Category Archives: Far right racists

Fascists urged to take advantage of media hysteria over Luton demo

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP Islam Out of BritainBritish National Party activists around the country must increase their leafleting and table top activities over the next few weeks in light of the public reaction and disgust at the outrageous anti-British display by Islamists in Luton, BNP leader Nick Griffin has said.

“Our telephones, donation hotlines and new membership departments have been burning with a flood of inquiries,” Mr Griffin told BNP News. “The anti-British army outrage in Luton has finally woken up tens of thousands of British people to the reality that this nation is being Islamified, and that the BNP represents the only hope of preventing this disaster from occurring,” he said.

“Now is the time for table tops in town centres, leafleting campaigns and outreach efforts like never before. The popular wave of public opinion is now firmly in our favour, and people can see that the BNP, and the BNP alone, were right all along.”

Mr Griffin said every BNP branch and group that is able should hold a table top outreach in as many towns and cities as possible this coming Saturday. “The outrageous Islamist activities of the past few days are still fresh in the public’s mind, and the time will never be better to engage with the public on the issue,” he said.

BNP news article, 12 March 2009

Kevin Quinn found guilty

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Kevin Quinn 3The leader of the British First Party who set up a stall with the Union flag and launched a tirade of offensive racist abuse has been convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence.

Police were called to the shopping precinct in St Andrews Road, South Oxhey, when leader of the far right party Kevin Quinn, 44, began using offensive language during a “demonstration” about the arrest in Sudan of schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons.

The jury of six men and six women took five-and-a-half hours to find Quinn guilty. Judge Warner adjourned sentence for reports on Friday, April 3.

Watford Observer, 6 March 2009

British First Party leader denies race hate charges

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Kevin QuinnThe leader of the British First Party set up a stall with the Union flag and launched a tirade of offensive racist abuse, a court heard. Kevin Quinn, 44, was charged with a religiously aggravated public order offence, after police were called to the shopping precinct in St Andrews Road, South Oxhey, on December 1, 2007.

Witnesses told St Albans Crown Court how they were offended by the racist and foul language used by Quinn with the aid of a megaphone. The first of the prosecution witnesses, Valerie Gay, was on the way to work in Woolworths when she saw the demonstration with a man on a megaphone and people handing out leaflets.

Asked by Isabel Delamere, for the prosecution, what she noticed first, Mrs Gay said: “It was the bad language being used to be honest. He was going on about a young lass that went to Sudan and he was using F and B words saying it was unfair she should be executed for naming a Teddy Bear Mohamed.” She added: “He was saying it was unfair she went out there to teach those retards and for that she was being executed.”

Mrs Gay said Quinn “definitely” used the word retard as it hit hard because she has a family member that is disabled. “He said we should execute the f****** Bs in this country and send them back home and before much longer it won’t be our country. I was shocked. I couldn’t understand why people have to be so racist. I believe in letting people lead their own lives,” she said.

The owner of an electrical store in the precinct, Ken Shah, who fled Uganda 30 years ago, heard a man shouting that Tony Blair should be called Tony Mohamed, the court heard. Mr Shah said: “They were shouting about Tony Blair should be Tony Mohamed because of all the immigrants coming in, and what is wrong with this country and about immigration and schools full of immigrant children.”

Quinn of Ousland Road, Queens Park, Bedford, denies intending to cause harassment, alarm or distress and using insulting words or behaviour, motivated by hostility towards members of a religious group.

The trial continues.

Watford Observer, 3 March 2009

You’ll note, by the way, that contrary to the Watford Observer headline Quinn has in fact been charged with religiously aggravated harassment and not with incitement to racial hatred – a much more serious offence which carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison – as he undoubtedly would have been if his abuse had been directed against the Jewish rather than the Muslim community. The reason is that Muslims are legally defined as a multi-ethnic faith group and so, unlike Jews or Sikhs, are not covered by the racial hatred law.

Nor is Quinn being charged with incitement to religious hatred. The reason is that the religious hatred bill was sabotaged by the “Lester amendment” which rendered the Racial and Religious Hatred Act almost completely useless when it comes to prosecuting far-right racists like Quinn who direct their hatred against the Muslim community.

