Reuters news agency are reporting that English Defence League financier & strategist Alan Lake is now being formally investigated by the Norwegian police in order to verify if he was an ideological influence on the mass-murdering Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik.
The Guardian have formally investigated and independently confirmed Alan Lake’s authorship of a “Final Solution” blueprint targeting the entire British Muslim population along with anyone perceived to be sympathetic towards them, including death threats against British Prime Minister David Cameron, Deputy PM Nick Clegg and the Archbishop of Canterbury. You can see a screenshot of Lake’s horrifying “Final Solution” here and here.
Alan Lake was interviewed by the Daily Mail in 2010 and openly discussed his involvement with the EDL as a financier and strategist.
Channel 4 News, describing Alan Lake as “the EDL’s chief financier” during their investigation of the EDL’s connections with Anders Breivik, have confirmed that Lake was interviewed on Norwegian television in April 2011. In that interview, Lake confirmed that he has funded the EDL.
Video footage is available of Alan Lake attending a meeting in London with senior EDL leaders Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka “Tommy Robinson”), Kevin Carroll and Roberta Moore, in a video released on 20 March 2011.
Roberta Moore has direct links to convicted terrorists in the United States whose organisation has been formally designated as a “terrorist group” by the FBI and who are banned from entering Israel.
Roberta Moore was photographed personally escorting Yaxley-Lennon while he was disguised as a rabbi before he gave a speech at the EDL’s demonstration in London on 3 September 2011. During that speech, Yaxley-Lennon publicly accused “every single Muslim” of collective guilt and publicly made a direct threat of EDL-led retribution against the entire British Muslim population.
Yaxley-Lennon is also on record as stating that he agrees with Anders Breivik’s opinions.
Alan Lake has been instrumental in facilitating the EDL’s alliances with Far-Right groups outside the UK. He also played a pivotal role in facilitating the EDL’s links to the American anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller (who was cited multiple times in Anders Breivik’s 1500-page manifesto and was in direct contact with a violent Norwegian who sounds suspiciously similar to Breivik). Lake even personally attended the protest against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” which Geller organised in New York last year; Yaxley-Lennon also attempted to accompany Lake to the protest but was prevented from doing so by the American authorities. Full details, along with an overview of Lake’s background, affiliations and activities to further the EDL’s agenda can be read here.
Pickled Politics
Thanks to Zaahid for the heads-up
Showing posts with label Pamela Geller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pamela Geller. Show all posts
November 11, 2011
September 09, 2011
Anders Breivik's spider web of hate
An analysis of the Norwegian killer's manifesto reveals the online network that features in his paranoid universe
Anders Breivik's manifesto mapped
The Guardian has mapped the webpages Anders Breivik links to,
and those pages that link back to Breivik's manifesto. Image: The Guardian
Anders Breivik's manifesto reveals a subculture of nationalistic and Islamophobic websites that link the European and American far right in a paranoid alliance against Islam and is also rooted in some democratically elected parties.
The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three "counter-jihad" sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian. All of these draw some of their inspiration from the Egyptian Jewish exile Gisele Littman, who writes under the name of Bat Ye'or, and who believes that the European elites have conspired against their people to hand the continent over to Muslims.
As well as his very long manifesto, Breivik also laid out some of his thoughts on the Norwegian nationalist site Document.no. In his postings there, Breivik referred to something he called "the Vienna school of thought", which consists of the people who had worked out the ideology that inspired him to commit mass murder. He named three people in particular: Littman; the Norwegian Peder Jensen who wrote under the pseudonym of Fjordman; and the American Robert Spencer, who maintains a site called Jihad Watch, and agitates against "the Islamisation of America".
But the name also alludes to a blog called Gates of Vienna, run by an American named Edward "Ned" May, on which Fjordman posted regularly and which claims that Europe is now as much under threat from a Muslim invasion as it was in 1683, when a Turkish army besieged Vienna.
All of these paranoid fantasists share a vision articulated by the Danish far-right activist Anders Gravers, who has links with the EDL in Britain and with Spencer and his co-conspiracist Pamela Geller in the US. Gravers told a conference in Washington last year:
Spencer and Geller were the organisers of the protest against the so-called 9/11 mosque in New York City. They also took over Stop Islamisation of America, a movement with links to the EDL and to a variety of far-right movements across Europe. Of the two, Spencer is less of a fringe figure. He has been fulsomely interviewed by the Catholic Herald in this country and praised by Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion, who called him "a profound and subtle thinker". Damian Thompson, a leader writer on the Telegraph, once urged his readers to buy Spencer's works, especially if they believed that Islam was "a religion of peace". Last week, Spencer's blog re-ran a piece from Geller's Atlas Shrugged website claiming that Governor Rick Perry, the creationist rightwinger from Texas, is actually linked to Islamists via Grover Norquist, the far-right tax cutter whom Geller claims is "a front for the Muslim Brotherhood". Geller also once republished a blogpost speculating that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.
