Mr Angry

You would have thought Darren Lumb would be in a happier mood, especially as he has just been promoted to the position of BNP West Yorkshire organiser.

But it appears not. Poor old “Dazza” has been more than a bit grumpy of late.

We’ve just had a less than friendly blog response from Lumb, using the same email address that is used on his own blog. It seems he is less than happy with our article “Griffin's Dog Day Afternoon” (http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/article/1483/griffins-dog-day-afternoon).

That article tells the tale of the “Combined ex-Forces” (CXF), a strange EDL off-shoot whose leader Michael Rafferty brags of having guns and snipers that they are willing to use against police officers. The story goes on to explain how Rafferty and his tin soldiers happily swelled the ranks at the recent BNP campsite/vigil held close to The Royal Albert Hall.

Lumb also camped out that day and was no doubt happy to see the bigger boys with their pretend military uniforms and shiny boots. We’ve included a photo of Darren trying to look menacing.

We would have thought that as Mr Lumb now holds such as important position within the BNP that his correspondence would have been a little more, polite?

To Hope not Hate

From Darren Lumb

“Listen you false pieces of shit, if you want to have a go anytime any place then so be it. but don't ever ever ever ever ever bring shame on our brave heroes, If you want to fight for the ''good cause'' then we will be happy to bring the fight to you, I’m sick and tired of your lies and propaganda, either come to the battleground or keep it SHUT.”

Lumb doesn’t just direct his bile at us. Prime Minister, David Cameron has also been a victim of his bile. This was left earlier today on David Cameron’s Facebook page.

“Oh cunt Im going to rip your fucking head off when I see you.. The one thing I don't like is traitors and Jews. Get ready wanker Im going to rip your arms and legs off..”

Recently we wrote how unemployed Lumb was convicted of using racially aggravated threatening or insulting words and behaviour after he called a petrol station worker “a black bastard” (http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/news/article/1946/bnp-organiser-convicted-for-racist-tirade) He also has previous convictions for assault and disorder.

Perhaps Darren has too much time on his hands? It’s possible that if Lumb got himself a job and stopped hanging around with pretend soldiers and washed up politicians his childish messages might come to an end.

Still, we’ll continue to judge Mr Griffin by the ongoing company he keeps.

Hope not Hate

Infidel leader praises the Protocols

The leader of the EDL's “Infidels” faction, John “Snowy” Shaw, has spoke out in support of the notoriously antisemitic book, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Hot on the heels of praise for the Book of Revelations, Shaw announced yesterday that his head is being turned by another historical document, the “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”.

With “the Protocols” Shaw has immersed himself in one of the most vile and dangerous forgeries of all time. According to Shaw, the book has already begun to make things “click” in his head, and he advises “all true British patriots take the time to read this”.

Despite the book being discovered as a forgery, it has long been viewed as definitive proof of a Jewish conspiracy by Nazis and anti-semites ever since. Adolf Hitler even had put it in the school curriculum in Nazi Germany. More recently, it was even among a selection of books that the BNP recommended for “patriots” during the 1980’s because they insisted it was still of historical interest.

The book is a crude record of the supposed minutes of a meeting of the Jewish community in the late 19th Century where plans for their world domination are discussed.

The book first surfaced in Russia in the early 1900’s and was used as a justification by antisemites to carry out pogroms against the Jewish community. It’s popularity spread as far as notorious Jew-Hater Henry Ford of Ford Motor car fame, who had a further 500,000 printed for distribution in the United States.

Having opened the book, Shaw is convinced by its authenticity. He is now adamant that both Jews and Muslims are conspiring together and that he “must stop them destroying our country”.

Hope not hate

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

MPs urge crackdown on internet hatred

MPs have urged the European Union to take the lead in cracking down on antisemitic sites from far right and Islamist groups.

At the first major debate on antisemitism last Thursday at Westminster Hall, John Mann, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism, said he was frustrated with progress on the issue. He said: "Is it beyond the EU to have some common standards relating to the internet that would greatly enhance what has happened in this country? "

But he warned: "Despite the history of the origins of the EU, the Commission has never, ever seen antisemitism as part of its remit, which must change. Addressing the internet would be a good start."

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is preparing a ministerial conference on dealing with internet hate. Noting a US initiative to challenge Google and Microsoft over antisemitism online, Mr Mann observed: "I am certain that if our colleagues in the US Congress can organise such meetings, we will in some way be able to get representatives, too."

His call was backed by LibDem MP Sir Alan Beith, who said: "Internet service providers will have to do a lot more to prevent the internet and social networking tools, which are of such immense value to so many people in the world, from becoming a source of terrible evil and a means by which evil is spread."

Mr Mann pointed to the success of prosecuting Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle, convicted of inciting racial hatred by posting stories such as"Tales of the Holohoax." It was the first case the Crown Prosecution Service brought involving the diffusion of race hate via the internet.

Louise Ellman raised concerns that those sites which went unchallenged were generally Islamist, coming from places like Saudi Arabia,, rather than those on the far right. But Denis MacShane said he did not believe antisemitism online was confined to extremist websites, saying: "I could bring to the House cartoons and articles in our main newspapers - our liberal newspapers, our left newspapers and our conservative newspapers - that precisely draw that moral equivalence between Israel and Nazism, which attempt to typecast all Jews as supporters of Israel who thus have a double loyalty."

Tom Watson was greatly concerned by rhetoric in the media, particulary that of TV host Glenn Beck of Fox News, whose shows are available in the UK. Last year, he noted, "Mr Beck and his guests invoked Hitler 147 times. Nazis, an additional 202 times. Fascism or fascists, 193 times. The Holocaust got 76 mentions, and Joseph Goebbels got 24."

A CST spokesman said: "This was an excellent debate that showed cross-party support for tackling antisemitism and a real understanding of our community's concerns. We must not forget or underestimate just how many good friends we have fighting our corner."

Jewish Chronicle

Racist BNP sets sights on Ireland

The racist British National Party have their sights set on Ireland, Sunday World can reveal. The controversial party have been building links with right-wing extremists across the island and even offered money and training to supporters living here.

A group of Irish BNP activists from the UK have been looking to make contact with the recently formed Irish National Party. One BNP member even spent a frantic three-day trip to Dublin desperately trying to find the INP leadership this week. However, we can reveal that since Sunday World exposed INP leaders David Barrett and Ollie Allen as Nazis, the pair have abandoned their planned anti-immigration party.

BNP activist, Paul Ryan, revealed that his party are desperate to get a foothold in Ireland and already have a network of contacts across the country. While trying to make contact with the INP, Ryan inadvertently revealed his plans to our undercover reporter.

He explained that party Deputy Chairman, Simon Darby, spends much of his time traveling to the North, where former orange man, Jim Dowson, runs the party’s call centre.

“Darby is very interested in getting a group going in Ireland that we can work together with,” Ryan declared. “I can get loads of people to join you from Irish community as well as our people living in Dublin. In the past the BNP had a problem with Irish people but there is a group of us now who support the party and they are very open to the idea of a similar party in Ireland.”

Ryan offered the party money and advice on security as well as issuing an invitation to attend the BNP’s annual red, white and blue festival, which draws in far right groups from across Europe. He ranted about the threats posed to Ireland and the UK by Muslims and mass immigration.

“I promise you that I can help you out as a party, financially with fundraising and to give you advice,” he added. “We are as determined as yourselves. Frank O’Brien (BNP election candidate) from the BNP is good friend of mine and he is of Irish descent, I want to put him in touch with the INP. We are in touch with Swedish groups and want to get a network across Europe of nationalist parties.”

BNP leading member Darby recently commented that he would be “overjoyed if an Irish National Party was set up and we would do all we could to help it.” His comment came just weeks before the Irish National Party publicly announced their existence.

A leaked email from BNP Solihull Councillor, George Morgan, to the INP pledged support for the group.

“As a fellow nationalist I believe that, regardless of whether we are of Celtic, or Anglo Saxon stock, we face the same basic threats to our heritage, culture, identity and ultimately our future,” the Cllr declared. “I further believe that as nationalists we must fight these threats on a united front, albeit different peoples but with a common ancestry. I would suggest that in the first instance you contact the regional organiser for the West Midlands.”

