Can the BNP ever lose its racist reputation?

A vandalised British National Party billboard in John Street, Carlisle

Splattered with paint and daubed with the words “Nazi scum”. . . an attack on a British National Party billboard in Carlisle shows emotions are running high ahead of European Parliament and county council elections.

Yet the far-right party, which has condemned the vandalism, insists it has received a positive response from voters across Cumbria as it canvasses for next Thursday’s ballots.

Some remain less enthusiastically inclined towards the BNP though. They are concerned a low turnout or an anti-establishment voting trend – in fury at the Westminster expenses scandal – could play right into the party’s hands and deliver the mass protest vote it has been hoping for. Those worries have triggered a campaign to limit any BNP gains.

Opinions about the BNP have rarely hit the middle ground since its formation in the early 1980s by John Tyndall, a former chairman of the National Front. He was a man photographed in Nazi uniform – without attending fancy dress parties – and who described Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf as his bible.

Other members have also been reported making extreme pro-Nazi, racist or homophobic comments over the years. Mark Collett, the BNP’s director of publicity, was made infamous by the 2002 television documentary Young, Nazi and Proud.

Former deputy leader Tony Lecomber was jailed for possessing explosives in 1985 and again in 1991 for assaulting a Jewish teacher.

Party chairman Nick Griffin, who visited Whitehaven on Saturday, has tried with limited success to rid the party of its racist image. But controversy continues to follow him. He denied the Holocaust ever happened in a party publication in 1996 and received a suspended jail sentence two years later for inciting racial hatred.

Mr Griffin – his party’s lead Euro election candidate for the north west – this week claimed the ‘controlled media’ had resorted to rehashing comments made a decade and a half ago to throw the BNP into a poor light.

“I have gone on record repeatedly as saying such things [Holocaust rejection] were immature politics and all of us have moved on,” he said.

Yet his insistence on having turned a corner has done little to wipe the slate clean of suspicions which still stalk the party. There was outrage last week at the prospect of Mr Griffin attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Yesterday he announced he would not be attending the garden party, in order not to embarrass the Queen.

And leading clergymen – including University of Cumbria chancellor Dr John Sentamu – have pleaded with the public not to let the Westminster expenses scandal convert into BNP votes, in protest against the three major parties.

Carlisle Against Racism has been a prominent campaign group against the BNP, which is standing in 42 of the 84 council seats. By the end of this week, it will have distributed 30,000 copies of its anti-BNP leaflets to homes including those in Carlisle, Longtown, Brampton, Penrith, Wigton, Silloth and Alston. Chairman Brent Kennedy believes the newly glossed image of the party – activists wearing suits proffering slick campaign leaflets – could lure many towards an alternative.

“They don’t know about the truth,” he said. “People just see the glossy leaflets – the false image they are physically putting out.”

He and other campaigners have been working to gather support for their work in Carlisle city centre. Mr Kennedy said: “We have had people saying they are going to vote BNP because they are racist. Some are people who are not racist but desperate because of the economic crisis and angry about MPs enriching themselves. On the other hand, a big majority were really supportive. They were thanking us for campaigning against the BNP, which the political parties are not doing.”

The anti-racism activist, who claims he has been attacked and intimidated while carrying out his work, has clear fears should the BNP taste electoral success.

“I’m worried there will be an increase of racist abuse and attacks on people and political opponents of theirs if they get a Euro MP elected. I have already contacted the police about that,” he revealed.

The church has also been drawn into the electioneering arena with Dr Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams urging people to use “great vigilance” when deciding who to vote for. They claimed some parties would exploit the current political situation if elected and said the BNP fostered “fear and division within communities, especially between people of different faiths or racial background”.

“This is not a moment for voting in favour of any political party whose core ideology is about sowing division in our communities and hostility on grounds of race, creed or colour,” they added. “It is an opportunity for renewing the vision of a community united by mutual respect, high ethical standards and the pursuit of justice and peace.”

BNP supporters in Cumbria are undoubtedly in a minority. But in the European elections – where a proportional representation voting system is used to ensure the number of MPs from each political party reflects the share of votes they received regionally – that could be enough to secure a seat. That is a factor which has mobilised trade unions. The Public and Commercial Services Union has launched a Make Your Vote Count campaign, backed by the Northern TUC, and will be in Carlisle on Saturday. May 30.

Regional co-ordinator Gordon Rowntree said: “Because the European elections use proportional representation there is a fear there. In the north west Nick Griffin could be elected. That’s why we’re working to get turnout higher because that would help the other political parties.”

Clive Jefferson, the BNP’s Cumbrian organiser, maintains his party has moved on and away from the racism linked to it in its early days. He said: “All of the opposition or people who would tar us with the same brush are using things from decades ago. It’s not relevant to the party today.”

The activist, who said his chairman did not encounter any aggression in Whitehaven on Saturday and criticised senior churchmen for their comments, vehemently denied his party was racist.

“It’s not racist, fascist or Nazi, as left-wing extremists dub us. I don’t think the majority of people think that now. What we’ve got are left-wing extremists, as I would call them, peddling this kind of rubbish,” he added.

Mr Jefferson also denied activists used any intimidation and said: “If anyone is telling you that, I would like them to tell me. It should be reported to police. This will not be tolerated. That’s not how we go about things. We are a political party.”

He described the vandal attacks on the poster in Caldewgate, Carlisle, as “nasty”.

Polling stations will be open between 7am and 10pm on Thursday, June 4. Cumbria County Council ballot papers will be counted the following day. The European count will be delayed until other countries have voted on June 6 and 7.

News and Star

The apologist for terror and the BBC

The chances are you haven’t heard of Nicholas Kollerstrom. At first glance this North London resident, who holds a PhD in astronomy, appears quaintly eccentric with his keen interest in the “science” of alchemy. Harmless enough you might think. But behind the veneer Nicholas Kollerstrom is in fact an antisemite, Holocaust denier and apologist for terror.

