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

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

On the Internet, that is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The violence is not limited to the United States.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redwatch is registered and hosted by companies in Arizona.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

azcentral

Oxford Union faces boycott over invite to Holocaust denier

The Defence Secretary, Des Browne, is leading a group of politicians and public figures who are boycotting an increasingly divided Oxford Union over the decision by its president to host a talk involving the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving and the BNP leader, Nick Griffin.

The event, entitled Free Speech Forum, which is planned for next Monday, has provoked uproar at the university and beyond. Some Oxford students say they have received death threats and fear they will be targeted by far-right groups.

More than a thousand people have signed a petition on the Downing Street website calling on Gordon Brown to condemn the talk. A protest rally in Oxford against what many students see as a cynical publicity stunt by the union's current president, Luke Tryl, is planned for tomorrow.

A string of politicians and celebrities have now pulled out of events at the world's most famous debating society, the credibility of which appears to have been badly damaged by Mr Tryl, a former chairman of the Halifax branch of Conservative Future, the Tory party's youth wing, who sees himself as a future prime minister.

Among those who have cancelled appearances are the television presenter June Sarpong, the Labour MPs Chris Bryant and Austen Mitchell, and Mr Browne. Sources close to Mr Browne said he did not wish to be "on the same programme as such people", and that "if he had known they had been invited he never would have agreed to speak in the first place".

Mr Tryl is said to be increasingly isolated in the society. One union insider said: "He has sacrificed so many great guests, simply for the sake of a fascist and a Holocaust denier to speak."

Denis McShane, the former Europe minister, pulled out of a meeting at the union last Thursday night after writing to Mr Tryl to object to plans for "two notorious anti-Semites to be given a platform at the Oxford Union". Mr McShane said: "To put four-star Jew-haters on to a prestigious platform like the Oxford Union is to validate modern anti-Semitism. If the Oxford Union has a right-wing ex-Toryboy president, he is entitled to invite whoever he wants. But those who think there should not be a platform for Jew-baiters are entitled to their view, too."

Asked about his position Mr Tryl, who describes himself as a "very liberal, modern person", said: "The BNP are in a minority, but they gain support when they say the liberals are silencing them." Pressed on BNP policies, however, Mr Tryl called them "abhorrent".

Yair Sivan, of the Union of Jewish Students, said: "There is no place for racists and fascists at universities ... Democracy does include the right to free speech, but it also includes the right to tell extremists they are not welcome – that democratic right would be one far more fitting for the Oxford Union."

The Oxford University newspaper, Cherwell, said students had received death threats from neo-Nazis. It is believed that BNP supporters are planning to "target" demonstrators at tomorrow's rally and at the event next Monday.

Divided union

* October 1994

Kermit the Frog was invited, prompting accusations of "dumbing down". Kermit told the 1,000-strong audience: "The responsibility of representing an entire species rests upon my shoulders. Frogs usually only get in here by being in an experiment."

* May 1996

O J Simpson made his only public speech in Britain after the not guilty verdict in his trial for the murder of his wife and her friend.

* October 2000

Ann Widdecombe pulled out of a debate after her proposal of a zero-tolerance approach to cannabis use was followed by eight shadow cabinet members confessing they had smoked the drug.

* March 2001

Michael Jackson lectured on his plans for a universal bill of children's rights. The speech, made after a teenage boy alleged the singer had molested him, was met with barely muffled sniggers.

Independent

Shame on us

What do you make of the following statement: "Asians are gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they'll be a third. Italy's down to 1.1 child per woman. We're just going to be outnumbered." While we're at it, what do you think of this, incidentally from the same speaker: "The Black community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order." Or this, the same speaker again: "I just don't hear from moderate Judaism, do you?" And (yes, same speaker): "Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children."

The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified, with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism for Islam - though, it should be stressed, these are the only amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book Ideology: An Introduction. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than the "hounding and humiliation" of Muslims so "they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man's law".

