Nazi hunter vows to bring last Hitler criminals to justice

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, chief investigator of Nazi war criminals for the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, talks to the media about his efforts to bring Nazi war
criminals to justice during a press conference at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles

They're now old, feeble, beloved by their children and grandkids - and accused of abetting the murder of millions

Six decades after the Holocaust, the world's leading Nazi hunter vowed Thursday to either bring the last of Hitler's war criminals to justice or pursue them to their graves.

"Contrary to public perception that it's too late, that's certainly not the case," said Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter for the renowned Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "We have three to five years until we won't be able to do this anymore."

Zuroff, director of the center's Israeli office, was at the center's Museum of Tolerance to release its annual report on the prosecution of some of the world's most evil men and women. He was also in town to promote his book, "Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice."

The good news: Four of the center's 10 most wanted Nazi war criminals may soon stand trial. They include Ivan Demjanjuk, a former American accused of helping slaughter Jews in several Waffen SS death camps, whose trial in Germany begins Nov. 30. Also about to face justice is Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of helping to kill 1,200 civilians. And Charles Zentai, alleged to have helped kill Jews in Hungary, whose extradition from Australia was approved last week. And Heinrich Boere, an alleged hit man for the SS in Holland, now awaiting trial in Germany.

The Simon Wiesenthal report listed 706 ongoing investigations of Nazi war criminals in two dozen countries, including 85 new cases between April 2008 through March 2009. During that period, six Nazis were convicted in Italy.

The bad news: Many nations still refuse to prosecute aging Nazis. At the top of the most-wanted list is Alois Brunner, a key SS operative responsible for the deportation of 128,500 Jews to concentration camps. He may be in Syria. He may be dead.

"It's not that hard to actually find these people. It's not even that hard to find the evidence for these people," said Zuroff, who considers himself part detective, part historian and part political lobbyist. "What is incredibly hard is to get countries that are reluctant to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, to do the right thing and to bring them to trial."

Among the countries that got failing grades for not going after Nazis: Australia, Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, Syria and the Ukraine. Canada, which has never deported a single Nazi, scored a D.

The United States got top marks for helping bring 37 of the 82 war criminal convictions worldwide, while stripping 75 Nazis of their citizenship and deporting 56.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said others may defend Nazi fugitives as old, feeble and forgetful and not worth prosecution. But they have been able to live fruitful lives, he said, while their victims did not.

"As long as a Nazi war criminal is still alive, they should know that there's someone looking for them," Hier said. "When you hunt a Nazi war criminal, all Nazi war criminals in the world feel vulnerable."

Holocaust survivors and their children agreed. Sol Teichman, his brother Samuel and their father were the only family members to survive the Nazi scourge. After surviving Auschwitz and a death march to Dachau where 6,000 fell, they were among the first Jewish refugees admitted to the U.S.

"We should go after them... they should not be forgiven," said Sol Teichman, 82, of Encino, a native of Czechoslovakia. "I lost 100 members of my immediate family... It's something I cannot forget, nor can I forgive."

"I want to see justice done," added the daughter of an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor in Camarillo, who asked that her name not be used. "I'd love to see 'em hang from a tree and let me at 'em."

Los Angeles Daily News

EasyJet apologises for trivialising the Holocaust in in-flight magazine

Berlin's Field of Stelae Holocaust Memorial which
commemorates the six million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide

EasyJet yesterday withdrew all copies of its in-flight magazine after it published pictures of designer-clad models posing in Berlin's Field of Stelae Holocaust Memorial which commemorates the six million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide. After Jewish campaigners accused the airline of 'trivialising the genocidal massacre of Jews', easyJet withdrew all copies - estimated at 250,000 - and issued a 'profuse apology'.

Labour MP Denis MacShane, who heads the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, said: 'This is further evidence of the banalisation of anti-Semitism.'