The right-wing coalition behind Wilders’ US visit

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Wilders CNNThe fiercely anti-Islam Dutch MP Geert Wilders has been traveling through the U.S. this week on a highly-publicised trip to meet with politicians, promote his controversial film “Fitna”, and raise money for his legal defence back home.

Although Wilders’s stated goal has been to campaign for free speech, his trip has been sponsored and promoted by an unlikely coalition of groups united primarily by their hostility towards Islam. His backers include neoconservative and right-wing Jewish groups on the one hand and figures with ties to the European far right on the other.

Since he was charged with incitement to hate and discrimination in the Netherlands in January and denied entry to Britain earlier this month on public safety grounds, Wilders has become something of a cause celebre for the U.S. right.

This week, he gave a private viewing of his 17-minute anti-Islam film in the U.S. Senate, where he was hosted by Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican. He also appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s and Glenn Beck’s popular right-wing TV shows, met privately with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and hobnobbed with former U.N. ambassador John Bolton at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

On Friday, he capped his busy week with an appearance at the National Press Club. At the event, he reiterated his calls for a halt to immigration from Muslim countries and pronounced, to raucous applause from the audience, that “our Western culture based on Christianity, Judaism, and humanism is in every aspect better than Islamic culture”.

His chief sponsors during the trip have primarily been neoconservative organisations such as Frank Gaffney’s Centre for Security Policy, David Horowitz’s Freedom Centre, and Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, which is also helping to raise money for Wilders’s legal defence.

An event he held at a Boston-area synagogue was sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition, an influential group whose board members include casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, and neoconservative writer David Frum, who attended Wilders’s Friday event in Washington.

His trip has also been heavily promoted by conservative blogger Pamela Geller, who sponsored a reception for him in Washington on Friday. Geller is perhaps best known for alleging during the 2008 presidential campaign that now-President Barack Obama is the illegitimate child of the late Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X; she also continues to argue that Obama is a secret Muslim.

A less well-known but key backer of Wilders’s trip has been the newly-formed International Free Press Society (IFPS), which is headed by Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard and upon whose advisory board Wilders sits. The IFPS has been instrumental in promoting Wilders’ case as a free-speech issue, joining him in calling for an “International First Amendment”, and it was a co-sponsor of Friday’s event at the National Press Club.

While the IFPS has strong ties to neoconservatives – its staff includes members of Pipes’s and Gaffney’s organisations – it also has ties to the European far right, and specifically the Belgian rightist party Vlaams Belang (VB), or Flemish Interest.

The IFPS’s vice president Paul Belien is married to Vlaams Belang MP Alexandra Colen, and has been a fierce defender of the party against its critics. And in 2007, Hedegaard and Belien – along with IFPS board members Bat Ye’or, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, and Sam Solomon – appeared with VB leader Filip Dewinter at the CounterJihad conference in Brussels. Although “the VB did not organise the conference, it provided an important part of the logistics and the security of those attending,” according to Belien.

Inter Press Service, 28 February 2009

See also “Synagogue hails Dutch lawmaker as a hero”, Jewish Telegraph Agency, 27 February 2009

Sun backs Wilders

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sun cartoon

“Britain recently disgraced itself by banning democratically elected Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering the country. His planned ‘crime’ was to screen a short documentary at a private viewing in the House of Lords…. Our cringing surrender to this authoritarian, book-burning mentality was ordered by mealy-mouthed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith under pressure from Labour peer Lord Ahmed…. Wilders’ visit would have gone unnoticed but for Jackboot Jacqui, whose Government has prostrated itself to accommodate Islam’s nastier fringes….

“It gave oxygen to rabble-rousing imams who brainwashed thousands of young British-born Muslims, not least the 7/7 murderers. It turned a blind eye to migrants who refuse to assimilate and instead colonise whole suburbs and cities where welfare has become a way of life. It encouraged multi-culturalism which, far from spreading tolerance, has entrenched primitive tribal customs, including forced marriages and honour killings. As a result, our security services are at breaking point keeping tabs on an army of shadowy troublemakers who flit back and forth to Pakistan — many to be trained in OUR mass murder.