Having written a number of books on astronomy quite how Kollerstrom came to dip his toes in the foetid waters of Holocaust denial is unclear. But it was not long before Kollerstrom was fully immersed in it. It was to be some baptism.

On 22 February 2007 Kollerstrom joined the forum of an American Holocaust denial website called ironically the Campaign for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). His user name was “astro3”. CODOH is run by Bradley R. Smith, a veteran Californian antisemite who founded the organisation in 1987 with the assistance of Mark Weber of the Institute of Historical Review (IHR). Smith too was closely associated with the IHR, which is the world’s leading forum for Holocaust denial, and Weber, a former member of the neo-nazi National Alliance, was a co-director of CODOH. Smith used to publish a newsletter called Prima Facie, which denied that Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust and which was gleefully advertised in Spearhead, then the house organ of the British National Party.

In an essay entitled “The Auschwitz ‘Gas Chamber’ Illusion” Kollerstrom argued that although there were gas chambers at Auschwitz these “were operated for purposes of hygiene and disinfection, in order to save lives and not take them”. The real victims, he argued, were the Germans beca-use: “As surprising as it may sound, the only intentional mass extermination program in the concentration camps of WW2 was targeted at Germans. From April, 1945 five million Germans were rounded up after surrendering, and deliberately starved until well over one million had died.”

By comparison the Jews had a rather nice time. In an article entitled “School Trips to Auschwitz” posted on CODOH in March 2008 Kollerstrom put forward his view that Auschwitz was not in fact a horrific death camp, but a Nazi-run Butlins-style holiday camp, where inmates could sunbathe by “the elegant swimming pool” while watching water-polo matches, and paint pictures and read books serenaded by no fewer than six orchestras. They could also go to the cinema, theatre or, if the urge took them, the brothel, or simply write postcards to loved ones, which the postman would collect “twice weekly”.

Kollerstrom believes his arguments are original and groundbreaking. However, as even a cursory perusal of his writings reveals, his “research” is nothing of the sort. It represents the undigested and regurgitated pseudo-science of comprehensively discredited sources such as Fred Leuchter. Kollerstrom denies he is a Holocaust denier. He might even believe it. He recently wrote to the Jewish Chronicle protesting his innocence and denying he was a Nazi sympathiser.

Whether or not he is a Nazi sympathiser is immaterial. He uses far-right antisemitic sources to argue far-right antisemitic causes. Kollerstrom is a Holocaust denier.

Holocaust denial is not Kollerstrom’s only interest. He is also particularly active in what is broadly known as the 9/11 “truth” movement, which peddles some of the craziest conspiracy theories around.

Kollerstrom is not, as he is wont to style himself, a courageous lone researcher seeking to penetrate beyond the “official” narrative of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and 7 July 2005. He is a fantasist who seeks to defend the indefensible. Of the 7/7 bombers he wrote: “Very simply, there is no evidence that puts the four alleged bombers in London on that morning, let alone setting off explosives, that would stand up in a court of law for two minutes. Period, end of story.”

Kollerstrom completely ignores the incontrovertible evidence of their guilt, harassing and distressing the victims’ families with his spurious claims that it was a “false flag” operation perpetrated by “CIA-Mossad-MI6” to buttress the case for the “war on terror”. One could dismiss him as a deluded idiot but taken together with his Holocaust denial it is hard to see him as anything other than an apologist for terror.

His activities were highlighted on 12 April when he attended the launch of the peace activist Milan Rai’s book about the London bombings and attempted to hijack it, giving a speech from the floor on the supposed “innocence” of the terrorists. Survivors of the 7/7 attacks such as Rachel North were appalled. She was not alone. On 14 April Kollerstrom was unmasked as a Holocaust denier by the Blairwatch website.

Three days later Tony Gosling, who moderates the 911forum website to which Kollerstrom contributed, banned discussion of the Holocaust in a thread entitled “Mossad trick – Link 9/11 Truth to Holocaust Denial”. Even when confronted with irrefut-able proof that Kollerstrom was an antisemite, the “truth” movement interpreted it as evidence of an Israeli plot to discredit their beliefs by linking them to antisemitism.

Kollerstrom aside, there is ample evidence that antisemitism and Holocaust denial remain rife within the so-called “truth” movement, where the denizens of such forums can be found muttering darkly about 9/11 being a “Zionist crime”, which dovetails neatly with Islamist claims that it was an “inside job”.

Perhaps the most famous son of the “truth” movement is the former MI5 agent turned “whistle blower” David Shayler who, if the Daily Mail is to be believed, now proclaims himself to be the Son of God. Further evidence that Shayler is experiencing some psychological difficulty came in a recent speech in which he stated, “we know from documents like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that the New World Order were going to use control of the money supply to create depressions and recessions”. The Protocols is a notorious forgery from tsarist times, often quoted by nazis.

Kollerstrom had held an honorary research fellowship in University College London (UCL) Science and Technology Studies. However, when his activities became known UCL terminated the fellowship with “immediate effect” on 22 April.

Running out of forums in which to peddle his odious views, Kollerstrom turned to the Iranian satellite television station Press TV, founded in July 2007 “to break the global media stranglehold of Western outlets” and to compete with other satellite channels such as the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera. It is funded up to the hilt by the Iranian regime to the tune of 27 million dollars.

In its mission statement Press TV claims to offer “unbiased” reporting and “in-depth and complete analyses of current affairs, portraying viewpoints, which are often ignored by current mainstream media outlets”. Quite what this meant was revealed on 18 May 2008 when Press TV reproduced on its website Kollerstrom’s article “The Walls of Auschwitz”, which claimed the gas-sing of the Jews was “scientifically impossible”.