The Field of Stelae Memorial is a 19,000 square metre site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or 'stelae' arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. It is designed to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. It is run by the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which said it does not permit commercial shoots and 'grants permission only to projects which are related to the memorial, the Holocaust or some aspect of commemoration'. The Foundation Memorial said it will be contacting the airline 'in order to clarify the circumstances of the photo shoot'.

A spokesman for easyJet said it 'profusely apologises to anyone who may be offended by the inappropriate fashion photo shoot at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin featured in this month's issue of the in-flight magazine.

'The magazine is produced by INK, an external publishing house, and easyJet were not aware of the images until they appeared in print. As a consequence we are now reviewing our relationship with the publisher and are withdrawing this month's issue from all flights.'

The airline said it was 'appalled by this insensitive and inconsiderate photo- shoot, the aim of which was to highlight some of Berlin's iconic landmarks and certainly no offence was meant'. The memorial, which cost £22million, was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, 60 years after the end of the Second World War.

Daily Mail

Fear and loathing in Dagenham

On a walkabout in east London, Nick Griffin is a magnet for feelings of grief as well as anger

On Thursday Nick Griffin paid his first official visit to Barking and Dagenham as the newly declared British National party candidate in next year's election. This took the form of "walkabouts" and the one I attached myself to went up and down the slopes on either side of Dagenham Heathway station on the District line, where there are shops and cafes and pubs and more white people than you can easily come across in Barking town centre, at the constituency's western edge.

Walkabouts are of course contrivances: the point is not so much to meet people as to be photographed meeting them. A small media mob followed Griffin and his minders. He shook hands with a couple of men in a white van and sat down at a table of drinkers in the Lord Denman pub. One passerby shouted: "Love ya!" and another: "Good luck!" How much of this had been pre-arranged is hard to say. The two women sitting outside a cafe who told him to piss off were obviously not in the script, but the drinkers and the white van – which passed us more than once, honking cheerily – may well have been. What can be said is that his appearance on Question Time has done him no harm.

A woman wanted to be photographed with him: "I saw you on that chat show." Then three white schoolboys posed with Griffin at their centre. A few other schoolboys – black this time – loitered at the crowd's edge. It wouldn't have been a surprise if they too had asked to be in a shot. Griffin appeared before them as a minor celebrity in a suburban high street. He might have been opening a new Boots. His face is soft-featured and he seemed anxious to please.

A reporter from the Barking and Dagenham Post asked whether, if elected, he'd serve all his constituents, no matter their origins or colour. Griffin said of course – he would work for anyone who had a right to be here and paid their taxes. So who would be excluded? The answer was many of those people who had "poured in" over the last few years, encouraged by a government that wanted to gerrymander its parliamentary constituencies. This is the BNP line: the Labour party has deliberately promoted immigration so that it can build up vote banks, with results that are particularly visible in Barking

His supporters followed him. Several were in their best suits. Richard Barnbrook, who is probably the second most famous member of his party, wore a sand-coloured number that might have been supplied as off-duty wear to the Afrika Korps. Another follower, buttoned up in lilac, turned out to be Lawrence Rustem, a Barking councillor and Elvis fanatic and "the only half-Turkish member of the BNP". He said he was "a refugee from Hackney", where he'd been mugged 18 years before. Consequently, he joined the party and became an activist. "For me, it's been a long form of revenge for what happened to me that night," he said.

Some things about the crowd were no surprise: that it was white, male and mainly about 50 years old. What I hadn't prepared for was the sense of loss and grief. Bob Bailey, who leads the BNP opposition on Barking council, outlined his career: son of a steelworker in Scunthorpe, 12 years in the marines, and now employed by "the security industry". The steelworks had sacked his dad, who never worked again, and now faced an uncertain future under Indian ownership. "We don't make anything any more, we don't own anything any more. It's an absolute disgrace. The country's just knackered. People have given up hope. They don't believe in anything, not in themselves, not in their neighbourhoods, not in their history. "

Bailey's solutions included the nationalisation of key industries, political withdrawal from the EU and military retreat from Afghanistan. He described it as "the politics of old Labour" combined with a "forward-looking nationalism". So far, so sweetly reasonable. Then I mentioned Barking's Labour MP, Margaret Hodge. "Poisonous bitch. Lives in Islington. A multimillionairess and a foreigner to boot."