Following a recent Sunday World exposé the emergent Irish National Party were exposed as an anti-Semitic far-right thugs. The group’s website was taken down within days and anti-Semitic party leader, paediatric nurse, David Barrett, has been keeping a low profile.

The party was unable to meet with the BNP to get vital funding and training as the BNP’s contact was intercepted by this paper. However, a new website was hastily launched this week to replace the INP’s failed project – the London registered Irishnationalparty.com site is believed to be linked to British attempts to gain a foothold in Irish politics.

The BNP say their plan for Ireland is to “end the conflict” by making the North and South part of the United Kingdom. BNP have links to Irish pro-life group, Youth Defence through their main fundraiser, Jim Dowson. Dowson runs the BNP’s Belfast call centre and is believed to be bankrolling the BNP, providing hundreds of thousands in funding, according to recently leaked accounts for the party. The former Orange Man has links to the loyalist murderer Michael Stone and has been described as a “rent-a-cause extremist”.

He formed Precious Life Scotland, later the UK Life League in 1999, and has been in regular contact with Youth Defence since.

Brian Whelan

Nick Griffin's foreign fascist festival

Fresh from agreeing to allow blacks and Asians join his party, Nick Griffin is this week embracing a group of men who have funny names and speak foreign languages. Have his regular trips to Brussels and Strasbourg finally brought out the British National Party chief’s cosmopolitan side?

Of course they haven’t. Far from sampling the diversity of Europe, Griffin [shared] a platform with some of the continent’s most narrow-minded politicians in Ghent yesterday (Wednesday).

According to his Facebook fan page, Griffin visited the Belgian city to address a “student symposium”. Yet the poster for the event indicated there will be precious little of the academic chin-rubbing you’d normally expect at a meeting billed as such. The poster depicts a burqa-clad woman standing in front of a European flag studded with minaret spires.

This crass Islamophobia is typical of promotional material produced by the far-right party Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), whose de facto youth wing, the National Student Association (NSV), is organising the event. Like the BNP, the Vlaams Belang has had to amend its rulebook in recent years after its precursor, the Vlaams Blok, was banned for flouting anti-discrimination laws.

Frank Vanhecke, the Vlaams Belang leader, also scheduled to speak in Ghent, is not as openly xenophobic as he used to be – he once denounced an Amsterdam mayor who named a square after Nelson Mandela as a “renegade towards his own people and race”. Yet he has no qualms about inciting hatred against Muslims. Women who wear a veil, he has said, have signed a contract for their deportation.

Another guest in Ghent was Bruno Gollnisch, deputy-leader of the French National Front. Gollnisch has been helping the BNP finesse its electoral strategy, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. By turning to him for advice, Griffin evidently no longer appears as keen to emphasise that he is “not” an anti-Semite as he was during his Question Time appearance. In 2004, Gollnisch suggested that the Nazi gas chambers may be a myth.

Griffin is no “gravy train or career politician”, a message directed at his constituents in northwest England recently declared. How then does he explain his use of a budget that is supposed to be reserved for parliamentary researchers and secretarial help to pay his bodyguard? Or his use of the European Parliament chamber to score the most parochial points imaginable? During a debate on the Haiti earthquake in January, he argued that no humanitarian aid should be given to its victims because the disaster had happened “in somebody else’s backyard”. Griffin quoted the Bible to claim that EU governments only had duties to their own citizens. The central teaching of Christianity – “love your neighbour as yourself” – is conveniently omitted when fascists interpret scripture.

It would be comforting if Griffin and his ilk were confined to the political margins. But the truth is that “mainstream” parties and European institutions have happily stolen many of the extreme right’s clothes and invariably wear them with greater ease. For example, Griffin’s wish for boats carrying asylum-seekers to be sunk is not far removed from what Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, is already doing. Last summer this agency helped the Italian authorities force a vessel to land in Libya; in contravention to international law, the people on board it were not granted the possibility to apply for asylum. Frontex is also planning to use pilotless drones – the type of warplanes that have caused numerous civilian deaths in Palestine, Afghanistan and Pakistan – in future operations designed to prevent migrants entering Europe.

If there is one thing more nauseating than Nick Griffin himself, it is how “respectable” politicians pander to his agenda.

The Samosa (article slightly edited)

Children of Hate - Fighting Back Against Racist Parents

Sixteen-year-old Stephan Mills rejected his father's racism despite years of indoctrination.
Psychologists say that is more common than many people think. Stephan's mother says that
thanks to her ex-husband, Stephan "had to relearn [how] to be a civilized human."

When Stephan Mills was 10 or 11, his father sat him and his older sister down after supper one night and told them that if they ever became emotionally involved with someone of color, he would kill them.

"I just nodded in agreement," said Stephan, now 16.

The incident seemed normal to a boy who for years had been steeped in his father's bigotry. Arthur Kemp, a South African white supremacist who has ties to British and American hate groups, indoctrinated his children with racist and anti-Semitic beliefs from the time they were very young. Stephan mostly adopted those views as his own. Several years ago, however, he rejected all that his father stood for. The experience would radically change his life and lead to his ongoing estrangement from his father, who's now divorced from his mother and believed to be living in England.

"Stephan's resentment toward his father is based partly on the fact that, in his sister's words, he had to relearn to be a civilized human," said his mother, Karen Mills. (Karen and Stephan Mills live near Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Intelligence Report interviewed them by phone and E-mail).

There was a lot to relearn. Arthur Kemp "was a very involved and doting father" when his children were small, Karen Mills said. He read to them often, carefully choosing books he felt would reinforce his ideology. Among them were the original "Noddy" series, English children's books that featured Golliwogs, dark-skinned caricatures that were later removed from the text because they were deemed racist. In one of Kemp's favorite Noddy books, the Golliwogs steal Noddy's car. Kemp enjoyed telling his children that the Golliwogs' theft of the car amounted to typical behavior for blacks.

But it wasn't only in books that Kemp found justification for his racism; post-apartheid South Africa offered plenty for him to complain about. "He tried to imprint on the children how bad Africa and everything here was," Karen Mills wrote. After striking workers toppled trashcans, for instance, "Arthur took the children into the main streets of the town and made them walk among the rubbish."

He also forbade socializing with non-white children. If they arrived at a friend's party to find that a black child had also been invited, Kemp made his children go home. When Stephan was six, his father reluctantly took him and his sister to swimming lessons at a public pool where one of the children turned out to be black. "He told us to get out and that we were leaving," said Stephan, who now uses his mother's maiden name. "I was still pretty young so I didn't really understand what was going on."

Kemp's attitude didn't change even when his children's health was at stake. When the family was living in Britain, he plucked his 6-year-old daughter, Joanne, from the dentist's chair rather than allow her to be treated by an Indian dentist, Karen Mills said. As a result, she suffered for three days with a tooth abscess.

When his children grew older, he allowed them to listen only to "white resistance" bands. Rap, especially, was prohibited. Although baseball caps, sneakers, baggy pants and big T-shirts were in fashion, he considered these items "ghetto nigger" clothing and wouldn't let his children wear them. He also relished showing them articles and statistics that purported to prove that blacks were inferior. He contended that blacks could never be race car drivers because they have poor depth perception, that they cannot swim because their bones are too dense, that they are not as intelligent because their brains are smaller.

"The children were actively encouraged to be vocal about their views and to challenge their peers," Karen Mills wrote. "In Stephan's case in particular, this resulted in him being ostracized and made an outcast as he followed his father's lead."

Stephan said he had few friends until his first year of high school. At times, he suffered from depression because his father's brainwashing had so alienated him from his peers, his mother said.

"I wasn't really someone that people wanted to hang around with," Stephan said. "They regarded me as weird because I was constantly talking about Hitler."

Karen Mills said she initially went along with her husband's views to please him, but the marriage grew troubled as he devoted himself increasingly to far-right politics. She refused to read his opus on white superiority, March of the Titans: A History of the White Race, and criticized him in front of their children.