Press TV became acquainted with Kollerstrom through the agency of David Irving’s cheerleader-in-chief, Lady Michele Renouf. On 7 May, shortly after his dismissal from UCL, Kollerstrom had approached her for “advice” on whether he would be able to “travel safely” to Germany to present his paper “the Walls of Auschwitz” to an academic conference in Berlin on the Holocaust. Never mind that he had not been invited nor was welcome at what was after all a genuine historical conference rather than an antisemitic free-for-all. Renouf advised him against going as he would no doubt be imprisoned, though this did not deter her from seeking a press pass for the event herself, which was refused.

Renouf recommended to Press TV that they interview Kollerstrom about his “scientific article”. Renouf has some clout with the Iranian media, boasting on her website of her “elected role” to take Tehran’s antisemitic road show to Europe following her participation in the Tehran-sponsored Holocaust denial conference. There, to her evident delight, she met President Ahmadinejad, the toast of antisemites the world over following his calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.

Press TV duly broadcast an interview with the “distinguished academic” on 14 May. Kollerstrom evidently hoped that a scientific journal could be persuaded to sponsor his own on-site chemical analysis of the walls of Auschwitz “in the tradition of the Leuchter Report and the Rudolf Report”.

His self-induced fall from grace did not deter the BBC from inviting Kollerstrom to be the subject of one programme in the new series of The Conspiracy Files to be broadcast in autumn. There was outrage when it was revealed that the BBC had paid his expenses though it emphatically denied paying him a fee. The Evening Standard revealed how in a particularly ghoulish manner Kollerstrom took to pestering and harassing the families of those who had lost loved ones in the 7/7 bombings. He put it to the father of one victim of the Tavistock Square bus bombing that her body had been placed there by the British, American and Israeli security services. He appears unmoved by the distress he caused.

According to the Evening Standard the BBC also paid for him to travel to Leeds to try to meet the family of the 7/7 ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan and the relatives of the other bombers. They all refused to meet him. The victims’ families have uniformly branded the BBC’s disgraceful indulgence of Kollerstrom’s warped theories an utter outrage. John Taylor, whose daughter died at Aldgate, observed “he is helping the terrorists more than anything and I am not happy with the BBC giving him a platform”.

There are plenty of others equally astonished that the BBC should use pubic money to further the activities and agenda of a hardcore Holocaust denier and apologist for terrorism.

Britain’s Holocaust deniers

• Michele Renouf Cheerleader-in-chief to the writer David Irving, Lady Michele Renouf, who gained her title from a brief marriage to the Australian financier Sir Frank Renouf, has earned a reputation as one of the most active antisemites in Britain and indeed Europe. Renouf, who runs Telling Films, a company that distributes DVDs denying the Holocaust, was banned from addressing the Croydon BNP branch by Nick Griffin, the party chairman, for fear her presence might taint the BNP. Ever one for the double standard, Griffin was spotted sharing a platform with her in the US together with David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, in 2005. She attended the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran in 2006 and has maintained her links to Iranian antisemites ever since.
• Richard Edmonds who was the BNP’s national activities organiser in the 1990s, has recently found a new acceptability within the BNP for the Jew-baiting and Holocaust denial he has made his speciality for three decades both here and abroad. This should come as no surprise in a party that has adopted Arthur Kemp’s classic antisemitic work March of the Titans as its main ideological primer. After the BNP came into existence, Edmonds picked up from where Martin Webster, the national organiser of the National Front during its 1970s heyday, left off by producing a new edition of the NF’s Holocaust News. Hundreds of thousands of copies of this hate sheet were distributed internationally. A devotee of David Irving Edmonds demonstrated against Irving’s imprisonment in Austria outside the Austrian Embassy in 2005.
• Yakob Zaki Born James Dickie, Yakob Zaki is a Muslim convert who works as an associate director of the pro-Iranian Muslim Institute, in which capacity he has contributed Holocaust denial articles to its publication Crescent International as well as the Tehran-based publication Kayhan. Addressing a rally of the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun in Wembley in April 1998 Zaki declared: “nobody was gassed to death in the concentration camps … David Irving has the right idea, destroy the Holocaust myth and you have destroyed Israel.”
• David Irving Once upon a time David Irving had a promising historical career ahead of him and his books were favourably reviewed by mainstream broadsheet papers. But his reputation has gone downhill since he was branded a liar in a libel action over his 1968 book The Destruction of Convoy PQ17. He has accumulated bans from entering several countries and has convictions in Europe. He famously lost a libel action against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt, when Mr Justice Gray described him an “active Holocaust denier”, an antisemite and racist who “associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism” and who “for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”. He was imprisoned in Austria in 2005 for “glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party”. Nevertheless Irving maintains his high standing among antisemites the world over and enjoys substantial financial backing from them.
• James Thring who is the convener of Planning for Peace and the author of Peace with Iran, was a close confidant of the veteran antisemite Lady Jane Birdwood. In May 2002 he spoke at a conference in Baghdad alongside the Russian fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the French far-right activist Serge Thion and the Respect MP George Galloway. He has declared that Israel is “an illegal, criminal, psychopathic, belligerent, apartheid entity bent on desecrating the Holy Land and destroying anyone or even any country that tries to seek justice for the Palestinians”. After David Irving’s imprisonment in 2005 Thring was among those who demonstrated outside the Austrian Embassy for his release.

Searchlight

Former Swedish neo-Nazis become Holocaust commemorators

‘I can no longer deny it happened, or salute what happened,’ says a former neo-Nazi teenager after a visit to Auschwitz as part of a Swedish initiative to confront troubled youths with their distorted anti-Semitic views.