A foreigner by this definition is a woman born Margaret Oppenheimer of wealthy German Jewish parents in Egypt in 1944, who has lived in the UK for at least 60 years and is minister of state for culture and tourism. That doesn't seem a very forward-looking definition. What chance then that the BNP accepts as full citizens all the Africans, Indians, Pakistanis and eastern Europeans who have so utterly transformed Barking since the 1990s? Their numbers are growing, and the BNP likes to cite their presence in Barking as an example of sneaky government strategy. In fact, they arrived through a much more chaotic agency, the free market.

Throughout most of the last century, the people of Barking and Dagenham depended on two institutions. For work and wages, there was the Ford car plant, which at its postwar peak employed 40,000. For housing, there was the local authority. In the 1920s at Becontree, the London county council built the largest municipal estate in Europe and smaller developments followed. In the words of Darren Rodwell, a Labour activist born and raised in the borough, Barking had "its own social system". You married and got a council flat. Children came along. You moved upscale to a three-bedroom house. When Margaret Thatcher's administration introduced the right-to-buy, this paternal system broke down. Tenants bought at discounts and sold on for a profit or let the houses to inner London authorities that needed to place homeless families. Most of the old housing stock is now owned privately. Relatively cheap property and fast trains into London make Barking an obvious destination for migrants. A borough that was once exceptional for its whiteness and familial connections changed with a bewildering speed that left its Labour rulers divided and broken. The party now accepts that voter alienation and disaffection were "endemic". In 2006, the BNP won a dozen council seats.

Some blame Hodge, who, like one of her Barking predecessors, Tom Driberg, has more of the West End about her than the East End. Others accuse a complacent local council that had never shed "workerist" attitudes born in the old Ford plant. The BNP fright has changed all that. Hodge has moved the centre of her operations to the town, knocked on doors and recruited 150 members, many non-white. In her office I met young men and women from, or with parents from, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Caribbean, as well an 83-year-old former mayor, George Shaw. All of them said much the same thing: the party had to reconnect to the electorate.

My guess is Griffin will lose, and possibly badly if Labour can get its targeted voters to the polls. But can they? Rodwell told me of his reconnecting spiel when he knocks on doors: "I can't do anything about the weather, West Ham or Gordon Brown … but you can try me on anything else."

Guardian

No Barking for Barnbrook

(Click on image to see it full-size)

Pas de deux

Emma Colgate, who has stepped into the breach in Thurrock after Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, decided to switch to Barking, east London, for the general election, is one of the BNP’s most hard-working councillors.

Elected to Thurrock council in May 2008 she has a 100% attendance record at meetings of the full council and the general services committee. She is the sole BNP councillor there but holds significant power because the council is split between Labour and the Conservatives. After the former Conservative council leader, Terry Hipsey, crossed the floor to join Labour, she used her vote to keep what Hipsey described as a “dysfunctional Tory group” in power.

Only last week, Griffin appealed for donations to launch the party’s “run-up campaign to the general election”, saying: “In this next General Election I will be standing in Thurrock where the split vote between the old parties means we could win a Parliamentary seat with just 27% of the vote” – a highly improbable scenario. He had been putting his face around in Thurrock but on 15 November at the BNP’s annual conference announced that he would be standing in Barking because it was the BNP’s best chance of winning a parliamentary seat.