With his marriage collapsing, Arthur Kemp became violent, especially toward Stephan, Karen Mills said. Once, when Stephan was about eight, he hit his son's face until his nose bled and blood spattered on the bedroom wall, she said. He stopped only when the maid's screams brought Karen rushing into the room and she pulled Kemp off Stephan. Later, Kemp allegedly beat Stephan while his mother was at work. The backs of Stephan's legs were so swollen that he could not bend them to get into his bath. "If you ever hit my child again," she told Kemp, "I'll kill you."

Still, she did not report the incidents to the police. "You try to block it out because maybe it's more than you can deal with," said Mills, a lawyer who now works for the South African government. "You hope that it'll resolve itself and turn a blind eye."

Kemp dismissed the allegations from his former wife in an E-mail to the Intelligence Report. "It is all a pack of lies from a mentally ill person," he wrote. "I am disappointed that you would stoop to exploiting a person with severe psychological problems in this way." Karen Mills responded that Kemp has always claimed she's mentally ill simply because she disagrees with him.

Mills still feels guilty for allowing her children to suffer what she now sees as both physical and emotional abuse. "Why couldn't I do something?" she asked. "I just never stood up to him."

Kemp's persistence in forcing his beliefs on his children — along with his disengagement from their lives as he immersed himself in white nationalism — led them to question their father and the values he espoused, Karen Mills said. In a September 2008 post on the anti-racist site Lancaster Unity, Stephan called his father a "racist ass" and said he should be deported to South Africa. He wrote: "I remember almost every night when we would ask for a bedtime story (when most NORMAL fathers would read their children a normal book) he would instead tell us stories about how the white race was all supreme and then read us chapters from his horrible book "March of the White Titans" [sic]. Well dad if you ever read this or even hear about it I just wanted to let you know that I HATE YOU!! You have no idea what i went through at school because of you, you twisted my mind and made my entire childhood a horrible misery."

As his wife and children lost respect for him, Kemp withdrew further from the family. Karen Mills believes that's because they no longer fit his image of the model right-wing family that would help him achieve his political goals. "His political beliefs are the absolute be-all and end-all of his life," she said. "I think the reason why he's cut the children off is they don't conform to his political beliefs and aspirations."

Instead, "he began to seek out people who admired him and particularly his book," she recalled. "The admiration, and in particular the view of him as this great right-wing academic, became his main driving force."

He left the family in November 2006. "Picture this situation," Stephan wrote in November 2008 on Lancaster Unity. "I am fast asleep on thursday morning and when i wake i find that he is gone and then i receive a phone call from him telling me he is on a flight to London… THIS ASSHOLE DIDNT EVEN HAVE THE MANNERS TO SAY GOODBYE TO MY FACE!! I have not seen my father in now [a]bout two and [a] bit years."

Karen Mills said Kemp has had almost no contact with his children since the divorce. "I don't think there's any way that Arthur could fix the broken relationship with Stephan," she said. Nonetheless, "Stephan has gone through something of a catharsis." In addition to his posts on Lancaster Unity, he chose to discuss his father when he was assigned to give a school speech on someone who had influenced him — only he said his father's influence had been entirely negative. Now, his social life is improving, and he has resolved to be as unlike his father as possible. "I am stuck with some of his traits and characteristics — Mom used to joke with me that I have the Kemp laziness gene — but definitely not his political views," he said.

Yet there's no bringing back the years he lost to his father's hate. "You," he wrote to him in the September 2008 Lancaster Unity post, "will never understand what you have done to me."

Southern Poverty Law Center

Web racists challenge convictions

Sheppard (left) and Whittle were jailed after a failed bid to seek asylum in the US

Two men have started appeals against the UK's first convictions for inciting racial hatred via a foreign website

Simon Sheppard, 51, was sentenced to four years and 10 months, and Stephen Whittle, 42, to two years and four months at Leeds Crown Court in July.

Sheppard, from Selby, North Yorks, and Whittle, of Preston, Lancs, controlled US websites featuring racist material. Sheppard's counsel Adrian Davies told the Appeal Court on Thursday the sites were "entirely lawful" in the US. He said that there was no evidence that anyone in England and Wales - except for the police officer in the case - had ever seen any of them.

Referring to the jailed UK extremist Muslim cleric Mr Davies said: "Despite this, Mr Sheppard has been sentenced to a longer term of imprisonment than Abu Hamza," he told the court. "These are matters which, in my submission, ought to attract the closest and most careful scrutiny of the court of the supposed legal basis of these convictions."

During their first trial in 2008, Sheppard and Whittle had skipped bail and fled to California, where they sought asylum claiming they were being persecuted for their right-wing views. However, they were subsequently deported back to the UK.

The investigation began when a complaint about a leaflet called "Tales of the Holohoax" was reported to the police in 2004 after it was pushed through the door of a Blackpool synagogue. It was traced back to a post office box in Hull registered to Sheppard. Police later found published material including grotesque images of murdered Jews alongside cartoons and articles ridiculing ethnic groups.

The pair were charged under the Public Order Act with publishing racially inflammatory material, distributing racially inflammatory material and possessing racially inflammatory material with a view to distribution. Sheppard, of Brook Street, Selby, was found guilty of 16 offences and Whittle, of Avenham Lane, Preston, was found guilty of five. Sentencing, Judge Rodney Grant said that he had rarely seen material which was so abusive and insulting.

At the Court of Appeal on Thursday, Mr Davies said that the Act did not contemplate a situation where publication was in an electronic form but only in "hard copy" form. And publication did not result merely when a website was set up but only when someone actually looked at it.

The hearing continues.

BBC

Global anti-Semitism demands a united response

The recent desecration of a Jewish cemetery in south Ottawa should be a wake-up call. The beast of anti-Semitism is back.

In Europe, politicians who deny the Holocaust or trivialize the massacre of Jews are elected to the European Parliament. The Swedish left-wing paper, Aftonbladet, recently published an article claiming that Israeli soldiers kidnap and kill Palestinians to extract and sell their organs. This is the blood libel first put into circulation in the middle ages in England by anti-Jewish priests.

Another of the old anti-Semitic stereotypes is that of the secret cabal or lobby manipulating events behind the scenes to the profit and interest of Jews. A U.S.-based website called "Uncle Semite" has just published a 19-volume "catalogue of Jewish names" with 220,000 listed so that they can be sent anti-Semitic e-mails.

In Britain, the leader of the anti-Jewish [British] National Party has been elected to the European Parliament. There, alongside openly anti-Semitic MEPs from Hungary, France, Belgium and Italy, he enjoys parliamentary immunities and lavish allowances and expenses to spend peddling his poison.

Or take the Hungarian MP, Oszkar Molnar, who speaks for the main opposition party, Fidez. He said Hungary was under threat from "global capital -- Jewish capital if you like -- which wants to devour the entire world, especially Hungary." His party is set to win power next year and his anti-Jewish remarks have been defended by the party leadership.

Then there are the difficulties of Britain's Conservative Party. Its leader, David Cameron supports Israel and is a sincere friend of Britain's Jewish community. But his hardline anti-EU associates have made an alliance in Europe with oddball Latvian politicians who celebrate the Waffen SS conscripts from Latvia despite the widespread massacres of Jews in the country during the war. British members of the European Parliament are led by a Polish politician, Michal Kaminski, who was formerly a member of a neo-Nazi party as a young man and has said Jews should apologize for killing Poles in the Second World War.

It is as if Europe's nerve-endings on anti-Semitism have atrophied and a new tolerance of what a few years ago was politics beyond the pale is now the norm. At the same time global anti-Semitism has the endorsement of state leaders such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and is propagated throughout Europe by a network of Wahabi mosques and preachers financed by Saudi Arabia. Egypt recently tried to install its Culture Minister, Farouk Hosni, as head of Unesco despite his call to burn Israeli books at Cairo University. He was defeated but only by a handful of votes and nation after nation at Unesco were ready to vote for a man with his record as the UN's education and culture supreme.

Dislike of Israel has permitted dislike of Jews to become tolerated politics again. Of course to criticize Israel is not anti-Semitic. But Jews in Canada, Britain or elsewhere in the world should not be made to feel that their beliefs and affinities can face a new anti-Semitism when other forms of racism are combatted.

