tuesday.

Senator McCain was repeating his charge that Mr Obama was a tax-and-spend liberal.

But having said over the weekend that he and President Bush, as fellow Republicans, share some economic philosophies, Mr McCain was accused of doing a U-turn yesterday.

'We (Obama and McCain) both disagree with President Bush on economic policies. My approach is to get spending under control,' Mr McCain said.

He added that the difference was that: 'He (Obama) thinks taxes have been too low and I think that spending has been too high.'

Mr Obama said: 'After 21 months and three debates, Senator McCain still has not been able to tell the American people a single major thing he'd do differently from George Bush when it comes to the economy.'

He claimed that 'the biggest gamble we can take is embracing the same old Bush-McCain policies that have failed us for the last eight years'.

The Daily Mail

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

BNP legal director Lee Barnes calls Britain a “sick society” that must be destroyed by the god Odin to make way for a BNP order

By Hexapla.

He also claims that the 7/7 bombings were committed by the British government, that actor Heath Ledger died because he unleashed the powers of Odin and launches a racist tirade against Barack Obama.

BNP legal director Lee Barnes wants Odin to destroy the UK!

A few days ago BNP legal director Lee Barnes published his fascist-Odinist interpretation of the newly released Batman movie, The Dark Knight, entitled 'Batman and the Odinic Archetype'. Now, Odinism is a fictitious religion expounded by many fascists, such as Lee Barnes, as the spiritual means to revive the White race, corrupted and weakened by Christianity. In that article, Lee Barnes reads Heath Ledger’s character, the Joker, as the prime embodiment of the god Odin. But, Lee Barnes’ interpretation takes on a starkly disturbing twist when he argues:

“Just like Odin the Joker is an agent of chaos, a force unleashed to destroy a sick society and to make way for a new order”

It is undoubtedly clear that BNP legal director Lee Barnes sees and condemns British society as ‘sick’ which needs to be destroyed by the force of ‘Odin’ to make way for a new BNP-imposed order.

Lee Barnes claims Heath Ledger died by unleashing the powers of Odin!

But, Lee Barnes plunges to even greater depths of fascist intellectual depravity when he asserts that Heath Ledger (who died shortly after the filming of The Dark Knight) died because by playing the Joker character, he took on the forces of ‘Odin’ and as such couldn’t control those powers:

“Heath Ledger by unlocking this arhcetype unleashed a darkness within himself he was unable to control.

In order to control the archetype he needed to understand the 'Sun' side of the archetype, that of the Odinic veneration of nature and the love for folk, family, the forests and the fields. The shadow of Odin is just one aspect of his divine nature, for the other aspect is personified by the wandervogel movement of the early 1930's and the Hippie movement of the 1960's established by the scions of the German wandervogel movement in California after the war.

Heath needed to purge himself of the shadow of the Joker, but he did not know how to do that.

Heath never knew he was channeling an archetype, and therefore he was swept away by it.

He needed to get into the countryside, camping and just commune with nature.”

Lee Barnes claims the 7/7 bombings were an 'inside job'

Thumbing his yellowing dictionary of wild conspiracy theories (again), Lee Barnes accuses the British government of carrying out the 7/7 bombings in another recent article, ‘The Shadow Government attacks its own Citizens’:

“7/7, like 911, was an inside job - that the government used its assets in islamist terrorist groups to work with islamist terrorists to assist in the creation and planting of bombs ?”

Apart from insulting the memories of the 7/7 victims, BNP legal supremo Lee Barnes then accuses the US, Saudi Arabia and Israeli governments of setting up terrorist groups to attack Britain in order to, as he puts it, force British “citizenry into surrendering their liberty for security”!

But, then again Lee Barnes will find fellow fascist travellers who believe that 7/7 and 9/11 were, implausibly, ‘inside jobs’. Ex-BNP councillor and rabid anti-Jew hater Simon Smith writes in his latest article, 'The Enigmatic Larry O'Hara':

"I regard acceptance of the September 11th attacks as an "inside job" as the touchstone of an intelligent person's integrity in politics".

Similarly, Dissent Congress, a pro-BNP outfit, argued on the right-wing British Democracy Forum site under the thread 'The only way the BNP can attract support':

"The BNP needed 9/11 to act as a trigger by blaming it on Muslims when it was an inside job.

If 9/11 never happened and the bitter feeling towards Muslims never emerged then the EDs would probably be a bigger party and get better election results."