He is probably wrong about that. For a start he would need considerably more than 27% to oust Labour in one of its safe seats. And the increasing number of minority ethnic residents will make his task that much harder, especially after his recent attack on London as no longer British. Griffin also claimed that Richard Barnbrook, who had very publicly declared that he was going to be Barking’s next MP, had stood aside willingly and had now set his sights on becoming leader of Barking and Dagenham council.

Colgate is currently the BNP’s national administration officer, an appointment announced at the BNP’s European election victory rally in Blackpool in June. Before that she was Barnbrook’s researcher, employed by the Greater London Authority at London taxpayers’ expense. She remains on the public payroll, however, as she is one of several BNP senior officers on the EU gravy train as staff for the two MEPs.

Despite Griffin’s optimism about the party’s prospects in Thurrock, she will have a hard job to win the seat. In the 2005 general election, the BNP candidate Nick Geri came fourth with 5.8% of the vote. Colgate herself stood in Basildon in 2005, where she came fourth with 4.8%.

Hope not hate

BNP signs its first non-white member...

Rajinder Singh, who has appeared on the BNP's internet TV channel,
blames Muslims for the death of his father during the Partition of India in 1947

...but he's only joined because he hates Muslims

An elderly Sikh who describes Islam as a "beast" and once provided a character reference for Nick Griffin during his racial hatred trial is set to become the British National Party's first non-white member.

Rajinder Singh, an anti-Islam activist in his late seventies who blames Muslims for the death of his father during the Partition of India in 1947, has been sympathetic towards Britain's far-right party for much of the past decade even though he currently remains barred from becoming a member because of the colour of his skin. But last weekend the BNP's leadership took their first steps towards dropping its membership ban on non-whites after the Human Rights Commission threatened the party with legal action. The move will be put to a vote of members soon.

Martin Wingfield, the BNP's communications and campaigns officer, has already put forward the case for Mr Singh's membership, telling members on its website: "I say adapt and survive and give the brave and loyal Rajinder Singh the honour of becoming the first ethnic minority member of the BNP."

A BNP spokesman said last night: "He is perhaps the kind of immigrant you want if you are going to have them."

Mr Singh, a former teacher from Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, says he would be "honoured" to become a card-carrying member of the BNP. Explaining his motives, Mr Singh said: "I am a retired teacher, living a quiet life. I got in touch with the BNP on certain core policies that appeal to me. I also admire them since they are on their own patch, and do not wish to let anyone else oust them from the land of their ancestors."

Mr Singh and another Sikh from Slough who goes by the pseudonym Ammo Singh have previously co-operated with the BNP and have been used by the party's leadership to try to woo Asian supporters, particularly Hindus and Sikhs living in areas where tensions with Muslims run high. The party has had little success, however, with all mainstream Sikh and Hindu groups widely condemning the BNP.

But Rajinder Singh and Ammo Singh – who keeps his identity secret but is thought to be an accountant in his late thirties – have answered Mr Griffin's call, thanks to the BNP's staunchly anti-Islamic rhetoric since September 11. In December 2001, Ammo Singh claimed he had helped the BNP distribute thousands of anti-Islamic leaflets in Southall, west London, but recently he has kept a low profile. Rajinder Singh, on the other hand, has begun to appear in BNP literature more frequently, writing for the party's newspaper, Freedom, and appearing on the internet television channel, BNPTV.

His intense dislike of Islam appears to stem back to his father's death during the Partition of India, which led to the deaths of an estimated two million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. "I come from partitioned Punjab that saw a lot of bloodshed in 1947," he said. "Anyone escaping that genocide would pray to God, [say] never again and vote for BNP."

Mainstream Sikh groups said they were appalled. Dr Indarjit Singh, director of the Network of Sikh Organisations, said: "Sikhism stresses equality for all human beings. Therefore Sikhs who are true to their faith, will having nothing whatsoever to do with any party that favours any one section of the community."