They used to paint swastika graffiti, get into street fights with immigrants, and distribute anti-Semitic propaganda. But after studying the cases of a few of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II, some former Swedish neo-Nazi teenagers came to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial to underline their new attitudes.

The kids, some of whom were active members of neo-Nazi groups, came to the memorial on Monday to present the findings of their research into the stories of 16 Holocaust victims from their hometown of Karlstad, and to add pages of testimony for the previously unknown dead. The project, named Combatting Social Unrest, is the initiative of Swedish Holocaust educator Christer Mattsson. The concept is to take troubled youths off the street, confront their prejudices and ignorance and slowly convert them into Holocaust educators themselves.

”The first time I took a neo-Nazi to Auschwitz, I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. ”But after seeing it, after seeing where Jews used to live, he said: ”I can no longer deny it happened, or salute what happened.”

The journey has been an arduous one. Of the 100 teenagers in his program, Mattsson said about five to eight are ”hard-core neo-Nazis” - some completely reformed, others not. Those, some sporting Nazi tattoos, did not make the trip to Israel, either for fear of offending survivors or to remain anonymous for their own safety. The only former active member who arrived, 17-year-old Joar, refused to be photographed and would be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution from his former friends.

The shy, blond Joar hid behind a baseball cap and a large pair of sunglasses. He would only say that he used to have ”different opinions.” ”I didn’t know so much. I’ve learned a lot about the Holocaust,” he said, through a translator. ”I have a different perspective on life now.”

‘In our own backyard’

Sweden remained neutral during World War II. It had a very small Jewish population and closed its gates to refugees. That policy began to change as the horrors of the Holocaust became apparent and Sweden began to lean toward the allies. In 1944, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg began handing out papers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps. After the war, some 27,000 survivors arrived in Sweden.

In Karlstad, 16 Jewish women died shortly afterward, most from illness, and were buried in a Jewish cemetery. Mattsson took his students there to ask them if they still believed the Holocaust to be a myth. They, in turn, decided to investigate the women’s stories. The result is a 100-page book that details their stories.

On Monday, they presented their findings to Israel’s official Holocaust museum and memorial. Yad Vashem spokeswoman Estee Yaari said it probably marked the first time it had ever dealt directly with neo-Nazis.

The teenagers toured the museum and met with Mirjam Akavia, a Holocaust survivor who fled to Sweden after the war. She vividly described her childhood and how she was yanked out of school and sent to the camps, where only she and sister emerged while the rest of her family perished.

”When I was 12, it was the end of my beautiful childhood. It was the end of everything,” she said.

The Swedish teenagers were not much older when they encountered their own local brand of anti-Semitism.

”The headmaster of my former school, who is here today, was beaten up by people I knew three years ago,” said 17-year-old Jennifer Lindstrom, who said she joined Mattsson’s group so she could have the tools to battle her classmates’ rhetoric and actions.

”Maybe because I have been studying about the Holocaust and Nazism, maybe because I have been to Auschwitz and the empty shtetels (Jewish villages) in Poland or maybe because I got sick and fed up with racism and neo-Nazis - I could not remain silent.”

Lindstrom’s principal was assaulted because he tried to keep the neo-Nazi students out of his school. The two other teenagers in the group were Johanna Karlsson and Deken Izat, a Kurdish immigrant to Sweden who used to belong to a rival gang that battled with Joar’s.

Lindstrom said that finding out what happened in her own backyard proved to be the best way for her and her new friends to counter racism.

”It is slightly unreal to be here today and handing over material that we have worked with for so long, knowing that it will be here at Yad Vashem for always,” Lindstrom said.

YnetNews

BNP London leader hosts convicted Holocaust-denier

Yesterday, with just three days to go until polling day, two leaders of the British National Party took time out from the campaign to attend a secret meeting in London with three leading European neo-fascists, one of whom has a recent conviction for Holocaust denial.

Initially billed as a press conference, its true purpose seems to have been to further the ambitions of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, to become a Member of the European Parliament by building links with far-right MEPs.

A week ago Simon Darby, the BNP’s deputy leader and press officer, announced that the party was “honoured to be playing host to a special press conference to be held on the afternoon of Monday 28th April 2008” with “a number of guests from allied Parties from Europe”. They would include Bruno Gollnisch, a French MEP and vice president of the far-right National Front, and Andreas Mölzer, an Austrian MEP and leading member of the Austrian Freedom Party.

Yet four days later the BNP had pulled the plug on the press conference, with Darby lamely declaring: “It looks like we’ve lost the venue, but our foreign friends have been most understanding about this.”

Searchlight’s mole, who had drawn our attention to the European fascists’ visit long before Darby announced it, was convinced that this was a smokescreen to cover up Darby’s breach of security in publicising the event so far in advance.

Our mole was right. Yesterday afternoon Gollnisch, Mölzer and Georg Mayer, an Austrian far-right political fixer, arrived at St Pancras International station on the Eurostar and were whisked off, not to a press conference but to a private meeting with Griffin and Richard Barnbrook, who heads the BNP’s candidates’ list for the London Assembly.

The meeting revealed the true face of the BNP, which has recently been making vigorous attempts to con Jewish voters in London into voting for the party. In January 2007 a French court handed Gollnisch a three-month suspended prison sentence and fined him €5,000 (£4,000) for denying the Holocaust. The court in Lyon found he had “disputed a crime against humanity” in remarks he made during a news conference in the city in October 2004.

Gollnisch had questioned the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust and said the “existence of the gas chambers is for historians to discuss”.

Mölzer is the publisher of Zur Zeit, an Austrian political magazine in which racism, antisemitism and xenophobia are staple features. Its recent promotion of openly Nazi and antisemitic books prompted the Berlin weekly Junge Freiheit, on which Zur Zeit was originally modelled, to sever all connections.