The heated exchanges that followed were trivialised in the mainstream media as "a nasty literary punch-up", "the talk of the literary world", "a spat" between "two warring professors", and the silence that followed seemed to confirm it as a passing tiff between two high-ranking members of the chattering class.

I see it differently. Amis's views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness. Only last week, the London Evening Standard felt able to sponsor a debate entitled: Is Islam good for London? Do another substitution here and imagine the reaction had Judaism been the subject. As Rabbi Pete Tobias noted on Comment is Free, the so-called debate was sinisterly reminiscent of the paper's campaign a century ago to alert its readers to the "problem of the alien", namely the eastern European Jews fleeing persecution who had found refuge in the capital. In this context, Rod Liddle's contribution to proceedings - "Islamophobia? Count me in" - sounds neither brave, brash nor provocatively outrageous, merely racist. Those who claim that Islamophobia can't be racist, because Islam is a religion not a race, are fooling themselves: religion is not only about faith but also about identity, background and culture, and Muslims are overwhelmingly non-white. Islamophobia is racist, and so is antisemitism.

And it is different for another reason. The views quoted by Eagleton first appeared last year, in an interview Amis gave to Ginny Dougary of the Times. That they passed with virtually no comment at the time says a great deal about the depoliticised state of intellectual debate in Britain. While a great deal of media time and energy is spent discussing the latest translation of War and Peace or the artwork in the refurbished St Pancras station, there has been, with a few notable exceptions, a puzzling lack of effort when it comes to something as critical as expressing support for an increasingly demonised minority in our society. Martin Amis should have been taken to task by his peers for his views. He was not.

This is all the more remarkable when you look closely at what Amis has been saying about Muslims and Islam. To the Dougary interview first. Eagleton drew particular attention to a passage that argued for collective punishment: "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."

Amis sought to excuse the passage quoted above by pointing out that it was prefaced by the words "There's a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say, 'The Muslim community ... (etc)'." And he repeatedly highlighted the fact that the comments were spoken, not written, as Eagleton wrongly claimed (which, in some degree, allowed Amis to dodge the central charge of Islamophobia). In a letter to the Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, he explained, "It was a thought experiment, or a mood experiment." He had not "advocated" anti-Muslim measures, "merely adumbrated" them.

If, for some, the distinction was not quite clear, Amis expanded his defence in a live interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 News. He maintained that the target of his attack was Islamism, "an extreme ideology within a religion". He was not, he stressed, attacking Islam itself or Muslims in general, though he ran into some difficulty when Snow reminded him of his observation on the alleged "extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture", and of his reaction on seeing his six-year-old daughter's toys being searched by airport security: "Oh yeah, and stick to people who look like they're from the Middle East" (itself further proof, if such were needed, of the racist nature of Islamophobia). Taken along with his assertion that "there are great problems in Islam", did not these statements, Snow proposed, indicate that he was taking "scattergun" aim at all Muslims? Amis retorted: "I do not believe in any persecution of the Muslim community. I think that would be counterproductive."

At which point, the question becomes unavoidable: is efficacy now to be the benchmark for persecutors? He also confessed to "little impulses, urges and atavisms now and then", which was uncomfortably like a collusive wink to the audience: we all have our little prejudices, don't we? Though he was forced to squirm a little, Amis refused to recant or apologise. His demeanour throughout was the ostentatious weariness of the unfairly traduced, and he called for an end to the whole dull business. "Can I ask him [Eagleton], in a collegial spirit, to shut up about it?" he wrote in a letter to this newspaper.

Do we let the homophobe off the hook just because he tells his critics to shut up? Do we pass over the rantings of the antisemite just because he did not commit the poison to the page? To judge from the response of most liberal commentators, the defence seemed to work, and Amis's wish to have a line drawn under the affair was granted. While Eagleton was attacked as a clapped-out marxist, Amis was commended, by a writer in the Observer, for "owning up - bravely, as it turned out - to what amounted to a revenge fantasy". His "thought experiment" was the incautious but challenging musing of one of the most vivid and verbally energetic modern writers in English. In the Guardian, one writer concluded that although he was often irritating, Amis had raised important questions, while among the rhetorical questions asked by Professor John Sutherland was whether Eagleton's - Eagleton's! - position at Manchester University was tenable after labelling a colleague a bigot and a racist.

