Category Archives: Far right racists

Dudley mosque to be backed – UKIP and BNP protest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

No mosque here 3Plans for an £18 million mosque and community centre in the Black Country are to be recommended for approval.

Protesters have handed in petitions with more than 1,000 signatures and written hundreds of letters of objection. But sources have revealed planning officers are set to give the scheme, for derelict land between Hall Street and the Flood Street island in Dudley, the green light.

Ukip councillor Malcolm Davis, who has led opposition to the multi-million pound proposals, said recommending the scheme for approval would be a “monumental disgrace”.

Express & Star, 19 February 2007

The fascists of the British National Party – who claim that they have been “leading the collection of signatures by residents concerned that the town centre will be Islamified” – are also outraged: “The news of the mosque go-ahead comes just days after a Times story warned that thousands of Christian churches could close in the next decade and that the Christian landscape is in retreat.”

BNP news article, 19 February 2007

For the BNP campaign against the Dudley mosque see here.

Why is the BNP being legitimised?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mayor“The problem we have at present is that not only is the rise of a fascist party not being given adequate attention, but its agenda is being capitulated to and fed from the mainstream.

“The daily diet of attacks on Muslims based on lurid headlines and without thought to the impact on community relations is dangerous and counterproductive and feeds the BNP. The stigmatisation of legitimate political engagement by Muslims and their community organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain, the hysterical debate on the veil, and so on, are doing the BNP’s work for them. Muslims are being singled out for attack.

“The fascist right sees the demonisation of Muslims as one of its chief weapons in sowing the seeds of division. Hatred and fear of Muslims is key to the BNP’s rhetoric, and its purpose is not to have a sensitive debate about multiculturalism in modern Britain but to whip up racism and discrimination.

“We have seen the notion of ‘Islamofascism’ invented, whilst mainstream Muslim organisations are openly equated with the fascists. On BBC News on January 29, for instance, Mark Easton reported a dossier on extremism and said: ‘Tonight the author of the report confirmed to me that they are likening the Muslim Council and the British National party’.”

Ken Livingstone in the Guardian, 16 February 2007

Dutch far right party tries to block appointment of Muslims to Cabinet

Posted on by Bob Pitt

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: A far-right Dutch political party objected Thursday to the appointment of two Muslims to the Cabinet because they have dual nationalities.

Ahmed Aboutaleb and Nebahat Albayrak were named to become the junior ministers for social affairs and integration respectively in the new centrist Cabinet being formed by Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende. They would be the first Dutch Cabinet members who are Muslim.

An opposition member of parliament for the nationalist Freedom Party said the two should be barred because they have second nationalities – Aboutaleb also holds Moroccan citizenship, and Albayrak Turkish. They “remain the servant of two different countries and that can lead to conflicting interests, and that’s why it’s necessary to oppose this,” Sietse Fritsma said.

His remarks were interrupted by an uproar of protest from lawmakers across the political spectrum until he was cut off by the gavel of the parliamentary chairwoman, Gerdi Verbeet.

Verbeet adjourned the session, and when it reconvened she said Fritsma had withdrawn his motion to block their appointment because it conflicted with the Dutch Constitution prohibiting discrimination, which he had sworn to uphold.

Geert Wilders, the leader of the Freedom Party, told NOS television later that Verbeet, a Labor Party member, was misusing her position to support the two designated Cabinet members, who belong to the same party. “It’s unworthy, not objective and very dangerous,” he said.

Press Association, 15 February 2007

See also Expatica, 15 February 2007

BBC Leicester gives platform to fascist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fascist scum (4)The fascist British National Party boasts: “BNP Head of Publicity and co-defendant in the famous Free Speech Trial, Mark Collett was last week invited to participate in a studio debate at BBC Radio Leicester about multiculturalism in the city. Mark was born and went to school in Leicester so is well acquainted with life there. The most striking aspect of the debate was that Muslims, and opposition MPs sat in the same studio with Mark giving a lie to the ‘No Platform for the BNP’ stance.”