Georg Mayer is another Freedom Party officer and spokesperson for the far-right Identity Tradition Sovereignty group in the European Parliament until its collapse late last year when five far-right Romanian MEPs walked out in protest at anti-Romanian remarks by their Italian colleague Alessandra Mussolini. Gollnisch had been the group’s leader.

Searchlight would normally have informed the Home Office of an intended visit to Britain of a convicted Holocaust denier, but as we found when the BNP played host to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front who has several Holocaust denial convictions, MEPs enjoy a privileged status and cannot be excluded.

Instead Searchlight passed the information to the Evening Standard, with which we had been working on the story.

We later tracked down the visitors at the plush Rembrandt Hotel in South Kensington where they were staying the night and even managed to speak to Mayer about the event.

This latest confirmation of Griffin’s continued espousal of Holocaust denial follows days of revelations about Barnbrook’s bizarre personal relationships, his drunkenness and his incompetence as the BNP opposition leader on Barking and Dagenham council. It is typical of Griffin that he should attempt to boost his European aspirations regardless of the further damage that exposure of this meeting may cause to Barnbrook’s electoral prospects.

Today’s Daily Mail, which reveals the marriage that Barnbrook had hoped to keep hidden, to a woman who hates his politics, will be seen by millions of Londoners. At the same time, more than 700 Searchlight Hope not Hate volunteers are giving out 250,000 leaflets at 200 tube and railway stations across Greater London, making it Britain’s biggest ever anti-fascist drive on a single day.

Later today the Searchlight and Daily Mirror Hope not Hate bus will visit Downing Street, where Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Cabinet members will sign up to the campaign and endorse our message of Hope not Hate.

Searchlight

The uprising against facism: Students storm Oxford Union debate

The principle that everyone is entitled to their say, however obnoxious their opinions might be, was put to the test at the Oxford Union last night as hundreds of protesters gathered to voice their disapproval of the two men from the extreme right whom the illustrious debating chamber had invited there to speak.

One of the guests, the BNP leader Nick Griffin, heads an organisation that wants to see millions of people deported from the UK because they do not regard them as truly British.

He was due to share a platform with the historian David Irving, who has courted notoriety for decades by claiming that Hitler did not give the order to commit genocide, that there were no gas chambers and that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis.

Scuffles broke out as anti-fascist groups yelled "Shame on you" at members filing into the union building, and the police shut the gates with the chamber only half full. While a handful of students crushed against the main gate to create a diversion, 30 others scaled the wall and barged past the tight security, occupying the area around the debating table until they were persuaded to leave.

"I hope we're not giving Griffin further publicity by doing this," said Peter Simpson, a student at Essex University who stormed the chamber, "but history has shown that you need to draw the line with fascists. I think a lot of people are here because they know what happened in the Second World War and they don't want it to happen again."

Dr Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat MP due to join the debate, criticised Thames Valley Police for "failing to put a cordon around the Union", allowing the protestors to barge through.

"The failure of the police is outrageous," he said as he told students in the chamber of plans to split the speakers after the university authorities decided it was too dangerous to walk Mr Griffin and Mr Irving across the quadrangle to the debating hall. The police have failed to provide for the safety of this event; failed to provide for the safety of this going ahead as planned. I'm very disappointed. The police imply that they don't have enough resources to move people away from the perimeter or that it is not their job."

In order to get the debate under way, the speakers were split into two groups, with Mr Irving, jailed last year in Austria after pleading guilty to Holocaust denial, speaking in the main chamber, and Mr Griffin, convicted of incitement to racial hatred over material denying the Holocaust in 1998, in a cramped room in the main university building.

Warned to expect a maelstrom of abuse, they had avoided the main demonstration by arriving in separate black cabs, 10 minutes apart and 90 minutes early. The debate – on how far the freedom of speech should extend – finally started more than an hour late at 10pm.

Mr Irving defended accusations that his publications and speeces denied the existence of the Holocaust. "I still refuse to be bowed. I am not going to write what they want me to write. I'm going to write what I find in the archives," he said.

Across the yard, Mr Griffin went head-to-head with two student debaters. "The majority of racist attacks are on white people by members of ethnic minority communities," he said. "Those people outside are a mob and they could kill. Had they grown up in Nazi Germany they would have made splendid Nazis. Any restriction on free speech is dangerous. You start by saying people should not speak and you end up with burning people at the stake. Free speech is an absolute, it is universal."

Mr Irving, reported to have left at 10.45pm to a chorus of jeers from waiting demonstrators, said that disagreeing with some elements of the "whole package" did not make him a Holocaust denier. He had been invited to speak at the Oxford Union seven times, he said, but security fears had put paid to any chance of appearing. Speaking at the Union was something he cherished, he added, saying that the most important thing that any student listening to him could do was to think for themselves.

The president of the Oxford Union, Luke Tryl, was unconvinced. "I think David Irving came out of that looking pathetic," he said "I said in my introduction that I found his view repugnant and abhorrent because I wanted that on record."

Outside, some protesters chanted "Kill Tryl", to which the Union president said: "I don't think they do their cause any favours by inciting violence. That is my only regret."

Last night's meeting breached an unwritten agreement observed for years by the mainstream political parties – not to give the far right a public platform. Instead, it fell back on a much older principle, summed up in a maxim attributed to the French philosopher Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Mr Tryl, who has been under intense pressure to cancel the event, defended the decision to go ahead. He said: "David Irving and Nick Griffin have awful and abhorrent views but the best way to defeat those views is through debate.

"I remain committed to the principle that free speech has to prevail. I really worry about how the far right has been able to portray themselves as free-speech martyrs and I hope that this sort of debate will help dispel that myth – to show that the liberal mainstream are prepared to take them on and beat them in debate."

