The following is an article by Sonia Gable, recently published in Searchlight magazine. Needless to say, my posting the article to my blog implies no agreement with Searchlight's political orientation, but is done for the purpose of enlightening members of the British National Party regarding the betrayal of our party by its leadership.
Mrs Gable poses the perennial question, which many others have posed over the last quarter century: is Griffin damaging nationalism by his incompetence, or is he damaging it to order?
Regardless of the answer to this question, which may never be satisfactorily, or conclusively, answered, one way or the other, the fact that he is damaging it, most severely, seems to be incontrovertible.
The latest evidence of this is the British National Party's very disappointing showing in the Barnsley Central by-election, the result of which was announced in the small hours today.
This was, remember, the type of constituency for which it might be said the BNP was made: overwhelmingly English, northern, urban, working, and lower middle class; the demographics could hardly have been more favourable for a massive protest vote in the party's favour.
The fact that a sizeable segment of the BNP's core constituency, the English ordinary working people, abandoned their erstwhile natural political home and, faute de mieux, voted in significant numbers for UKIP, is a sign of their desperation, and volatility; not merely because of their betrayal by the Establishment parties, but also because of the all too evident inadequacy of the BNP's leadership, and the party's lacklustre and vapid campaign, devoid of meaningful political content, and the red meat of ethno-nationalism.
Where's the beef? Indeed.
Who can doubt but that the second place achieved by UKIP, or even the first place achieved by Labour, would have been the BNP's, if only our party were to have had a decent and a competent leader: a leader who unites the party, rather than divides it, a leader who sets a good example for others to follow, rather than a bad one, a leader, in fine, who brings the best out of the party, rather than the worst?
A good leader would have spoken plainly to the people of Barnsley. It's plain speaking, and passionate conviction, that wins friends and influences people, rather than mealy-mouthed, politically 'correct' sound-bites, perhaps nowhere more so than in Yorkshire.
Mrs Gable's article now follows.
Incompetence or design?
Does the British National Party’s leader have a death wish? Nick Griffin has widely been accused of being incompetent or distracted by his role as an MEP, but increasingly members are wondering whether he is destroying the party deliberately.
The party has suffered a run of very poor by-election results since last May, but it is Griffin’s damaging appointments to senior party positions that are causing hitherto loyal supporters finally to desert him and the party’s regional bases to disintegrate.
Just when the BNP’s Yorkshire region should have been throwing everything into the Barnsley Central by-election campaign on 3 March, members were left confused and disillusioned by Griffin’s imposition of Ian Kitchen as the Yorkshire regional organiser and Simon Goodricke, who served an 18-month prison sentence for perverting the course of justice by tipping off fraudsters while a West Midlands Police detective constable, as his deputy.
Inevitably, it did not take long for Kitchen’s wife Linda, who has stood as a BNP candidate and addresses party meetings, to attract the interest of the media – specifically the Sunday Sport – for her starring role in a hard-core porn film.
Nobody doubted that Griffin had been fully aware of her “outside interests” when he replaced the popular Chris Beverley with Mr Kitchen, who brings little organisational ability to the job. Even more embarrassing was that he appointed the couple to organise this summer’s Red, White and Blue so-called family festival this summer.
Even when the Sunday Sport turned the party into a laughing stock, Griffin stuck by the Kitchens and instead suspended the respected Yorkshire activist Nick Cass for committing the sin of inviting party members to a “special private meeting” to discuss Kitchen’s appointment and the party’s dire financial state. It took a full five days for the BNP to announce that the Kitchens had “laid down all their roles in the party with immediate effect”, leaving Adam Walker, the BNP’s national organiser, to assume charge of the Barnsley campaign.
According to Cass, party members in Yorkshire are “leaving in their droves” and “fed up of being treated like skivvies whilst the leadership offers no explanation for the party’s current financial mess and lack of meaningful leadership”.
Barnsley Central contains several wards in which the BNP has polled 20-31% in recent years and in Enis Dalton the party has a local candidate without any known skeletons in her cupboard. After the BNP’s disastrous showing in the Oldham by-election in January, Griffin tried desperately to concoct excuses and blame others. He now seems to be going all out to achieve a similar failure in Barnsley.
Another region where Griffin appears to be scuppering the BNP’s chances is Wales, which faces Welsh Assembly elections in May. In 2007 the BNP took almost 5% of the vote and nearly got a candidate elected in the regional list section of the election, which is fought under proportional representation.
The ‘liar’ and the thug
Differences between BNP members in Wales came to a head at the BNP’s annual organisers’ meeting in Stoke-on-Trent on 12 February. Kevin Edwards, a Llandybie community councillor and Pembrokeshire party organiser, had tendered his resignation from the party the previous Monday after being inundated with calls from “distraught ex and current members” angry at the conviction of a BNP member for a vicious assault at a working men’s club before Christmas.
The assault was not the first time that Roger Phillips had shown his thuggish nature. Last year he posted death threats against Baroness Uddin on Facebook and in December 2009 he made an expletive-filled telephone call threatening to kill a man who posted an anti-BNP video on YouTube. His Patriot Products business sold racist merchandise including golliwog badges with the names and colours of Premier League football clubs and his Facebook photos included one of a cornflakes box with an open-mouthed black minstrel and the doctored logo “Coon flakes”.
Edwards drew all this to Griffin’s attention, describing Phillips as “unstable” and “a ticking bomb”, who has set the BNP back years in Wales. Griffin replied: “He’s got to go. I’m shocked that this was not dealt with in South Wales ages ago”. Relieved, Edwards withdrew his resignation.
Yet when Edwards turned up at the organisers’ meeting Brian Mahoney, the Wales regional organiser and Griffin loyalist, informed him that the party’s Advisory Council had met the previous night and decided that nothing was to be done about Phillips. If the press broke the story a few days before polling day, “then let them do it”, said Mahoney.
This “shattered” Edwards’s belief in Griffin’s “integrity and honesty”. Resigning again, Edwards explained: “Nick is either a blatant liar, politically naïve or just listens to some very bad advise [sic]”.
Edwards is not the only key activist to leave recently. In the North West region, where Griffin sits as an MEP, James Clayton, one of the party’s new younger activists, resigned as Blackpool organiser and West Lancashire coordinator, saying he no longer wished “to hold a position of responsibility in the charade and financial Bermuda Triangle that is the BNP”.
Paul Morris, the Eastern regional organiser, also resigned apparently unable to cope with the job. According to Eddy Butler, who was expelled from the BNP last year after challenging Griffin for the leadership, no BNP meetings or activities have taken place since the general election in Epping Forest, Morris’s own area, where the BNP once had six councillors now down to one. In the entire region there are “only a couple of functioning units now”, says Butler, compared to about 25 before the general election.
Admittedly Morris suffered under the handicap of sharing the same name as a prolific Welsh blogger who posts under the name “Green Arrow”. That Paul Morris has also become disillusioned with the BNP after a long period of sycophantic belief that the party could do no wrong. His hero-worship of Griffin was mostly not reciprocated – Griffin regarded him with contempt – though on one occasion, desperate for all the support he could get, Griffin invited him to speak at a Red, White and Blue festival and was filmed shaking his hand.
Edwards’s resignation and the Kitchen porn scandal resulted in Morris withdrawing his website’s unconditional support for the BNP, though not his belief that there is no better person than Griffin to lead the party, it is only Griffin’s incompetent advisers who are the problem.
Chronic waste and chaos
But Griffin has gone out of his way to appoint unsuitable people to senior party positions. The moronic Clive Jefferson was in quick succession given the jobs of north west regional organiser, national elections officer, national organiser, national nominating officer and party treasurer, as well as retaining his job on Griffin’s constituency staff paid for by the European Parliament. Even the most capable person could not have done all those jobs properly.
Jefferson in effect controls the BNP together with Patrick Harrington, who is not a BNP member but a leader of a rival party. He appears to have performed little better than Jefferson. According to Paul Golding, who resigned as the BNP’s communications officer last autumn but remains a BNP councillor, six months after Harrington’s appointment as party manager, “we still have chronic wastage, staff chaos, inefficiency, no contracts (a legal requirement), no staff training and wages not paid and several NEW employment-related court cases looming. Several staff are even complaining that they are employed but haven’t got any work to do.”
Golding also castigated the party’s failure to make any effort at fighting by-elections. Instead, explains Golding, Griffin has been “completely taken in by the promises and fantasies” of Jefferson, who promoted the “grand dream” of catching up with the mainstream parties’ “amazing online electioneering databases”. That was why Griffin told Golding he was not bothered to fight elections until the new system, named Alfred, came online to solve all the party’s electoral problems.
Griffin has said that would take two years, and no doubt several fundraising appeals, while providing a ready excuse for numerous electoral failures. But, according to Golding, instead of turning to reputable experts to develop a suitable elections database, the BNP “hired an amateur IT guy who downloaded a free piece of software off Google and began to bodge/edit it”.
Golding reveals that “the IT projects manager brought in to make Alfred work has walked away stating it will never work (and hasn’t been paid his wages in the process), so Alfred has been quietly shelved”, leaving the BNP with no election capability at all.
Griffin has said his main aim is to get re-elected as an MEP, yet he has also spoken of turning the BNP into a “civil rights” movement and abandoning elections. The next European election is in 2014 and Griffin may just be using it as an excuse to do nothing much for the next three years, by which time little will remain of his party. Either that or Griffin believes incredibly that people really will vote for him because of his participation in a parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg about which voters know and care little and BNP activists even less.
Searchlight Magazine 2011
Friday, 4 March 2011
Griffin, the Once and Future Bankrupt
This is an interesting report which was recently published in one of Ireland's popular sunday newspapers. Make of it what you will.
Fascist group’s secret Irish bank account
The BNP is funnelling all its cash through a secret Northern Ireland bank account, we can reveal.
And we can further reveal the party – which has debts of around £500,000 – is busy setting up phoney groups to channel money and assets through in case the party folds under the financial strain. The party’s ‘Doomsday Scenario’ is also hiding money from an ever-growing list of disgruntled creditors.
A Sunday World investigation has found the race hate party [sic] – run by convicted racist Nick Griffin – is putting all its money through an account with the Bank of Ireland. However the Sunday World understands the bank doesn’t know because the account is in the name of an accountant based on the outskirts of Belfast.
Bank chiefs at the bank are believed to be looking into the claims although publicly they told the Sunday World they couldn’t comment on an individual’s account.
Meanwhile there have been rumblings that the party is using the vast sums both their MEPs are getting from the Brussels gravy train to prop up the BNP. Leader Griffin and former NF pal Andrew Brons won seats at the European Parliament last year. The election success has brought hundreds of thousands of pounds into the BNP coffers.
An MEP is entitled to a monthly salary of €4299 plus a staggering €304 ‘subsistence’ allowance for every day they attend which they aren’t required to show any receipts for. And that doesn’t include the €19,709 which they receive every month which is designed for staffing costs. Yet last year Nick Griffin was forced to send out a grovelling begging letter to all BNP members saying the party needed donations or else it would fold.
“The BNP are totally insolvent with debts of around £500,000 yet they continue to trade incurring more debts and seriously damaging many small unsuspecting British and Irish businesses,” said a source.
“They are unable to pay the few remaining employees not shunted onto the European parliament payroll. Of the 23 employees they have 17 of them are being paid with European money. Griffin and Co have also left the staff recently paid off in Belfast and Nuneaton with not even the back wages they are entitled to – the only thing propping up the rotten edifice is the European Parliament payroll money.
“This huge pot of cash is strictly and legally only to be used to pay for European staff exclusively. Around 75% of all BNP staff are on the EU payroll, even though they work primarily for the BNP itself.”
And he says the BNP had great difficulty getting any bank to open an account on their behalf.
“No bank wanted to touch the BNP so they managed to set it up through a local accountant. He then doles the money out to the party people and nobody is any the wiser. This £40-50 grand per month is all that is keeping the BNP and Griffin afloat. The accountant was originally blamed by Griffin for the financial problems which beset the party even though it had nothing to do with him.
Sunday World by Steven Moore
Fascist group’s secret Irish bank account
The BNP is funnelling all its cash through a secret Northern Ireland bank account, we can reveal.
And we can further reveal the party – which has debts of around £500,000 – is busy setting up phoney groups to channel money and assets through in case the party folds under the financial strain. The party’s ‘Doomsday Scenario’ is also hiding money from an ever-growing list of disgruntled creditors.
A Sunday World investigation has found the race hate party [sic] – run by convicted racist Nick Griffin – is putting all its money through an account with the Bank of Ireland. However the Sunday World understands the bank doesn’t know because the account is in the name of an accountant based on the outskirts of Belfast.
Bank chiefs at the bank are believed to be looking into the claims although publicly they told the Sunday World they couldn’t comment on an individual’s account.
Meanwhile there have been rumblings that the party is using the vast sums both their MEPs are getting from the Brussels gravy train to prop up the BNP. Leader Griffin and former NF pal Andrew Brons won seats at the European Parliament last year. The election success has brought hundreds of thousands of pounds into the BNP coffers.