That is why the initiative of the Canadian Parliament to set up its own commission of inquiry into anti-Semitism, which will begin hearings today, is to be welcomed.

I have the honour of representing the British House of Commons after I chaired a similar commission of inquiry which reported in 2006. There was no doubt after our evidence sessions and visits outside of London that British Jews faced levels of anti-Semitic pressure that was not acceptable in a modern democracy. Girls frightened to wear a Star of David chain, boys jostled on their way home from school if they sported a kippa were minor incidents, if frightening enough for students. Worse were the attacks on rabbis or Hasidic students and the organized network of anti-Semitic Islamist ideologues making university life a misery for Jewish students if they did not bow to the anti-Israel hate of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Now is time for a fightback. Government departments, editors, university leaders, diplomats and all decent politicians have to wake up to the return of organized anti-Semitism in too many of the world's democracies. Canada is showing a lead in North America but the struggle against 21st-century anti-Semitism has to be global or it will fail.

Denis MacShane, a British MP, was No. 2 at the Foreign Office under Tony Blair. He chaired the British House of Commons Commission of Inquiry into Anti-Semitism. He will be talking about his new book "Globalising Hatred: the new Antisemitism" in Ottawa and Toronto.

Denis MacShane
Ottawa Citizen

BBC storm as two of BNP's most notorious activists are invited on Radio 1 to insult Ashley Cole

The BBC is facing demands for an investigation after allowing two leading BNP activists to make unchallenged 'racist' statements on a flagship news broadcast.

Radio 1's Newsbeat programme introduced the interviewees as 'two young guys who are members of the BNP' - but a Mail on Sunday investigation has discovered that they were, in fact, key members of the far-Right party's leadership.

The activists claimed black England footballer Ashley Cole [pictured, left] was not 'ethnically British' and spoke of him 'coming to this country' - even though he was born in East London. More than 100 people have complained that the extremists were given an easy ride on the BBC's most listened-to news broadcast, and now leading politicians are calling for an investigation into whether it breached broadcasting rules.

But the programme's editor defended the item, claiming he had been inundated by messages from supportive listeners, some of whom said the BNP 'says what most of us are thinking'.

The row comes after the BBC's controversial decision to allow BNP leader Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time for the first time. One listener described the Newsbeat interview as so 'staggeringly soft, woefully weak and uncritically unchallenging that I feel sick to my stomach', while another said they were 'shocked and disappointed' to see the BBC giving 'substantial and uncritical publicity' to the BNP.

The Mail on Sunday has discovered the full background of the two 'young BNP supporters' identified by the BBC only as Joey, 24, and 28-year-old Mark. Both men are senior officials in the BNP party hierarchy, and one has a notorious history of racist, homophobic and anti-semitic views and is a self-confessed admirer of Adolf Hitler.

Joey is Joseph Barber, also known as Joey Smith, who runs the BNP's record label Great White Records and is one of its leading artists, recording tracks including Pondlife and Christmas Is A British Thing.

The other guest was Mark Collett, the former leader of the Youth BNP and now the party's head of publicity. He was exposed in a Channel 4 documentary Young, Nazi And Proud in 2002, when he was filmed saying 'Hitler will live forever' and said of British black people: 'Just because a dog is brought up in a stable, doesn't make it a horse.' He also said: 'AIDS is a friendly disease because blacks, drug users and gays have it.'

Collett was tried on race-hate charges after another documentary, BBC1's The Secret Agent, broadcast secret footage of alleged racist activities - but was cleared after two trials .

Radio 1, which has 11million listeners a week, featured the two-minute interview with the pair ten days ago, as well as another with party leader Nick Griffin. A transcript is on the BBC website, with a direct link to the BNP website. Radio 1's young audience, including many from working-class backgrounds, is also the key target for the BNP. Their campaigning helped them poll more than six per cent of the vote in June's European elections, winning two seats. That success has forced the BBC to give more airtime to the party, including Griffin's controversial invitation to appear on BBC1's Question Time on October 22.

BBC guidelines, which govern all the Corporation's output, set strict criteria on the use of anonymous sources.

Unmasked: Mark Collett, a senior BNP activist, seen in a Channel 4 documentary

The rules say: 'With an anonymous source... we must give the audience as much information about them as is compatible with protecting their identity, and in a way that does not mislead the audience about their status. We should normally identify on-air and online sources of information and significant contributors, as well as providing their credentials, so that our audiences can judge their status.'

The interview was also an apparent breach of National Union of Journalists guidelines which say that when interviewing representatives of racist organisations, 'journalists should carefully check all reports for accuracy and seek rebutting or opposing comments. The antisocial nature of such views should be exposed'. But Newsbeat did not disclose any details about its BNP interviewees' backgrounds other than their first names and ages - and now refuses to discuss the reason behind the decision.

Reporter Debbie Randle, who interviewed the men, did not question them about their roles in the party or ask them about any previous controversy. Unprompted by either of the activists, she invited them to give their views on Chelsea football star Cole. Born in Stepney, East London, he has now gained his 72nd England cap in the World Cup qualifier against Ukraine, which England lost 1-0.

'So when you see someone like Ashley Cole play for England, are you happy to watch him?' she asked.

'Joey' replied: 'If he wants to come to this country and he wants to live by our laws, pay into society, that's fine.'

'But,' Ms Randle asked, 'if he wanted to call himself British that would be a problem?'

Joey replied: 'He cannot say that he's ethnically British.'

Asked whether it was 'OK for people who are not white to call themselves British', he said: 'You cannot say they are ethnically British. It's denying our heritage. It's taking that away from us.'

Newsbeat did not reveal anything about Collett's background - including the TV exposés and subsequent court cases - but featured his views on whether 'the idea of races mixing was a bad thing'.

Collett said: 'I would be upset if there were no more giant pandas, I'd be upset if there were no more lions, if there were no more tigers, so equally I'd be upset if white people weren't here any more.'

Asked why the views of people who had lived here for a generation should not count, Collett added: 'Are you trying to compare somebody, or a group of people, who've lived here for maybe 30 years, to people who've lived here for 40,000 years? There's a vast, vast difference in timescale there, my dear.'

Party officials Joey Barber and Mark Collett pose as 'BNP supporters' for Radio 1 Newsbeat

The BBC said the editors of Newsbeat would make no comment on the decision not to reveal who Collett and Barber were.

But Newsbeat editor Rod McKenzie had previously published a blog on the BBC website responding to criticism. He wrote: 'We're impartial - that means we should examine all political parties and put their representatives on the spot with fair and firm questioning. Impartial journalism and censorship do not sit happily together. We believe in getting the facts and the arguments out there for people to decide - not in judging what is "right" or "wrong" in a political context - that's for you to do. The BNP are not an illegal party. They enjoy electoral support and have elected representatives.

'It is the BBC's job to properly examine all legitimate political parties that operate within the law and for which people clearly vote. A great many texts we received [after the broadcast] were broadly supportive of the BNP. Over time, it's evident from following our listeners that the party touches a nerve of support or interest.

'The large pile of texts on my desk raise issues around immigration, political correctness and an apparent frustration with mainstream politics that means the BNP, or at least some of their policies, appeals to some people. It's also clear that not much is known about the party's policies beyond immigration and race which is something we were keen to explore - and did. By the way, we also received messages of support from those who believed we had exposed the weakness of the BNP on a range of issues.'

Mr McKenzie appeared to be unaware that it is common BNP practice to mobilise members to post supportive messages on websites whenever their party is in the news. The broadcaster has also responded to the 100-plus complaints it received about the interviews from listeners.

The BBC's complaints unit said: 'Newsbeat interviewed Nick Griffin and two young BNP activists in the light of huge audience response to recent stories about BNP electoral success and what they stand for. Both interviews were rigorous and the bulk of the tough questions asked were inspired by, or directly quoted, listeners. Our audience have diverse views on these subjects and many believe we should examine the BNP's policies more closely. This was a way to shine a light on the views of the BNP, allowing people to make up their own minds.'

But Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt called on the BBC to launch an investigation as to whether the interview breached its guidelines. He said: 'The point of interviewing the BNP is to make sure that they are held to account for their totally noxious views. It would appear that did not happen here and that is a matter of great concern.'

Under fire: Radio 1 Newsbeat editor Rod McKenzie, left, with BBC radio presenters Simon Mayo and Chris Moyles, himself no stranger to controversy

MP John Whittingdale, chairman of the Commons Culture and Media Committee, said: 'If the person being interviewed has a track record in the public eye and holds a position in a political party, then to pass him off as a young person just expressing his own view is not an accurate portrayal and I would expect the BBC to make clear who they are. This should be looked at by the BBC management and possibly the BBC Trust [the Corporation's governing body]. Potentially there may have been a breach of the BBC guidelines. This needs to be properly looked at.'

A BNP spokesman said the BBC had merely asked the party to provide two young supporters from Northern England. He said: 'They just said they wanted young members. We were surprised not to have faced more difficult questioning but Radio 1 is not a heavy-duty political organ like Radio 4. It is an informative thing for young people. It is not too serious. It set out to find out what we think. The platform of Radio 1 is very informal, it is all first names, that is how younger people are. People's surnames are not as important as they are to another generation.'

The controversy comes after Radio 1 breakfast-show host Chris Moyles sparked outrage over 'misjudged' comments about filming for the family history show Who Do You Think You Are? Moyles said: 'I went off to Ireland and other places to film and, unlike a lot of the Who Do You Think You Are? shows, I didn't go to Auschwitz. Pretty much everyone goes there whether or not they're Jewish.'

In full...the Newsbeat interview that caused a storm

This is the BBC's own full transcript of the Newsbeat interview:

Randle: Do you think it's OK for people who aren't white in this country to call themselves British?

Joey: Civicly British they are. You cannot say they are ethnically British. It's denying our heritage. It's taking that away from us.

Randle: At what point do they become ethnically British? How long do they have to be here?

Asking the questions: Debbie Randle in the BBC studios

Joey: Well, I think it would be an awfully long time before someone would become ethnically British.

Randle: So when you see someone like Ashley Cole play for England, are you happy to watch him?

Joey: If he wants to come to this country and he wants to live by our laws, pay into society, that's fine.

Randle: But if he wanted to call himself British that would be a problem?

Joey: He cannot say that he's ethnically British.

Randle: Why is the idea of races mixing such a bad thing?

Joey: If everybody integrated it would take away everybody's identity.

Mark: I would be upset if there were no more giant pandas, I'd be upset if there were no more lions, if there were no more tigers, so equally I'd be upset if white people weren't here any more.

Randle: But we're the same species, which makes it a bit different, doesn't it?

Mark: You could say that but if all of a sudden there weren't any sparrows and there were only crows, I'd still be sad there weren't any sparrows.

Randle: Can you understand that some people are happy to mix?

Mark: No, I think people have been brainwashed. I think the media, the Government, have forced it down people's throats and they've indoctrinated people.

Randle: You don't think people are bright enough to decide themselves?

Mark: I think when people are bombarded 24 hours a day to force multiculturalism upon them, people are going to succumb to that. We shouldn't have to bend our ways to people who've been here five minutes.

Randle: You're talking like people here are on holiday. They've lived here, some of them, for a generation, some of them for longer. Doesn't that count?

Mark: Are you trying to compare somebody, or a group of people, who've lived here for maybe 30 years, to people who've lived here for 40,000 years? There's a vast, vast difference in timescale there, my dear.

Randle: My point isn't the difference in times between one group of people and another, it's saying they're not visitors, they are not holidaymakers, they are people living here.

Mark: If I went to live and work in another country then I would still adhere by their culture and they should adhere by ours.

Mail Online

Chelsea to ban antisemitic football chants

Chelsea FC have pledged to find and ban supporters filmed singing antisemitic songs about rivals Tottenham at a match last month.

Clips of fans chanting in a concourse at Stoke City’s Britannia Stadium were posted on YouTube, leading Spurs to complain to the west London club. They can be heard singing "Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz" while beer bottles are thrown around.

Chelsea, owned by Roman Abramovich, said they had passed the clips to police who are now investigating. In a statement, the club said: “Chelsea utterly condemns all forms of discrimination, including antisemitic chanting, as we are sure do the vast majority of our fans. If we are provided with evidence that season ticket-holders or members have engaged in such activity we will take the strongest possible action, including supporting criminal prosecution.”

It is thought the Football Association could ask Stoke to hand over CCTV footage from inside the stadium. A number of fans’ faces are visible in the clips. Chelsea have previously banned supporters from singing antisemitic songs at its Stamford Bridge ground.

JC

Cameron's unsavoury European ally

The Polish MEP Michał Kamiński is an antisemite, homophobe and nationalist. But David Cameron is courting him

Michał Kamiński, the Polish MEP and leader of the European Conservative and Reformist grouping in the European parliament, has been invited to attend the Conservative party conference. His opposition to the Lisbon treaty has led British Conservative MEPs to view him, and the Law and Order Party (PiS) that he represents, as natural allies.

But the picture is far from simple. In eastern Europe the road from communism to democracy has been a difficult one. While it has brought freedom, that freedom has at times meant the freedom to hate. Kamiński has impeccable anti-communist credentials. He has experience both as a parliamentarian and adviser to the Polish president. He has an equally strong record as an antisemite, homophobe and Polish nationalist. His politics fit as easily into the Polish as they do into the European context. He is at ease with both constituencies.

In the last years of communism in the 1980s, Kamiński belonged to the Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski (National Rebirth of Poland – NOP), a youth nationalist organisation that took as its inspiration the ideology of Roman Dmowski. At the same time, NOP declared its ideological proximity to the Falanga, a fascist youth organisation established under the umbrella of the National Democratic movement in the late 1930s. Dmowski and the Falanga were committed to a Polish state on racial principles, where the Jewish community would not have a place.

During the first years after the fall of communism, NOP openly proclaimed its determination to establish a national state. In its fight against the perceived evils of western influence, NOP mobilised skinhead groups that became notorious for attacking leftwing parties and the opposition. In the 1990s Kamiński moved on to became a deputy for the Nationalist Christian ZChN party. More recently, he has assumed the role of presidential advisor, since he is believed to be a smooth and well-connected operator in the Polish and European political scenes.

Fortunately for those who are trying to understand the man, he has left a good record of his political activism. A consistent element of his pronouncements has been his desire to defend Poland's interests against its enemies and critics. In 2001, when the leftwing president Aleksander Kwaśniewski made an official apology for atrocities committed by Poles against Jews in the town of Jedwabne in 1941, Kamiński made a public declaration in defence of those who felt that Poles had nothing to feel ashamed of. Likewise, his electoral call for "Poland for Poles" could have only one meaning in the Polish context: that non-Catholics had no place in post-communist Poland. In 2005, Kamiński publicly used a particularly vulgar phrase to describe homosexuals when interviewed on television about the then mayor of Warsaw's refusal to give permission for a gay pride march.

When Kamiński wants to be seen as a European statesman, his earlier pronouncements are quoted against him. His response has been to refuse to engage with his critics. The reason for this disdain lies in his confidence that what he has said – and the values to which he very likely still subscribes – cannot injure his political base in Poland. In a country where no politician, clergyman or activist has been prosecuted for antisemitic pronouncements, even though these are neither few nor discreet, what Kamiński has to say on the Jewish question is widely condoned. To the horror of those Poles who had hoped for a process of reconciliation between Jews and non-Jews after the debates on Jedwabne, an attempt was made last year to prosecute Jan Gross, the author of a book about Jedwabne and a more recent book on antisemitism after the war, for slandering Poland.

Tolerance of sexual diversity, meanwhile, is not something most Poles understand or want to understand. Since sexuality is seen through the prism of the Polish woman's duty to bear children for the nation, the rights of individuals and pleas for tolerance fall on deaf ears. Kamiński's contempt for homosexuals is matched by the contempt of the ruling Polish centre-right for women and their right to assert control over their bodies.