A minority of the students gathered outside the building agreed with Mr Tryl. Kudzh Ranga, a black law graduate living in the city, said he supported the right of Mr Griffin and Mr Irving to speak. "Though I don't agree with [Mr Irving's] stance on racism and the Holocaust I think it is only proper to let him come and address the general public," he said.

But most students and protesters in the street vehemently disagreed. They included Jean Kaigamba, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. He said: "I'm flabbergasted that people who claim to be intellectuals invite extremists in the name of free speech to give them a platform and let them air their perverted view."

David Green, a former committee member of the Oxford Union, said he had resigned from the organisation in protest. "What the union is doing today is extremely irresponsible – namely giving prominence to Holocaust deniers, people who are completely discredited," he said.

Independent

Illegal abroad, hate web sites thrive in U.S.

It might come as a surprise to the soldiers who defeated fascism in World War II, but the United States has become a refuge for Nazism and other brands of extremism over the last decade.

On the Internet, that is.

Hundreds of foreign-language Web sites are using U.S. servers to dodge laws abroad that prohibit Holocaust denial or racist and anti-Semitic speech. Incorporated by businesses in the United States, they thrive out of reach of prosecutors in Europe, Canada and elsewhere.

In the Chicago area, the connections range from Radio Islam, a hate site inspired by a Moroccan exile in Sweden, to a site created by a former Illinois man who was extradited to Germany for Holocaust denial. One Chicago server company is home to 17 hate sites, eight of them European.

The noxious sites, often filled with anti-Semitism or crude ranting about blacks and immigrants, spotlight a trans-Atlantic divide over hate speech. Many European countries have criminalized Holocaust denial or racist speech, while the First Amendment grants even Nazis and other fringe groups the freedom to spread their message in the U.S.

"Essentially, our view is it's better to be able to confront their ideas and see what they're up to," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization. "But most Europeans regard the Americans as insane on this point. They really do."

Radio Islam, which lists a Chicago post office box as its contact address, has frustrated the Swedish government for years, prosecutors said in phone interviews. Hosted on a server in Washington state, its contents include paranoiac writings and the complete text of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in at least 17 languages.

Much of the site is devoted to extolling Ahmed Rami, a Moroccan exile in Sweden who claims he fled to Europe after attempting to assassinate his country's king. In his adopted home, he made vitriolic radio broadcasts until Swedish authorities shut down his program and even jailed him in the 1990s.

But suddenly the U.S.-based Radio Islam Web site popped up promoting Rami's paranoid views that the United States is occupied by Jewish forces, Adolf Hitler was a misunderstood hero, and Judaism is not a religion but a "dangerous Mafia."

In an interview from Stockholm, Rami claimed to have nothing to do with the site.

"It's a group of men or teenagers who put it up," Rami said. "Sometimes I write something, and it ends up on their Web site."

(The Rami-oriented site has nothing to do with another Chicago-based Radio Islam, which disavows racism and reports it has interviewed Holocaust survivors on the air.)

Little study has been done on the extent to which the Web inspires real-world crime, but Brian Marcus, director of Internet monitoring with the Anti-Defamation League in New York, said cyber hate motivated Benjamin Smith, a gunman from Wilmette, Ill., who shot his way across Illinois and Indiana in 1999. He targeted blacks, Jews and Asians, killing two people and wounding nine before committing suicide.

"He (Smith) even said in an interview that it was through the Internet that he discovered the World Church of the Creator," Marcus said, referring to an Illinois group now called the Creativity Movement. "And then in July 1999 he goes on a real-world, multi-state killing spree."

The violence is not limited to the United States.

British and Polish journalists and human-rights activists have demanded their governments shut down two allied hate sites called Redwatch. The sites publish "enemies lists" with home addresses, and they have been blamed for egging on violence by the far right.

British journalist Peter Lazenby, a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post, found his photographs and former address featured in online enemies lists posted on the British version of Redwatch, which maintains three Web addresses on U.S. servers.

After Redwatch posted its blacklist, a thug stabbed a trade union leader in the face outside his home last year, and two schoolteachers had their home and car firebombed in 2003.

"The government says because these sites are based in the United States and (because of) your First Amendment, nothing can be done," Lazenby said from Leeds, England. "Well, they certainly manage to shut down pedophile sites and arrest the people behind them."

For its part, Redwatch says it doesn't encourage violence and was created in response to leftists' attacks on white nationalists.

"We consider Marxists and Capitalists as traitors and they will face the people's courts someday to pay for their crimes," Redwatch said in an online statement.

In Warsaw, authorities have struggled to shut down the U.S.-hosted, Polish-language Redwatch. The site promotes the message of the Creativity Movement, which formed in Illinois and has long included Chicago Polish neo-Nazis.

Last year, Polish media reported that a Jewish human-rights activist whose home address was listed on Redwatch was stabbed in the back. A suspect later charged in the case reportedly claimed he was seeking revenge for a previous attack at a soccer game, but human-rights groups are convinced it was a hate crime.

"They stabbed him in the back," said Rafal Pankowski, a researcher studying hate groups. "He was almost killed on the steps of his house in the center of Warsaw."

Asked whether Redwatch readers had a role in the stabbing, a Redwatch correspondent who would not provide his identity e-mailed, "No comment."

Redwatch said it doesn't condone criminal activity but merely collects details about "persons engaged in anti-fascist, anti-racist, and left-wing activities as well as the degenerate sympathizers and activists of the pedophile lobby," adding that leftists have kept similar lists about fascists.

Even high school students have drawn Redwatch's wrath. The site posted a photo of a class that cleaned up a Jewish cemetery. If the intent was intimidation, it succeeded. The principal forbade the school from doing such service projects in the future, Pankowski said.