An MEP is entitled to a monthly salary of €4299 plus a staggering €304 ‘subsistence’ allowance for every day they attend which they aren’t required to show any receipts for. And that doesn’t include the €19,709 which they receive every month which is designed for staffing costs. Yet last year Nick Griffin was forced to send out a grovelling begging letter to all BNP members saying the party needed donations or else it would fold.
“The BNP are totally insolvent with debts of around £500,000 yet they continue to trade incurring more debts and seriously damaging many small unsuspecting British and Irish businesses,” said a source.
“They are unable to pay the few remaining employees not shunted onto the European parliament payroll. Of the 23 employees they have 17 of them are being paid with European money. Griffin and Co have also left the staff recently paid off in Belfast and Nuneaton with not even the back wages they are entitled to – the only thing propping up the rotten edifice is the European Parliament payroll money.
“This huge pot of cash is strictly and legally only to be used to pay for European staff exclusively. Around 75% of all BNP staff are on the EU payroll, even though they work primarily for the BNP itself.”
And he says the BNP had great difficulty getting any bank to open an account on their behalf.
“No bank wanted to touch the BNP so they managed to set it up through a local accountant. He then doles the money out to the party people and nobody is any the wiser. This £40-50 grand per month is all that is keeping the BNP and Griffin afloat. The accountant was originally blamed by Griffin for the financial problems which beset the party even though it had nothing to do with him.
Sunday World by Steven Moore
Thursday, 3 March 2011
The question of national identity
No wonder Griffin and Walker want to try to deter members of the British National Party from visiting certain web sites, which they laughably refer to as being "proscribed." The entire basis of Griffin's career of exploitation of British nationalists' genuine patriotic concern for the well-being of their country, and their people, is that they should be kept in a state of ignorance and fear. Ignorance of his past of selfish factiousness, corruption, and personal inadequacy, and fear of persecution, harassment and victimization should they openly criticize or find fault with him or his regime.
I've pointed out before, on this blog, Griffin's past identification of himself as a Welsh nationalist, rather than a British nationalist.
Perhaps Harrington similarly regards himself, despite his English name, as an Irish nationalist.
This could go a long way towards explaining their apparent anti-British, and anti-English behaviour.
The following article, despite its hostile source, provides much useful background information on the "terrible twins", Griffin and Harrington.
As I have said before if a 'red' were to say "the sky is blue, the grass is green", it would not be sensible for nationalists to disagree.
The article now follows.
When Patrick Harrington and Nick Griffin ran the 1980s National Front there were quite a few immediate and striking anomalies. The old “Butcher’s Apron”, the Union Jack, was one of the first things to go as their revolutionary zeal took an uncontrollable hold over the shrinking organisation. The national flag was left to the “reactionaries” who broke away from them – the likes of Martin Wingfield, who now works for the Griffin’s BNP, and Andrew Brons, who represents the party as an MEP. Griffin and Harrington referred to their brand of the NF as the “radicals”.
What replaced the Union Jack on the front of their monthly bore sheet, National Front News, was pictures of black folk they liked, Muslims even. They even began quoting from and selling copies of Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book, not long after the Libyans had fired shots from the window of their People’s Bureau and killed a British police woman.
And the more people complained, the more extreme the NF seemed to become. This was their new party: the mysticism of Catholic fascism, the adulation of bizarre ranting eastern European fascists, and a Pol Pot like obsession with taking the party back to year zero.
Ireland, however, was their main problem. While the NF’s Ulster organiser was jailed for his part in the firebombing of the homes of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers in protests over the Anglo Irish agreement, the inner circle of the party was toying with Catholicism at the same time as vying for the affections of the major benefactor of the IRA, Colonel Gaddafi.
Harrington was always Griffin’s younger, more “radical” offsider. Despite being part of a “collective leadership” it was Griffin and Harrington who took the reins and led the party into ideological wilderness and oblivion. It was Harrington who obligingly photographed Griffin standing adoringly under a huge portrait of Colonel Gaddafi on their visit to Tripoli. It was Harrington, who often made much of his Irish roots, who shocked the traditionally loyalist NF by refusing to condemn the IRA in a television exposé of the NF’s activities in 1988. Not only did it anger the NF’s already fractured membership, it led the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), Ireland’s largest paramilitary group, to demand that the party leave Northern Ireland and later to write in its monthly publication Ulster, “The NF are wankers”.
Harrington and Griffin parted company in early 1990. Their NF “Political Soldiers” group gave up marching on an empty stomach. It had been bled dry of members and cash for some time.
After taking control of the BNP in 1999, Griffin never mentioned Ireland. The party was growing; it and its membership were firmly, if not violently, loyalist. Evidence of this was apparent when its Liverpool branch put an Irish tricolour on its banner in 2007 and a near riot ensued. By 2008 Griffin was the leader of a rapidly expanding party capable of sending shockwaves through the political establishment. He even engaged a hardline Protestant to set up and run a party call centre in Northern Ireland staffed only by Protestants.
The party has occasionally made noises at election times about inviting the Republic of Ireland to step back into union with Britain if the BNP came to power, but that is not a very likely or realistic scenario, given that Griffin’s daughter was in a loyalist “Kick the Pope” band until she fled Northern Ireland last year when her father fell out with the “super-Prod” fan of loyalist paramilitaries, Jim Dowson.
As the BNP entered a steep decline following last year’s general election, out of the shadows stepped Harrington again, not quite as fresh-faced as when he last took centre stage in the 1980s, but still not as bloated as Griffin has become since taking over the BNP. Harrington had been running his own minor organisation, Third Way, and a political party, the National Liberal Party, which is supposedly a rival party to the BNP.
One of Harrington’s first acts was to stage a bitter fallout with the officers of the BNP’s fake trade union Solidarity, where with Griffin’s approval Harrington ousted its founder and installed himself as General Secretary.
His next major falling out was with – you guessed it – Dowson. It seems that Harrington has been representing the Belfast call centre staff against Dowson while simultaneously representing the party in negotiations with the same staff, some of whom have still not been paid monies owed since before Christmas.
Harrington’s other area of interest is the BNP’s faux civil rights organisation, “Civil Liberty”. It sounds like a legitimate civil rights organisation – and preposterously describes the well known human rights organisation Liberty as its sister group – but it tends to crawl out from under its stone only when there is a white person (usually a racist) in trouble with the law. So we hardly fell off our seats when last week “Civil Liberty” offered its support to the former IRA man Gerry McGeough who was jailed for the attempted murder of a part-time Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier and full-time postman in 1981.
While on the run from British and Irish authorities (which included a daring escape from custody), McGeough went to America where he arranged for arms, missiles and ammunition to be sent to the IRA in Northern Ireland. He also attempted to claim political asylum in Sweden and served eight years in Germany awaiting trial for an attack on a British Army barracks there.
McGeough sat on the executive of the IRA’s political wing until 2003 when he attempted a takeover of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the largely moribund marching organisation (seen as the Catholic equivalent of the Orange Order), airing his extreme anti-gay and right wing views.
With the advent of peace talks and cease-fires, McGeough decided he would rather “save Ireland from sodomy” and launched a monthly magazine called The Hibernian, dedicated to “Faith, Family and Country”. Traditionally, the AOH was seen as a rival cultural organisation to Sinn Fein.
In an interview published in Searchlight in 2006, McGeough said: “Sinn Fein has been heavily infiltrated by homosexual activists and British double agents in recent years. A lot of republicans can’t fathom the liberal values of the leadership. They do not understand why they are pursuing a liberal British agenda. Immigration is a massive concern and there are a lot of people who are not happy with the level of immigration.”
Having fallen foul of Sinn Fein, McGeough was considered persona non grata by the Republican movement, even being labelled as a “fascist” on a web forum used by supporters of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), the political wing of the rival Irish National Liberation Army. But as the British far right has often found, there remain rather extreme pits of “traditional” Catholicism in the republic, where people with like-minded fears and hatreds can come together on mutual issues. Even the hardline loyalist Dowson, who as good as owned the BNP for a couple of relatively lucrative years, has found tapping into the Republic’s Catholic conservatism financially beneficial.
McGeough might have been an outcast, but he was by no means alone in his religious extremism.
In March 2007 McGeough stood for election against a Sinn Fein candidate as an Independent Republican in Fermanagh. He was arrested for the attempted murder, some 30 years after [sic] event, while leaving the polling station and had since then been living under various forms of incarceration and house arrest.
Last month McGeough was convicted for that attempted murder. For loyalists and Unionists, the community in Northern Ireland in which the BNP puts so much faith, the now-disbanded UDR was a much revered local almost totally Protestant regiment. To Irish nationalists and republicans, it was an imperialist and sectarian force that colluded with loyalist murder squads.
Although McGeough attracted some sympathy from the Republican movement for his actions at the height of the IRA’s campaign in Britain, Northern Ireland and mainland Europe, few have much time for his views on Ireland today or his extreme (“traditionalist”) Catholicism. He is likely to serve only two years under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
Last week “Civil Liberty” broke its recent silence to pay homage to McGeough. Lauding McGeough and The Hibernian for covering issues and themes “long abandoned by Sinn Fein and other leftist Irish Republican organisations such as opposition to abortion and homosexuality, scepticism about multiculturalism and mass immigration into Ireland”, it went on to praise McGeough for “criticism of the international banking system” (this normally refers to Jews) and articles about “English Catholic writers, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who helped develop and make popular distributist ideas in the first half of the twentieth century across the British Isles”.
Yes, it seems as if McGeough had a reading list in later years not too dissimilar to the one the Griffin-Harrington NF recommended to supporters, and indeed that Harrington himself recommends to this day. According to “Civil Liberty”, McGeough’s case has been “followed by radical nationalists across the British Isles with varying degrees of sympathy”.
This sort of language has set the BNP ablaze with innuendo and accusation. Just who are these “radical nationalists” who have such varying degrees of sympathy with McGeough? Many point the finger at Harrington, who has launched a myriad of legal letters and challenges in recent months to stop publication of a “private” photograph of himself proudly posing in front of a commemoration to the fallen members of “D Company, 2nd Battalion of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA”.
BNP members and supporters are furious and the BNP section of the “British Democracy Forum” is alight with accusations, recriminations and the airing of old suspicions and hatreds directed at Harrington and the IRA in general. It seems that the memories and the hatreds of the NF’s past leader remain as current and virile as ever. Some are even threatening to picket any meeting that he addresses or attends.
Following a newspaper report in Ireland about the BNP’s sympathy for McGeough, the BNP’s Ulster organiser has gone to hysterical lengths to laugh it off. Describing the story as “desperation”, Steven Moore realises that the BNP could be treading on some very sensitive toes if Griffin and Harrington decide to take the revolutionary garden path once more. Having helped organise a BNP “cultural event” in the loyalist heartland of East Belfast for Griffin last week, the last thing Moore wants is for what is left of the disillusioned paramilitaries in the area to turn their benign interest into a burning dislike for the party.
It is understood that the rival NF’s current leaders in Northern Ireland have photocopies of the article in the Irish press and are avidly distributing it to shocked BNP members there as they prepare to step up their activities.
To date neither the BNP nor Harrington has responded publicly, though we understand certain old enemies of Harrington high up in the BNP have been taking very long and deep breaths. Last night Harrington was asking for details of the moderator of the British Democracy Forum, no doubt so he could send him a legal letter to stop the appearance of further pictures of Harrington’s escapades in Belfast.
Civil liberty ended its article on McGeough by expressing its support for the “ethnic identity of the respective nations of the British Isles submerged for far too long under the dead hand of the British state”.
And one senior BNP official even turned up to a meeting of Irish Republicans in London last month to commemorate the Hunger Strikers.
No wonder the “loyalist” BNP is wriggling in silence.
Thanks to Matthew Collins at HOPE not hate / Searchlight
I've pointed out before, on this blog, Griffin's past identification of himself as a Welsh nationalist, rather than a British nationalist.
Perhaps Harrington similarly regards himself, despite his English name, as an Irish nationalist.
This could go a long way towards explaining their apparent anti-British, and anti-English behaviour.
The following article, despite its hostile source, provides much useful background information on the "terrible twins", Griffin and Harrington.
As I have said before if a 'red' were to say "the sky is blue, the grass is green", it would not be sensible for nationalists to disagree.
The article now follows.
When Patrick Harrington and Nick Griffin ran the 1980s National Front there were quite a few immediate and striking anomalies. The old “Butcher’s Apron”, the Union Jack, was one of the first things to go as their revolutionary zeal took an uncontrollable hold over the shrinking organisation. The national flag was left to the “reactionaries” who broke away from them – the likes of Martin Wingfield, who now works for the Griffin’s BNP, and Andrew Brons, who represents the party as an MEP. Griffin and Harrington referred to their brand of the NF as the “radicals”.
What replaced the Union Jack on the front of their monthly bore sheet, National Front News, was pictures of black folk they liked, Muslims even. They even began quoting from and selling copies of Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book, not long after the Libyans had fired shots from the window of their People’s Bureau and killed a British police woman.