If Kamiński is made to feel politically comfortable in Strasbourg and at the Conservative party conference, it will confirm his conviction that good use can be made of him and the Polish PiS grouping because of their opposition to the Lisbon treaty. Kamiński's friends have previously threatened to refuse to co-operate with other conservatives when Kamiński was not elected as vice-president of the European parliament for the Conservative and Reformist bloc. If they withdrew now, the bloc would be very close to dissolution, because parliamentary rules require a grouping to bring together MEPs from 7 countries.

Kamiński's previous visit to the United Kingdom was in 1999, when he led a delegation to comfort General Pinochet, pending his extradition to Spain. Kamiński gave the ailing general a replica of the Black Madonna icon. Both men were apparently deeply moved and Kamiński declared this to be the most uplifting moment of his entire life. One wonders if his meeting with David Cameron will have the same impact.

Comment is free

The BBC on the BNP - Radio 1's Newsbeat interview is shameful

'Young' BNP members Joey Smith and Mark Collett

Regular readers of this [New Statesman] blog will know that I tend to harp on about the self-serving, right-wing "myth" of the BBC's supposed "liberal left bias".

For those who remain unconvinced, let me point you towards Radio 1 Newsbeat's "interview" with two "young BNP members", on the BBC website. It is so staggeringly soft, woefully weak and uncritically unchallenging that I feel sick to my stomach. Here, in full, is the absurd attempt at rigorous and impartial journalism on the BBC (I mean, Radio 1, what is the point of it?):

'Do you think it's OK for people who aren't white in this country to call themselves British?

Joey: Civicly British they are. You cannot say they are ethnically British. It's denying our heritage. It's taking that away from us.

At what point do they become ethnically British? How long do they have to be here?

Joey: Well I think it would be an awfully long time before someone would become ethnically British.

So when you see someone like Ashley Cole play for England, are you happy to watch him?

Joey: If he wants to come to this country and he wants to live by our laws, pay into society, that's fine.

But if he wanted to call himself British that would be a problem?

Joey: He cannot say that he's ethnically British.

Why is the idea of races mixing such a bad thing?

Joey: If everybody integrated it would take away everybody's identity.

Mark: I would be upset if there were no more giant pandas, I'd be upset if there were no more lions, if there were no more tigers, so equally I'd be upset if white people weren't here any more.

But we're the same species which makes it a bit different, doesn't it?

Mark: You could say that but if all of a sudden there weren't any sparrows and there were only crows, I'd still be sad there weren't any sparrows.

Can you understand that some people are happy to mix?

Mark: No, I think people have been brainwashed. I think the media, the government, have forced it down people's throats and they've indoctrinated people.

You don't think people are bright enough to decide themselves?

Mark: I think when people are bombarded 24 hours a day to force multiculturalism upon them, people are going to succumb to that. We shouldn't have to bend our ways to people who've been here five minutes.

You're talking like people here are on holiday. They've lived here, some of them, for a generation, some of them for longer. Doesn't that count?

Mark: Are you trying to compare somebody, or a group of people who've lived here for maybe 30 years, to people who've lived here for 40,000 years? There's a vast, vast difference in time scale there, my dear.

My point isn't the difference in times between one group of people and another, it's saying they're not visitors, they are not holidaymakers, they are people living here.

Mark: If I went to live and work in another country, then I would still adhere by their culture and they should adhere by ours.'

Is anyone else as shocked as I am by the soft, naive, piss-poor questioning? Why the pleading tone from reporter Debbie Randle? Where in the interview are these two BNP "kids" properly challenged - on the criminal convictions and dubious backgrounds of leading BNP figures; the party's nakedly racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic discourse; the BNP's policies on (voluntary) repatriation and mixed-marriage bans, etc? Why is the piece headline "Young BNP members explain their beliefs", as if they are innocent members of, say, Amnesty International or on an Alpha course, rather than of a party whose members are banned from becoming police officers or prison officers?

In May, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) published "race reporting guidelines" for the media, which included this particular point:

'When interviewing representatives of racist organisations or reporting meetings or statements or claims, journalists should carefully check all reports for accuracy and seek rebutting or opposing comments. The antisocial nature of such views should be exposed.'

Does anyone think reporter Debbie Randle stuck to those (voluntary) guidelines, or even to basic common sense (i.e. if you're interviewing young members of a racist party, those members' views should be challenged and their racism exposed)? According to her profile on the BBC website, she is a "Senior Broadcast Journalist" and someone desperate to interview Prince William, who once wanted to be a singer, cites Jon Snow as her favourite "reporter" because "he's so cool" and had a first job working in a bingo club. Judging by this abysmal interview, and the pass she gives the odious BNP and its "young" members, she should probably head back to that bingo club while her Radio 1 bosses hang their heads in shame for commissioning this awful feature.

The normalisation of the BNP in our political and media discourse continues apace - aided and abetted, as usual, by our public-service broadcaster. It's disgusting and depressing.

Mehdi Hasan writing in the New Statesman

Let's play Spot the BNP member!

Click on image to see it full-size

Every now and again, the comments sections to our posts come up with something just as interesting as the post itself, and this happened yesterday.

One of our eagle-eyed readers had been over to David Irving's site and has come up with a real doozie. Just in case you don't know, Irving is the discredited historian who brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 1996. The case was a disaster for him, with the judge ruling, among other things, that Irving had 'for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence'. Irving is a Holocaust denier (though he attempted to recant on that position during the libel hearing), as well as an antisemite and racist, and has for years associated with far-right extremists who promote neo-Nazism, not the least of which is BNP leader Nick Griffin.

On a visit to Austria in 2005, Irving was apprehended, tried and eventually convicted of 'glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party', which is a crime in Austria under the Verbotsgesetz* law. He served a prison sentence from February to December 2006 on the charges.

Nick Griffin and David Irving were invited to speak at a forum on 'free speech' at the Oxford Union on 26 November 2007. The debate took place after Oxford Union members voted in favour of it, but was vigorously disrupted by protesters.

Griffin has repeatedly claimed that the squeaky-clean new BNP is no longer a Holocaust-denying, antisemitic party packed with neo-nazis, which doesn't quite work when you attempt to speak in a debate with the likes of David Irving. Nor does it work when it's discovered that some of your most prominent people attend Irving's garden parties, particularly those that sell tripe like Irving's tedious tome 'Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich' that was 'snapped up' for a mere £125. Quite why anyone would pay such an enormous sum of money for a book written by the likes of Irving is beyond me. It seems to be beyond Publishers Weekly too, who wrote of it;

'This is a repellent book, and not only because of its subject. Irving (Goering) has been increasingly under fire for exploiting seemingly indefatigable research to distort history. In the book in hand, he uses enough pejoratives to sustain the illusion of objectivity regarding Hitler's propaganda chief, yet suggests that the admittedly bad man had a cause not entirely bad in itself. Nazi brutality is almost always retaliation for the plots of international Jewry and the criminality of domestic Jews. Even the books notoriously burned are "decadent and anti-German." The term Redakteur (editor) "to Goebbels' sensitive ear had a Jewish ring." Protesters in Saarbrucken are "a clamoring ragbag of communists, Jews, freemasons and disgruntled emigres." There is always, in Irving's own words, a "Jewish problem" that Goebbels struggles to solve. Much of the book, heavily indebted to the self-serving Goebbels diaries, is in such a vein. There seems always to be an agenda to Irving's documentation, and the language of camouflaged admiration suffuses his pages amidst his ritual scolding of the Nazis for their excesses. The real insidiousness of the biography is that its formidable documentation will gain it acceptance as history.'

The post on Irving's site that describes the garden party also has a couple of revealing comments by the man himself;

'Steve drives Jessica to Burnham station, as she wants to return to London (for the ghastly Notting Hill Gate carnival: Black-rap-crap all day. She'll grow out of it)'

'Devon, the last refuge for the White English from scoundrels.'

Clearly Irving hasn't changed much over the years, remaining antisemitic and racist. All the more shocking (though not entirely surprising) then to see that this garden party was attended by a couple of prominent members of the BNP, Julian Leppert and Jonathan Bowden.