We can dispense with Amis's polite fiction that he is talking about "Islamism"; there are just too many generalisations ("The impulse towards rational inquiry," Amis wrote elsewhere, "is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male"), too many references to "them" and "us". When he says, for example, "they" are gaining on "us" demographically, he is demonstrably not talking about "Islamists". The danger of being overrun, outnumbered, outbred is a repugnant trope beloved of supremacists everywhere (it was used by the Evening Standard about "aliens" 100 years ago). It is, for example, horribly familiar to Arab Israelis, and to Irish Catholics (from whom Eagleton is descended). When Amis voices his fears of being overrun, he is, and he knows he is, perpetuating and enhancing the spectre of the other, and loading it with the potent imagery of swarming poverty, violence and ignorance.

At the Cheltenham literary festival, Amis treated his audience to a discussion on the relative value of Muslim and western states, the former being, in his estimation, less evolved than the latter. "I am just saying that some societies are more evolved than others," he said. (Evolved is an interesting choice of word. In the Belgian Congo, the colonisers used to employ a system of rewarding colonised people who alienated themselves from indigenous society: they were raised to an officially designated category of évolués.) "There is no inoffensive way to put this," Amis continued provocatively. "By evolved, I mean more civilised. We have more respect for civil society."

This is not the time or place to debate the proposition or the definitions Amis employs, though I would say, in a general response to the generalised argument, that I have seen, at times, rather more respect for civil society, from how they treat their families and the elderly to strangers in the street, in Damascus, Ramallah and east Jerusalem than I have seen, at times, in London, New York and Paris. Equally, when he says, "Here in the west we have the most evolved society in the world and we are not blowing people up", it is hard not to think of the ghosts of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Muslim dead from Iraq to Afghanistan who might take issue with him. No, here the salient point is that Amis, contrary to his assertions, is talking about Islam, not Islamism, Muslims, not Islamists.

It is one thing - and the right thing - to challenge at every turn antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, incitement to violence and hatred where it exists among Muslims, just as we should where it exists in the police, the church, the political parties, newspapers or anywhere else. But British Muslims I have spoken to now talk about feeling "deluged" by hostile comment. Hardly a day goes past when they are not lectured and scolded by writers claiming to be the champions of true liberalism. Muslims who argue for Muslim schools are criticised by journalists who send their children to Christian or Jewish faith schools. Muslim women who choose to wear the niqab are upbraided by powerful politicians who claim to feel "intimidated". Those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are antisemites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists. Muslims are under siege. Worried that if they speak out they will be accused of being quasi-Islamist, many have given up trying to engage in the debate over what Amis calls "the problems of Islam" (our old friend the "problem of the alien" again).

This is a community under attack, and not just by novelists. By every official index, violence and discrimination against Muslims have increased since 2001. The victims of physical violence will always be a minority - although Asian people are twice as likely to be stabbed to death than they were ten years ago - but what the majority experience in their daily lives is much more insidious, the kind of coded rejection that in this more enlightened age takes the place of outright expressions of racism. And, of course, hanging over them are threats of control orders, curfews, arrest and extended periods of detention without trial. Just as the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act left the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation, so the infinitely more repressive anti- terrorist legislation - including 28 days' detention without charge rather than the old seven when the IRA were active - of today intimidates, alienates and inflames Muslims.