As well as the "counter-jihad" websites such as Spencer's and May's, analysis of Breivik's web reveals a dense network of 104 European nationalist sites and political parties. Some of these are represented in parliaments: Geert Wilders's Dutch Freedom party; the French National Front; the Danish People's party, the Norwegian Progress party (of which Breivik was briefly a member before he left, disgusted with its moderation); the Sweden Democrats. Others, like the EDL, are fringe groupings. Then there are those in between, such as the Hungarian far-right party Jobbik. But they range all across Europe. They are united by hostility to Muslims and to the EU.
One place where these strands intertwine is the Brussels Journal, a website run by the Belgian Catholic MEP Paul Belien, a member of the far-right Vlaams Belang party. The British Europhobic Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan appeared for three years on the Brussels Journal's masthead. Hannan has since denounced the European neo-fascist parties as not really rightwing at all.
To appear on this list is not to be complicit in Breivik's crime. Peder "Fjordman" Jensen was so shocked by it that he gave himself up to the police and gave an interview to a Norwegian paper in which he appeared genuinely bewildered that his predictions of a European civil war should have led anyone to such violence.
It is still more unfair to blame Melanie Phillips. Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that "Bat Ye'or's scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying", she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the "counter-jihad" belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.
The world view of the counter-jihadis echoes that of the jihadis they feel threatened by. The psychological world of the jihadis has been described by the British psychiatrist Russell Razzaque, who rejected recruitment by Hizb ut-Tahrir when he was a medical student. It is not just a matter of a black-and-white world view, he says, though that is part of it. "It's a very warm embrace. You felt a sense of self-esteem, a sense of real embrace. Then it gives you a sense of purpose, which is also something you've never had so much. The purpose is a huge one. Part of a cosmic struggle when you're on the right side: you're another generation in the huge fight that goes back to the crusades."
This clearly mirrors Breivik's self-image. What makes him particularly frightening is that he seems to have radicalised himself, just as jihadis do, before he went looking for advice and guidance on the internet. But he was able to take the last few steps into mass murder all alone, so far as we know. Jihadi groups also withdraw from the world into a cramped and paranoid universe of their own. Suicide bombers such as the 9/11 and 7/7 groups spent months psyching each other up before the crime, talking obsessively for hours every day. But Breivik, though he withdrew from society to his farm, seems to have spent his time alone with the internet. It allowed him to hear his own choir of imaginary friends, and hear inside his head their voices cheering him on to murder and martyrdom. Here they are, mapped.
Comment is free
Thanks to Zaahid and NewsHound for the heads-up
Anders Breivik's manifesto mapped
The Guardian has mapped the webpages Anders Breivik links to,and those pages that link back to Breivik's manifesto. Image: The Guardian
The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three "counter-jihad" sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian. All of these draw some of their inspiration from the Egyptian Jewish exile Gisele Littman, who writes under the name of Bat Ye'or, and who believes that the European elites have conspired against their people to hand the continent over to Muslims.
As well as his very long manifesto, Breivik also laid out some of his thoughts on the Norwegian nationalist site Document.no. In his postings there, Breivik referred to something he called "the Vienna school of thought", which consists of the people who had worked out the ideology that inspired him to commit mass murder. He named three people in particular: Littman; the Norwegian Peder Jensen who wrote under the pseudonym of Fjordman; and the American Robert Spencer, who maintains a site called Jihad Watch, and agitates against "the Islamisation of America".
But the name also alludes to a blog called Gates of Vienna, run by an American named Edward "Ned" May, on which Fjordman posted regularly and which claims that Europe is now as much under threat from a Muslim invasion as it was in 1683, when a Turkish army besieged Vienna.
All of these paranoid fantasists share a vision articulated by the Danish far-right activist Anders Gravers, who has links with the EDL in Britain and with Spencer and his co-conspiracist Pamela Geller in the US. Gravers told a conference in Washington last year:
"The European Union acts secretly, with the European people being deceived about its development. Democracy is being deliberately removed, and the latest example being the Lisbon Treaty. However the plan goes much further with an ultimate goal of being a Eurabian superstate, incorporating Muslim countries of north Africa and the Middle East in the European Union. This was already initiated with the signing of the Barcelona treaty in 1995 by the EU and nine north African states and Israel, which became effective on the 1st of January, 2010. It is also known as the Euro-Mediterranean co-operation. In return for some European control of oil resources, Muslim countries will have unfettered access to technology and movement of people into Europe. The price Europeans will have to pay is the introduction of sharia law and removal of democracy."Spencer's jihadwatch.org is linked to 116 times from Breivik's manifesto; May's Gates of Vienna 86 times; and Fjordman 114 times.