Click on image to see it full-size

Leppert is the famed BNP postie whose car registration is NAZI. Leppert was the BNP’s candidate for mayor of London in 2004 and is currently the councillor for Hainault ward on Redbridge Council. Back in January 2007 Leppert attended a conference in London where he sat through anti-Jewish tirades from a close confidante of David Irving and from one of the leaders of the Islamic Party of Britain. His only other claim to fame is that he once described fellow councillor Lawrence Rustem, a man of mixed race, as having been allowed into the BNP because he is 'only half a wog'.

Bowden resigned back in July 2007 in a major huff following an attack on him by the Covert Undercover Nuisance Tactics blog (run by one of Griffin's chums, Tommy Williams), during which he was accused of being a paedophile. The attack was obviously in retaliation for his support of leadership-challenger Chris Jackson in the then-recent BNP leadership challenge. Bowden appears to have made up with the party now and seems to be back in the fold despite his cracklingly good resignation letter from August 2007;

'I am sick and tired of the human scum and vermin which proliferate in such shallows waters. To be accused of being a child abuser is amongst the lowest thing that can possibly be imagined. To even refute such allegations from criminal psychopaths like these is beneath one’s dignity...I will seek to have police action carried out against this vile Internet site [Covert], but I also intend to resign as cultural officer, advisory council member and member of the BNP. I do not wish to associate - even tangentially - with such low-grade lycanthropes and psychotic criminals. Williams [Griffin-ally Tommy Williams], I gather, is a convicted drug dealer and career criminal with a string of convictions.'

Griffin's desperate attempts to portray the BNP as having moved well away from its antisemitic and nazi ancestry looks hollow when two of his finest are attending events at the invitation of one of the best-known antisemitic nazi-lovers in the country. But will he take any action against them? Leppert is definitely in the party and we're assured that Bowden is, too. If Griffin is adamant about the party's shift away from its ignoble past, presumably he'll take action against these two reprobates.

Would you bet your shirt on it?

* Verbotsgesetz

Our readers have spotted three definite BNP members in the pictures and possibly one former member. See who you can spot and let us know via the comments section to this post. :-)

Lee Barnes: Jewish Bolsheviks to blame for Holocaust

When Lee John Barnes, legal officer of the British National Party, proclaims on his blog, “WW2 – Time To tell The Truth” you wonder if at long last the BNP leadership is simply going to tell its followers that Nazism was a uniquely hideous ideology; and that its innumerable crimes against humanity were epitomised by the Holocaust. But then you read the article, (penned as a response to Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express) and once again the grim reality of the BNP hits you between the eyes: because this is a poisonous and revealing article that depicts the Holocaust as a defensive action against “Jewish Bolsheviks”.

“…The Holocaust was the price ordinary Jews of Europe paid for the actions of the Bolshevik Jews in Russia after the Russian Revolution.

The fear of the Bolshevik threat, and the fact that so many Jews were Bolsheviks, allowed Hitler to link Jews with Bolshevism.

Therefore the Holocaust lays at the feet of those Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia and Germany whose actions allowed ordinary people, and ordinary Germans, to link Bolshevism with Jews.

Hitler used this linkage between Jews in Russia and the ideology of Bolshevism as the basis of his anti-Jewish propaganda, and this in turn led to the Holocaust itself.

Those like Rosa Luxemberg, a Jewish-Polish Bolshevik, were used by Hitler to create the perception that Germany was threatened with a Judeo-Bolshevik threat in Germany that linked Jews, Russia and Bolshevism – and this was, unfortunately, correct.”

The fact that Bolshevik scum like Rosa Luxemberg have statues erected in their honour in todays Germany shows how sick and degenerate Germany has become.

She would have turned Germany into a death camp like the Soviet Union, a charnel house of horror and murder with gulags filled with Germans, Jews, democrats and nationalists.

It was the actions of Bolshevik filth like Rosa Luxemberg in Germany during the Spartacist Uprising that allowed Hitler to equate Jews and Bolshevism – and thereby prepare the way for the Holocaust.

The issue that never gets debated in the media or the Hollywood movies is why did ordinary Germans participate in the Holocaust.

There are two reasons ;

1) They were ordered too [sic] as they would have been shot if they did’nt eg the troops involved in killings and shipping prisoners to concentration camps and concentration camp guards

2) They were terrified of Jewish Bolshevism as they saw what scum like Rosa Luxemberg did in Germany after WW1 and they feared that if the Communists took power, what happened in Russia would happen to them.

The Holocaust was not the product of ‘evil’ Germans, it was a product of the fear installed in ordinary Germans by the Russian Revolution and the actions of Jewish Bolsheviks like Rosa Luxemberg in Germany itself…”.

So, Barnes correctly plays the anti-antisemite card by repeatedly distinguishing between (bad, very bad) Bolshevik Jews and all other “ordinary” Jews, but how does this fit with his saying that Hitler was “unfortunately, correct” to link “Jews, Russia and Bolshevism”? There is no explicit condemnation in the article for the genocidal conclusions that Hitler and “ordinary Germans” (to use Barnes’s phrase) drew from this alleged Jewish/Bolshevik linkage. On the contrary, Barnes saves all of his hatred for one side only:

“…murdering Bolshevik scum…communist jackboot…Stalin, the insane butcher…[Jewish Bolshevik] blood frenzy…[Bolshevik] Jewish death cult…Soviet Union, a charnel house of horror and murder…Bolshevik filth…”.

The historical (in)accuracy of the article is another matter altogether. When an article correctly states that millions of Poles were murdered in WW2, you have to rub your eyes to believe that there really is no mention here of Nazis. Instead, its “the murdering Bolshevik scum that were murdering millions of Poles”. Indeed, when Barnes discusses who bears responsibility for WW2 and the mass murders of the period, the Nazis are once again invisible. Jews, however (especially of the Bolshevik variety) are certainly not:

“…The tragedy is that whilst the Bolsheviks from Russia were killing poles, the Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia that ran the secret police were killing millions of ethnic Russians, poles and their fellow Jews.

Stalin, the insane butcher that he was, was prepared to allow the Jewish Bolsheviks that ran the execution gangs and the secret police free rein to murder millions of his fellow ethnic Russians and Jews due to his insane paranoia.

These Jewish Bolsheviks were the driving force behind the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, and they projected their self loathing upon not just Russians but also those Jews who were not militant atheists and Communists like them. In their blood frenzy anyone who was a nationalist, anti-communist, a democrat, religious, Jewish or non-Jewish, was regarded as an enemy…

…the secret police NKVD and other security units were primarily an Jewish death cult determined to liquidate as many Christians, religious Jews and non-Jewish Russians as possible.

The war has to be laid at the feet of the Bolsheviks, Stalin and the Jewish terrorists in the empire of horror created by Stalin and his willing executioners.

No Russian Revolution = No Hitler…”

Barnes is canny enough to know that he shouldn’t just be quoting Hitler on the Jewish-Bolshevik tie up. So, he plays the British patriot card and quotes Winston Churchill on the subject:

“Let us not forget the words of Winston Churchill himself.

In an article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8 1920, Winston Churchill asserted::

” There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews.”

For sure, the BNP has come a long way since the 1980s and early ’90s: when (then) BNP deputy leader Richard Edmonds would stand bedraggled on the corner of Brick Lane in his tatty green coat, peddling soggy copies of the antisemitic rag, “Holocaust News” to bemused locals. But it still hasn’t gone that far, and it is beyond chutzpah that Barnes should be quoting the one world statesman who consistently warned against Hitler and led the stand against Nazism. When the BNP is able to show even 1% of Churchill’s opposition to Nazism then perhaps they will have the right to quote him.

As for the other sources that Barnes has drawn upon for his noxious piece, he lists two at the end of the article:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1033.htm
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html

‘Information clearing house’ reads as if it’s a surplus store for left wing news, sort of where TK Maxx meets Indymedia. It’s a fairly typical amalgam of anti-Iraq and anti-Afghan War articles, and the compulsory attendant sneering at Israel and “Zionists”. (The fact that Barnes is referring his readers to it, says as much about the modern left as it does the modern right, but that’s another story…).