Muslims bridle at the broad strokes by which they are depicted. Every time a writer or politician or policeman begins a sentence by saying "Muslims must ...", there is little recognition of the sheer variety of belief within Islam, or of the cultural diversity among Muslims, or of the everyday pragmatic reality of what it means in a secular age to believe in God and to try to live by that belief. In this respect Muslims are like anyone else. Some are devout, some are not at all, some are not very much, and some are devout sometimes. Some are sinners; they fall down and try to get up again. Some are hypocrites who fall down and pretend to be still on their feet. Many fail to live up to their religion's, and their own, high expectations of themselves. Many have sex outside marriage, as many Catholics do. Some Muslims drink alcohol, as some Jews eat pork. A few, in common with a few Christians, think gay people should be murdered. Observant Muslims contest, dispute, accept and reject points of doctrine exactly as those from other faiths do. The Qur'an, as one Muslim put it to me, is not a program to be loaded and Muslims are not computers.

But almost worse than the ignoramus is the self-styled expert. After the attacks on the Pentagon and the twin towers, Tony Blair liked to be seen carrying his copy of the Qur'an, as though this were evidence of a deep understanding. (Not that his Qur'an was much help when he was writing to Pakistan's General Musharraf, at least according to Peter Stothard, observing him at work in Downing Street: "'Dear Pervez ...' says the prime minister, as his pen glides along the top of a letter. 'I'm never quite sure what name to use with Muslims,' he says, looking up at his staff and down dubiously at his handiwork so far." His staff suggested "General".) I can remember a presenter on the Today programme begin her challenge to a Muslim activist with the words, "But the Qur'an says ..." To which her interviewee retorted impatiently, "I'm sick of you people telling me what's Islamic or not. This is my religion and you don't know anything about it."

Reading Amis's letter to Alibhai-Brown hardly gives the impression that the author is an authority. Recalling that they once spent a convivial evening together, he said, "That night you revealed ... that you were Shia and, as far as I understand it, the Shia minority speaks for the more dreamy and poetic face of Islam." Is he perhaps confusing Shias with Sufis? The letter itself was a staggering exercise in condescension, its recipient praised as one of the good Muslims in the same way the Belgians kindly patted their évolués on the head. In a separate interview about his fictional reimagining of Mohammed Atta, who piloted the hijacked plane into the first of the twin towers, Amis acknowledged that he took "an enormous liberty in that I made him an apostate, rather than a religious maniac". He said, "It would have bored me blind to look into the mind of someone who was fanatically religious. I make him a cynic who is there just for the killing, and I wanted to emphasise that, that's it's a secret no longer well-kept, that killing people is tremendously empowering and exciting."

As a novelist, Amis is free to do whatever he wants with his characters, but the hijackers' steps on the road to 9/11 repay investigation. Reducing the motivation of the enemy to bloodlust leads nowhere, as the experience of the British in Ireland proved. The result will be wrong and it will be cliche. It may be, given Amis's spectacular powers, flamboyant, but that will only make it flamboyant cliche. Horrorism. Death cult. Thanatoid. Striking words but poor substitutes for understanding, reason and real knowledge. Go back to the start of this article. Look at the substitutions and then ask yourself what you are reading. An important question from a leading literary figure? A brave revenge fantasy? No. A major cultural and literary figure endorsing prejudice against Muslims.

Why did writers not start writing? There is Eagleton and there is the Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra, who took apart Amis's strange and chaotic essay on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. But where are the others? Four days after the Pentagon and the twin towers were attacked, the novelist Ian McEwan wrote on these pages: "Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality." As an expression of outraged, anguished humanism, McEwan's formulation was truthful, moving and humbling, and can hardly be bettered. But it seems to me the compassion is flowing in one direction, the anger in another. I can't help feeling that Amis's remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines.

And I can't help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.

Guardian

200 protest against dismal BNP conference

Around two hundred anti-fascists gathered outside the ghastly New Kimberley Hotel in Blackpool yesterday to protest at the British National Party holding their conference at the resort for the second time. Protesters came from Blackpool itself, Lancaster, Barrow, Manchester, Tyne and Wear, Nottinghamshire and Liverpool, and included students and trades unionists.

