Stop the march of Hate

Stop the marchers of hate

Today the HOPE not hate campaign launched a petition that calls on Merseyside police to ban the BNP from marching through Liverpool City Centre on 14 March.

The BNP's march of hate is designed to whip up racial hatred. Pure and simple. Liverpool is a multiracial society and does not deserve the hatemongers.

Please sign the petition and encourage your friends to do likewise

HOPE not hate

More on the BNP's dishonesty and 'London's Mothers Against Knives'

Nobody's ever going to think this has got anything to do with Mothers Against Knives, are they?

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Five Chinese Crackers. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

It's been about three months since Richard Barnbrook, of BNP infamy, managed to set up a MyTelegraph blog account. The blog has proved to be a valuable resource in exposing how dishonest the BNP are, and after a period of relatively sanitised posts that followed 'Blame the Immigrants', it has begun to give readers a clearer view of the party's racism. One thing in particular exposes this better than any other, the Mothers Against Knives campaign.

London's Mothers Against Knives

In terms of openness and honesty, the campaign got off to a bad start. Despite being called 'Mothers Against Knives', it was set up by Richard Barnbrook himself, who as far as I know isn't actually anyone's mother. The aim of this was pretty clear - to link something from the BNP to something external by giving the impression of being a grass roots organisation set up by mothers of victims, like Mothers Against Violence, Mothers Against Murder And Aggression or especially, Mothers Against Knives.

That's right. There was already a campaign group called Mothers Against Knives set up by victims' mothers, which had already had national coverage in the press, and more importantly, copyrighted the name. Mothers Against Knives were less than happy to have their name used by the BNP, and wrote to the BNP and the Barking and Dagenham Post to say so, demanding that the BNP stop using the name.

Although it may be possible that the BNP were unaware that there was already a group with their name and didn't actually bother checking, their response removes any doubt about their lack of honesty. The campaign is now 'London's Mothers Against Knives', with the word 'London's' in a different font on the campaign's petition, which will only make it look as though the BNP's group is the London branch of the original group - something the party is no doubt counting on.

The petition as it appears on Barnbrook's blog was changed to show the new name of the group - but this is not the only change to the original post that has happened.

The petition

Originally, Barnbrook had uploaded a copy of the actual signature page of the petition to his blog. The wording above the potential signatures was wonderfully vague, saying only that the people signing supported 'tough new measures' to tackle knife crime, without actualy saying what those measures would be. The page disapeared after I pointed this out in the posts's comments.

This vague wording rang alarm bells for me, especially as Barnbrook had been showing off on his blog about asking questions in Mayor's Question Time regarding how many black people were accused of knife crimes. Could it be that the petition would end up being used to call for draconian measures to be taken against black people? I have asked this question several times in the blog's comments. Barnbrook has never bothered to answer.

Or at least, not directly. On 27 August, one day after arguing that including two maquettes in the London Assembly building - one of Nelson Mandela and another commemorating the abolition of slavery - were somehow equivalent to WWI agression, Barnbrook published 'Smile - we've all just been mugged.'. The post argued that funding the Notting Hill Carnival was like being collectively mugged, and more importantly, threw the figures for black people accused of knife crime into the mix to argue that:

'Perhaps my question to Boris Johnson should demand an explanation as to why for instance the Notting Hill Carnival cannot, likewise, be suspended until the African Carribean community learns to control its violent and aggressive young men.'

So, knife crime figures are already being used to argue for something that Barnbrook clearly feels will collectively punish black people. Once Barnbrook has what he thinks are enough signatures to present the petition to the London Assembly (or wherever), it seems pretty obvious that it will be connected to calls for something to be done to black people until the 'African Carribean community learns to control its violent and aggressive young men.'

With any luck, the Assembly will have been paying attention and will know that the people signing the petition will have been misled by:

• Not being told that there is no grass roots organisation set up by anyone's mother.
• Not being told that 'London's Mothers Against Knives' is not the London branch of 'Mothers Against Knives'.
• Not actually being informed of exactly what the petition will be used to call for.

Which pretty much means that everything about the petition is misleading from top to bottom and left Barnbrook with a set of completely useless signatures. Does that make 'London's Mothers Against Knives' the most dishonest thing the BNP has put out since 'Africans for Essex'? Maybe, but it has stiff competition.

5cc

A malicious campaign

Amid alarmist and misleading stories, more than 260,000 people have signed a petition against a so-called 'mega mosque'.