Independent

Note by LU

Rajinder Singh is well known to Nick Griffin and has been dodging around the BNP for some time. It was Singh who spoke up for Griffin as a character witness when he was in court at Leeds back in 2006, bizarrely claiming that Griffin wasn't racist. On that occasion, the BNP paid for a top hotel for the night for Mr S, and treated him to lunch at a pub - a fact that was heavily criticised at the time by the Sikh community, many of whom were demonstrating AGAINST Griffin outside the courtroom.

Singh has also addressed the Kirklees branch of the BNP, speaking about his hatred of Muslims. He was also in the BNP's 2004 election broadcast. He has been roundly condemned for his long-standing connections to the BNP and Nick Griffin.

The Observer had an excellent report on Ravinder Singh back in 2001, regarding the distribution of thousands of CDs, tapes and leaflets claiming that Islam poses a threat to Britain. The article is here.

Back in 2006, there was a bit of a fuss on the Stormfront nazi forum when it was announced that Singh was to attend the Kirklees meeting as the BNP's ethnic liaison committee leader. At that time, the likes of Arthur Kemp, who then ran the BNP’s indoctrination programme for voting members, openly posted on Stormfront, but along with the change in image over the past couple of years went a withdrawal from such places (at least under names that clearly identified the poster). This meant that Kemp went through Stormfront and carefully deleted most, if not all, of his posts. Fortunately, some of them are referred to in quotes.

'Originally Posted by Arthur Kemp
Anyone who cannot see the political and propaganda advantage to be gained by having an ethnic demonstrating that the BNP is not a "race-hate" party, has absolutely no understanding of practical politics and should stick strictly to hobbyism.'

Clearly, Rajinder Singh is nothing more than a 'propaganda advantage'.

BNP go to police over 'racist' link

The British National Party has lodged a complaint with the police on race grounds after students were directed to a list of names and postcodes of members on the internet.

Staffordshire University's student union president Assed Baig posted an article on the union website, which contained a link to a site identifying 30 BNP members living within two miles of the university's Stoke campus in College Road.

It was removed from the website on Wednesday hours after The Sentinel contacted the union, which stressed the article expressed the views of an individual and not necessarily its other members. Some students posted comments on the union website in response to the article before it was removed, the majority of which were against the publication of the link.

BNP Councillor Michael Coleman yesterday made a formal complaint to Staffordshire Police. He told The Sentinel: "This is clearly a criminal act. Members are now afraid that people, predominantly students, are going to go round to their homes and smash their windows. There is an unwritten rule that in politics you do not involve people's homes or families. This kind of thing will set a precedent for the future that we do not want to see in Stoke-on-Trent.

"The complaint has been lodged on the grounds that the president of the student union has broken data protection laws, as well as the race relations act and the public order act, because he has incited people to cause violence. His actions have led us to believe that he is pursuing radicalism within the student union body.

"We are a political party and it looks like he is trying to use the student body to serve his own aims. If you want to oppose us then you should stand on the street and distribute leaflets. What Mr Assed has done is totally unacceptable. He needs to be told in no uncertain terms that this is not a road we want to go down. We are pursuing this matter with the police because members are quite rightly furious and very concerned about it."

Stoke-on-Trent City Council BNP group leader Councillor Alby Walker, pictured, said: "We believe Mr Assed has broken data protection act laws and that the posting of the link to BNP members details was racially motivated."

Chief Inspector Peter Hall, of Stoke-on-Trent division, said: "We are making arrangements to discuss Mr Coleman's concerns and investigate any potential offences."

Mr Baig was unavailable for comment.

The Sentinel

Revealed! David Irving Can Be a Jerk

So secretive is Holocaust denier David Irving that he often doesn’t reveal the locations of his lectures until hours before they’re scheduled to begin — and even then, he only tells vetted guests. It must have been a blow, therefore, when his private E-mails appeared on the Internet, courtesy of self-described anti-fascist hackers.

