Griffin and Barnes on Israel

While much of the neo-Nazi fringe remains opposed to the existence of Israel, the whites-only British National Party recently declared its full-throated support for Israel's attack on Gaza. The shelling of Gaza City by Israeli forces has brought joy to the heart of BNP head of legal affairs Lee Barnes: "This sort of 'disinfecting' process whereby Israel is required to sterilise areas of radical Islamist support ... is what all nations have to do in order to eradicate Islamist cells who have managed to take over territory either within or on the edges of their borders," Barnes wrote on his blog on January 4. He continued, "Get used to the casualties - for without them any nation so infected with Islamism will surrender, rot away into liberal apathy and then dies as it is taken over."

Nick Griffin, the BNP's Cambridge-educated, media-friendly chairman, echoed Barnes' comments in an essay called "Israel's Gaza affair:" "The Israelis will NEVER get unbiased reporting on the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation, despite being the only civilised country in the region & fighting for their very existance [sic]," Griffin proclaimed. "It is NOT our place to get involved but you aren't the only one to be 100% behind them, they are an example to us all because the only thing the Islamic Terrorists understand is FORCE."

Griffin's endorsement of Israel's attack on Gaza marks the latest phase in his attempted transformation of the BNP from an anti-Semitic horde of football hooligans into a viable right-wing alternative to the Conservative Party. Once an open denier of the Holocaust, Griffin published a pamphlet in 1997 called "Who Are The Mind Benders?" that claimed Jews had conspired to brainwash the British people by dominating the media. He immediately received a two year suspended sentence for inciting racial hatred.

After seizing control of the BNP's chairmanship in 1999, Griffin realized his neo-Nazi tactics had failed. He shifted strategies, adopting a platform that closely mirrored that of Jean Marie Le Pen's then-incipient Front National in France. Griffin savaged the government for its supposedly soft handling of pedophiles, bashed homosexuals (despite claims by former far-right activist Martin Webster to have engaged in a secret gay tryst with Griffin), and called for the dismantling of multiculturalism.

With Muslims immigrating to Britain in increasing numbers, Griffin assailed Islam in 2004 as a "vicious, wicked faith," and claimed the "Islamification" of his country was a form of rape. Islamophobia thus became the foundation of Griffin's new strategic thrust.
In a 2007 essay, Griffin revealed the cynical motives behind his replacement of the BNP's anti-Semitism with Muslim bashing: "It stands to reason that adopting an 'Islamophobic' position that appeals to large numbers of ordinary people - including un-nudged journalists - is going to produce on average much better media coverage than siding with Iran and banging on about 'Jewish power', which is guaranteed to raise hackles of virtually every single journalist in the western world."

During the spring of 2008, the BNP campaigned through Jewish areas in London, blanketing neighborhoods with leaflets juxtaposing fearsome images of radical Muslims with a smiling headshot of Pat Richardson, the BNP's only Jewish councillor. "I'm in the BNP because no one else speaks out against the Islamification of our country," Richardson declared.

Ruth Smeed of the Board of Deputies of British Jews observed with astonishment, "The BNP website is now one of the most Zionist on the web - it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel and at the same time demonises Islam and the Muslim world." However, Smeed and a wide array of Jewish organizations in Britain were not fooled by Griffin's new philosemitic patina. They rejected his play for their votes and urged their constituents to do the same.

But while Britain's Jewish community has largely rebuked the BNP's cynical machinations, it is unclear where Israel stands on its support for the Gaza invasion. Will the Israeli government publicly denounce the BNP's support, or silently accept it in the face of mounting pressure from European governments to accept a cease fire?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/neo-nazis-for-israel_b_156497.html

Israeli troops kill U.N. truck driver at Gaza crossing

JERUSALEM — Israeli soldiers opened fire Thursday on a truck attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the beleaguered Gaza Strip, killing one United Nations-contracted driver and seriously wounding another, U.N. officials said.

The shooting occurred at the Erez checkpoint, the main entrance used by relief agencies to funnel badly needed food and medical supplies into Gaza, where Israel is waging a devastating, 13-day-long military campaign against the militant Islamic group Hamas.

U.N. officials said that they had contracted the truck to deliver supplies into Gaza, and that the Israeli military had approved the delivery. But Israeli ground troops, which control the Erez checkpoint, fired on the truck. It wasn’t clear what caused the Israeli soldiers to open fire, and Israeli military officials weren't immediately available for comment.

Relief officials said that as a result of the shooting, Israel closed the Erez checkpoint. It was unclear whether any relief trucks would be allowed to enter Gaza on Thursday, despite what humanitarian agencies describe as a worsening humanitarian crisis.