Speakers included Donna Guthrie: UAF, Stephen Mullen: Blackpool and the Fylde College Student's Union, Alec McFadden: North West TUC, Jane Rogers: Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre TUC, Paul Jenkins: Barrow and South Cumbria UAF, Dan Ratcliffe: Lancaster University SAAR, Mike Killian: Manchester UAF and others.

The BNP, rather than standing around sneering at us from inside the hotel as they did last year, chose instead to hide behind drawn curtains - except for a few who appeared momentarily to snap off a picture or two, much to the annoyance of the police who had told them not to. While most of the people who choose to do this at least tried to be discreet, Mark Collett, being the BNP's most arrogant moron, pulled his curtain wide open and stood in front of it grinning down at us until ordered to stop being a prat by the police.

This buffoon craves the limelight, good or bad, and one wonders why any party leader, particularly one as paranoid as Nick Griffin, would want such an uppity and ambitious little snot standing very closely behind him. I'd advise Griffin to check for concealed knives.

Cumbria BNP's Clive Jefferson made a couple of appearances at the door for no apparent reason, though maybe he simply wanted to be caught on Granada TV's camera. While on the subject of Granada TV, there was an excellent report on the demo last night including (sadly) a snippet of Griffin followed by three of our people. Nice. If anyone managed to get a digital recording of it, please sling it across to us at lancaster.uaf@zen.co.uk

A number of people at the demo speculated on the reason for the curtains being closed and it was suggested that the most likely reason was that there was hardly anyone in there attending the conference. This was borne out an hour or so after the demo had ended, when a group of us drove past the hotel on our way home only to see that the curtains had been opened and that there was a small cluster of around fifteen to twenty people sitting around a table in the dining room apparently engaged in a discussion. Maybe they were asking where the missing accounts have got to.

Assuming that a similar discussion was taking place in the resident's lounge (though it looked empty to us) that indicates a 'national' conference attended by about forty people. Wow.

All in all, a good demo. The weather didn't get too out of control, the conference looked pretty dismal and our speakers were great.

Thank you to everyone who made the effort to turn out, particularly to our friends who travelled from well out of the area. Many thanks to our speakers who all did a sterling job despite being frozen and our thanks to the many members of the Blackpool public who stopped to chat or who were driving past but gave us the thumbs-up.

Well done everyone (and thanks to Jim B. and Phil for the pics). :-)

See you in sunny Blackpool! Demonstrate against the fascist BNP on Saturday

The New Kimberley Hotel is situated at 585-589 New South Promenade, Blackpool FY4 1NQ roughly two miles South of Blackpool Tower. There is a map showing its location here.

We're meeting on the grass area at the front of the hotel at 12 noon. However, if you would like to join the trades union march to the hotel or you intend to arrive in a coach, you might prefer to park at Starr Gate, another half-mile further South, where the police have designated an area for a meeting and parking point here. If you intend to do this, be at Starr Gate at a little before noon as that's when the march sets off.

* We'd like a lot of noise (when the speakers aren't saying anything) so bring anything you've got that will let the BNP know we're out there. Trumpets, drums, whistles and loud voices are all welcome.

* There are a lot of people out there with digital cameras. If you find you've taken some great pictures on the day that we might be able to use on the blog, let us know on lancaster.uaf@zen.co.uk

* One word of warning. As those who were at the demo last year can tell you, Blackpool is cold in November, particularly on the seafront. Wear warm clothing.

* Safety first. Whether arriving or leaving the demo, do so in a group where possible. We don't expect any problems but it would be foolish to take chances.

Having said all that, it looks like it's going to be a great demo and it'll certainly show the BNP that they are not wanted in Blackpool.

Keep warm, keep safe and enjoy yourselves!

Councillor helped in BNP campaign

Tamworth's only independent councillor has admitted aiding the far-right wing British National Party with their election campaign in last week's byelection.

Councillor Chris Cooke's firm PDQ printed the postal vote letters for the BNP candidate Lynne Smith. Councillor Cooke, representing Glascote, yesterday admitted helping post the letters to voters, prior to the Castle Ward by-election. Coun Cooke also told the Tamworth Times: "I am against the European Union, and I think immigration has gone far too far."