Lee Barnes' racist rant against US presidential candidate Barack Obama

It seems that BNP legal director Lee Barnes is angry at a Black man for being, well, Black! Here are extracts from Lee Barnes racist article, ‘The BBC, Hurricane Katrina and the Obama Effect’, in which he attacks Barack Obama over his successful Berlin rally:

“The pictures of the 100,000 german lemmings lining up to listen to a speech of Barack Obama is evidence of the utter, horrifying power of the media to influence and manipulate the minds of the public, both in Europe and America.

This Obama hysteria in the US, Europe and germany is a sign of a deep sickness in all our democracies, and also a deep sickness in the soul of the german people ...

The endless incultation of poisonous war guilt in the minds of young people in germany has resulted in the creation of a pathological germany, a germany sick, twisted and at war within itself.

The german people have a death wish. They abort their children and their future in the name of excorcising the ghost of the past ....

His [Barack Obama] black skin allows the media to trigger the 'slave guilt reflex' inculcated in white children (inserted into their minds during school) whilst his part white racial heritage means he can be sold to the public as part of the 'inclusiveness' agenda and the new advertising niche that has taken hold in the mind of the media, that of the mixed race ....

The fact that the BBC showed live the speech of Obama in Berlin was an example of the way the media has such power to influence the British public ...

THIS WAS PURE MANIPULATION - the intent was to violate the perceptions of the British public and to bolster the Obama reflex ....

The fawning, sickening, lickspittle liberal scumbag of the BBC, Matt Frei, as usual was introducing Obama ...”

In conclusion, we ask this: is this the best the BNP has to offer? The simple answer – yes.

-----

Postscript: The following is Lee Barnes' response to the article (we need not add any commentary as you couldn't make this up):

Hi To The Puppets

30 July 2008

To be attacked for my Odinic Archetype article first on Stormfront and then on Lancaster Unity is proof that the right targets are right in my sights.

When both the Zionists of LU and the Hollywood Nazis of SF, the puppetmasters and their puppets, are attacking you then this is complete validation of your position

Only when both the Puppetmasters and the Puppets of the Zionist-Nazi Nexus are attacking you, can you say you are near the truth.

Forty years after the shot rang out, race fears still haunt the US

Life has changed beyond recognition for many Americans since an assassin's bullet killed Martin Luther King in 1968. Yet despite the rise of a black middle class and Barack Obama's challenge for the White House, the racial divide still exists - and for an urban underclass, things have only got worse.

Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, looks frozen in time. The sheets of the beds are rumpled, undrunk coffee stews in cheap cups, a meal seems half-eaten. It is a re-creation of the room as it was at 6.01pm on 4 April, 1968. That was the moment when, on the balcony outside, the room's most famous guest, Martin Luther King, was shot dead.

King died four decades ago at the end of an era of civil rights victories that ended racial segregation and won black Americans the vote. It was a struggle that finally cost him his life, felled at the Lorraine by a white assassin's bullet from across the street.

But though Room 306 - preserved as part of a museum - is unchanged from that bloody day 40 years ago, black America itself is almost unrecognisable from King's time. It has been transformed, both for the better and for the worse. Some positive developments would have been unimaginable for King. Senator Barack Obama is running for President and could become the first black person to hold the job. Black politicians hold top offices in cities and states across the continent. They are buoyed by a large black middle class every bit as wealthy, suburban and professional as its white counterpart.

Yet, since 1968, much of black America has also been beset by disaster. A vast underclass inhabits America's ghettos, mired in joblessness, drugs and gang violence. In the inner cities half of all black males do not finish high school. Six in 10 of those will end up in jail by the time they reach their mid-thirties. These people grow up in an environment often more segregated, more hopeless and more dangerous than the Jim Crow era of the Deep South.

It is perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes facing modern American black leaders such as Charles Steele, now president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King founded and used as his tool to bring civil rights to America. 'If Dr King was alive now, he would be distressed and disappointed in America,' Steele said. 'America is still racist to a large degree. More so perhaps. It's subliminal and embedded in the system.'

That is pretty much the view of Thelma Townsend, 68, who should be retired but still works as a nurse in the suburb of Orange Mound. The suburb is a landmark in Memphis, built for black Americans more than 100 years ago on the 5,000-acre site of a slave plantation. Once it rivalled New York's Harlem as a centre of black culture and economic power. But now it has been hit hard by drugs and gangs and unemployment. Many houses are dilapidated and abandoned. Townsend snorts in disgust at the past 40 years in black America. 'It ain't changed for the better that I can see,' she said. 'Drugs are rampant, so killings are rampant. If anything, it's got worse around here.'