Today happens to be the deadline for signing an e-petition on the No 10 Downing Street website to oppose the building of a so-called "mega-mosque" in East London. The petition, started by a "Jill Barham", reads as follows:

We the Christian population of this great country England would like the proposed plan to build a Mega Mosque in East London Scrapped. This will only cause terrible violence and suffering and more money should go into the NHS."

As of midnight last night, this petition had attracted more than 263,000 signatories, making it far and away the most popular petition currently on the No 10 website. For some time now, incendiary emails have been circulating falsely suggesting that a "mega mosque" was to be built in West Ham with a capacity for more than 70,000 worshippers with the cost being met by public funds provided by the Greater London Authority.

Papers like the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard have played to this gallery by running alarmist stories and online polls about the "mega-mosque".

In fact, the Tablighi Jamaat, the global Muslim missionary group that has owned that particular 18-acre site in West Ham since 1996 made it clear that they have not yet even submitted their plans to the local authorities in Newham Council and in any case the proposed mosque they would like to build will actually have a capacity of around 12,000 people, not 70,000. The Tablighi Jamaat have set up a website specifically to respond to the misinformation being spread regarding the proposed mosque.

And in a statement issued yesterday, the GLA also sought to clear up the confusion:

There are not now, and have never been, any plans by the Mayor or Greater London Authority to spend any public money on such a mosque. Indeed, it would be illegal for the Mayor of London to do so...The particularly vicious nature of the campaign against a possible Muslim place of worship in East London should be condemned by all of those who support the long established right of freedom of religion in this country, and all the more so as it is based on information which has long been established to be factually untrue.

There are currently around 1,700 mosques in the UK. While the earliest UK mosques were simply converted houses, as many British Muslims have become relatively wealthier in recent years they have donated money for larger, more prestigious, purpose built premises. The same has also happened with other minority faith groups; it's just that because there are more British Muslims than the combined total of British Hindus, Jews, Sikhs and Buddhists, you are generally more likely to see a mosque near where you live in the UK than you are a Hindu mandir, a Jewish synagogue, a Sikh gurdwara or a Buddhist temple.

And in what could be an inspired move, the Tablighi Jamaat have recently appointed Allies and Morrison - the people behind the refurbishment of the Royal Festival Hall - as their architects for the proposed West Ham mosque. Most mosques around the UK are functional rather than beautiful and it would great if the Tablighi Jamaat could take a lead in this area.

I don't really know who this "Jill Barham" is but the embittered tone of her petition reminds me of an interview I did for BBC Radio Oxford a couple of years back. I was on with the Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens who was complaining that British Muslims were generally more serious about their faith than Christians were and that Churches were in decline, while the numbers of mosques was increasing.

It was clear that Hitchens was aggrieved at what he thought was a declining religiosity among Christians. I don't know whether this is true or not, but complaining about Muslims building their own places of worship does not seem to be a very ethical way of arresting a perceived decline in Christianity.

Inayat Bunglawala
Comment is free

Note: Jill Barham is of course 'English Rose', a friend of Lancaster BNP's Chris Hill. Might have known really.

No.10 website carries threats of violence against Muslims

THE EXTREME RIGHT have threatened violence against Muslims on Downing Street's website in a protest over a proposed Mosque.

The British National Party and other neo-Nazi groups are supporting a petition on No.10's website which warns, ominously, of "terrible violence and suffering" should the so-called mega mosque go ahead

This is certain to be taken as a warning that physical violence could be unleashed against Muslims unless the dissenters get their way and defeat plans to build a mosque on the Olympic site in Stratford, east London.

Yesterday the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, attacked another online poll being run at the same time, on the London Evening Standard's "thisislondon" website, which is also being pushed on the BNP's website.

Organised

Livingstone said the poll was "aimed at stirring up communal hatred by spreading entirely false statements about plans for a new mosque in East London."

The mayor accuses opponents of spreading false propaganda by claiming £100m of public money would be pumped into the mosque, when there are no plans to spend any public money on the project.

Livingstone said the false claims were "clearly designed to deliberately whip up communal hatred and contain content that is entirely untrue.They are clearly being spread in an organised way for unscrupulous political reasons".

He added: "There is no proposal to use any public money at all for such a mosque; there is no link between plans for a mosque and the Olympics; and, as widely reported, there are actually no plans for a mosque on the scale claimed in the email."

However the Downing Street petition, with its implicit threat of far-right attacks on Muslims, is potentially even more serious. Over 30,000 people had signed the petition this morning.

Blink is encouraging readers to complain to No.10 over the reference to "terrible violence and suffering" if the mosque is built. Please email webmaster@pmo.gov.uk and ask for these words to be removed or failing that, the whole petition taken off line.

Black Information Link