Defending his assistance to the BNP, Coun Cooke said the printing was a business decision. He had helped Ms Smith gain access to blocks of flats, and posted some of the letters himself. He said he had a long-standing friendship with Ms Smith.

He added: "I said I would print material for any of the other parties. I knew the BNP candidate before she was a candidate, so it is quite natural for me to help her. I had no hand in it, apart from helping her get into the high rise flats. I explained to her how to do that and delivered the leaflets."

Coun Cooke denied that there was a conflict of interest between his role as an independent councillor and helping the BNP campaign. He did not believe he had let down the people who voted for him.

He said: "I am what I am. Everyone knows my views as a councillor, and as an independent I am beholden to nobody."

In a recent letter to Tamworth residents, Coun Cooke defended BNP candidates, saying they had become the victims of 'hysterical propaganda' for 'daring to stand for a legal political party that says immigration has gone too far and we must get out of the EU'. On the candidates for the Castle byelection, Coun Cooke wrote: "not one of them would disgrace our council."

Both the leaders of the Conservative and Labour groups on Tamworth Borough Council expressed their disappointment at Coun Cooke's actions. Both stopped short of calling for his immediate resignation, but said he should not stand as an independent again.

Coun Peter Seekings (Lab) said: "I am absolutely shocked that he would deliver leaflets for a party that in my opinion is a racist party. I think he has let down his constituents because he has always claimed to be an independent. It is going to be very difficult for him to be elected again as an independent."

Coun Jeremy Oates (Con) added: "I am very disappointed in his actions. When people voted for him, he was standing as a candidate independent of any political party. If he wishes to align himself with the BNP he should say so when seeking election."

The Castle Ward seat was up for grabs following the retirement of Conservative councillor, Graham Ingley, who stepped down due to ill health. The by-election was won by former Mayor Marion Couchman (Lab) --by just six votes. She took the seat with 619 votes. The Conservative candidate, Ian Stuart, won 613 votes, followed by the British National Party candidate Lynne Smith with 208 votes. Jenny Pinkett, for the Liberal Democrats, won 95 votes.

Overall, 5593 votes were cast. This represented 27.4 per cent of the electorate. The result does not significantly change the make-up of the council. There are now six Labour councillors, 23 Conservatives, and one independent.

icTamworth

BNP circus rolls into Colwyn Bay for court hearing

The bizarre spectacle of BNP leader Nick Griffin flanked by an entourage of party activists arrived in a tiny court room in North Wales yesterday.

The far-right leader claimed he was providing “moral support” for Llysfaen community councillor Patrick Pattison, amid attempts to slap an injunction on him at Colwyn Bay County Court.

Conwy council wants an order banning Mr Pattison from “behaving in a threatening, abusive or insulting way towards officers and members”. It follows allegations of “unacceptable” behaviour by the 55-year-old former Independent councillor, who caused outrage when he defected to the BNP earlier this year.

Mr Griffin, national chairman of the British National Party, squeezed into the tiny courtroom with four other party members.

Clearly taken aback by their presence, deputy district judge Peter Anderson asked why they were there, and was told by Cllr Pattison: “People are trying to blacken my character and these people have come to offer moral support.”

“That’s fine,” replied the judge: “So long as they are not trying to put pressure on anyone.”

Council solicitor Peter Brown then told the court he would be calling 11 witnesses to give evidence of Mr Pattison’s unacceptable behaviour which led to the injunction being sought. Mr Pattison said he would have only a couple of character witnesses but wished to submit some references without the individuals’ identity being made public.

The 10 minute hearing ended with the judge deciding Colwyn Bay court was unsuitable for the full hearing, due to the unusual interest in it. The case was adjourned until January when it will be heard by in Rhyl.

Outside the court Mr Griffin said he had attended because he felt the case should be adjourned and he wanted to support a member of the party.