And the more people complained, the more extreme the NF seemed to become. This was their new party: the mysticism of Catholic fascism, the adulation of bizarre ranting eastern European fascists, and a Pol Pot like obsession with taking the party back to year zero.
Ireland, however, was their main problem. While the NF’s Ulster organiser was jailed for his part in the firebombing of the homes of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers in protests over the Anglo Irish agreement, the inner circle of the party was toying with Catholicism at the same time as vying for the affections of the major benefactor of the IRA, Colonel Gaddafi.
Harrington was always Griffin’s younger, more “radical” offsider. Despite being part of a “collective leadership” it was Griffin and Harrington who took the reins and led the party into ideological wilderness and oblivion. It was Harrington who obligingly photographed Griffin standing adoringly under a huge portrait of Colonel Gaddafi on their visit to Tripoli. It was Harrington, who often made much of his Irish roots, who shocked the traditionally loyalist NF by refusing to condemn the IRA in a television exposé of the NF’s activities in 1988. Not only did it anger the NF’s already fractured membership, it led the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), Ireland’s largest paramilitary group, to demand that the party leave Northern Ireland and later to write in its monthly publication Ulster, “The NF are wankers”.
Harrington and Griffin parted company in early 1990. Their NF “Political Soldiers” group gave up marching on an empty stomach. It had been bled dry of members and cash for some time.
After taking control of the BNP in 1999, Griffin never mentioned Ireland. The party was growing; it and its membership were firmly, if not violently, loyalist. Evidence of this was apparent when its Liverpool branch put an Irish tricolour on its banner in 2007 and a near riot ensued. By 2008 Griffin was the leader of a rapidly expanding party capable of sending shockwaves through the political establishment. He even engaged a hardline Protestant to set up and run a party call centre in Northern Ireland staffed only by Protestants.
The party has occasionally made noises at election times about inviting the Republic of Ireland to step back into union with Britain if the BNP came to power, but that is not a very likely or realistic scenario, given that Griffin’s daughter was in a loyalist “Kick the Pope” band until she fled Northern Ireland last year when her father fell out with the “super-Prod” fan of loyalist paramilitaries, Jim Dowson.
As the BNP entered a steep decline following last year’s general election, out of the shadows stepped Harrington again, not quite as fresh-faced as when he last took centre stage in the 1980s, but still not as bloated as Griffin has become since taking over the BNP. Harrington had been running his own minor organisation, Third Way, and a political party, the National Liberal Party, which is supposedly a rival party to the BNP.
One of Harrington’s first acts was to stage a bitter fallout with the officers of the BNP’s fake trade union Solidarity, where with Griffin’s approval Harrington ousted its founder and installed himself as General Secretary.
His next major falling out was with – you guessed it – Dowson. It seems that Harrington has been representing the Belfast call centre staff against Dowson while simultaneously representing the party in negotiations with the same staff, some of whom have still not been paid monies owed since before Christmas.
Harrington’s other area of interest is the BNP’s faux civil rights organisation, “Civil Liberty”. It sounds like a legitimate civil rights organisation – and preposterously describes the well known human rights organisation Liberty as its sister group – but it tends to crawl out from under its stone only when there is a white person (usually a racist) in trouble with the law. So we hardly fell off our seats when last week “Civil Liberty” offered its support to the former IRA man Gerry McGeough who was jailed for the attempted murder of a part-time Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier and full-time postman in 1981.
While on the run from British and Irish authorities (which included a daring escape from custody), McGeough went to America where he arranged for arms, missiles and ammunition to be sent to the IRA in Northern Ireland. He also attempted to claim political asylum in Sweden and served eight years in Germany awaiting trial for an attack on a British Army barracks there.
McGeough sat on the executive of the IRA’s political wing until 2003 when he attempted a takeover of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the largely moribund marching organisation (seen as the Catholic equivalent of the Orange Order), airing his extreme anti-gay and right wing views.
With the advent of peace talks and cease-fires, McGeough decided he would rather “save Ireland from sodomy” and launched a monthly magazine called The Hibernian, dedicated to “Faith, Family and Country”. Traditionally, the AOH was seen as a rival cultural organisation to Sinn Fein.
In an interview published in Searchlight in 2006, McGeough said: “Sinn Fein has been heavily infiltrated by homosexual activists and British double agents in recent years. A lot of republicans can’t fathom the liberal values of the leadership. They do not understand why they are pursuing a liberal British agenda. Immigration is a massive concern and there are a lot of people who are not happy with the level of immigration.”
Having fallen foul of Sinn Fein, McGeough was considered persona non grata by the Republican movement, even being labelled as a “fascist” on a web forum used by supporters of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), the political wing of the rival Irish National Liberation Army. But as the British far right has often found, there remain rather extreme pits of “traditional” Catholicism in the republic, where people with like-minded fears and hatreds can come together on mutual issues. Even the hardline loyalist Dowson, who as good as owned the BNP for a couple of relatively lucrative years, has found tapping into the Republic’s Catholic conservatism financially beneficial.
McGeough might have been an outcast, but he was by no means alone in his religious extremism.
In March 2007 McGeough stood for election against a Sinn Fein candidate as an Independent Republican in Fermanagh. He was arrested for the attempted murder, some 30 years after [sic] event, while leaving the polling station and had since then been living under various forms of incarceration and house arrest.
Last month McGeough was convicted for that attempted murder. For loyalists and Unionists, the community in Northern Ireland in which the BNP puts so much faith, the now-disbanded UDR was a much revered local almost totally Protestant regiment. To Irish nationalists and republicans, it was an imperialist and sectarian force that colluded with loyalist murder squads.
Although McGeough attracted some sympathy from the Republican movement for his actions at the height of the IRA’s campaign in Britain, Northern Ireland and mainland Europe, few have much time for his views on Ireland today or his extreme (“traditionalist”) Catholicism. He is likely to serve only two years under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
Last week “Civil Liberty” broke its recent silence to pay homage to McGeough. Lauding McGeough and The Hibernian for covering issues and themes “long abandoned by Sinn Fein and other leftist Irish Republican organisations such as opposition to abortion and homosexuality, scepticism about multiculturalism and mass immigration into Ireland”, it went on to praise McGeough for “criticism of the international banking system” (this normally refers to Jews) and articles about “English Catholic writers, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who helped develop and make popular distributist ideas in the first half of the twentieth century across the British Isles”.
Yes, it seems as if McGeough had a reading list in later years not too dissimilar to the one the Griffin-Harrington NF recommended to supporters, and indeed that Harrington himself recommends to this day. According to “Civil Liberty”, McGeough’s case has been “followed by radical nationalists across the British Isles with varying degrees of sympathy”.
This sort of language has set the BNP ablaze with innuendo and accusation. Just who are these “radical nationalists” who have such varying degrees of sympathy with McGeough? Many point the finger at Harrington, who has launched a myriad of legal letters and challenges in recent months to stop publication of a “private” photograph of himself proudly posing in front of a commemoration to the fallen members of “D Company, 2nd Battalion of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA”.
BNP members and supporters are furious and the BNP section of the “British Democracy Forum” is alight with accusations, recriminations and the airing of old suspicions and hatreds directed at Harrington and the IRA in general. It seems that the memories and the hatreds of the NF’s past leader remain as current and virile as ever. Some are even threatening to picket any meeting that he addresses or attends.
Following a newspaper report in Ireland about the BNP’s sympathy for McGeough, the BNP’s Ulster organiser has gone to hysterical lengths to laugh it off. Describing the story as “desperation”, Steven Moore realises that the BNP could be treading on some very sensitive toes if Griffin and Harrington decide to take the revolutionary garden path once more. Having helped organise a BNP “cultural event” in the loyalist heartland of East Belfast for Griffin last week, the last thing Moore wants is for what is left of the disillusioned paramilitaries in the area to turn their benign interest into a burning dislike for the party.
It is understood that the rival NF’s current leaders in Northern Ireland have photocopies of the article in the Irish press and are avidly distributing it to shocked BNP members there as they prepare to step up their activities.
To date neither the BNP nor Harrington has responded publicly, though we understand certain old enemies of Harrington high up in the BNP have been taking very long and deep breaths. Last night Harrington was asking for details of the moderator of the British Democracy Forum, no doubt so he could send him a legal letter to stop the appearance of further pictures of Harrington’s escapades in Belfast.
Civil liberty ended its article on McGeough by expressing its support for the “ethnic identity of the respective nations of the British Isles submerged for far too long under the dead hand of the British state”.
And one senior BNP official even turned up to a meeting of Irish Republicans in London last month to commemorate the Hunger Strikers.
No wonder the “loyalist” BNP is wriggling in silence.
Thanks to Matthew Collins at HOPE not hate / Searchlight
The Griffinite School of Falsification
The second issue of the new-look Voice of Freedom arrived at my humble abode the other day.
I hear that Mr Griffin is now editing it in place of the noted man of letters, Clive Jefferson.
It was amusing to see that the paper's front page headline was "The Great Pretender", in allusion to David Cameron, and his recent speech on multiculturalism. It was amusing, not so much because of the accompanying photomontage of Freddie Mercury (real name Farrokh Bulsara) with his head replaced by that of David Cameron, but because "the Great Pretender" was a term that I had used to characterize Mr Griffin himself, last year, in an article I had published on this very blog.
Well, they do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I've also noticed that the term I used to describe the British National Party's candidate in the Barnsley by-election, "Local Girl" is being used by the party a great deal.
On page ten of the paper there is a report headed "Democracy Banned in Bridgend" which tells readers about Bridgend council's discussion about preventing the presence of a BNP stall selling papers and collecting anti-war signatures in the town. So far so good. Above the report, however, is a photograph of five BNP members standing behind a table festooned with party literature.
The trouble is that I recognize four out of the five members as being from the south-east region - nothing to do with Bridgend at all. The four members I recognize are, from left to right, Malcolm Collins, who lives in Southsea, Roger Knight, the former Portsmouth and Fareham group organizer, Lynne Mozar, the newly-appointed south-east regional fundholder, and Gavin Miller, the Portsmouth and Fareham group fundholder. It would appear to be highly unlikely that the photograph was actually taken in Bridgend, as the headline and report would lead the uninformed reader to believe. Certainly, the picture is not of Bridgend, or even South Wales, activists.
Now, the question is: does this matter? Clearly, the paper's editor, Mr Griffin, thinks not. But is he a good judge in such matters as honesty and integrity?
I suggest that it does matter. To use a photograph taken in a different part of the country completely, as an ostensible illustration of the text, is misleading and dishonest. Why was it done? Has activity in Bridgend reached such a low ebb that there are no activists willing to be photographed? Very likely, which is where the dishonesty comes in a second time. Mr Griffin is striving, through the few instruments he still has in his control, such as the monthly Voice of Freedom, and the party web site, to give an entirely false impression of the state of the party.
The party's greatest resource is its human capital, its activists, and members. Those members are in a bad way at present, feeling abused, exploited, taken for a ride by the leadership, and so are, in growing numbers, ceasing activity, ceasing donating, staying away from meetings, and getting on with their non-political lives.
Griffin knows this, he ought to as he has created the situation, but like the Great Pretender he is he wants to deceive and mislead, if necessary right up to the final denouement. He knows no other way, you see, it's just the way he is: the Great Pretender.
I hear that Mr Griffin is now editing it in place of the noted man of letters, Clive Jefferson.
It was amusing to see that the paper's front page headline was "The Great Pretender", in allusion to David Cameron, and his recent speech on multiculturalism. It was amusing, not so much because of the accompanying photomontage of Freddie Mercury (real name Farrokh Bulsara) with his head replaced by that of David Cameron, but because "the Great Pretender" was a term that I had used to characterize Mr Griffin himself, last year, in an article I had published on this very blog.
Well, they do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I've also noticed that the term I used to describe the British National Party's candidate in the Barnsley by-election, "Local Girl" is being used by the party a great deal.
On page ten of the paper there is a report headed "Democracy Banned in Bridgend" which tells readers about Bridgend council's discussion about preventing the presence of a BNP stall selling papers and collecting anti-war signatures in the town. So far so good. Above the report, however, is a photograph of five BNP members standing behind a table festooned with party literature.
The trouble is that I recognize four out of the five members as being from the south-east region - nothing to do with Bridgend at all. The four members I recognize are, from left to right, Malcolm Collins, who lives in Southsea, Roger Knight, the former Portsmouth and Fareham group organizer, Lynne Mozar, the newly-appointed south-east regional fundholder, and Gavin Miller, the Portsmouth and Fareham group fundholder. It would appear to be highly unlikely that the photograph was actually taken in Bridgend, as the headline and report would lead the uninformed reader to believe. Certainly, the picture is not of Bridgend, or even South Wales, activists.
Now, the question is: does this matter? Clearly, the paper's editor, Mr Griffin, thinks not. But is he a good judge in such matters as honesty and integrity?
I suggest that it does matter. To use a photograph taken in a different part of the country completely, as an ostensible illustration of the text, is misleading and dishonest. Why was it done? Has activity in Bridgend reached such a low ebb that there are no activists willing to be photographed? Very likely, which is where the dishonesty comes in a second time. Mr Griffin is striving, through the few instruments he still has in his control, such as the monthly Voice of Freedom, and the party web site, to give an entirely false impression of the state of the party.