BNP news article, 13 February 2007

It is of course absolute disgrace that Collett should be given a platform by a publicly funded radio station. This is the man who called asylum seekers “cockroaches” and urged cheering BNP supporters to “show ethnics the door in 2004”. A couple of years earlier he stated his admiration for Nazi Germany:

“National Socialism was the best solution for German people in the 1930s…. When people say ‘Do you take any inspiration from that?’, I mean, I honestly can’t understand how a man who’s seen the inner city hell of Britain today can’t look back on that era with a certain nostalgia and think, yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people out in the streets, you know, saluting and everything, was a bad thing … would you prefer your kid growing up in Oldham and Burnley or 1930s Germany?”

The BBC’s own report illustrates how the racist propaganda of the fascists is given legitimacy by the anti-Muslim comments of mainstream politicians, with Collett echoing Jack Straw’s comments on the niqab and David Cameron’s warnings about the threat of Sharia law: “The BNP’s Mark Collett condemned the wearing of the veil by some islamic women, and said that wearing a full veil was ‘a powerful statement against integration’. He also claimed a high proportion of young Muslims want Sharia law in the UK.”

BBC Leicester, 8 February 2007

UAF conference this Saturday

Posted on by Bob Pitt

UAF conference 2007Unite Against Fascism National Conference
17 February 2007 9.30am-5pm
TUC Conference Centre, Great Russell Street, London WC1
Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road

The British National Party (BNP) is receiving the highest levels of support for a fascist party in British history. In recent years its vote has increased in a context of rising racism, Islamophobia and attacks on multiculturalism. At the 2006 local elections it polled over 238,000 votes compared to 3,000 votes in 2000, and now has a record 49 local councillors.

The BNP is a fascist organisation. As history shows, fascism stands for the total annihilation of whole communities, freedoms and democratic rights.

In 2007 the BNP will be targeting the local elections in England and Wales and elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly.

Active campaigning can stop the BNP. In the 1930s the Jewish and Irish communities, trade unions and others defeated the fascist Blackshirts at Cable Street, and in the 1970s the National Front was defeated by mass anti-Nazi campaigns. More recently the BNP was defeated in Millwall and Oldham. Learning lessons from these campaigns is crucial.

Unite Against Fascism is organising this national conference to look at the impact of increasing BNP support, to discuss strategies that have been successful in stopping the BNP and to bring together the broad opposition that is needed to halt the rise of fascism including from trade unions, Muslim, Jewish and other faith communities, black, Asian, lesbian, gay and disabled communities and students.

Further details on UAF website.

Bedworth by-election result

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islam a threat to us allThe BNP came second in a council by-election in Bedworth, Warwickshire, last week. This disturbing result demonstrates how the climate of racism and anti-Muslim hysteria is playing into the hands of the Nazis.

Labour held on to its seat in Bede ward on Thursday of last week, polling 658 votes, but the BNP’s Alwyn Deacon, a pub landlord from Nuneaton, took 546 votes. The Tory vote fell to 301, less than two fifths of its previous vote in the ward.

In recent council elections voters in Bede have been faced with a choice of just Labour or Tory candidates. The by-election saw a wider field of candidates, with the Liberal Democrats standing and winning 119 votes.

The efforts of anti-fascists to hold back the BNP were not helped by a leaflet put out locally by the Searchlight organisation. These echoed Tory leader David Cameron’s recent remarks, equating the BNP to “Islamic extremism”.

Socialist Worker, 14 February 2007

Wilders: get rid of half of Koran!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

geert_wildersAMSTERDAM – If Muslims want to stay in the Netherlands, they should tear out half the Koran and throw it away. And they shouldn’t listen to the imam.

Faction leader of the Freedom Party (PVV) Geert Wilders said this in an interview with daily newspaper De Pers on Tuesday.

He said the holy book of Islam contains “plenty of terrible things.” Wilders said once again that Islam is a violent religion. “If Mohammed lived here today, I would propose he be tarred and feathered as an extremist and driven out of the country,” he said.

The politician wants to impress on people that Islam is “the greatest danger threatening us.” He says that other political parties avoid topics like this. “Everything we are proud of, we are selling to the devil. Former head of the Mossad Efraim Halevy says that World War III has begun. I would not use those words, but it’s true,” said Wilders, who in the past has voiced his fear of a “tsunami of Islamisation in the Netherlands.”