The E-mails, along with the username and password for Irving’s website and AOL E-mail account, were posted last week on WikiLeaks, a website that publishes leaked documents. The messages reveal that it’s not only anti-racists who clash with the long-winded Hitler apologist: Irving’s own assistant, a young blonde woman named Jaenelle Antas, berated him repeatedly for his churlishness.

In a Nov. 7 E-mail, for instance, Antas wrote that Irving recently had been “snotty, rude, and disrespectful toward me.” She also said she was thinking about quitting. “I don’t care if you are frustrated, angry, stressed out, tired, or whatever — treating anybody like the way you have been treating me is unacceptable,” she wrote. “I bend over backwards to help you out on this tour, doing jobs that last year you would have done yourself, and not just making bookings, but also doing things like driving, helping you secure funds to reprint books and locating second-hand books. The only thanks I usually get are long whines about how something isn’t exactly perfect. Why would anyone in the world want to work with or even be friends with someone who is acting the way you have been acting lately? You like to say you treat me better than anyone else does, but the truth is, lately you have treated me worse than anyone else ever has. It hurts my feelings, it makes me angry and resentful, and it makes me question whether or not I should be doing this job anymore.”

Antas was responding to earlier E-mails from Irving in which he accused her of neglecting her responsibilities and “knee-jerk retorting.” “As for your more unhelpful and hostile messages: ‘Get over it,’” Irving wrote on Nov. 7. “I have been working since 6 a.m. this morning trying to catch up and plug holes you have left, e.g., by not bothering to inform me the Sala Thai no longer exists.”

But Irving appears to have gotten over this negligence. In subsequent E-mails, he tries to make it up to Antas with some not-so-subtle sweet talk. “Darling J, you are so efficient and beautiful,” he wrote on Nov. 13. “Please work your magic on (a) attached list [of prospective attendees at his New Jersey talk] and (b) me.”

According to her Myspace page, Antas is a 24-year-old college graduate from Minnesota with a passion for singing. She also appears to have a passion for posting on Stormfront, the leading white supremacist forum. As Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times noted on his blog, Antas likely comments there under the name “Tristania.” The photos Tristania posts are of Antas, and in September, Tristania posted the schedule for Irving’s U.S. speaking tour this fall. Tristania has posted more than 4,000 times since joining Stormfront in 2005.

Also published on WikiLeaks are lists of people who ordered tickets to Irving’s talks in Philadelphia, New York City and New Jersey, along with their addresses, phone numbers, and E-mails. People who might not be friendly to Irving, including those believed to be Jewish, are flagged with the German word “Achtung” (attention). “ACHTUNG is quarter-Jewish” appears below one listing.

Despite their recent E-mail spat, Antas has remained sufficiently loyal to Irving to forward a statement from him to Wired.com. In it, Irving downplayed the leak and suggested that the hackers invented some of the posted material, though he did not respond to a follow-up question from Wired.com asking for specifics. “We shall be apologizing to the many people who may find themselves inconvenienced by these juvenile cyber-nasties,” Irving wrote. “We are puzzled that they are so frightened by historical debate.”

In 2000, Irving lost a lawsuit filed in Britain that alleged that American historian Deborah Lipstadt had libeled him by calling him a Holocaust denier. In 2005, he was sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison after pleading guilty to telling audiences that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. (Unlike in the United States, Holocaust denial is a crime in many European countries.) Irving was most recently in the news when a knife fight erupted between two white supremacists at his talk last month in Palm Beach County. The leaked E-mails show that Irving wrote the next day to one of the attendees, John Browne, banning him from future events. “Among your guests, it appears, were some who caused a serious affray and damage to hotel property,” he wrote.

In his response to Irving, Browne denied associating with anyone who illegally possesses weapons or resorts to violence. He also said he stepped into the hall where the fight was taking place and took the knife from one of the men. “I think some self examination on your part is warranted, but you can’t ask yourself not to attend future events,” wrote Browne, who runs a white nationalist consulting business. “It seems the questionable association was a Trojan horse within your own house.”

