The BNP’s real concern is race, not Islam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edmund Standing writing at Harry's Place

Combating the BNP - 1

By Edmund Standing, Researcher, Centre for Social Cohesion

Recently, the Centre for Social Cohesion, a non-partisan independent think-tank, published a report which I authored, entitled 'The BNP and the Online Fascist Network'. The purpose of that report was simple.

The British National Party, under Nick Griffin, has worked very hard to create a wholly false image of itself as a mainstream, 'patriotic' nationalist party, that has left behind its links with neo-Nazism. That deception has met with considerable success. The truth is very different.

In the report, I demonstrated, through looking at BNP supporting blogs, forums, and YouTube accounts, as well as official party literature and material sold via its website, that the BNP has not changed in substance at all. Rather, it is a racist party, founded by neo-Nazis, with a racial ideology that continues to share much in common with neo-Nazism.

However, it is also a party that now has a number of elected councillors and two MEPs. A few years ago, no-one would have thought it possible that the BNP could ever enter the political mainstream. In this article I shall discuss how and why this has happened, and what needs to be done to combat it.

In 2000, BNP leader (and now MEP) Nick Griffin stood before an audience of American 'white nationalists' and proposed that while he had no intention of 'selling out' the BNP's principles, he now wanted to 'sell' the party. So, he stated, the BNP would now use 'salable' words such as 'freedom' and 'democracy', and replace discourse about 'racial purity' with talk of 'identity'. In recent years, particularly following the 7/7 terrorist atrocities, the BNP has sought to align itself with what is loosely termed the 'anti-jihad movement' and to shift its focus from attacking Jews and black people to opposing 'Islamification'.

This focus on Islam has been combined with an even more intense campaign against asylum seekers and the encouragement of white self-pity. Then, of course, there is the very real problem that many voters, especially from old Labour heartlands, are feeling increasingly alienated from the political process, which is seen to be the domain of an arrogant and self-serving liberal intelligensia wholly disconnected from the concerns of ordinary working people. So, for its European election campaign this year, a key BNP slogan was 'Punish the Pigs', with the party presenting itself as a bulwark against the arrogant and greedy politicians of the mainstream parties.

Griffin is a man who has rightly been described as a 'political chameleon' and under his guiding hand, the BNP has been developing in a similar manner. Looking at the kind of statements it gives to the media and its huge shift away from neo-Nazi racial discourse and towards nationalist populism and a 'little Englander' approach, the BNP appears, superficially, to have changed dramatically. Elsewhere, I have argued that this is entirely to be expected and that it actually illustrates something very positive about modern Britain: the BNP has had to change its rhetoric because the majority of white Britons are not racists and would be instantly turned off by a party attempting to 'sell' ideological racism and a policy of mass repatriation of all non-white citizens.

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

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

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

When it comes to Islam, the BNP hasn't exactly had to work hard to whip up anti-Muslim bigotry and paranoia about 'Islamification'. Looking at the scare stories on its website's news section, a large number of them are drawn straight from mainstream media sources, and the party is being greatly assisted by the grossly disproportionate coverage given in newspapers to the outrageous statements and provocations of Anjem Choudary and his motley crew of social misfits who go under a variety of names but are essentially Al-Muhajiroun. In hysterical report after report, a tiny minority of bin Ladenist fanatics and fantasists have been presented as a serious threat to our society.

The fact is, of course, that while Al-Muhajiroun is a dangerous group with many links to terrorism, it represents only the tiniest handful of Muslims in Britain, not that you would know that given the amount of time Choudary gets in the media. So, when the BNP claimed in its European election material that it would 'ensure that British troops are not abused on the streets of our cities by Muslims', it was in particular cynically appealing to the concerns of those who get the majority of their understanding of the world from reading simplistic and hyped up tabloid stories.

Likewise, when the British media regularly feature quotes from Choudary saying the 'Islamic flag' is going to fly above 10 Downing Street, the BNP's response that 'we aren’t prepared to stand back and watch as Britain drifts into being an Islamic republic' sounds perfectly reasonable.

It's not just a case of media scare stories, however. Another important factor that is undoubtedly greatly assisting the BNP in its promotion of anti-Muslim sentiment is the problem of largely self-appointed Muslim 'community leaders' and organisations and their very vocal and, to the majority of Britons, unreasonable lists of demands of how British society should change to accommodate what is presented as Islam and the 'rights' of Muslims.

In the final part of this two part series, Edmund explores how best the political establishment and society should combat BNP and show them up for exactly the racist, bigoted party it is.

eGov Monitor

Centre for Social Cohesion reveals BNP's online fascist network

On the day that two leading British National Party (BNP) members take their seats in the European Parliament, a new Centre for Social Cohesion report reveals that members and supporters of the BNP and its online activists display significant ideological affinity with key tenets of the neo-Nazi ideology. This included: support for violence; antisemitism and an admiration of the Third Reich; extreme racist views; and Holocaust denial.

The BNP and the Online Fascistm Network shows blogs run by members and self-professed supporters of the BNP continue to host, and link to, material that is pro-Nazi, racist, antisemitic, and homophobic. The BNP continues to sell books produced by neo-Nazi publishing houses on its website.

Support for violence:

• Lee Barnes – leading member and head of the BNP legal team – supports the National Front on his blog. He refers to the group as a valid ‘nationalist’ organization and suggests that they operate as a street force for the BNP.
• Barnes advocates the downfall of western civilization: ‘The West deserves all it gets. The faster the fools that run the West destroy the West the better.’
• The BNP supporting blog Britain Awake praises Combat 18 and supports violent attacks on Muslim women. Britain Awake is hosted by a self-described member of the BNP who claims to have attended the party’s exclusive Red, White and Blue festival.

Antisemitism and an admiration of the Third Reich:

• The official BNP YouTube account and the official YouTube accounts of the Thurrock and Burnley BNP branches show close links with neo-Nazi and antisemitic activists and organizations, as do the users who have been accepted as ‘friends’ of these channels.
• Blogs run by members and self-professed supporters of the BNP continue to host, and offer links to, material that is pro-Nazi, racist, antisemitic, and homophobic.
• A member of the Covert Tactics blog, strongly linked with the BNP, refers to Jews as ‘greedy subhuman scum’. One member, Tommy Williams, is a neo-Nazi whose name appeared on the leaked list of BNP members. The blog expresses admiration for Hitler and has on a number of occasions denied or trivialised the Holocaust.

Extreme racist views:

• So-called patriotic concerns of the BNP mask an underlying fear of racial ‘dissolution’ and a commitment to ’soft’ ethnic cleansing in the form of policies attempting to coerce non-white Britons into leaving the UK.
• Material found on BNP supporting YouTube accounts, blogs, and internet forums contravenes the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006.

Holocaust denial:

• The BNP website promotes books by neo-Nazi publishing houses which are dedicated to rehabilitating Nazism and denying the Holocaust.

Edmund Standing, author of the report, says:
“The report shows that the BNP is a party dedicated to promoting racism, and continues to attract and empower adherents to neo-Nazi ideology, whose supporters include admirers of Adolf Hitler.”

Douglas Murray, Director of the CSC, says:
“This report shows that members and supporters of the BNP continue to hold and express the vilest racist, antisemitic, homophobic and sexist views - shocking even to those of us who thought our opinion of the BNP could never be lower.”

Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Research Fellow at the CSC, says:
“The BNP leadership insist that they are a mainstream political organisation, yet this report demonstrates how abhorrent their views truly are."

For a pdf of the full report, click here.

Centre for Social Cohesion