The letters ‘ihr’, however, will be brutally familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the American far right and Holocaust denial scene. IHR stands for Institute for Historical Review and it was for many years the world’s leading supplier of Holocaust denial propaganda. It still trades in such filth, but the covers and titles of its propaganda are not quite as explicit as they once were. Still, when a senior BNP officer repeats the Hitlerite line that World War 2 and the Holocaust were defensive actions against Jewish Bolshevism – and he then links to the IHR website – you know that not too much has changed: even if Richard Edmonds is no longer hanging about on street corners.

CST

BNP nazi guest barred from UK

A white supremacist friend of Nick Griffin, the British National Party leader, was banned from entering Britain yesterday as he headed to speak at the BNP’s Red White and Blue festival this weekend.

Preston Wiginton (left), one of the world’s most active nazis and antisemites, was refused entry by immigration officers at Heathrow airport under laws to keep out “undesirables”. He was to have been the star overseas guest at the BNP’s tenth RWB festival, which opens today in Derbyshire.

It was Wiginton, 44, who organised Griffin’s anti-Islam tour of three US universities at the end of October 2007. As well as financing the trip, Wiginton appealed to users of the Stormfront nazi internet forum to donate money to Griffin while he was in America.

Wiginton had been unknown in the UK before Griffin’s trip and it was Searchlight that exposed him and revealed his extensive nazi activities and connections. This was no doubt what brought him to the attention of the UK Border Agency.

Shortly after his tour Griffin wrote an open letter to “European Colleagues” endorsing Wiginton’s involvement in organising a march in Moscow at which leading nazis addressed a crowd of fascists giving the Nazi salute while shouting “death to the Jews” and “Pure Russia”.

Griffin praised Wiginton as a “very effective organiser [who], rarely among American nationalists, understands the importance of image and popular acceptability to all nationalist parties”. The letter explained that Wiginton “is very well connected in Russia, with good contacts with various nationalist organisations and elected politicians”. The organisations to which he refers are some of the most racist and murderous neo-nazi groups and skinhead gangs in Russia who have been responsible for dozens of racist murders.

Referring to Wiginton’s role in planning a “major march and rally” in Moscow Griffin continued “the BNP supports this endeavour wholeheartedly and asks all our European comrades to do likewise, hopefully thereby creating the beginnings of an effective cooperation between patriots of both Western and Orthodox Christendom against our common enemies: Mass immigration; radical Islamism; Western liberalism and Wall Street/White House dollar imperialism”. The language is typical of neo-nazis.

Griffin and Wiginton have collaborated for many years. Wiginton spearheaded US support for Griffin during his trial for inciting racial hatred, setting up an online petition calling on the British government to drop the prosecution. Together with Jamie Kelso of Stormfront, he also organised a protest outside the British consulate in Houston, Texas in January 2006.

Wiginton’s connections and activities are wide-ranging. He caused a furore at Texas A&M university some years ago by arranging a series of meetings for Frosty Wooldridge, a prominent opponent of immigration. The two men ran a joint campaign to repeal a 2001 Texas law that allows immigrants to pay the same reduced fees at state universities as Texas residents.

These days Wiginton works with the Texas chapter of the Minuteman Project, a group of would-be vigilantes who take violent exception to Mexican immigrants, or the “mestizo parasite” as he prefers to call them.

Kevin Strom, leader of the neo-nazi National Vanguard (NV), was another associate until his arrest on child pornography charges when Wiginton and Griffin dropped him like a ton of bricks. Wiginton boasts of being friends with perhaps the most famous NV member, April Gaede, mother of the nazi pop twins Prussian Blue. Their act is named after the chemical residue left by Zyklon B, the gas used to murder the Jews in the Nazi death camps.

Wiginton also has close ties to Denis Gerasimov, lead singer of the notorious Russian white power band Kolvorat (Swastika), for whom he wrote a racist ditty on how immigration is diluting the purity of Russia’s “blood” and “soil”.

Despite repeated denials to the contrary Wiginton regularly posts antisemitic vitriol to Stormfront to which he also donates money. A typical posting of his, on 13 July 2007, read: “And the jew – how many nations and economies have they destroyed – yes they were doing this in many centuries ago as well. The jew has infested every nation – there is no where else to go.”

That Griffin should invite this hardline nazi to help celebrate his election to the European Parliament at the BNP annual festival shows yet again that the BNP’s claim to legitimacy is just a pretence and that Griffin has not moved far from his fascist roots.

Searchlight/Hope not hate

The neo-Nazi 'asylum seekers'

Whittle and Sheppard - a pair of freaks by any standards

They looked like a pair of cranks straight out of a Louis Theroux documentary. One was an unrepentant woman hater whose racist and anti-Semitic views were too hard-line even for the British National Party. The other, his long-haired sidekick, sought the protection of a pseudonym that he used to make extremist rants.

Their hunger to stir up controversy saw them flee from justice in the north of England and stage an unlikely claim for political asylum in Los Angeles. But their journey has now ended with jail sentences in the UK.

Jurors at Leeds Crown Court decided neo-Nazis Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle were not just harmless oddballs, but dangerous propagandists dedicated to whipping up racism. On Friday, Sheppard was jailed for four years, 10 months and Whittle for two years, four months.

In a landmark case, they have become the first Britons to be convicted of inciting racial hatred online, having printed leaflets and controlled websites featuring racist material.

The court heard the investigation into the pair began when a complaint about an anti-Semitic comic book called Tales of the Holohoax was made to the police in 2004 after it was pushed through the door of a synagogue in Blackpool, Lancashire. It was traced back to a post office box in Hull registered to Sheppard, 51, a former BNP organiser kicked out of the far-right party after he was jailed in 2000 for distributing a racially inflammatory election leaflet.

The spotlight fell on the publishing activities of Sheppard, of Selby, North Yorkshire, a self-styled "scientific publisher", whose online ramblings took in a hatred of women and a morbid fixation with cannibalism. But a police investigation discovered that his prime motivation was racism and he dedicated himself to producing what prosecutors called "obnoxious and abhorrent'' books, pamphlets and web pages.

On his website, Sheppard employed Whittle, 41, of Preston, Lancashire, as a columnist under the pseudonym "Luke O'Farrell".

Although their vitriol was variously directed at black, Asian and other non-white people, most of the material shown to the jury was virulently anti-Semitic. The language and racial slurs used by the pair cannot be repeated here, but some of the excerpts presented to the court offered a flavour of their discourse. One leaflet claimed that Auschwitz had not really been the location of industrial mass murder but had been, instead, a holiday camp provided by a benevolent Nazi regime for Europe's Jewish population.

Jonathan Sandiford, prosecuting, told the jury that it held up survivors of the Holocaust to "ridicule and contempt", accusing them of lying about the genocide of six million Jews. Another story was illustrated with photographs of dead Jews. Sheppard also wrote that Holocaust victim Anne Frank's diary was "evil".

Reviewing lawyer Mari Reid, of the Crown Prosecution Service's counter-terrorism division, said members of the public were entitled under the law to hold racist and extreme views. But she added: "What they are not entitled to do is to publish or distribute those opinions to the public in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner either intending to stir up racial hatred or in circumstances where it is likely racial hatred will be stirred up."

The defence argued that the online material did not fall under the jurisdiction of UK law, because Sheppard's site was hosted on servers in California. But in a landmark ruling, the judge dismissed this - potentially paving the way for further prosecutions against the owners of other hate sites who believe they are exploiting a legal loophole. Jurors, too, rejected the defence's claim that the pair's writings were merely satirical.

Sheppard was found guilty of 11 offences and Whittle was found guilty of five offences in July 2008. Sheppard was found guilty of a further five charges in January 2009. But the pair were not in court to hear the verdicts against them. Before the jury in the first trial could return verdicts, both men fled to Los Angeles International airport and attempted to claim political asylum. But their bid was thrown out by an immigration judge, and they were held at Santa Ana prison in California until they were returned to the UK to serve their sentences.

The irony of two racists attempting to exploit the immigration and asylum system was lost on no-one who followed the case.

BBC