This is the bad side of black America since King died, and it exists in cities across the country. In Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, Kansas City, St Louis and many other places, once proud black neighbourhoods have fallen prey to the ravages of crime and drugs. Even King's hometown neighbourhood of Auburn Street in Atlanta is a wreck and shadow of its former self. Orange Mound and other black Memphis inner-city suburbs are typical. Gangs with such names as Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples boss the local drugs trade. Killings and shootings are common. Drug addicts seem more common than jobs.

The roots of this decay partly lie in the fatal shot that felled King. His murder sparked race riots in 125 cities that left 46 people dead, 2,600 injured and 21,000 arrested. Entire black and inner- city neighbourhoods were burnt down overnight. Many never recovered. The violence quickened the process of 'white flight', destroying the tax base of many city cores.

At the same time new civil rights laws allowed the black middle class to flee too. What was left behind became the underclass, deeply vulnerable to the wave of drugs such as crack and heroin that invaded in the Seventies and Eighties and hit by the decline in manual jobs as America's manufacturing industry disappeared overseas.

Statistics indicate that things are getting worse. More black people are being jailed than a decade ago. Only 31 per cent of black children born to middle-class parents earn more than their parents, compared with 68 per cent of white children. More than half of black workers are stuck in low-paid jobs.

Many experts think there is little prospect of the underclass's plight changing at all. 'The outlook is very bleak,' said Professor Jerald Podair, an expert on civil rights history at Lawrence University. near Appleton, Wisconsin.

Yet that is also far from the whole picture. Obama's run for the presidency has energised even those with little hope. 'Obama does make me proud,' said Townsend. But it also shows the successes of the black middle class, fulfilling King's dream of black Americans taking their rightful place in the nation.

For Obama is far from alone in seeking high office. New York state and Massachusetts boast black governors despite both states being in New England, far away from traditionally southern centres of black population. Big cities such as Atlanta, Washington, Philadelphia and Newark have black mayors who have based their appeal on the same sort of 'post-racial' consensus that is powering Obama's campaign.

At the same time, the successes of such mayors and governors have undercut the traditional power of 'old style' black leaders such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton, whose roots lay in black churches. Now modern black politicians are perhaps more at home in the boardroom than the pulpit. They self-consciously - and successfully - woo white voters as much as they appeal to their black base.

Now Obama is trying to make that case on a national scale. Though recent weeks have seen Hillary Clinton's supporters and Republicans try to raise race as an issue, Obama has fought back with a bold speech challenging America to have a frank and open debate about race. 'Race is the question in America that has still never really been asked,' said Podair.

Not everyone is ignoring it, though. Wendi Thomas, 36, is asking the race question in Memphis. She is a local black columnist on the city's Commercial Appeal newspaper who deals with racial issues. Now she is setting up a project called Common Ground to encourage Memphis citizens of all races to come together at weekly meetings and talk frankly about the race issues that bother them. At the end of it the 'graduates' will be encouraged to go out into the rest of the city and break down racial boundaries. Her first pilot scheme with 200 places has rapidly filled up and will begin meeting on 24 April. 'I just wanted to actually do something, rather than just write about it,' Thomas said.

Memphis is a city much in need of such a project. The city is split almost 50-50 between black and white. Yet it feels like a segregated place whose two halves rarely meet, maintaining their own neighbourhoods, schools and parks. It is a city where the issue of race lies constantly under the surface, boiling below a patina of tourist-friendly Southern charm. 'Race underlies everything in this community. We need to have these discussions, even though they are painful and messy,' Thomas said.

That is true. The fact remains that even middle-class black people and whites have fundamentally different perceptions of America. While many whites are flocking to Obama's campaign on the base of its post-racial appeal, that is not how many blacks see it. As he sweeps up more than 90 per cent of the black vote in the Democratic race, there is a clear feeling of racial pride in his candidacy. Indeed fervour and hope for Obama have become a keystone of black America in 2008. 'It is unreal. It is surreal. I hate to hope too much. But I genuinely think that King would be bursting with pride,' said Thomas.

But there are many other points on which black and white Americans differ. Many whites were outraged when Obama's former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, said the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were 'chickens coming home to roost'. They saw his words as conspiracy-minded, unpatriotic and anti-white.

But many blacks reacted with a collective shrug, pointing out that much of what Wright said - even some outrageous claims about government conspiracies - were fairly common in some urban black churches and always had been.