Last year, the Polish government announced it had worked with the FBI to shut down Redwatch. But it remains online today, and a spokesman for the site says it only was offline briefly because of bandwidth problems. The FBI has no record of working to shut down the site, a spokeswoman in Washington said.

Redwatch is registered and hosted by companies in Arizona.

Polonica, a Polish-language far-right Web site registered to a Chicago Post Office box, has a list of scores of people it claims are secret Jews, calling them "little jews (sic) in Poland, which is under occupation, and people of Jewish origin who have changed their name." The site's targets include Magdalena Abakanowicz, who designed an installation of 106 cast-iron figure sculptures at the south end of Grant Park. (Through a spokeswoman, Abakanowicz declined to comment.)

Anti-Semitism hasn't vanished among the Polish far right even though the country has had few Jews since they were exterminated during the Holocaust.

"Polonica shows the kind of obsessive anti-Semitism which is not infrequent in Poland," Pankowski said. "It's difficult to be anti-Semitic in a country where you don't have Jews. So they have to invent it."

The site originally listed its administrative contact as "Smierc zydokomunie" or "Death to judeocommunism," but for several years it has been registered to Zdzislaw Jesse Brzezinski. Efforts to contact Brzezinski were unsuccessful.

A multilingual Web site established by a Cicero, Ill., man continues to sell literature and raise money for the man's defense even though he was deported to Germany in 2005 to serve a prison term for Holocaust denial.

In 1995, the man, a German citizen named Germar Rudolf, registered a site for the Belgian Foundation Vrij Historisch Onderzoek (Free Historical Research). Pressured by authorities there, he moved his publishing operation to England and then New York. The site is now hosted on a Texas server.

A former chemist, Rudolf had written a 1993 report in Germany that disputed the Nazi gassing of Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. He was convicted of inciting racial hatred and fled, eventually entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico, federal officials said.

"The idea of thought crimes in the 21st century is just outrageous," said Michael Santomauro, VHO's president.

But historians, Holocaust survivors and watchdog groups say such sites ally themselves with hate groups.

VHO, for example, also posts the Web site of l'Association des Anciens Amateurs de Recits de Guerres et d'Holocaustes, a vitriolic Holocaust denial group that uses the same Chicago Post Office box as Radio Islam. The association's essays alternately deny the Holocaust, blame Zionists for somehow causing it and regurgitate medieval blood libels - the false accusation that Jews ritually slaughter Christian children.

One of the most prolific hosts of foreign racist sites is Gary Lauck of Lincoln, Neb., a former Chicago resident who claims to head the American branch of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Lauck, who spent time in a German prison after he was convicted of racial hatred, hosts about 80 German, Swedish and other foreign Web sites.

In interviews, Lauck speaks in great torrents in what reporters often describe as an ersatz German accent; in fact, Lauck says, he has had a speech impediment since childhood. Born in Wisconsin, Lauck says he has been a Nazi since he first read "Mein Kampf" as a teen.

In 1978, he was the chief propagandist of the National Socialist Party of America when the city of Skokie tried to block it from holding a rally. The battle was fought all the way to the Supreme Court, but when the group prevailed, they shifted their location to Chicago. Lauck and about 25 others appeared dressed in a Stormtrooper uniforms.

They were outnumbered by thousands of others, both sympathizers and counter-protesters. He says he still has a uniform stained with egg thrown by one of the throngs of "enemies," as he calls them.

For years, Lauck reportedly smuggled illegal Nazi flags, swastikas, propaganda and bomb-making manuals to Germany. In 1995, Lauck was arrested in Denmark and extradited to Germany for distributing the materials. A Hamburg court convicted him of inciting racial hatred and other counts, and he served a four-year term.

Nowadays, clients often approach Lauck through anonymous e-mails, so that even he doesn't know their identity.

"We'll say, OK, in the future, all you do is send an envelope with some Euro bank notes in it and say this is for Web site XYZ,' " Lauck said.

One client is the Danish National Socialist Movement. While the Nazi party is legal there, it asked Lauck to host its backup Web site.

"We had an attack by left-wings a short while ago," said party leader Jonni Hansen, "and our Web hosting by Lauck rescued us, because we were thrown out of the Danish Web server."

A Nazi organization called Deutsches Kolleg - which maintains a Web site through CWI Global Hosting of El Paso, Texas - calls the Berlin government a U.S. puppet and claims to be a legitimate representative of the German people.

The group was founded by Horst Mahler, a former leader of the far-left Baader-Meinhof gang, whose acts of political terror forced West Germany into a state of emergency in the 1970s. Mahler himself was imprisoned for 12 years for bank robbery and springing a fellow gang member from jail. After his release, however, he converted to Nazism.

The Web site Deutsches Kolleg extols the virtues of Hitler and promises to exterminate the Jews. Mahler has again landed in prison, this time for "racial incitement."

CWI registered the site of a Nazi organization called Deutsches Kolleg, but the clients' views don't reflect the company's, Jason A. Taylor, chief technical officer, wrote in an e-mail response to a reporter.

Speaking for many Web hosts, Taylor wrote, "As freedom of speech' in content is a very thin line, we believe that the necessary law-making bodies and court systems shall determine what is legal and what is not and CWI will abide by that."

Servers who do business anonymously or who say it is not their job to censor their clients frustrate groups seeking to shut down hate sites, among them the Anti-Defamation League, which combats racism. The First Amendment prohibits the government from stepping in to close Web sites, but there is nothing to stop private businesses from refusing to host Internet extremism, the league says.

In Wheeling, Ill., a site run by a group calling itself the Hungarian National Foundation offers a hodgepodge of criticism of the government, links to extreme right parties, and literature accusing Jews of fomenting revolution.

The foundation was incorporated in Illinois by Gabor Meszaros. In a phone interview, Meszaros said he established the site to promote democracy as street protests broke out in his former homeland.