The party's greatest resource is its human capital, its activists, and members. Those members are in a bad way at present, feeling abused, exploited, taken for a ride by the leadership, and so are, in growing numbers, ceasing activity, ceasing donating, staying away from meetings, and getting on with their non-political lives.
Griffin knows this, he ought to as he has created the situation, but like the Great Pretender he is he wants to deceive and mislead, if necessary right up to the final denouement. He knows no other way, you see, it's just the way he is: the Great Pretender.
Civil Liberty director wants Griffin's resignation
Kevin Scott, director and founder of the nationalist civil rights organization, Civil Liberty, established under the aegis of Nick Griffin, has publicly stated that he wants Griffin "...to stand down immediately as chairman of the BNP."
Mr Scott made the remark in the course of a heated debate, conducted on Dr Andrew Emerson's Facebook page, over the article in praise of a convicted IRA terrorist, McGeough, that he had published anonymously on the web site of Civil Liberty.
Mr Scott did not state his reasons for wanting Mr Griffin to go, but in view of Civil Liberty's ostensible commitment to defending the civil rights of nationalists, one wonders whether it might perhaps have anything to do with the way in which the constitutional rights of members of the British National Party have been set at nought by Griffin, firstly through the rigging of the nominations' process for a leadership election last year, and subsequently through the unjust victimization of Eddy Butler, the leading challenger, and his most active supporters.
Of course, such tyranny and hypocrisy may not concern Mr Scott in the slightest. He may have entirely different reasons of his own for wishing to see the back of Mr Griffin, such as wanting to see the BNP survive, and flourish, perhaps.
Mr Scott's post now follows.
Kevin Scott : I'm afraid Andrew is away with the fairies on this!! As usual! As with many other things!!
I wrote the piece on McGeough for Civil Liberty (of which I am the Director) and I think it is a fine piece of writing designed to highlight why some Irish people might think the same as us nationalists (well, at least, the anti-imperialist ones!) on the mainland.
Pat Harrington had no knowledge of the article nor the fact I was writing it and probably didn't even realise it had been posted on the CL website for all to see (friend and foe!) That clear enough for you,
Andrew? Now, please, old chap, acknowlege me as the author on your crap Searchlight proxy blog? Otherwise, I will get annoyed with you! And might even delete you as a Facebook friend!!
As for the origins of Civil Liberty. It was, in fact, a Lee Barnes idea. Unlike many others, I like Lee. Again, unlike many others, I also like Pat. But, I want, like Lee, Nick Griifin to stand down immediately as chairman of the BNP. [Emphasis mine]. Andrew, apparently, thinks that as well, but I was never a member of the (internationalist and imperialist) British Labour Party! Pat works for NG and is paid money by the EU. He is not a member of the BNP. Unlike me!
Some Scottish chap, apparently, volunteered to run Civil Liberty, but he had second thoughts. So I was asked to run it instead (by NG, if I remember correctly) and recruited a couple of chaps to help me. Both of whom have since fallen out with Nick Griffin!
All of that happened before I even met Pat Harrington. However, many years ago, I did come across him in a pub in Sunderland after an NF meeting in the town. He told me to **** off, since I was BNP!
Mr Scott made the remark in the course of a heated debate, conducted on Dr Andrew Emerson's Facebook page, over the article in praise of a convicted IRA terrorist, McGeough, that he had published anonymously on the web site of Civil Liberty.
Mr Scott did not state his reasons for wanting Mr Griffin to go, but in view of Civil Liberty's ostensible commitment to defending the civil rights of nationalists, one wonders whether it might perhaps have anything to do with the way in which the constitutional rights of members of the British National Party have been set at nought by Griffin, firstly through the rigging of the nominations' process for a leadership election last year, and subsequently through the unjust victimization of Eddy Butler, the leading challenger, and his most active supporters.
Of course, such tyranny and hypocrisy may not concern Mr Scott in the slightest. He may have entirely different reasons of his own for wishing to see the back of Mr Griffin, such as wanting to see the BNP survive, and flourish, perhaps.
Mr Scott's post now follows.
Kevin Scott : I'm afraid Andrew is away with the fairies on this!! As usual! As with many other things!!
I wrote the piece on McGeough for Civil Liberty (of which I am the Director) and I think it is a fine piece of writing designed to highlight why some Irish people might think the same as us nationalists (well, at least, the anti-imperialist ones!) on the mainland.
Pat Harrington had no knowledge of the article nor the fact I was writing it and probably didn't even realise it had been posted on the CL website for all to see (friend and foe!) That clear enough for you,
Andrew? Now, please, old chap, acknowlege me as the author on your crap Searchlight proxy blog? Otherwise, I will get annoyed with you! And might even delete you as a Facebook friend!!
As for the origins of Civil Liberty. It was, in fact, a Lee Barnes idea. Unlike many others, I like Lee. Again, unlike many others, I also like Pat. But, I want, like Lee, Nick Griifin to stand down immediately as chairman of the BNP. [Emphasis mine]. Andrew, apparently, thinks that as well, but I was never a member of the (internationalist and imperialist) British Labour Party! Pat works for NG and is paid money by the EU. He is not a member of the BNP. Unlike me!
Some Scottish chap, apparently, volunteered to run Civil Liberty, but he had second thoughts. So I was asked to run it instead (by NG, if I remember correctly) and recruited a couple of chaps to help me. Both of whom have since fallen out with Nick Griffin!
All of that happened before I even met Pat Harrington. However, many years ago, I did come across him in a pub in Sunderland after an NF meeting in the town. He told me to **** off, since I was BNP!
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
McGeough no Irish patriot, Griffin and Harrington no British patriots
What follows should make every decent, patriotic, British ethno-nationalist sick to the stomach. It's an article, published anonymously, on the web site of the supposedly British nationalist organization, Civil Liberty. Its director, Kevin Scott, has subsequently acknowledged his authorship of the article, modestly describing it as "...a fine piece of writing..."
The article's adulatory tone about a convicted former IRA terrorist, gunman, and the would-be assassin of an off-duty British soldier, is a sickening example of how the malign influence of the terrible twins, Griffin and Harrington, has perverted, not only the manners and morals (as if that were not bad enough) of the British National Party's leadership, and its constitution, but the party's political ideology as well.
Of course this traitorousness on the part of Griffin and Harrington is all of a piece with their appalling history of betrayal of the ethno-nationalist movement. We saw how, in September 1988, just a couple of months before Gaddafi ordered the bombing of the Pan Am passenger plane that was destroyed over Lockerbie, in Scotland, Griffin and Harrington knelt at the bloodthirsty dictator's feet, begging for blood-money from the man who was sending weapons and explosives to the IRA, with which to murder and maim innocent British, and Irish, men, women, and children.
Perhaps the sight was enough even to turn Gaddafi's stomach. He sent them packing with only a few hundred copies of his "Little Green Book" of the Libyan People's something-or-other, for their pains.
Kevin Scott's anonymous article now follows.
Gerry McGeough jailed
21st February 2011
Civil Liberty correspondent
Traditional Irish nationalist Gerry McGeough jailed
Gerry McGeough, the traditional Irish nationalist and radical Catholic activist, has been jailed for the shooting of an off-duty UDR soldier in 1981 and membership of the IRA between 1975 and 1981. He was convicted by a Diplock court - a judge sitting without a jury - and is likely to serve two years in jail in Ulster under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
The 52-year-old had led Sinn Fein's opposition to the EU Nice Treaty in the Republic of Ireland in 2001. He was also a Sinn Fein national executive member before leaving the party in 2003 after becoming disgusted with what he regarded as the socially "liberal" views of the "noveau Sinn Fein".
In 2006, he launched a monthly magazine called 'The Hibernian', dedicated to "Faith, Family and Country". In 2007, he stood against Sinn Fein in the Northern Ireland Assembly elections. He was arrested on the 8th of March, 2007, after leaving the election count in Omagh.
Twenty nine issues of 'The Hibernian' were published between May 2006 and September 2008, when it ceased publication due to the bail conditions imposed on the editor, Gerry McGeough, following his arrest. It covered issues and themes long abandoned by Sinn Fein and other leftist Irish Republican organisations such as opposition to abortion and homosexuality, scepticism about multiculturalism and mass immigration into Ireland and criticism of the international banking system and globalism. It also supported distributism and published articles about English Catholic writers, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who helped develop and make popular distributist ideas in the first half of the twentieth century across the British Isles.
He was also, for a time, the editor of a mass circulation Irish Catholic newspaper, the 'Irish Family', in the Irish Republic.
Gerry McGeough shouted "Long live the Irish nation" as he was led to the cells following his conviction and his case has been followed by radical nationalists across the British Isles with varying degrees of sympathy.
Although Civil Liberty unequivocally condemns terrorism, we also support the self-determination and ethnic identity of the respective nations of the British Isles submerged for far too long under the dead hand of the British state and its puppet masters in the City of London.
Gerry McGeough summed up his views in a recent interview: "Sinn Fein has been heavily infiltrated by homosexual activists and British double agents in recent years. A lot of republicans can't fathom the liberal values of the leadership. They do not understand why they are pursuing a liberal British agenda. Immigration is a massive concern and there are a lot of people who are not happy with the level of immigration."
Read more about genuine Irish nationalism.[Emphasis mine].
The article's adulatory tone about a convicted former IRA terrorist, gunman, and the would-be assassin of an off-duty British soldier, is a sickening example of how the malign influence of the terrible twins, Griffin and Harrington, has perverted, not only the manners and morals (as if that were not bad enough) of the British National Party's leadership, and its constitution, but the party's political ideology as well.
Of course this traitorousness on the part of Griffin and Harrington is all of a piece with their appalling history of betrayal of the ethno-nationalist movement. We saw how, in September 1988, just a couple of months before Gaddafi ordered the bombing of the Pan Am passenger plane that was destroyed over Lockerbie, in Scotland, Griffin and Harrington knelt at the bloodthirsty dictator's feet, begging for blood-money from the man who was sending weapons and explosives to the IRA, with which to murder and maim innocent British, and Irish, men, women, and children.
Perhaps the sight was enough even to turn Gaddafi's stomach. He sent them packing with only a few hundred copies of his "Little Green Book" of the Libyan People's something-or-other, for their pains.
Kevin Scott's anonymous article now follows.
Gerry McGeough jailed
21st February 2011
Civil Liberty correspondent
Traditional Irish nationalist Gerry McGeough jailed
Gerry McGeough, the traditional Irish nationalist and radical Catholic activist, has been jailed for the shooting of an off-duty UDR soldier in 1981 and membership of the IRA between 1975 and 1981. He was convicted by a Diplock court - a judge sitting without a jury - and is likely to serve two years in jail in Ulster under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
The 52-year-old had led Sinn Fein's opposition to the EU Nice Treaty in the Republic of Ireland in 2001. He was also a Sinn Fein national executive member before leaving the party in 2003 after becoming disgusted with what he regarded as the socially "liberal" views of the "noveau Sinn Fein".
In 2006, he launched a monthly magazine called 'The Hibernian', dedicated to "Faith, Family and Country". In 2007, he stood against Sinn Fein in the Northern Ireland Assembly elections. He was arrested on the 8th of March, 2007, after leaving the election count in Omagh.
Twenty nine issues of 'The Hibernian' were published between May 2006 and September 2008, when it ceased publication due to the bail conditions imposed on the editor, Gerry McGeough, following his arrest. It covered issues and themes long abandoned by Sinn Fein and other leftist Irish Republican organisations such as opposition to abortion and homosexuality, scepticism about multiculturalism and mass immigration into Ireland and criticism of the international banking system and globalism. It also supported distributism and published articles about English Catholic writers, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who helped develop and make popular distributist ideas in the first half of the twentieth century across the British Isles.
He was also, for a time, the editor of a mass circulation Irish Catholic newspaper, the 'Irish Family', in the Irish Republic.
Gerry McGeough shouted "Long live the Irish nation" as he was led to the cells following his conviction and his case has been followed by radical nationalists across the British Isles with varying degrees of sympathy.
Although Civil Liberty unequivocally condemns terrorism, we also support the self-determination and ethnic identity of the respective nations of the British Isles submerged for far too long under the dead hand of the British state and its puppet masters in the City of London.
Gerry McGeough summed up his views in a recent interview: "Sinn Fein has been heavily infiltrated by homosexual activists and British double agents in recent years. A lot of republicans can't fathom the liberal values of the leadership. They do not understand why they are pursuing a liberal British agenda. Immigration is a massive concern and there are a lot of people who are not happy with the level of immigration."
Read more about genuine Irish nationalism.[Emphasis mine].
Griffin used to admire Gaddafi, so why not the IRA?
The following is an article, published in Searchlight in 2006, that gives some useful background information on a certain Gerry McGeough, a recently convicted, former IRA terrorist and gunman. McGeough is also, disgracefully, an object of praise in an article recently published on the web site of Civil Liberty, a supposedly British nationalist organization.