Spencer and Geller were the organisers of the protest against the so-called 9/11 mosque in New York City. They also took over Stop Islamisation of America, a movement with links to the EDL and to a variety of far-right movements across Europe. Of the two, Spencer is less of a fringe figure. He has been fulsomely interviewed by the Catholic Herald in this country and praised by Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion, who called him "a profound and subtle thinker". Damian Thompson, a leader writer on the Telegraph, once urged his readers to buy Spencer's works, especially if they believed that Islam was "a religion of peace". Last week, Spencer's blog re-ran a piece from Geller's Atlas Shrugged website claiming that Governor Rick Perry, the creationist rightwinger from Texas, is actually linked to Islamists via Grover Norquist, the far-right tax cutter whom Geller claims is "a front for the Muslim Brotherhood". Geller also once republished a blogpost speculating that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.
As well as the "counter-jihad" websites such as Spencer's and May's, analysis of Breivik's web reveals a dense network of 104 European nationalist sites and political parties. Some of these are represented in parliaments: Geert Wilders's Dutch Freedom party; the French National Front; the Danish People's party, the Norwegian Progress party (of which Breivik was briefly a member before he left, disgusted with its moderation); the Sweden Democrats. Others, like the EDL, are fringe groupings. Then there are those in between, such as the Hungarian far-right party Jobbik. But they range all across Europe. They are united by hostility to Muslims and to the EU.
One place where these strands intertwine is the Brussels Journal, a website run by the Belgian Catholic MEP Paul Belien, a member of the far-right Vlaams Belang party. The British Europhobic Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan appeared for three years on the Brussels Journal's masthead. Hannan has since denounced the European neo-fascist parties as not really rightwing at all.
To appear on this list is not to be complicit in Breivik's crime. Peder "Fjordman" Jensen was so shocked by it that he gave himself up to the police and gave an interview to a Norwegian paper in which he appeared genuinely bewildered that his predictions of a European civil war should have led anyone to such violence.
It is still more unfair to blame Melanie Phillips. Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that "Bat Ye'or's scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying", she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the "counter-jihad" belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.
The world view of the counter-jihadis echoes that of the jihadis they feel threatened by. The psychological world of the jihadis has been described by the British psychiatrist Russell Razzaque, who rejected recruitment by Hizb ut-Tahrir when he was a medical student. It is not just a matter of a black-and-white world view, he says, though that is part of it. "It's a very warm embrace. You felt a sense of self-esteem, a sense of real embrace. Then it gives you a sense of purpose, which is also something you've never had so much. The purpose is a huge one. Part of a cosmic struggle when you're on the right side: you're another generation in the huge fight that goes back to the crusades."
This clearly mirrors Breivik's self-image. What makes him particularly frightening is that he seems to have radicalised himself, just as jihadis do, before he went looking for advice and guidance on the internet. But he was able to take the last few steps into mass murder all alone, so far as we know. Jihadi groups also withdraw from the world into a cramped and paranoid universe of their own. Suicide bombers such as the 9/11 and 7/7 groups spent months psyching each other up before the crime, talking obsessively for hours every day. But Breivik, though he withdrew from society to his farm, seems to have spent his time alone with the internet. It allowed him to hear his own choir of imaginary friends, and hear inside his head their voices cheering him on to murder and martyrdom. Here they are, mapped.
Comment is free
Thanks to Zaahid and NewsHound for the heads-up
July 25, 2011
The Reality of Right-Wing Nationalism Hits Norway
75 years ago this October, my grandfather, the son of Jewish immigrants to London's poor East End, took to the streets with thousands of others to stop the ultra-nationalist British Union of Fascists from marching through a largely Jewish area.
The event turned into a pitched battle, with Oswald Mosley's fascists and the Metropolitan Police on one side, and locals, Jews, Irish, socialists and communists on the other. The fight (which became known as the Battle of Cable Street) ended with victory for the anti-fascist side, with the fascists and police beaten off the streets.
Following the Holocaust, Fascism became a dirty word, but Nationalists have continually tried to detoxify their brand and reinstate themselves into the mainstream. Mosley returned in the 1950s, this time labelling black immigrants, rather than Jews and Irish, as the main "threat" to the "British way of life". In the late-60s, Conservative MP Enoch Powell became famous for predicting that mass immigration would lead to "rivers of blood". Through the 70s, right-wing nationalism and street-thuggery rose in the form of the National Front, but the movement was resisted on the streets, and finally dissolved in the early-80s as a new, multicultural music scene brought young black and white people together socially. By the 90s, nationalism seemed to be a thing of the past, but the 9/11 attacks gave the racist right a chance to re-brand as an anti-Islam force. Nearly ten years on, and we can see that the "Islam is a threat" message has worked its way from fascist meeting rooms into the political mainstream-right in Europe and the US.