“The council in Burnley is trying the same trick against one of our councillors there, and the allegations are groundless. They are up against the European Convention on Human Rights,” he said.

Mr Pattison said his defence case was not yet ready. Mr Pattison, 55, a motor mechanic, of Berth-y-Glyd, Llysfaen, was also accompanied by his girlfriend Wendy Lewis. She read a letter from one acquaintance of mixed race who praised his community spirit and refuted the claim that Mr Pattison was a racist.

Daily Post

Poor Old Soul: The return of David Irving

The late comedian Frankie Howerd was well known for saying, “it’s wicked to mock the afflicted”.

It has long been tempting not only to call the rightwing quasi-historian David Irving a liar, in the words of the judgment in his failed libel action against Dr Deborah Lipstadt, but also to question his grasp on reality, particularly about his past and present political associations.

I admit I have a personal axe to grind. In 1964 I pleaded guilty with a colleague at Middlesex Sessions of entering Irving’s north London flat “by artifice” (not burglary as the far right insist). I also admitted stealing by finding a GPO telephone engineer’s pass. Charges against a third defendant, David Freedman, were dismissed, but for the past 44 years Irving has insisted that Freedman was also guilty. Well let’s not let the facts get in the way of Irving’s warped thinking.

Around ten years ago Irving said I had made his life a Holocaust for the previous 30 years, an accusation I happily accept. Now in his dotage Irving appears to be making a late bid to gain fame in place of his infamy – which brings to mind another Frankie Howerd phrase, from Up Pompeii!: “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me”. Too right.

Some years ago Irving threatened to sue me and the publisher Pearson Longman over a chapter I had written in a book on the far right in Europe. I was able to provide documentary evidence of the truth of each of the points he claimed were defamatory of him, and demonstrate that he was associated with the extreme right in Britain.

What puzzled our libel lawyer was another reference to something Irving claimed I had written. It was at this point we wondered whether he was suffering from early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, as the passage complained of did not exist.

Irving is keen to distance himself from the BNP and claims on his website that he has “no point of contact whatever” with Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, or the BNP itself. Yet when he last tried to take the country by storm with a speaking tour in the early 1990s it was the BNP that made the arrangements for his meetings in London and Brighton.

One of Irving’s rallies was to be at Chelsea Old Town Hall. He had invited the US Holocaust denier and all-purpose fruitcake Fred Leuchter despite a ban on him entering the country. Leuchter claimed to have proved there were no gas chambers in the Nazi death camps in Poland. The meeting was packed with leading nazis from around the world, including John Tyndall, then the leader of the BNP. It broke up after a few minutes when Home Office officials and several police officers entered to remove Leuchter. He was deported a few days later.

Video evidence shows Griffin with Chris Marchant, a former Balkans War mercenary, telling Thames TV’s This Week that Irving had hired their new security firm to protect the meeting.

Irving’s failed attempt to hold a meeting at the Royal Warwicks Club in Coventry on 21 September in the wake of a small meeting in Rugby shows that he still has dealings with far-right extremists. The Rugby meeting was organised by Steve Kerr, a long-time nazi, as was the Coventry meeting booked under the guise of the “Military History Book Club”.

Irving’s speaking tour was set to continue with a meeting in Birmingham on 26 October followed by a second attempt in Coventry on 14 November, Liverpool on 26 November and Halifax. His website does not advertise that he has been invited to take part in a “free speech forum” at the Oxford Union on 27 November, to which an invitation to Griffin has already been withdrawn.

Irving recently moved into a ten-bedroom house in large grounds in Windsor, where he has already held a meeting and garden party for the rich suckers who continue to support this liar.

Irving’s position on the Holocaust has become a movable feast. He has threatened to sue The Jewish Chronicle if it calls him a Holocaust denier, though he reproduces on his website without comment a recent Guardian article that does just that. He now says he is not sure of the numbers killed. Our view is that to minimise the Holocaust by claiming that “only” two million died, or whatever number he plucks out of the air, is just another version of Holocaust revisionism. And two million in a planned genocide would still be two million too many.