Does anyone else see a pattern emerging here? A pattern of anti-British, and particularly anti-English, subversion, being co-ordinated by the corrupt, money-mad traitor, Griffin, and his intimate, the alleged IRA sympathizer, Pat Harrington.
We have already seen, last summer, the disgraceful spectacle of disgraced former teacher, Adam Walker, while representing the British National Party in an official capacity, visiting a shrine comemmorating the most atrocious Japanese war criminals, that even the prime minister, and Cabinet of Japan, refuse to visit. This was, without a doubt, intended by Walker to dishonour the glorious memory of our fallen British servicemen in the Far East, and all those who suffered unspeakable cruelties at the hands of the sadistic, Japanese military.
Now we see Kevin Scott, the director of Civil Liberty, publicly lying about British "concentration camps" in South Africa during the Boer War, suggesting that the deaths of Boer internees there, which were mainly a result of disease, and poor hygiene, were actually intended by the military authorities, and trying to create some kind of spurious moral equivalence between British treatment of the Boers, and the Japanese treatment of British prisoners of war. He does this, of course, from the basest, the most despicable, of motives: an attempt to curry favour with Adam Walker, nominal national organizer of the BNP, and to exonerate the latter for his shameful insult to British servicemen.
The Searchlight article on the man who tried to murder an off-duty British soldier, and who receives praise from the anti-British Civil Liberty, now follows.
Ex-Provo gives new life to Irish clerical fascism
A former senior Provisional IRA member, who until 2003 sat on Sinn Fein’s national executive, is reorganising the extreme nationalist right in Ireland by attempting a takeover of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the largely moribund marching organisation seen as the Catholic equivalent of the Orange Order.
Gerry McGeough, 47, from Tyrone, now living in Dublin, has been described by the FBI as a “dedicated terrorist” and “senior commander” in the IRA. He makes no secret of his Provisional IRA past and his extreme anti-gay and pro-traditional Catholic views. McGeough is believed to have served on the PIRA’s “headquarters staff” and overseen its international arms buying and military operations during the early 1980s. He has served eight years in total in American and German prisons, awaiting trial for an IRA attack on a British barracks in Germany in 1988 and attempts to purchase surface-to-air missiles in the US. Until recently he was the editor of the large circulation Irish Catholic newspaper the Irish Family.
Now he has turned his attentions to saving Ireland from “sodomy” and immigration and returning it to “Catholic Faith and Gaelic Heritage“. In May McGeough, as editor, and Charles Byrne, a 28-year-old from Drogheda, launched a monthly magazine called The Hibernian, dedicated to “Faith, Family and Country”. Seemingly well funded and run from premises in the border town of Drogheda, the magazine acts as a publicity vehicle for McGeough and the extreme right in Ireland. Some of its contributors are associated with Youth Defence, an extreme anti-abortion group, and the Society of Pope Pius X, others are those attempting to infiltrate and take over the AOH.
In recent months local newspapers in rural southern Ireland and the border area have carried advertisements for those interested in joining a revitalised AOH which is to focus on the promotion of so-called “Hibernian” values. McGeough says that a significant number of persons associated with his brand of homophobia and extreme Catholicism have now been recruited into existing AOH “divisions”, the term for local units of the organisation, and have formed new “divisions” in Dublin and other areas of Ireland.
The AOH in Ireland, and Scotland, is controlled by the AOH “Board of Erin”. It has a largely middle-aged membership and confines itself to small parades and charity work. Unlike its sister organisation in America, which runs the New York St Patrick’s parade and controversially refuses to allow Irish-American gay groups to take part in the event, the Board of Erin has largely stayed out of Irish politics since the 1940s. Before this the “Hibs” were strongly associated with conservative parties and its members were often involved in physical fights with IRA supporters.
The first outing of McGeough’s new look AOH was a televised speech on 26 May by Michael McDowell, the Irish Minister for Justice, on civil partnerships for same-sex couples. The speech was interrupted when a jug of water, a number of cups and copies of the Irish constitution were thrown at the minister by eight men in the audience who accused him of seeking to pervert Irish children. The men, who were eventually escorted from the building, identified themselves to the media as members of the AOH. On the same day the website of The Hibernian carried a press release stating: “We, the General Tom Barry Division No. 1975 AOH, Cork and the Naomh Lorc O’Tuathail Division No. 31 AOH, Dublin, wish to state that we carried out today’s protest at the launch of a conference on homosexual ‘marriage’ …
We contend that the farce in regard to so-called civil unions for homosexuals is merely a prelude to the introduction of adoption ‘rights’ for practicing sodomites. As we made clear at today’s protest, Irish children must be protected from the attention of such perverts and for the State to even contemplate enshrining laws to allow them direct ‘guardianship’ access to helpless Irish children makes a mockery of our Constitution …”
However not all in the AOH were supportive of the actions of some of their new members. A week later Tony Carroll, the AOH public relations officer, said: “We saw the pictures on TV and everybody was amazed at what went on”. He pledged further to investigate the disruption and take “appropriate action”. However McGeough believes the days of mere charity work by the AOH are numbered. He said, in a taped interview forwarded to Searchlight: “I am part of a new group of people in the organisation who want to take a more pro-active stance on Catholic issues. If the leadership have a problem with Catholic teachings, then they should take it up with the Pope. The organisation which was moribund for years under that leadership is now attracting huge numbers of new people. We only have a convention every three years. but I believe we will see a radical shake-up at the next election.”
The former terrorist first emerged as a figure on the Irish extreme right when he accompanied Justin Barrett on a lecture tour of Irish towns in March 2004 in support of Barrett’s bid for election to the European Parliament. Barrett was a founding member of Youth Defence and former leader of the “No to Nice” campaign which opposed Irish ratification of the EU’s Nice Treaty. In an initial referendum held in June 2001 the Irish public voted against ratification.
Support fell away from Barrett following the exposure of his and his supporters’ links to European neo-fascist groups connected to Roberto Fiore’s International Third Position by Searchlight and the Sunday Mirror in September 2002 during the second Nice referendum campaign. At this vote the Irish people voted in favour of the treaty. Barrett and another Youth Defence founder, Niamh Nic Mhathuna, had attended conferences of Fiore’s neo-fascist Forza Nuova in Italy.
Barrett had also attended the German NDP’s “National Day of Resistance” rally in Passau in May 2000 at which former members of the Third Reich spoke along with international neo-fascist figures such as Udo Voigt, leader of the NDP. Youth Defence had also written a letter to Candour, an independent British far-right and antisemitic magazine, requesting funding at the time of its foundation in 1992. When confronted by video film of brown-shirted skinheads marching with neo-nazi flags through the conference on national television, days before the second Nice referendum, Barrett’s defence that he was unaware of the nature of the meetings became a national joke.
It was during this period that McGeough, then acting as organiser of the Sinn Fein anti-Nice campaign, became involved with Barrett and his cohorts. The two are still in close political contact although McGeough says he does not agree with Barrett’s vocal opposition to immigration. In his book The National Way Forward Barrett stated he believed immigration to Ireland was a “genetic” problem.
McGeough is seeking to attract support from republican activists disillusioned by the political direction of his former party. With the Provos focusing now on mainstream politics, fringe republican groups have increased their political activity.
Because of his IRA activities McGeough had a strong following among some Provo supporters. He was elected to the Sinn Fein national executive in 1999 while studying history in Trinity College. He became the party’s national campaigns organiser in 2001 and remained on the executive until 2003. During that time he, along with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, led Sinn Fein election campaigns and toured the country addressing republicans on behalf of the party.
The former terrorist is scathing of his former comrades in the leadership of Sinn Fein. In the Searchlight interview McGeough said: “Sinn Fein has been heavily infiltrated by homosexual activists and British double agents in recent years. A lot of republicans can’t fathom the liberal values of the leadership. They do not understand why they are pursuing a liberal British agenda. Immigration is a massive concern and there are a lot of people who are not happy with the level of immigration.”
However McGeough stresses that he is not a “racist”, stating that he has a Spanish wife and his children have black Nigerian friends. In an earlier interview he said: “I welcome new blood into the country but there’s a difference between that and being deluged by scam-mongers”.
The reality of McGeough’s and his cohorts’ ideas are more clearly expressed in The Hibernian. The professionally produced magazine has carried articles outlining the threat to Ireland from “multiculturalism”, as well as prayers, pictures of the Virgin Mary and long pieces in each edition promoting the infamous Father Fahey. Fahey, a 1930s Irish priest, called for the destruction of the “worldwide Jewish, communist and Freemason conspiracy”, however he did not support the Nazis, suspecting they were also part of the Jewish conspiracy.
The magazine has also featured articles promoting the Society of Pope Pius X, the extreme Catholic sect whose members include Fiore, Barrett and Derek Holland, formally of the British National Front and now believed to be in Ireland. It was in one of the sect’s churches that James Charles Kopp, the US abortion doctor murder suspect, worked while on the run in Ireland in 2000.
The only two websites that have links to The Hibernian are “Irish nationalism”, an openly racist site, and the “Irish Bulletin”. The second site, which has a banner proclaiming “Dispatches from the battle to defend Irish unity, culture, tradition and orthodoxy”, is the only outlet that initially promoted The Hibernian. It also carries “news” reports similar in content and style to those on The Hibernian’s website. Under the heading “European Nationalist Movements and Philosophies” the Irish Bulletin has links to the websites of Forza Nuovo, the International Third Position publication Final Conflict and the neo-nazi National Democratic Party of Germany among other extremist groups.
Interviews by McGeough were also approvingly reproduced in June 2004 in the magazine of National Vanguard, the extreme racist and neo-nazi organisation in the USA. According to Republicans McGeough had contact with nazi gangs while imprisoned in Louisiana until his release in 1996.
The links that Barrett and Youth Defence have with McGeough maintain a tradition of involvement with former terrorists. Fiore, who has a terrorism conviction, was wanted in Italy for questioning over his knowledge of links between members of his terrorist group the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR) and renegade Italian secret service officers who were later convicted. NAR members were implicated in the bombing of Bologna railway station in 1980, which killed 85 people.
Youth Defence also helped establish another former Ulster paramilitary, James Dowson. In the late 1990s Youth Defence supplied money to Dowson, who has convictions for firearms offences and UDA tattoos, to set up his extreme anti-abortion group Precious Life. Dowson is now a self proclaimed Protestant pastor and attends British National Party rallies and International Third Position education conferences in London. Youth Defence and Precious Life maintain “sisterly” relations.
Mags Glennon, a researcher who writes for the Republican Socialist magazine Fourthwrite, said: “Irish Republicanism has traditionally been secular and open to all religions. McGeough’s magazine speaks of a ‘crusade’ and ignores any historical figures not white, straight and Catholic. It also has extremist anti-contraception and anti-women articles. The Catholic right constituency it is aiming for is rapidly diminishing in Ireland, but he is attempting to marry strict Catholicism with nationalism and anti-immigration views.’”
Although the comical Barrett might now have retired from the media frontline following deeply embarrassing election and referendum campaigns, the Irish extreme right may have another liability in McGeough. He managed to single-handedly destroy the Provos’ arms network in the US when he attempted to buy missiles to take down “warships in the sky” (his name for helicopters) from undercover FBI agents in 1982. A former student who knew McGeough during his years at Trinity also has a tale of duplicity: “Gerry was friendly with a lot of people around college political circles. He was always very much a Catholic and his traditionalist views did not always go down well with some in Sinn Fein. He could be a bit of a rogue though and used to wear a pioneer pin [a symbol that the wearer has taken a Catholic pledge of abstention from alcohol] but was always fond of the odd pint.”
© Searchlight Magazine 2006
Does anyone else see a pattern emerging here? A pattern of anti-British, and particularly anti-English, subversion, being co-ordinated by the corrupt, money-mad traitor, Griffin, and his intimate, the alleged IRA sympathizer, Pat Harrington.
We have already seen, last summer, the disgraceful spectacle of disgraced former teacher, Adam Walker, while representing the British National Party in an official capacity, visiting a shrine comemmorating the most atrocious Japanese war criminals, that even the prime minister, and Cabinet of Japan, refuse to visit. This was, without a doubt, intended by Walker to dishonour the glorious memory of our fallen British servicemen in the Far East, and all those who suffered unspeakable cruelties at the hands of the sadistic, Japanese military.
Now we see Kevin Scott, the director of Civil Liberty, publicly lying about British "concentration camps" in South Africa during the Boer War, suggesting that the deaths of Boer internees there, which were mainly a result of disease, and poor hygiene, were actually intended by the military authorities, and trying to create some kind of spurious moral equivalence between British treatment of the Boers, and the Japanese treatment of British prisoners of war. He does this, of course, from the basest, the most despicable, of motives: an attempt to curry favour with Adam Walker, nominal national organizer of the BNP, and to exonerate the latter for his shameful insult to British servicemen.
The Searchlight article on the man who tried to murder an off-duty British soldier, and who receives praise from the anti-British Civil Liberty, now follows.
Ex-Provo gives new life to Irish clerical fascism
A former senior Provisional IRA member, who until 2003 sat on Sinn Fein’s national executive, is reorganising the extreme nationalist right in Ireland by attempting a takeover of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the largely moribund marching organisation seen as the Catholic equivalent of the Orange Order.