Wilders: “Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!”

Expatica, 13 February 2007

Iain Dale discovers media double standards over Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A post yesterday on Iain Dale’s Diary reveals that the eponymous Tory blogger has belatedly woken up to the double standards practised by the media in connection with the Robert Cottage trial. He writes:

“Last October the police raided two peoples’ homes in Pendle and uncovered explosives, rocket launchers, chemicals, BNP literature and a nuclear biological suit. A former British National Party member, Robert Cottage, who stood in last year’s local elections in Colne has now subsequently been accused of possessing the largest amount of chemical explosives of its type ever found in the country.

“Maybe I have missed the story, but I have not seen this covered in any of our national newspapers or national broadcast media. Why? If these kind of things had been discovered in the home of a British Muslim I suspect the media would be playing a rather different tune. Think of the front page headlines recently when similar discoveries were made elsewhere in the country.”

Iain Dale’s Diary, 13 February 2007

Perhaps Dale should consider raising this issue with his own party. The heavily publicised report Uniting the Country (pdf here), prepared by the Conservative Policy Group on National and International Security under Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, dismisses talk of media double standards over the Robert Cottage case as a product of Muslims’ victim mentality. The authors complain (p.11) that Muslim perceptions of discrimination have created:

“an environment in which distortion also finds ready, if unwitting, acceptance. The Group was told a story in two widely separated towns of the alleged suppression by mainstream media, on anti Islamic grounds, of the discovery of a BNP chemical weapons factory. This had been manufactured from four separate reports over the space of a month in different local newspapers. The story began with a report of a BNP member being charged with possession ‘of chemical components which could be used to make explosives’. It ended, despite there being no new facts, with the claim of the discovery of ‘chemical weapons’.”

Dead writer’s words fan flames of Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dead writer’s words fan flames of Islamophobia

By Alfio Bernabei

Searchlight, February 2007

A RACIST CALL to blow up a mosque made by Italy’s best selling writer Oriana Fallaci seems to be achieving some of its intended effect, with a little help from rightwing parties.

In that famed part of Tuscany nicknamed Chiantishire, Islamophobia, fanned by Fallaci’s incendiary remarks, reached a peak in December with a second demonstration against the building of a mosque in Colle Val d’Elsa, a town of 14,000 inhabitants near Siena.

While the majority of the protesters recited the Lord’s Prayer, neo-fascists acted as Fallaci’s foot soldiers. The building site came under attack, not for the first time. Metal barriers were torn down and metal poles, which were part of the foundations, uprooted. Among the attackers police identified Forza Nuova militants who had vowed to launch a crusade “to protect our traditions”.

In a separate incident a few days earlier, the severed head of a pig was thrown at the entrance to the building site. Around 1,000 Muslims live in the area, working in farming.

Such protests are nothing new – they have occurred in Genova, Lodi and Padova, among other places, over the past few years. Rightwing political parties, such as the xenophobic Northern League, the neo-fascist National Alliance and Forza Italia, can count on hundreds of their members to take to the streets when demonstrations are called against the erection of mosques. The nazi-fascists always rush to the scene, eager to be seen at the forefront of such protests. Forza Nuova has issued leaflets linking all mosques and Muslims with terrorism, saying: “There is no such thing as a moderate Islam, no mosques to be allowed in our land”.

The current incidents at Colle Val d’Elsa have acquired special significance because of the ghost of a celebrity hovering in the background and questions about the role that certain media can play in fanning the flames of racism, whether through editorial misjudgement or, as some have suggested, by design, wanting to espouse the doctrine of a clash of civilisations.

Fallaci, who died last September, had a house in the area. Interviewed in June 2006 by The New Yorker she said that rather than see a mosque intruding in her beloved environment, she would obtain explosives and blow up the building. “I will go to my friends in Carrara, you know, where there is the marble. They are all anarchists. With them, I take the explosives. I make you juuump [sic] in the air. I blow it up! I do not want to see this mosque – it’s very near my house in Tuscany. I do not want to see a 24-metre minaret in the landscape of Giotto … So I BLOW IT UP!”

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