"I would not label my Web site extremist," Meszaros said, adding, "My intention behind the site is just to promote democracy or the freedom of speech - what we all stand for."

But the site also gushes about a book tour by ex-Ku Klux Klansman David Duke under the headline, "Dr. Duke's Book Sweeps Across Hungary!" A visit by an Israeli military delegation this year drew headlines: "Budapest under Israeli Occupation? ... The murderers and child killers in blue arrived on the 9th of March."

Stormfront White Nationalist Community, based in West Palm Beach, Fla., is the giant of international Web hate sites. It hosts discussion groups in 20 languages, including "Stormfront en Francais" and "Stormfront Downunder," and boasts more than 111,000 members.

Spokesman Jamie Kelso portrays Stormfront as simply a white interests organization, not unlike those that lobby for blacks or Latinos. But Stormfront members exchange racial slurs and cheer on violent video that includes images of Russian skinheads beating up minorities.

"I say bash anything that isn't white," one member writes. "Bash em and bash em and bash em until there is nothing left."

Kelso says it's clear why the site draws foreigners.

"No other country has a First Amendment," he said. "In Canada, where we're very big, you can be jailed for what's called hate speech. You can be jailed and fined and sanctioned. Same thing in Germany."

European authorities have tried to disrupt Stormfront by arresting moderators there.

"You see everything from anti-Semitism to anti-Muslim, anti-Moroccans and (anti)-Turkish," said Niels Vandelen, director of the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination. "Everything is on there in just the most brutal and unacceptable manner."

In Chicago, Radio Islam frustrates the producers of a WCEV program with the same name (the local broadcast has a similar Web address at RadioIslam.com). Abdul Malik Mujahid, a Chicago Imam who heads a company that produces the program, said guests have included Holocaust survivors and Jewish rabbis.

A 2003 report by the EU Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia called the Swedish-Moroccan RadioIslam.org "one of the most radical right-wing anti-Semitic home pages on the net with close links to radical Islam(ist) groups."

It's not hard to find evidence of this. A poem attributed to Rami eulogizes Lt. Khalid al-Islambuli, the man executed for murdering Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981.

"Peace be upon thee the day the first bullet hit the chest of the despot and overthrew the throne," Rami states. "He was soaking in his blood, and you took revenge for Egypt and all the (M)uslims."

In interviews, Rami boasted of his own attempt to assassinate a head of state. Rami was a former Moroccan army officer who fled after participating in a 1972 coup attempt, he said. He was granted asylum in Sweden.

Whether or not he is behind Radio Islam, Rami is delighted with the site - and the potential of the Web.

"The Internet is more free," he said. "It's difficult to control. The Internet is a fantastic revolution in the modern times."

azcentral

BNP leader and Holocaust denier invited to Oxford Union

· Dictator among those asked to address students
· University debating society under fire

The Oxford Union debating society came under fire last night after its president said he had approached Holocaust denier David Irving, British National party chairman Nick Griffin and the Belarussian dictator, Alexander Lukoshenko, to speak at forthcoming events.

Luke Tryl said he had asked Mr Irving and Mr Griffin to speak at the union's Free Speech Forum, due to take place at the end of November, adding that Mr Lukoshenko, the Belarussian president, accused of a string of human rights abuses, had been approached to address students later in the term.

"The Oxford Union is famous for is commitment to free speech and although I do think these people have awful and abhorrent views I do think Oxford students are intelligent enough to challenge and ridicule them," he told the Guardian, adding that no formal decision on who would be invited had been made.

However, the move drew widespread criticism from student groups and anti-fascist campaigners.

In a joint statement, Oxford Jewish Society presidents Daniel Bloch and Steven Altmann-Richer said: "It will be a disgrace if these discredited speakers are allowed a platform at a forum on free speech. They have an embarrassing history of disregard for legal restrictions on it. It will certainly go down as a black mark on the reputation of the Oxford Union."

Duncan Money, a second-year student at the university who says he has suffered a series of threats from rightwing extremists, said: "It is disappointing that the Oxford Union has chosen to promote and legitimise fascism ... Doubtless the controversy will bring them feverish excitement but for those of us who confront hate-filled bigots and are on the receiving end of death threats because of it, the issue is a bit more serious."

The BNP said Mr Griffin would attend the event if it went ahead. However, the invitation to Mr Lukoshenko was blocked by the Foreign Office, which said he was subject to an EU travel ban.

Mr Irving, who told the Guardian last month that he was launching a comeback speaking tour of the UK, denied that he had received any formal approach from the Oxford Union but added that he would like to speak to the students there.

"I have had many invitations to speak there in the past but they normally get withdrawn after threats of violence and intimidation. It is a pity because I think there are a lot of students who would like to hear what I have to say."

Last month the discredited historian told the Guardian that he believed the Jews were responsible for what happened to them during the second world war and that the "Jewish problem" was at the root of most of the wars of the last 100 years.

Guardian

German neo-Nazi activist sentenced to jail for denying Holocaust

The head of a neo-Nazi party based in the south German state of Hesse was sentenced to four months in jail by a court in the town of Friedberg for denying the Holocaust.

Marcel Woell who leads the National Democratic Party (NPD) had referred to "the sites of so-called national socialist terror".

The 24-year-old NPD chairman who was previously convicted on several counts of inflicting bodily harm, had also branded school trips to the Holocaust memorial sites as "brainwashing pupils".

Woell said he had never the intention of denying the existence of the Holocaust which is considered a crime in Germany and may carry a maximum sentence of five years.

The NPD has around 400 members in Hesse and is being monitored by Germany's domestic intelligence service as the neo-Nazi party is classified as a "threat to the constitutional order" because of its political ideology.

Several neo-Nazi activists have already been imprisoned in Germany in recent times for denying the Holocaust.

IRNA