Gerry McGeough, 47, from Tyrone, now living in Dublin, has been described by the FBI as a “dedicated terrorist” and “senior commander” in the IRA. He makes no secret of his Provisional IRA past and his extreme anti-gay and pro-traditional Catholic views. McGeough is believed to have served on the PIRA’s “headquarters staff” and overseen its international arms buying and military operations during the early 1980s. He has served eight years in total in American and German prisons, awaiting trial for an IRA attack on a British barracks in Germany in 1988 and attempts to purchase surface-to-air missiles in the US. Until recently he was the editor of the large circulation Irish Catholic newspaper the Irish Family.
Now he has turned his attentions to saving Ireland from “sodomy” and immigration and returning it to “Catholic Faith and Gaelic Heritage“. In May McGeough, as editor, and Charles Byrne, a 28-year-old from Drogheda, launched a monthly magazine called The Hibernian, dedicated to “Faith, Family and Country”. Seemingly well funded and run from premises in the border town of Drogheda, the magazine acts as a publicity vehicle for McGeough and the extreme right in Ireland. Some of its contributors are associated with Youth Defence, an extreme anti-abortion group, and the Society of Pope Pius X, others are those attempting to infiltrate and take over the AOH.
In recent months local newspapers in rural southern Ireland and the border area have carried advertisements for those interested in joining a revitalised AOH which is to focus on the promotion of so-called “Hibernian” values. McGeough says that a significant number of persons associated with his brand of homophobia and extreme Catholicism have now been recruited into existing AOH “divisions”, the term for local units of the organisation, and have formed new “divisions” in Dublin and other areas of Ireland.
The AOH in Ireland, and Scotland, is controlled by the AOH “Board of Erin”. It has a largely middle-aged membership and confines itself to small parades and charity work. Unlike its sister organisation in America, which runs the New York St Patrick’s parade and controversially refuses to allow Irish-American gay groups to take part in the event, the Board of Erin has largely stayed out of Irish politics since the 1940s. Before this the “Hibs” were strongly associated with conservative parties and its members were often involved in physical fights with IRA supporters.
The first outing of McGeough’s new look AOH was a televised speech on 26 May by Michael McDowell, the Irish Minister for Justice, on civil partnerships for same-sex couples. The speech was interrupted when a jug of water, a number of cups and copies of the Irish constitution were thrown at the minister by eight men in the audience who accused him of seeking to pervert Irish children. The men, who were eventually escorted from the building, identified themselves to the media as members of the AOH. On the same day the website of The Hibernian carried a press release stating: “We, the General Tom Barry Division No. 1975 AOH, Cork and the Naomh Lorc O’Tuathail Division No. 31 AOH, Dublin, wish to state that we carried out today’s protest at the launch of a conference on homosexual ‘marriage’ …
We contend that the farce in regard to so-called civil unions for homosexuals is merely a prelude to the introduction of adoption ‘rights’ for practicing sodomites. As we made clear at today’s protest, Irish children must be protected from the attention of such perverts and for the State to even contemplate enshrining laws to allow them direct ‘guardianship’ access to helpless Irish children makes a mockery of our Constitution …”
However not all in the AOH were supportive of the actions of some of their new members. A week later Tony Carroll, the AOH public relations officer, said: “We saw the pictures on TV and everybody was amazed at what went on”. He pledged further to investigate the disruption and take “appropriate action”. However McGeough believes the days of mere charity work by the AOH are numbered. He said, in a taped interview forwarded to Searchlight: “I am part of a new group of people in the organisation who want to take a more pro-active stance on Catholic issues. If the leadership have a problem with Catholic teachings, then they should take it up with the Pope. The organisation which was moribund for years under that leadership is now attracting huge numbers of new people. We only have a convention every three years. but I believe we will see a radical shake-up at the next election.”
The former terrorist first emerged as a figure on the Irish extreme right when he accompanied Justin Barrett on a lecture tour of Irish towns in March 2004 in support of Barrett’s bid for election to the European Parliament. Barrett was a founding member of Youth Defence and former leader of the “No to Nice” campaign which opposed Irish ratification of the EU’s Nice Treaty. In an initial referendum held in June 2001 the Irish public voted against ratification.
Support fell away from Barrett following the exposure of his and his supporters’ links to European neo-fascist groups connected to Roberto Fiore’s International Third Position by Searchlight and the Sunday Mirror in September 2002 during the second Nice referendum campaign. At this vote the Irish people voted in favour of the treaty. Barrett and another Youth Defence founder, Niamh Nic Mhathuna, had attended conferences of Fiore’s neo-fascist Forza Nuova in Italy.
Barrett had also attended the German NDP’s “National Day of Resistance” rally in Passau in May 2000 at which former members of the Third Reich spoke along with international neo-fascist figures such as Udo Voigt, leader of the NDP. Youth Defence had also written a letter to Candour, an independent British far-right and antisemitic magazine, requesting funding at the time of its foundation in 1992. When confronted by video film of brown-shirted skinheads marching with neo-nazi flags through the conference on national television, days before the second Nice referendum, Barrett’s defence that he was unaware of the nature of the meetings became a national joke.
It was during this period that McGeough, then acting as organiser of the Sinn Fein anti-Nice campaign, became involved with Barrett and his cohorts. The two are still in close political contact although McGeough says he does not agree with Barrett’s vocal opposition to immigration. In his book The National Way Forward Barrett stated he believed immigration to Ireland was a “genetic” problem.
McGeough is seeking to attract support from republican activists disillusioned by the political direction of his former party. With the Provos focusing now on mainstream politics, fringe republican groups have increased their political activity.
Because of his IRA activities McGeough had a strong following among some Provo supporters. He was elected to the Sinn Fein national executive in 1999 while studying history in Trinity College. He became the party’s national campaigns organiser in 2001 and remained on the executive until 2003. During that time he, along with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, led Sinn Fein election campaigns and toured the country addressing republicans on behalf of the party.
The former terrorist is scathing of his former comrades in the leadership of Sinn Fein. In the Searchlight interview McGeough said: “Sinn Fein has been heavily infiltrated by homosexual activists and British double agents in recent years. A lot of republicans can’t fathom the liberal values of the leadership. They do not understand why they are pursuing a liberal British agenda. Immigration is a massive concern and there are a lot of people who are not happy with the level of immigration.”
However McGeough stresses that he is not a “racist”, stating that he has a Spanish wife and his children have black Nigerian friends. In an earlier interview he said: “I welcome new blood into the country but there’s a difference between that and being deluged by scam-mongers”.
The reality of McGeough’s and his cohorts’ ideas are more clearly expressed in The Hibernian. The professionally produced magazine has carried articles outlining the threat to Ireland from “multiculturalism”, as well as prayers, pictures of the Virgin Mary and long pieces in each edition promoting the infamous Father Fahey. Fahey, a 1930s Irish priest, called for the destruction of the “worldwide Jewish, communist and Freemason conspiracy”, however he did not support the Nazis, suspecting they were also part of the Jewish conspiracy.
The magazine has also featured articles promoting the Society of Pope Pius X, the extreme Catholic sect whose members include Fiore, Barrett and Derek Holland, formally of the British National Front and now believed to be in Ireland. It was in one of the sect’s churches that James Charles Kopp, the US abortion doctor murder suspect, worked while on the run in Ireland in 2000.
The only two websites that have links to The Hibernian are “Irish nationalism”, an openly racist site, and the “Irish Bulletin”. The second site, which has a banner proclaiming “Dispatches from the battle to defend Irish unity, culture, tradition and orthodoxy”, is the only outlet that initially promoted The Hibernian. It also carries “news” reports similar in content and style to those on The Hibernian’s website. Under the heading “European Nationalist Movements and Philosophies” the Irish Bulletin has links to the websites of Forza Nuovo, the International Third Position publication Final Conflict and the neo-nazi National Democratic Party of Germany among other extremist groups.
Interviews by McGeough were also approvingly reproduced in June 2004 in the magazine of National Vanguard, the extreme racist and neo-nazi organisation in the USA. According to Republicans McGeough had contact with nazi gangs while imprisoned in Louisiana until his release in 1996.
The links that Barrett and Youth Defence have with McGeough maintain a tradition of involvement with former terrorists. Fiore, who has a terrorism conviction, was wanted in Italy for questioning over his knowledge of links between members of his terrorist group the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR) and renegade Italian secret service officers who were later convicted. NAR members were implicated in the bombing of Bologna railway station in 1980, which killed 85 people.
Youth Defence also helped establish another former Ulster paramilitary, James Dowson. In the late 1990s Youth Defence supplied money to Dowson, who has convictions for firearms offences and UDA tattoos, to set up his extreme anti-abortion group Precious Life. Dowson is now a self proclaimed Protestant pastor and attends British National Party rallies and International Third Position education conferences in London. Youth Defence and Precious Life maintain “sisterly” relations.
Mags Glennon, a researcher who writes for the Republican Socialist magazine Fourthwrite, said: “Irish Republicanism has traditionally been secular and open to all religions. McGeough’s magazine speaks of a ‘crusade’ and ignores any historical figures not white, straight and Catholic. It also has extremist anti-contraception and anti-women articles. The Catholic right constituency it is aiming for is rapidly diminishing in Ireland, but he is attempting to marry strict Catholicism with nationalism and anti-immigration views.’”
Although the comical Barrett might now have retired from the media frontline following deeply embarrassing election and referendum campaigns, the Irish extreme right may have another liability in McGeough. He managed to single-handedly destroy the Provos’ arms network in the US when he attempted to buy missiles to take down “warships in the sky” (his name for helicopters) from undercover FBI agents in 1982. A former student who knew McGeough during his years at Trinity also has a tale of duplicity: “Gerry was friendly with a lot of people around college political circles. He was always very much a Catholic and his traditionalist views did not always go down well with some in Sinn Fein. He could be a bit of a rogue though and used to wear a pioneer pin [a symbol that the wearer has taken a Catholic pledge of abstention from alcohol] but was always fond of the odd pint.”
© Searchlight Magazine 2006
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
There may be trouble ahead...
The following article, published, in the magazine Searchlight, three years ago, following an earlier crisis within the leadership of the British National Party, which Griffin's corruption and incompetence had triggered, despite emanating from a source antithetical to British ethno-nationalism, makes interesting reading for those interested in Griffin's form as a nationalist party wrecker.
Nick Griffin political extremist and veteran splitter
By Dave Williams
The present crisis in the British National Party started over the unacceptable actions and incompetence of two national officers, Mark Collett and Dave Hannam, but quickly centred on Nick Griffin himself. In the light of accusations and denunciations flying around the far right, Dave Williams asks how much we really know about the extremist past of the BNP’s leader.
Nick Griffin factional leader
When the BNP split last month with the Yorkshire, East Midlands and Scottish regions openly siding with the expelled officers, led by Sadie Graham and Kenny Smith, many felt a certain sense of déjà vu. “We’ve been here before” was the heading on one article on the rebels’ blogsite, which stated somewhat ungrammatically: “It seems to be that the common denominator where trouble in Nationalist circles are concerned, is Nick Griffin”.
More than 20 years ago Griffin had been at the centre of the internal bloodletting that had destroyed the National Front. Was this mere coincidence, many asked.
Born in Barnet in 1959 Griffin was introduced to the NF as a teenager by his Conservative father, Edwin [sic, Edgar]. Griffin’s grandfather also showed him some of the more antisemitic literature of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
After attending St. Felix public school near Southwold, Griffin studied at Cambridge University, where he rose through the ranks of the Young NF before being appointed to the main party’s National Directorate in 1980. The early 1980s was a period of decline for the NF and it became embroiled in ferment as its young ruling clique, who had ousted first the NF’s longstanding leader John Tyndall in 1980 and then its national organiser Martin Webster in 1983, cast around for ways of repackaging their ideology. The fruits of this appeared in Nationalism Today, a journal that Griffin helped found and edited for a period.
In 1986 the NF was torn apart by an extremely bitter feud. The “radicals” grouped around Griffin and Derek Holland proclaimed themselves the “official” NF while the “reactionaries” coalesced around Martin Wingfield and Ian Anderson, who established the NF “Support Group”.
Griffin wrote a particularly vituperative pamphlet entitled Attempted Murder: The State/Reactionary Plot Against the National Front, in which he railed against his opponents accusing them of doing the state’s dirty work.
It also attacked the personal and professional abilities of two colleagues, Martin and Tina Wingfield, both of whom now occupy senior positions in the BNP.
It is a tawdry tale of plots and conspiracies, of disciplinary tribunals and expulsions, of incompetence, financial impropriety, theft and betrayal that sounds very familiar in today’s context. Griffin of course emerges from the story whiter than white, if you can pardon the pun. That is something else today’s BNP rebels might recognise.
If nothing else, reading Attempted Murder is a reminder that, whatever else anyone says about him, Griffin is a master of dissimulation, disruption and destabilisation, a skilled practitioner of using innuendo, smear and outright lie as a political tool. In short Griffin is a champion of the politics of factionalism which he uses to shore up and preserve his own position against those foolhardy enough to challenge his untrammelled authority.