Gradually, the anti-Islam message has morphed back into a more traditional anti-immigration message, being amplified by the right-wing tabloid press here (and Fox News in the US). The nationalist, anti-immigration message isn't easy to sell; it relies on persuading people that the past (or rather, an imaginary, idyllic past) is being replaced by a more dangerous future as immigrants join their society. Prior to 9/11 it seemed that the Western World had moved beyond irrational fear of foreigners, and that society's liberal tendencies had prevailed; but we soon learned that race hate and xenophobia weren't far beneath the surface; that US and European society had changed less since the 1940s than we'd convinced ourselves.
When the drum of fear and hate is being pounded consistently, the infection will naturally spread. For most fear-infected morons, the outlet of Twitter or a blog is enough. But it's inevitable that angry or mentally-disturbed individuals like Anders Behring Breivik will become infected too, and violence will follow, as it did last Friday in Norway. Breivik's choice of target, the mainstream, liberal Norwegian Labour Party, was a natural one for anyone understanding the history of European nationalism. He chose a multicultural youth camp, something designed to ease racial tensions in Norway, but also proof (in Breivik's confused world view) that evil forces were trying to dilute Norway's racial and cultural past into something new and alien.
Whether Breivik acted alone, it can be stated with certainty that he was influenced by master-manipulators of the nationalist movement. It's already been established from his own blog (English translation provided by @Dilmunite) that he admired the far-right English Defence League; according to many EDL Facebook posts, Breivik had many EDL Facebook friends, and attended an EDL rally in the UK in 2010. I'd recommend following @BanTheEDL and @EverythingEDL on Twitter for a collection of evidence linking group members with Breivik.
Another key Breivik influencer was someone I've often mentioned: Pamela Geller, a self-appointed "defender" of America against "creeping Islamification". Pamela spent the weekend tweeting new myths distancing herself from the terrorist, for her army of moron followers to disseminate.
In my Twitter feed, I've long watched morons large and small disseminate misinformation about Islam, Muslims and immigration. Their purpose was to spread enough hatred widely enough that sooner or later someone would take action, and set a chain of violence underway. It looks as though they found a new disciple (though not their first - right-wing terror plots have long been of concern, especially in the US), and no doubt other "white heroes" are watching and contemplating whether to follow Breivik's example (as was clearly his intention).
Western governments now need to decide whether Islamaphobic lies and smears equate to hate speech, and whether to prosecute the most virulent of these liars. The shock following the Norway attacks will quickly pass, and lack of action against armchair-nationalist morons by governments will result in more confidence in the nationalist movements, and inevitably more violence.
Many thanks to Moron Watch for this article.
June 14, 2010
PayPal spanks Pamela 'Atlas Shrugs' Geller for hate speech
In a bold and courageous move PayPal is refusing to do business with Pamela Geller's website "Atlas Shrugs" because it is an organization that promotes hate and intolerance. Pamela Geller's website "Atlas Shrugs" is a notorious right wing blog responsible for much misinformation. Indeed much of the blogs contents may legitimately be called "hate speech."
Geller's right wing fringe website "Atlas Shrugs" appeals to the worst in people. In particular, the blog breeds hatred and contempt for the President, and for Muslims. It is a voice for the ugliest, most ignorant segment of American society.
On her blog Geller reprints her notice from PayPal:
Thank you PayPal, thank you for doing the right thing.
Examiner
Geller's right wing fringe website "Atlas Shrugs" appeals to the worst in people. In particular, the blog breeds hatred and contempt for the President, and for Muslims. It is a voice for the ugliest, most ignorant segment of American society.
On her blog Geller reprints her notice from PayPal:
'Dear Pamela Geller,About Geller, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs writes:
We appreciate the fact that you chose PayPal to send and receive payments for your transactions.
However, after a recent review of your account, it has been determined that you are currently in violation of PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy. Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime.'
'The fact is that there are plenty of good reasons to make the judgment that Pamela Geller promotes crazy hate speech, racist groups, and conspiracy theories; her main targets are Muslims, but many of these reasons have nothing to do with Islam, radical or otherwise.Geller is entitled to spew her hater speech, and publish her foul and misleading website: this is a free country. But PayPal is in no way obligated to do business with her. PayPal should be saluted for their conscientious effort to stand up against hate and intolerance.
For example, her bizarre racist accusation that Barack Obama is the illegitimate child of Malcolm X. Or her promotion of Birther theories. Or her association with far right fascist parties in Europe, such as the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the BNP-linked English Defense League, and the neo-Nazi-linked Pro-Koln group. Or her outrageous support and whitewashing of murdered South African neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terreblanche.'
Thank you PayPal, thank you for doing the right thing.
Examiner
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