Saturday 14 April 2012

From RationalWiki: BNP Using Islam as a Platform to Push their Racist Views

As you're probably already aware, I despise the BNP. I noted previously how I think they, like some others, are simply using Islam as a platform to push their racist (and anti-Jewish) views.

From RationalWiki (visit the original page for references):

The current BNP was formed in 1982 from the ashes of previous right-wing political parties in 1970s Britain. John Tyndall, founder of the BNP, was a member of the openly racist National Front, which he led a splinter group from in 1980, founding the New National Front, which would become the BNP two years later. 
Early BNP leaders did not deny their racist connections. Tyndall is known to have remarked that "Mein Kampf is my bible". After the current wonky-eyed Chairman and Fat Hitler impersonator, Nick Griffin (no relation to Peter Griffin of Family Guy), replaced Tyndall in 1999 and Tyndall was expelled from the party, the BNP has attempted to change its image by using spin and political euphemisms. For example, the BNP denies that it is a white supremacist organisation, claiming instead that it represents the interests of "the indigenous peoples of these islands in the North Atlantic which have been our homeland for millennia". [...]
The British National Party advocates British withdrawal from the European Union, and, according to its constitution, "is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples." Hence the party is "committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent, the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948." 
If enacted, this policy would involve deporting "back to their own country" not only recent immigrants, but all members of the sizeable Asian and West Indian communities that have grown in Britain over the past sixty years, Chinese communities that have been in Britain for over 200 years and African communities that have been in Britain for over 500 years, notwithstanding that most of the current generation of these ethnic minorities have lived their entire lives in Britain.
In a statement of the party's policies and intentions, Griffin repeatedly emphasised that the party is "not racist", while describing Britain as a "fundamentally white nation", condemning miscegenation as unnatural, and reiterating that he considers non-caucasians, or white citizens who choose non-whites as sexual or marriage partners, are unsuitable for party membership. He stated that, once the BNP has removed the majority of immigrant groups from the country, "[t]hose non-Europeans who stay will have British passports and will be protected by our laws, but they will be regarded as permanent guests, and not as native English, Scots, Welsh or Irish, because such status springs from blood and not from printers’ ink." 
Antisemitism has also been a significant aspect of BNP ideology, and BNP leaders, including Nick Griffin, have made several statements of Holocaust denial. On Question Time, Nick Griffin was challenged on it but refused to comment on why he changed his views or why he originally denied it, muttering something about it being illegal and free speech or something, even after Justice Secretary Jack Straw pointed out that he could not, and would not be prosecuted for it (Holocaust denial is not actually a crime in the UK, as it is some European countries). However, in recent years the party has decided that its major enemy is Islam. A BNP statement during 2006 asserted that "[t]he real enemies of the British people are home grown Anglo-Saxon Celtic liberal-leftists who seek to destroy the family as the building blocks of society and impose multiculturalism on a reluctant indigenous population and the Crescent Horde - the endless wave of Islamics who are flocking to our shores to bring our island nations into the embrace of their barbaric desert religion".
The BNP's attempts to disguise its racialist roots and pose itself as a legitimate political force are not at all convincing, especially as many of its prominent members have past convictions for violent offences and hate crimes. Its attempts to sound the alarm about the supposed Islamic "threat to all of us" also comes off as hollow in the wake of this quote from Mr Griffin: "We bang on about Islam. Why? Because to the ordinary public out there it's the thing they can understand. It's the thing the newspaper editors sell newspapers with. If we were to attack some other ethnic group—some people say we should attack the Jews... But ... we've got to get to power. And if that was an issue we chose to bang on about when the press don't talk about it ... the public would just think we were barking mad. They'd just think oh, you're attacking Jews just because you want to attack Jews. You're attacking this group of powerful Zionists just because you want to take poor Manny Cohen the tailor and shove him in a gas chamber. That's what the public would think. It wouldn't get us anywhere other than stepping backwards. It would lock us in a little box; the public would think "extremist crank lunatics, nothing to do with me." And we wouldn't get power."

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