It is ironic that so many of those now bleating about their betrayal, personal and ideological, by Griffin seem so oblivious to the factional role he played during the split and subsequent disintegration of the NF in the 1980s. When Griffin took over the NF had 4,000 to 5,000 members but that dwindled as part of his systematic plan for developing a trained core cadre of activists, which he termed the Political Soldiers.
Having driven the NF into the ground Griffin abandoned it in 1989 for the International Third Position (ITP), a revolutionary “nationalist” sect.
One other point discovered by the BNP dissidents is the lengths to which Griffin will go to win out. Smearing his opponents as “neo-nazis” was pretty hypocritical considering that Griffin perhaps would not even be BNP chairman today were it not for the help of the quite unabashed nazis he today derides. Indeed for all his ideological twists and turns throughout his career Griffin has always remained one thing: a hardline extremist [sic].
Particularly illuminating was the testimony of the Scottish Blood and Honour boss Steve Cartwright who went on record with his memories of Griffin in Wales in the mid-1990s. “Our meeting with Griffin went well,” recalled Cartwright, “he pushed all the right buttons, emphasising militancy as well as paying due respect to the Nationalists and National Socialists of the past. He also spoke of the need to re-package and modernise our beliefs in the hope of reaching the British public.” He went away satisfied that this was the man to succeed the veteran BNP leader, John Tyndall.
Griffin’s trial in 1998 on race hate charges arising from statements denying the Holocaust in The Rune, a magazine that he edited, and his Holocaust denying performance on The Cook Report further impressed this hardline nazi faction within the BNP that “our man had balls”. During the leadership election campaign Griffin used Tony Lecomber, who had served two three-year prison sentences on explosives charges and for assaulting a Jewish teacher, as his hatchet man to circulate the most defamatory personal smears against Tyndall. In September 1999 Griffin was elected chairman.
However Griffin soon let down the hardliners who had backed him and sided with the “modernising” faction led by Lecomber and Eddy Butler, realising that he was more likely to gain political power following their agenda than that of the “neo-nazis”. And for a while all was well.
Under Griffin’s leadership the BNP made an electoral breakthrough to get three members elected to Burnley council in 2002, and went on to win further local elections in the following years. But these gains were largely the result of external factors and Griffin has never managed to deliver the successes he promised his members’ efforts would bring them at each electoral round.
The political baggage he carries with him, not to mention the personal defects which make him resort to violent factionalism at the first sign of a challenge to his authority, limit the extent of progress the BNP can make with him at the helm. Those in the rebel faction have come to understand this, which is why they have moved on from calling for the dismissal of Collett, Hannam and John Walker, the party treasurer, to understanding that the BNP’s real problem is Griffin himself.
Nick Griffin and Holocaust denial
Griffin began flirting with the BNP in 1993, two years after leaving the International Third Position.
John Tyndall, the BNP leader at the time, overcame his initial distaste for Griffin’s activities and began mentioning him favourably in Spearhead.
Griffin finally joined the BNP in 1995 and soon gravitated towards the hardline Croydon branch, which included a number of the party’s most ardent antisemites. Soon afterwards Griffin began to contribute to The Rune, an antisemitic magazine published by Paul Ballard and his comrades. Ballard was a veteran BNP member and sympathiser of the nazi terror group Combat 18.
Griffin became editor of The Rune in 1995. Tyndall had no problem with this and the following year appointed him editor of his own magazine, Spearhead.
The Rune showed Griffin to be a hardliner par excellence. He used the publication to argue forcefully against modernising the BNP, stating that “the electors of Millwall [who voted in the BNP’s first local councillor in 1993] did not back a post modernist rightist party but
what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan ‘Defend Rights for Whites’ with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate.”
As editor of The Rune Griffin plumbed new depths in antisemitic invective. It became a platform for glorifying the British Union of Fascists and Hitler’s SS and for describing the Holocaust as the “holohoax”.
Comments such as these led to his house being raided by the police in 1997 and he and Ballard being hauled before the courts for inciting racial hatred. Ballard pleaded guilty but Griffin chose to contest the charges, inviting a number of “expert” witnesses to testify for him at his trial in 1998 including the noted French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. The effort was in vain. Griffin was found guilty and handed a nine-month prison sentence suspended for two years.
It was during his defence that Griffin made his notorious statement: “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the Earth was flat … I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter-day witch-hysteria.”
Griffin has also attacked the “revisionist” writer David Irving for admitting that some Jews may have been killed during the “holohoax”, accusing him of “back tracking on the old gas chamber lie”.
In 1997 Griffin wrote the pamphlet, Who Are the Mindbenders? an antisemitic tirade against what he saw as Jewish control of the British media, the means by which, Griffin alleged, Jews were trying to brainwash white people into accepting multiculturalism.
The BNP always rejects accusations that Griffin is antisemitic, claiming it was all in the distant past. This is far from the truth. As recently as April 2007 Griffin told a reporter that he did believe in the Holocaust but only because “European law” required him to do so.
‘We’re all on the same side’ – Nick Griffin and Combat 18
Nick Griffin has always distanced himself from the activities of the wannabe nazi terror machine Combat 18 (C18). Indeed shortly after its formation as a BNP stewards group the BNP proscribed the organisation.
However, as Griffin hastily prepared for his trial on charges of inciting racial hatred in 1997, he decided that one of the planks of his defence would be that C18 had produced far worse and had never been prosecuted for it. Needing some documents he asked Steve Cartwright, head of Blood and Honour, to contact Will Browning, leader of C18, telling Cartwright to reassure Browning that he and C18 were on “the same side”.
Browning later sent Griffin a “bumper pack” of C18 material. Griffin phoned Cartwright asking him to pass on his thanks to Browning. As Cartwright recalled, “Griffin was particularly tickled by the name of the parcel sender – Mr Beast, London”.
Nick Griffin’s ideology, the political soldiers
As leader of the BNP Nick Griffin has put in place a system of voting members who are required to undergo ideological training and has been unconcerned at the departure of officers and members unwilling to follow his every command.
But this is not the first time Griffin has chosen to develop a political elite rather than a mass organisation. In 1986 after a series of purges and splits in the National Front, Griffin gained control of one faction and set about turning it into his “political soldiers”, under the influence of Roberto Fiore, a fugitive from justice in Italy who became Griffin’s mentor, friend and business partner.
The group made contact with all sorts of international political mavericks including Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, the US black separatist leader Louis Farrakhan and both sides of the divide in Ireland.[Emphasis mine].
A series of booklets outlined their creed under the slogan “Long Live Death” and a policy that aped Fiore’s terrorist agenda of destabilisation in Italy that had produced the bombings of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Attempts to stir up Welsh nationalists to bomb English second homes in Wales led to protests with placards stating NF = MI5. [Emphasis mine].
Griffin’s NF was far from an ordinary political party. Even some of his own members were worried when they were given advice on resisting police interrogation that experts said was more apposite for political terrorists.
Many of those who fell out with Griffin in those days are now back at Griffin’s side. One of them is Patrick Harrington, who now runs Solidarity, the BNP’s fake trade union. Harrington and Graham Williamson, also involved in Solidarity, lead Third Way, whose political philosophy appears to differ considerably from that of the BNP.
Its website features an equal opportunities statement and it claims to welcome “guest workers … to fill gaps in the country’s infrastructure”.
It seems that Griffin’s desire to build a political elite along the lines of the political soldiers overrides any ideological differences between the BNP and Third Way. Griffin’s obsession with a coming civil war or race war also shows how little his politics have changed in over 20 years.
It is worth remembering that Harrington in an interview for a television exposé of the NF political soldiers [C4: Disciples of Chaos, 1988] refused to condemn IRA bombings and that Griffin, Harrington and Williamson went to Libya to seek funds from a regime that armed both sides in the Northern Ireland conflict.[Emphasis mine].
Griffin is still prepared to work with whomever he thinks can help him get what he wants, the more shadowy they are the better. One of the bones of contention among the rebels is the power Griffin has vested in Lance Stewart, the South African former police officer who heads the
BNP’s “intelligence department”, Arthur Kemp, the former South African spook who edits the BNP’s new website and runs ideological training for the voting members, and Lambertus “Bep” Nieuwhof, a convicted pro-apartheid terrorist who provides internet services to the party.
© Searchlight Magazine 2008
Nick Griffin political extremist and veteran splitter
By Dave Williams
The present crisis in the British National Party started over the unacceptable actions and incompetence of two national officers, Mark Collett and Dave Hannam, but quickly centred on Nick Griffin himself. In the light of accusations and denunciations flying around the far right, Dave Williams asks how much we really know about the extremist past of the BNP’s leader.
Nick Griffin factional leader
When the BNP split last month with the Yorkshire, East Midlands and Scottish regions openly siding with the expelled officers, led by Sadie Graham and Kenny Smith, many felt a certain sense of déjà vu. “We’ve been here before” was the heading on one article on the rebels’ blogsite, which stated somewhat ungrammatically: “It seems to be that the common denominator where trouble in Nationalist circles are concerned, is Nick Griffin”.
More than 20 years ago Griffin had been at the centre of the internal bloodletting that had destroyed the National Front. Was this mere coincidence, many asked.
Born in Barnet in 1959 Griffin was introduced to the NF as a teenager by his Conservative father, Edwin [sic, Edgar]. Griffin’s grandfather also showed him some of the more antisemitic literature of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
After attending St. Felix public school near Southwold, Griffin studied at Cambridge University, where he rose through the ranks of the Young NF before being appointed to the main party’s National Directorate in 1980. The early 1980s was a period of decline for the NF and it became embroiled in ferment as its young ruling clique, who had ousted first the NF’s longstanding leader John Tyndall in 1980 and then its national organiser Martin Webster in 1983, cast around for ways of repackaging their ideology. The fruits of this appeared in Nationalism Today, a journal that Griffin helped found and edited for a period.
In 1986 the NF was torn apart by an extremely bitter feud. The “radicals” grouped around Griffin and Derek Holland proclaimed themselves the “official” NF while the “reactionaries” coalesced around Martin Wingfield and Ian Anderson, who established the NF “Support Group”.
Griffin wrote a particularly vituperative pamphlet entitled Attempted Murder: The State/Reactionary Plot Against the National Front, in which he railed against his opponents accusing them of doing the state’s dirty work.
It also attacked the personal and professional abilities of two colleagues, Martin and Tina Wingfield, both of whom now occupy senior positions in the BNP.
It is a tawdry tale of plots and conspiracies, of disciplinary tribunals and expulsions, of incompetence, financial impropriety, theft and betrayal that sounds very familiar in today’s context. Griffin of course emerges from the story whiter than white, if you can pardon the pun. That is something else today’s BNP rebels might recognise.
If nothing else, reading Attempted Murder is a reminder that, whatever else anyone says about him, Griffin is a master of dissimulation, disruption and destabilisation, a skilled practitioner of using innuendo, smear and outright lie as a political tool. In short Griffin is a champion of the politics of factionalism which he uses to shore up and preserve his own position against those foolhardy enough to challenge his untrammelled authority.
It is ironic that so many of those now bleating about their betrayal, personal and ideological, by Griffin seem so oblivious to the factional role he played during the split and subsequent disintegration of the NF in the 1980s. When Griffin took over the NF had 4,000 to 5,000 members but that dwindled as part of his systematic plan for developing a trained core cadre of activists, which he termed the Political Soldiers.
Having driven the NF into the ground Griffin abandoned it in 1989 for the International Third Position (ITP), a revolutionary “nationalist” sect.
One other point discovered by the BNP dissidents is the lengths to which Griffin will go to win out. Smearing his opponents as “neo-nazis” was pretty hypocritical considering that Griffin perhaps would not even be BNP chairman today were it not for the help of the quite unabashed nazis he today derides. Indeed for all his ideological twists and turns throughout his career Griffin has always remained one thing: a hardline extremist [sic].
Particularly illuminating was the testimony of the Scottish Blood and Honour boss Steve Cartwright who went on record with his memories of Griffin in Wales in the mid-1990s. “Our meeting with Griffin went well,” recalled Cartwright, “he pushed all the right buttons, emphasising militancy as well as paying due respect to the Nationalists and National Socialists of the past. He also spoke of the need to re-package and modernise our beliefs in the hope of reaching the British public.” He went away satisfied that this was the man to succeed the veteran BNP leader, John Tyndall.
Griffin’s trial in 1998 on race hate charges arising from statements denying the Holocaust in The Rune, a magazine that he edited, and his Holocaust denying performance on The Cook Report further impressed this hardline nazi faction within the BNP that “our man had balls”. During the leadership election campaign Griffin used Tony Lecomber, who had served two three-year prison sentences on explosives charges and for assaulting a Jewish teacher, as his hatchet man to circulate the most defamatory personal smears against Tyndall. In September 1999 Griffin was elected chairman.
However Griffin soon let down the hardliners who had backed him and sided with the “modernising” faction led by Lecomber and Eddy Butler, realising that he was more likely to gain political power following their agenda than that of the “neo-nazis”. And for a while all was well.
