If you tell a lie big enough...

A British National Party claim on Monday that the police are investigating Searchlight for attacking a commercial company’s website is a lie of which Joseph Goebbels would be proud and further evidence of how the party’s election campaign is falling apart.

The BNP website went down for several hours over the holiday weekend. On Sunday evening the party claimed it had suffered a “massive Denial of Service Attack … emanating from Eastern Europe and Russia”.

The statement, which appeared on the blog of Simon Darby, the BNP’s deputy leader, continued: “On Friday the servers of Clear Channel, part of a huge conglomerate that provides billboard advertising, suffered a similar attack. Their IT professionals tracked the criminal activity back to a notorious ‘anti-fascist’ organisation.

“This organisation was protesting at the decision by Clear Channel to allow the BNP to display advertising in support of our European Election Campaign.” The statement claimed that Clear Channel’s lawyers were issuing writs against “the perpetrators” that would involve “the possibility of potential criminal charges including racketeering”.

A further statement on Monday claimed that the “Counter Terrorism Unit at Scotland Yard” was investigating the attack on the BNP website and that Searchlight “is now being investigated by the Metropolitan Police for a similar attack on the servers of Clear Channel”.

Clear Channel denied the BNP’s claims. A spokeswoman for the company told a Searchlight researcher: “I’ve checked with our IT department and we haven’t experienced any denial of service”.

Last week Searchlight asked people to email Clear Channel to protest against its decision to display BNP posters and over 5,300 people responded. So far Clear Channel is standing by its policy of allowing all political parties to advertise at the market rate though the company “does not support them in any way”.

The BNP knows well the difference between a denial of service attack on a website and an email protest campaign. Paul Golding, who runs the BNP’s “Operation Fightback”, has himself often asked supporters to email media outlets that have run anti-BNP stories and anyone else who has upset the fascist party.

We can only assume that the BNP has realised just how hard it is being hit by the constant exposés of its fascism and lies in the media and is desperately trying to divert attention from its difficulties by throwing out wild accusations against its opponents.

Last week the BNP placed on its website an interview with Helen Forster, a party member, that Golding recorded after her conviction for racist intimidation was exposed in the Daily Mirror. Although she had told the Mirror reporter that she was “still in the BNP”, she lied blatantly to Golding that she had never joined the party. The BNP then falsely claimed it had taken the “Daily Mirror’s scalp”. Promised writs from the BNP’s fake “lawyer”, Lee Barnes, failed to materialise.

Searchlight awaits Clear Channel’s writs and Metropolitan Police enquiries about a fictitious attack on Clear Channel’s website with bated breath. The BNP should remember that wasting police time is a serious criminal offence.

Meanwhile, whatever the real reason for the absence of the BNP’s website over the weekend, Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, could not let it pass without grabbing another opportunity to milk his supporters for money. Claiming ludicrously that the BNP had suffered the “largest cyber attack in recorded history”, he explained that they had been “forced to hire a Cyber Defence expert” and “need to invest in additional hardware and servers”. The items had to be paid for immediately, but “every penny we possess is allocated to the Euro Election Campaign”.

The party therefore desperately needed £5,000, so much so that Griffin had “personally donated £250 to this appeal to set things in motion”, no doubt yet another of the lies that seem to trip so easily from his mouth.

Hope not hate

Republication of Nazi-era newspaper draws lawsuit

German authorities launched legal action yesterday against a British publisher who reprinted and sold a Nazi newspaper featuring fiery remarks by Adolf Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

The paper - the Voelkischer Beobachter (People's Observer), from March 1, 1933 - is the second in a series of Nazi-era newspapers republished in annotated facsimiles that has sparked a row in Germany over press freedom. The latest edition in the series hit German news-stands early yesterday, with a photograph on the front page of the Reichstag parliament building in flames, seen as a pivotal moment in the rise to power of the Nazis.

The fire was used by Hitler, who had been sworn in as chancellor four weeks earlier, to "prove" that Communists were hatching a plot against the German government and justify a swift crackdown.

"Murder, terror, fire and destruction: these are the terrible things this fanatical party [the Communists] leaves behind it," Goebbels writes in the commentary on the first page.

"We've had enough," cries the headline. "Now we're going to take ruthless and dramatic measures."

Bavaria's finance ministry, which holds the rights to all publications from the main Nazi publishing house, said in a statement it would seek to press charges against the publisher, Peter McGee, for copyright infringement. In addition, it would lodge a civil action to stop future papers being published.

On Jan. 16, the ministry issued a order banning any further publication of Nazi material but the publishers ignored the instruction. Bavaria said it is concerned about the possible offence to Holocaust survivors and the potential misuse of the material by neo-Nazis. While the publication of excerpts of documents from the period was allowed, the complete reprinting of these papers "risks being misused and is not acceptable," the ministry said.

Sandra Paweronschitz, chief editor of the series, said the argument the papers could fuel extremist activity was "as short-sighted as it is wrong." She pointed out that the republications are accompanied by commentary from leading historians putting the papers in their proper historical context.

"We will fight this attack on the freedom of the press with all legal means -- if necessary not only in civil courts but also before the Federal Constitutional Court," she said.

Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said she supported the publication of the paper but hoped people would also read the historians' comments.

"As a Holocaust survivor, these texts are much more to me than just interesting historical documents. They are part of a harrowing reality that I can still recall," she said in a commentary on the publisher's Web site. If people read only the propaganda, she acknowledged, it could be "disastrous."

With many financial commentators comparing the current economic crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the paper also contains a headline about the "American financial scandal" that would not be out of place in today's news.

The Mellon bank -- now known as Bank of New York Mellon -- was ordered to pay US$400-million in a tax-evasion scandal, the paper reports under the headline: "Banking crisis expands even further."

The row over the republished papers follows a similar spat last year over the republication of Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf ("My struggle"), which has been banned in Germany since the end of the Second World War.

National Post