“… it is impossible to disagree with what Wilders has to say about extremists. He told an American audience recently: The Europe you know is changing. You have seen the landmarks. The Eiffel Tower and Trafalgar Square and Rome’s ancient buildings, the canals of Amsterdam. They are still there. And they still look very much the same as they did a hundred years ago. But a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is another world very few visitors see.

“Throughout Europe a new reality is rising, entire Muslim neighbourhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. It’s the world of headscarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands – or slaveholders, if you prefer – walk three steps ahead.

“With mosques on many street corners, shops have signs you cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighbourhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, city by city.

“There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe. With larger congregations than there are in churches.And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: We rule.

“Sounds about right to me.”

Trevor Kavanagh in the Sun, 23 February 2009

Mad Mel explains the rise of the BNP

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Melanie Phillips Jihad in Britain“Last week, the British National Party won a council seat in Sevenoaks, Kent…. Around the country, the BNP is making an ever stronger political showing. Last month, it only narrowly failed to take a council seat in Bexley, South London, and last week it did well in wards in Yorkshire, the Midlands and Lewisham, another South London borough. It is also strongly tipped to win at least one European Parliament seat in the forthcoming elections.

“The reason for its increasing success is obvious. Like all populist, neo-fascist parties, the BNP is opportunistically exploiting the failure by the political establishment to address issues of pressing and legitimate concern to the public…. Britain is changing before our very eyes. As a result of the current rate of immigration, within half a century the projected steep increase in the UK’s population will be entirely made up of people not born in Britain – most of whom will have come from the Third World.

“Meanwhile, the fanatically imposed doctrine of multiculturalism has brought about the erosion or denigration of Britain’s history, religion and identity, leaving generations of children – both indigenous and immigrant – appallingly ignorant of the common culture they need to share.

“It is entirely reasonable to want one’s country to express its own culture through its institutions, laws and practices. Yet those who defend this principle are called ‘racist’. Britain is witnessing an alarming growth of separate Muslim enclaves ruled by a parallel Islamic Sharia law. It is entirely reasonable to want one system of law for all. Yet those who say so are called ‘Islamophobic’.”

Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail, 23 February 2009

Of course, Phillips omits to mention one important factor in the rise of the BNP – the legitimisation of their racist politics by bigoted right-wing commentators like herself whose anti-Muslim tirades are often barely distinguishable from the sort of thing you might read in a BNP propaganda leaflet.

When terrorism isn’t newsworthy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

At the Scottish Islamic Foundation website Osama Saeed lambasts the media’s almost total failure to report the conviction of Neil MacGregor, the self-proclaimed “proud racist and National Front member” who threatened to blow up Glasgow Central Mosque and behead one Muslim a week until every mosque in Scotland was shut down:

“Imagine if a Scottish Muslim had pled guilty to threatening to blow up Glasgow Cathedral and behead one Christian a week until all British troops were pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“There would be outrage, right? It would be splashed over the front page of every newspaper in the land. It would be the top of all news bulletins. There would be volumes written on what motivated him, his family background and his beliefs. There would be a rich stream of analysis from a variety of positions. Government would be asked what it was doing to avoid such a thing from happening.

“So when news came into the Scottish-Islamic Foundation office this week of one Neil MacGregor pleading guilty to threatening to blow up Glasgow Central Mosque and behead one Muslim a week until all Scottish mosques were shut down, we thought it couldn’t possibly be true. There had been no build up to such a trial, no coverage during it and none on the verdict. We Googled it, and nothing came up. Not a sausage, nada, zilch.

“Immediately, we fired out a press release. If this hadn’t been brought to the attention of our media, surely they’d cover it once they heard of it? Seems not. Well, apart from Scotland Today (brief mention 10 minutes in).

“So I phoned up the newsdesks of some of our major newspapers and asked how this could have happened. Some said they’d get back to me, but haven’t. Others put their hands up and said it was a big mistake. Helpfully, it was pointed out that some news outlets rely entirely on output from the Glasgow Courts Press Agency, and it seems that they might not have put anything out on this. It’s something we’ll be following up. At the Atif Siddique trial in 2007, there were even unidentified figures there on hand to brief the press on a plot to behead the Canadian prime minister which wasn’t even brought up during the trial, but led the news the next day as a result.

“There is a chance for redemption. MacGregor will be sentenced on March 6. This should provide a sufficient hook for media outlets to give coverage.”