HateWatch

Help for Heroes wristband row: investigation completed

Statement from ASDA

We’ve come to the end of our investigation at Asda Rochdale and can’t find any truth in the allegation that one of our colleagues refused to serve a customer for wearing a Help for Heroes wristband.

Our regional operations manager Paul Rowland said: “We’ve completed our investigation and it’s clear this exchange never happened. We’ve interviewed over 400 colleagues in the store, examined over three days worth of CCTV footage and talked to other customers and we can find absolutely no evidence that a colleague said what was alleged.”

The investigation has taken longer than some people expected because of the number of people we had to interview.

“We are disappointed and angry that right-wing groups are using this mythical incident to whip up racial hatred,” said Paul. “Thankfully the people of Rochdale will see straight through that. We remain big supporters of the work our troops do serving our country.”

Your ASDA

Caption Competition

What are these two pillocks up to?

BNP targeted wrong Asian peer

The British National Party mixed up two members of the House of Lords during a hate campaign waged on the internet, it has been revealed

Lord Patel of Blackburn (Lab) told peers of his experiences with the ultra-nationalist group during the debate on the Queen's Speech yesterday.

"I am myself a great lover of the internet and all that it brings, although I did have some problems of my own last year when I came into conflict with a number of supporters of a certain party recently represented on Question Time," he told the House. Lord Patel said he had refused to meet with BNP and "found myself the subject of an intense and somewhat vulgar internet campaign".

"I remember, over the whole weekend, reading pages and pages of internet blogs calling me any number of names and epitaphs, none of which I can repeat here," he said. "The culmination of this was on the Sunday evening, at the height of this small trouble, when I came across a front-page piece all about me - where I was born, what school I went to, what jobs and roles I have had over the years.

"Becoming slightly unnerved, I continued to the end of this long document, and I suppose that I was somewhat relieved to find that my detractors had not done their homework as well as I had thought. In their final attempt to disgrace me, they had published a picture of me. However, when I scrolled down to look at the picture, I saw that it was not a picture of me. It was a picture of my friend from the crossbenches, the noble Lord, Lord Patel.

"Well, I thought that it was easy to mistake one name for another. But perhaps they had gone a tad too far by suggesting that all peers look the same."

Lord Patel said he hoped his namesake, renowned physician Lord Patel of Dunkeld in Perth and Kinross, "did not suffer any difficulties from this". He then drew attention to the murders of four gay men in London and "a dramatic increase in homophobic attacks".

"This kind of hate crime, which is deplored by the vast majority of people, must not be allowed to continue," he said. "We have to turn our backs on those who seek to drive division and hatred between us and who would see our great country turn in on itself and away from the universal rights that so many have fought for and lost their lives defending."

ePolitix

BNP barred from holding meetings at Moonrakers

The British National Party has been forced out of its regular meeting place after the licensees of a Swindon pub realised they had been taking private bookings from the extremist group for more than four years.

Landlords Nick and Debbie Sharpe, who have run the Moonrakers in Cricklade Road, since 2005, were ‘horrified’ to learn they had been renting out their private function room, the Crossways Suite, to the far-right party. But since discovering the group, which has always paid three months in advance in cash, was holding monthly meetings at the pub, the couple told them they were no longer welcome.

The BNP held its last meeting at the pub three months ago before members were refused further bookings, including for a meeting last Monday. The meetings were kept so low-key that even brewery boss James Arkell did not know what was happening at the pub until Monday.

John Walker, press and media officer for the BNP, said he was disgusted by the pub’s reaction.

“I find it hard to believe that the pub landlords have not known it was hiring out the venue to the BNP for four years. I am sick and tired of this approach people have that the BNP is not allowed to carry on as a normal political party. If they don’t want our business then we shall just go elsewhere and I would urge all BNP members and voters to do the same.”

Swindon Advertiser