I am sure all decent people will oppose this apologist for Hitler wherever he goes. Watch the Searchlight websites for news of his movements.

Searchlight

Far-right group destroyed by insult

Far-right politicians in the European Parliament will lose tens of thousands of euros to promote their ideas because their political group collapsed when five Romanian MEPs quit. The Identity, Sovereignty and Tradition group disbanded after ten months because the number of its members had fallen under 20, the minimum needed to form a political group, the EU legislature said.

The ITS included Jean-Marie Le Pen of France and Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of the Italian wartime Fascist dictator. The seeds of the group’s collapse were sown last week when she insulted the Romanian people, a Romanian ITS member said.

The Greater Romania Party (PRM) said that her insults came in comments about the expulsion of dozens of Romanians from Italy after a Romanian Gypsy was arrested last week over the murder of the wife of an Italian naval officer. Ms Mussolini was reported to have said: “Breaking the law has become a way of life for Romanians.” The demise of the grouping was welcomed by EU mainstream parties.

Times Online

BNP by-election fear means Green candidate withdraws

A Green Party candidate has withdrawn from a by-election in an attempt to prevent the BNP from gaining a Sandwell Council seat.

Vicky Dunn, aged 30, made the decision not to stand in the Princes End, Tipton, by-election called in response to the sacking of BNP councillor James Lloyd. Elected in 2004, Mr Lloyd had not attended council meetings for six months and had failed to give an explanation for his absence. He was told he would face crippling legal costs to win back his seat by going to the High Court and decided not to contest the decision.

Ms Dunn said her move was an attempt to prevent a split vote at the election on December 6. She said: "The BNP have put up a candidate, but it's best for the people of Princes End if any other party wins.

"The Greens don't want to split the vote and let the BNP in, so I have withdrawn."

Birmingham Post

BNP forces unwanted by-election

The far-right British National Party (BNP) has forced Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council to hold an unwanted by-election in Welham Green.

The authority wanted to avoid a costly poll in the seat recently vacated by Peter O'Brien, who has resigned over child porn allegations, until the full council election in May. But Mark Fuller, a BNP activist living in Hatfield, encouraged residents to send letters calling for an election. Only five letters have been submitted, but a borough council spokesman confirmed that only two were required to force an election.

The council says it wanted to avoid a poll to save public money, but the letters accuse the ruling Conservative group of trying to escape a back-lash following Mr O'Brien's resignation.

Mr Fuller said: "We found that residents were angry not only at the actions of their former councillor but also at this attempt by the ruling Conservative group to subvert the democratic process to suit their own ends."

A council spokesman said the election would be arranged in January.

Croydon Guardian

Former KKK boss invited to address Madrid and Valencia fascists

Spanish police fear violent clashes in the run-up to next Tuesday's 20th November anniversary of the death of former fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, in 1975. A serving Spanish soldier and self-confessed neonazi has been jailed for the murder of a 16 year old anti-fascist protester in a riot at a Metro station in Madrid last Sunday, and the regional government of Madrid has authorised four demonstrations convoked by various extreme right-wing organisations over the coming days.

Next Saturday, the Falange will pay tribute to former party leader, Primo de Rivera, at the 'Homage to José Antonio, murdered by the socialists in 1936'. On Sunday, the National Confederation of Ex-Combatants will gather, and on the 20th November itself, the National Front will get together at the Valle de los Caídos while the Falange will meet up in Alcalá de Henares.

Permission for a demonstration organised by the Anti-Fascist Confederation on the 24th November has been denied.

According to a report on the 20minutos website, former Klu Klux Klan leader, David Duke (57) [an old chum of Nick Griffin], will be addressing a rally jointly organised by the Centre for National Democratic Studies and the radical National Democracy party at 5pm at an undisclosed location in Madrid city-centre next Sunday. This will be followed, either on the 23rd or 25th November with an appearance in Valencia at an event organised by the National Alliance.

thinkSpain