Under Griffin’s leadership the BNP made an electoral breakthrough to get three members elected to Burnley council in 2002, and went on to win further local elections in the following years. But these gains were largely the result of external factors and Griffin has never managed to deliver the successes he promised his members’ efforts would bring them at each electoral round.
The political baggage he carries with him, not to mention the personal defects which make him resort to violent factionalism at the first sign of a challenge to his authority, limit the extent of progress the BNP can make with him at the helm. Those in the rebel faction have come to understand this, which is why they have moved on from calling for the dismissal of Collett, Hannam and John Walker, the party treasurer, to understanding that the BNP’s real problem is Griffin himself.
Nick Griffin and Holocaust denial
Griffin began flirting with the BNP in 1993, two years after leaving the International Third Position.
John Tyndall, the BNP leader at the time, overcame his initial distaste for Griffin’s activities and began mentioning him favourably in Spearhead.
Griffin finally joined the BNP in 1995 and soon gravitated towards the hardline Croydon branch, which included a number of the party’s most ardent antisemites. Soon afterwards Griffin began to contribute to The Rune, an antisemitic magazine published by Paul Ballard and his comrades. Ballard was a veteran BNP member and sympathiser of the nazi terror group Combat 18.
Griffin became editor of The Rune in 1995. Tyndall had no problem with this and the following year appointed him editor of his own magazine, Spearhead.
The Rune showed Griffin to be a hardliner par excellence. He used the publication to argue forcefully against modernising the BNP, stating that “the electors of Millwall [who voted in the BNP’s first local councillor in 1993] did not back a post modernist rightist party but
what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan ‘Defend Rights for Whites’ with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate.”
As editor of The Rune Griffin plumbed new depths in antisemitic invective. It became a platform for glorifying the British Union of Fascists and Hitler’s SS and for describing the Holocaust as the “holohoax”.
Comments such as these led to his house being raided by the police in 1997 and he and Ballard being hauled before the courts for inciting racial hatred. Ballard pleaded guilty but Griffin chose to contest the charges, inviting a number of “expert” witnesses to testify for him at his trial in 1998 including the noted French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. The effort was in vain. Griffin was found guilty and handed a nine-month prison sentence suspended for two years.
It was during his defence that Griffin made his notorious statement: “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the Earth was flat … I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter-day witch-hysteria.”
Griffin has also attacked the “revisionist” writer David Irving for admitting that some Jews may have been killed during the “holohoax”, accusing him of “back tracking on the old gas chamber lie”.
In 1997 Griffin wrote the pamphlet, Who Are the Mindbenders? an antisemitic tirade against what he saw as Jewish control of the British media, the means by which, Griffin alleged, Jews were trying to brainwash white people into accepting multiculturalism.
The BNP always rejects accusations that Griffin is antisemitic, claiming it was all in the distant past. This is far from the truth. As recently as April 2007 Griffin told a reporter that he did believe in the Holocaust but only because “European law” required him to do so.
‘We’re all on the same side’ – Nick Griffin and Combat 18
Nick Griffin has always distanced himself from the activities of the wannabe nazi terror machine Combat 18 (C18). Indeed shortly after its formation as a BNP stewards group the BNP proscribed the organisation.
However, as Griffin hastily prepared for his trial on charges of inciting racial hatred in 1997, he decided that one of the planks of his defence would be that C18 had produced far worse and had never been prosecuted for it. Needing some documents he asked Steve Cartwright, head of Blood and Honour, to contact Will Browning, leader of C18, telling Cartwright to reassure Browning that he and C18 were on “the same side”.
Browning later sent Griffin a “bumper pack” of C18 material. Griffin phoned Cartwright asking him to pass on his thanks to Browning. As Cartwright recalled, “Griffin was particularly tickled by the name of the parcel sender – Mr Beast, London”.
Nick Griffin’s ideology, the political soldiers
As leader of the BNP Nick Griffin has put in place a system of voting members who are required to undergo ideological training and has been unconcerned at the departure of officers and members unwilling to follow his every command.
But this is not the first time Griffin has chosen to develop a political elite rather than a mass organisation. In 1986 after a series of purges and splits in the National Front, Griffin gained control of one faction and set about turning it into his “political soldiers”, under the influence of Roberto Fiore, a fugitive from justice in Italy who became Griffin’s mentor, friend and business partner.
The group made contact with all sorts of international political mavericks including Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, the US black separatist leader Louis Farrakhan and both sides of the divide in Ireland.[Emphasis mine].
A series of booklets outlined their creed under the slogan “Long Live Death” and a policy that aped Fiore’s terrorist agenda of destabilisation in Italy that had produced the bombings of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Attempts to stir up Welsh nationalists to bomb English second homes in Wales led to protests with placards stating NF = MI5. [Emphasis mine].
Griffin’s NF was far from an ordinary political party. Even some of his own members were worried when they were given advice on resisting police interrogation that experts said was more apposite for political terrorists.
Many of those who fell out with Griffin in those days are now back at Griffin’s side. One of them is Patrick Harrington, who now runs Solidarity, the BNP’s fake trade union. Harrington and Graham Williamson, also involved in Solidarity, lead Third Way, whose political philosophy appears to differ considerably from that of the BNP.
Its website features an equal opportunities statement and it claims to welcome “guest workers … to fill gaps in the country’s infrastructure”.
It seems that Griffin’s desire to build a political elite along the lines of the political soldiers overrides any ideological differences between the BNP and Third Way. Griffin’s obsession with a coming civil war or race war also shows how little his politics have changed in over 20 years.
It is worth remembering that Harrington in an interview for a television exposé of the NF political soldiers [C4: Disciples of Chaos, 1988] refused to condemn IRA bombings and that Griffin, Harrington and Williamson went to Libya to seek funds from a regime that armed both sides in the Northern Ireland conflict.[Emphasis mine].
Griffin is still prepared to work with whomever he thinks can help him get what he wants, the more shadowy they are the better. One of the bones of contention among the rebels is the power Griffin has vested in Lance Stewart, the South African former police officer who heads the
BNP’s “intelligence department”, Arthur Kemp, the former South African spook who edits the BNP’s new website and runs ideological training for the voting members, and Lambertus “Bep” Nieuwhof, a convicted pro-apartheid terrorist who provides internet services to the party.
© Searchlight Magazine 2008
It is right and proper to discriminate on grounds of race
If, as the author of this article, an Israeli Jew, claims, "Israel has every right to give primacy to Jewish immigration", and this is not to be regarded as "racist", then why should not Britain have the right to accord preference to would-be immigrants of British ancestry, without being accused of "racism" by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and assorted ethnic aliens, including Jews.
If Jews believe that it is right and proper for Israel to discriminate, in its immigration policy, in favour of Jews, then they ought also to acknowledge that it is also right and proper for Britain to discriminate in its immigration policy, in favour of would-be immigrants of British descent, and against all other ethnic aliens, including Jews. To disagree would be hypocritical, would it not?
Surely, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander?
Why should there be a double standard here?
The article, from today's Jewish Cronicle, now follows.
Israel's crude and cruel immigration policy
By endorsing the deportation of 400 children, Netanyahu is defending the indefensible
By Dan Kosky, October 7, 2010
Shamefully, the spectre of deportation currently hangs over 400 Israeli-born children of foreign workers. Israel's cabinet decided this summer that, although the children attend Israeli schools and speak Hebrew, because their parents' visas have expired, the children must go.
Misguided as it is, the decision to forcibly remove these children from the only home they have known was actually a governmental concession. Interior Minister Eli Yishai had originally proposed that 1,200 children be expelled. Prime Minister Netanyahu called the compromise a "considered and balanced" resolution. In reality, the ad hoc decision has merely plastered over the cracks in a dilapidated policy. The government's heartless treatment of 400 children has exposed the remarkable absence of any plan to accommodate the needs of foreign workers in general.
Around 27,000 foreigners came to work in Israel last year and the tide shows no sign of slowing. There is every reason to believe that plenty more ambitious Colombians, Ghanaians, Filipinos and others will attempt to forge productive lives in Israel. Yet there is no sign that the government is taking any measure to regulate their arrival, let alone co-ordinate a role for them in society.
Until now, the Jewish state has never countenanced the prospect that non-Jews might want to shape their future in Israel. The concept of immigration since the foundation of the state has understandably been confined to the role of both safe haven and homeland for the Jewish nation. It should be a point of pride for the country's leaders that, 60 years later, tens if not hundreds of thousands of economic migrants are banging on Israel's doors to build better lives for themselves.
Instead, Prime Minister Netanyahu laughably portrayed the 1,200 children originally in question as a threat to the Jewish character of a state of 7.5 million people. Eli Yishai echoed this scaremongering with his warning that the children posed an "existential threat" to Israel.
This irresponsible reaction betrays a worryingly primitive approach to immigration, one that appears to see it as a zero sum game where either all or none are granted entry. Every democratic country regulates immigration. There is no reason why Israel cannot do likewise both to maintain the Jewish character of the state and to grant a place to non-Jews most suited to Israeli life.
Israel has every right to give primacy to Jewish immigration. It is no more problematic for Israel to place would-be Jewish immigrants at the head of the queue than it is for, say, France to prioritise citizenship for those of French descent. At the same time, it is surely possible to create a long-term plan to absorb a number of non-Jews who are eager to work and positively contribute to Israeli society.
Maintaining the culture and heritage of the state while entertaining the aspirations of "outsiders" is a difficult balancing act but, given the migrant history of the Jewish people, of all nations Israel should strive to treat justly the countless workers who continue to flock here from across the globe.
A comprehensive, enlightened policy is long overdue. Israeli-born children must be spared the terrifying prospect of deportation. It is vital that the Jewish state's commitment to humanity and justice is upheld.
Dan Kosky is a writer and communications professional based in Tel Aviv
The Jewish Chronicle
If Jews believe that it is right and proper for Israel to discriminate, in its immigration policy, in favour of Jews, then they ought also to acknowledge that it is also right and proper for Britain to discriminate in its immigration policy, in favour of would-be immigrants of British descent, and against all other ethnic aliens, including Jews. To disagree would be hypocritical, would it not?
Surely, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander?
Why should there be a double standard here?
The article, from today's Jewish Cronicle, now follows.
Israel's crude and cruel immigration policy
By endorsing the deportation of 400 children, Netanyahu is defending the indefensible
By Dan Kosky, October 7, 2010
Shamefully, the spectre of deportation currently hangs over 400 Israeli-born children of foreign workers. Israel's cabinet decided this summer that, although the children attend Israeli schools and speak Hebrew, because their parents' visas have expired, the children must go.
Misguided as it is, the decision to forcibly remove these children from the only home they have known was actually a governmental concession. Interior Minister Eli Yishai had originally proposed that 1,200 children be expelled. Prime Minister Netanyahu called the compromise a "considered and balanced" resolution. In reality, the ad hoc decision has merely plastered over the cracks in a dilapidated policy. The government's heartless treatment of 400 children has exposed the remarkable absence of any plan to accommodate the needs of foreign workers in general.
Around 27,000 foreigners came to work in Israel last year and the tide shows no sign of slowing. There is every reason to believe that plenty more ambitious Colombians, Ghanaians, Filipinos and others will attempt to forge productive lives in Israel. Yet there is no sign that the government is taking any measure to regulate their arrival, let alone co-ordinate a role for them in society.
Until now, the Jewish state has never countenanced the prospect that non-Jews might want to shape their future in Israel. The concept of immigration since the foundation of the state has understandably been confined to the role of both safe haven and homeland for the Jewish nation. It should be a point of pride for the country's leaders that, 60 years later, tens if not hundreds of thousands of economic migrants are banging on Israel's doors to build better lives for themselves.
Instead, Prime Minister Netanyahu laughably portrayed the 1,200 children originally in question as a threat to the Jewish character of a state of 7.5 million people. Eli Yishai echoed this scaremongering with his warning that the children posed an "existential threat" to Israel.
This irresponsible reaction betrays a worryingly primitive approach to immigration, one that appears to see it as a zero sum game where either all or none are granted entry. Every democratic country regulates immigration. There is no reason why Israel cannot do likewise both to maintain the Jewish character of the state and to grant a place to non-Jews most suited to Israeli life.
Israel has every right to give primacy to Jewish immigration. It is no more problematic for Israel to place would-be Jewish immigrants at the head of the queue than it is for, say, France to prioritise citizenship for those of French descent. At the same time, it is surely possible to create a long-term plan to absorb a number of non-Jews who are eager to work and positively contribute to Israeli society.
Maintaining the culture and heritage of the state while entertaining the aspirations of "outsiders" is a difficult balancing act but, given the migrant history of the Jewish people, of all nations Israel should strive to treat justly the countless workers who continue to flock here from across the globe.
A comprehensive, enlightened policy is long overdue. Israeli-born children must be spared the terrifying prospect of deportation. It is vital that the Jewish state's commitment to humanity and justice is upheld.
Dan Kosky is a writer and communications professional based in Tel Aviv
The Jewish Chronicle
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