But these double standards are par for the course, quite frankly. The media initially ignored the Robert Cottage case. And coverage of the Brian Donegan trial was non-existent. Violent extremism is deemed worthy of serious attention only when the violent extremists aren’t white.

Why the Wilders ban was right

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“I was disappointed by your one-sided coverage of the Geert Wilders controversy. Neither your editorial (‘Ban on Wilders was folly‘) nor your columnist Catherine Bennett (‘Geert Wilders has just made our leaders look truly idiotic‘, Comment) appeared able to distinguish between causing offence and inciting racial hatred. It is on the latter charge that Wilders faces prosecution in the Netherlands. While the principle of free speech covers the right to offend people, it certainly does not allow racists the right to whip up hatred against minority communities. For this reason, I and many others fully supported Jacqui Smith’s decision to ban Wilders from entering Britain.”

Letter from London Assembly member Murad Qureshi in theObserver, 22 February 2009

Guilty plea on bomb threat to Glasgow Central Mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Glasgow_Central_MosqueA man has admitted to threatening to blow up Glasgow Central Mosque, and behead one Muslim a week until every mosque in Scotland was shut down.

The proceedings at Glasgow Sheriff Court regarding Neil MacGregor, who sent the threats to Strathclyde Police as a National Front member, are reported in the latest edition of the Digger and have caused extreme alarm in the Muslim community.

Osama Saeed of the Scottish-Islamic Foundation said:

“I hope that he is dealt with in exactly the same manner as an extremist who was Muslim would be.

“This latest episode underscores the need for effective action tackling Islamophobia. The far right use fear of Muslims as a cloak for their old overt racism. They should realise they follow the same ideology as Al-Qaeda when they target an entire community for violence.”

Bashir Maan, President of Glasgow Central Mosque said:

“I’m surprised there hasn’t been more coverage of this. I could imagine the controversy and analysis there would have been if he had been a Muslim doing this to non-Muslims.”

Last year in Glasgow, Mary McKay was sentenced to six years for stabbing a Muslim man in the chest. She said: “I hope the guy is dead. I just stabbed a guy with the same colour of skin as a terrorist. I just saw the two Pakis and he had an NY on his top.”

Mosques across Scotland have been subject of attacks. As well as in Glasgow, this includes Edinburgh, Falkirk, Bathgate and Stirling.

The last Scottish Government Social Attitudes Survey found that half of Scots saw Muslims as a “cultural threat” to the country.

In the recent past, far right extremists have been found guilty of possessing explosives and planning to use them, for example Robert Cottage and Martyn Gilleard.

Scottish Islamic Foundation press release, 18 February 2009

Wilders to incite hatred in USA

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Geert Wilders Extremist2A member of the Dutch Parliament who was banned last week from entering the United Kingdom because of his inflammatory anti-Islamic views is about to be welcomed to the United States by some notable conservatives.

Geert Wilders – who has publicly compared the Koran to “Mein Kampf” – is scheduled to make public appearances in Washington next week, including a Feb. 27 press conference at the National Press Club. Wilders is seeking to promote his movie “Fitna,” an incendiary short documentary film that depicts Islam as a religion of terrorists.

The chief sponsor of Wilders’s National Press Club event is Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration Pentagon official who now runs the Center for Security Policy, a prominent neoconservative think tank. Others who hope to meet with Wilders include David Horowitz, a well-known conservative activist who promotes campaigns to fight Islamic extremism.

But Wilders’s U.S. tour seems to be testing the limits of free speech even among hard-core conservatives. Some seem to be keeping their distance – apparently fearful of associating with a right-wing political figure widely seen in Europe as a dangerous extremist and self-promoter. The organizers of next week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington – a splashy gathering with prominent speakers like GOP Chair Michael Steele and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee – have yet to decide whether Wilders will be welcome to speak.

David Keene, the president of The American Conservative Union and an organizer of the conference, at first told NEWSWEEK that he could not accommodate Wilders because all the speaking slots were booked. But after conferring with Gaffney over the weekend, he said he would seek to find time for a brief presentation. “If we can free up five or 10 minutes, we’ll see if we can let him speak,” Keene said.

Newsweek, 17 February 2009