The news would have come as less of a shock if black and white Americans (both of which groups are deeply religious) worshipped together. But they do not. Thomas, a Memphis native, has spent years looking for a racially mixed church to go to each Sunday. 'I still have not found one,' she said. That sort of de facto segregation has kept black and white America very much apart. After all, both have had such a different experience of the country. With the black middle class there is still a certain ambivalence about America; about whether they have truly been accepted. And there is a lot of evidence to say they have not been,' said Podair.

Ironically, one of the main reasons blacks and whites may start addressing race is in the growth of the Hispanic community in America. Hispanics are now America's largest ethnic minority, overtaking blacks, and numbering about 44 million people. They have pioneered communities all over the US, fundamentally changing the dynamics of race in a country that has long seen itself in terms of literal black and white.

Even in Memphis the issue has begun to appear. It is thought the number of Hispanics in the city could top 50,000 people. One in 10 babies in the city born last year was Hispanic. There is a Spanish-language local newspaper, Spanish radio stations and churches offer Spanish-language services. If black and white Americans really want to have a discussion about race, some think they need to hurry up and start talking before the conversation changes entirely.

For Steele, the man who now wears King's old mantle as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, such concerns are for the future. On Friday, he, the leadership conference and dozens of other groups will be holding ceremonies to remember King. Though many whites despised or feared King when he was alive, he is now a national American hero.

Those memorials will now take place against the backdrop of Obama's bid for the White House and it might be tempting to see a straight line linking the two. But for Steele many Americans were missing one of the most overlooked points of King's career. The fact is, by 1968, King himself had moved on from purely racial issues. Yet again he was ahead of his time. His final campaigns were focused on fighting poverty and labour disputes. He came to Memphis in support of striking workers.

'He was killed in Memphis because he had started to focus on poor folks, regardless of their colour,' Steele said. That was 40 years ago. As Obama's campaign changes the American political landscape, it might be wise to remember that race is not the only controversial issue that mainstream politics still tends to shun. There is the thorny issue of class, too.

'If you thought having a talk about race was difficult in America, then having one about class is even harder,' said Podair. Yet 40 years ago King tried to start that debate as well. A bullet cut short his ambitions. Room 306 at the Lorraine was not the only thing his death left frozen in time.

Observer

Intolerance hinders Democracy

Why it is impotant that we take notice of the bigotry within our countries

The bedrock of democracy is the allowance of all people over a certain age to vote. This way a diverse range of voters will cast there precious votes to ensure that their political wants are taken into account. This seems perfect on the very surface. You can imagine people queuing up with gumdrop smiles and jigging their way into the local voting stations.

But, for a country that now recognizes that your religion, gender, race or sexual preference should have no effect on your success as a politician or anything for that matter, how can it reconcile the fact that voters may be choosing who to vote for on purely bigoted grounds? for instance; deciding not to vote democratic this year because you would rather have another republican in power than a woman or a black guy. This seems to me to take away the whole point of politics if people (probably not the majority) are voting and not taking into account a senators political stances or policies but taking into account only race or gender.

A recent pole suggested that a large amount of Americans believed Barack Obama to be a Muslim. Now why would they immediately pigeon-hole him into the Muslim category? It doesn't take a huge IQ to conclude that it is simply his skin-colour that brought on such ignorance. As a side thought; I wonder how many average American Joes would vote for a Muslim...

This whole idea that people ignore politics and cast votes based on gender, race or sexuality makes me fear for the whole of the democratic system. It is throwing away a beautiful and pure system for choosing who you think deserves to be in power based on politics and replaces it with a perhaps racist or ignorant persons chance to throw away a great opportunity to make a better decision.

In England there is a party called the British National Party, who have been rightly dubbed the "British Nazi Party" because of their out rightly racist and intolerant views on immigrants (legal and illegal). I believe that this party has its origins in pure and simple bigotry; At one of their meetings on a BBC documentary one of the members stated that he "would rather have no Prime Minister than have a black Prime Minister" to which the crowd wooted and clapped. Is this politics? or is it racism and intolerance covered under a political veneer? the answer is obvious, and this type of person is watering down the voting system by voting on anything but political pretences.

Since the terrorist attacks on our countries our society has fragmented and racial tensions have risen, and nothing much has been done to mend them. Until we do, people like those in the BNP will continue to draw new members and spread their message of undemocratic intolerance.

Obstacles of freedom