"It's a tragic example of how impossible it’s becoming to deliver assistance here," John Ging, the top U.N. refugee official in Gaza, told the Al Jazeera television network. "We cannot continue in these circumstances where aid workers…are being killed and injured, even when they are in direct coordination with the Israeli liaison people, who are supposed to ensure their safety."
It was at least the second time in recent days that Palestinian relief workers contracted by the U.N. had been killed. On Monday, Israeli shells landed near the parking lot of a Palestinian company contracted by the U.N. World Food Program to deliver food supplies in Gaza. Two employees were killed and three severely wounded, according to WFP spokeswomen Barbara Conte, who said that the relief workers were not the target of the Israeli strike.
Nearly 700 Palestinians have died in Gaza since the conflict began, including a rapidly rising number of women and children, and nearly 3,000 have been wounded, according to Gaza health officials.

Israel planned to observe another three-hour pause in fighting Thursday afternoon to allow besieged Gaza residents — most of whom are running out of food and have had their water and electricity sources cut off due to the fighting — to emerge from their homes and collect food, cooking gas, blankets and other supplies.

But in the hours before the pause, Israeli forces continued to pound the narrow coastal territory, bombarding approximately 60 targets overnight including the homes of two leading Hamas militants.

An Israeli soldier was killed and another lightly wounded when militants fired on their brigade with an anti-tank missile during a firefight Thursday morning in central Gaza. The death marked the seventh military fatality since Israel sent ground forces into Gaza five days ago.
Also Thursday, a burst of rockets from southern Lebanon landed in northern Israel, but the Israeli military said it did not consider the attack a sign that the war in Gaza could expand.
At least three rockets landed near the Israeli town of Nahariya — one of them lightly injuring two women in a nursing home — and the Israeli military fired a volley of artillery shells back across the border in response.

The Israeli military downplayed the incident, calling it "an isolated event."
"We don’t expect there to be more" rocket fire from Lebanon, Major Avital Leibovich said.
No Lebanese group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Hezbollah, which fought a war with Israel in 2006 during which it lobbed more than 3,000 Russian-made Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, has condemned the war on Hamas but so far stayed on the sidelines of the conflict. Smaller pro-Palestinian militant groups in Lebanon also possess rockets.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/59250.html

“Israel’s Gaza Affair” by BNP Leader Nick Griffin

We have said nothing, quite simply, because it’s nothing to do with Britain, and therefore nothing to do with the British National Party. That is the simple answer to the number of newer readers who have emailed recently to ask why this website has said nothing about the current number one international news topic - Israel’s targeted but massive air and ground response to indiscriminate but relatively feeble Hamas missile strikes on Israeli civilians.
The fighting in Gaza is not a proper concern for a British political party - especially at a time when the Bankers’ Bust threatens the livelihoods of millions and what little remains of the social cohesion of our own country. One of the core tenets of our nationalist philosophy is that Britain should keep completely out of other people’s quarrels and wars unless there are clear issues of our own national interest to give us the right, and our government the duty, to interfere.
Beyond that, as nationalists and not imperialists, we recognise the right of every other people under the sun to seek to secure self-determination on a patch of earth that is their historic and spiritual homeland, and the duty of every government of such a nation-state to protect its citizens from terrorism or oppression.
That includes both the Israelis and the Palestinians, but while we instinctively would suggest that a land-for-peace, two-state solution is the most likely way to square their very differing ambitions, in the end it is entirely up to them whether they make peace or continue fighting from now until Judgement Day. It really isn’t any of our business.
A superficially logical argument has been made by several of our readers to the effect that the endless television coverage of dead or injured Palestinian children (the anti-Israeli bias of the leftist BBC is particularly marked) will inflame Islamist extremists against not only Israel but also against other Western states, including the UK and our soldiers currently stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The reality, however, is not only that our troops should not be there in any case (and never should have been, for thy are two patches of howling desert that have nothing to do with Britain) but that Islamist ‘extremists’ need no ‘inflaming’. The massively influential Wahhabi and Deobandi sects behind most Sunni ‘extremism’ were alive and kicking, against the West in general and Britain in particular, decades or indeed a century before the state of Israel came into existence.
Indeed, the destruction of Israel (which is the generally stated aim of all the far-left and Muslim demonstrators screaming and on occasion rioting outside the Israeli Embassy in London, and the generally unstated aim of the far smaller number of neo-Nazi cranks siding with them on the Internet) would most definitely not placate a single hardline Muslim.
One of the fundamental lessons of the West’s long and at times desperate defence against Islam’s institutionalised aggression, sexual predation and imperialism, is that every victory for Islamic fighters reinforces the hysterical certainty in the word of the Prophet and in Islam’s self-proclaimed destiny to conquer the entire world.
The destruction of Israel would not send Islam back into a peaceful slumber, but would merely inspire and radicalise a whole new generation of Jihadist fanatics with the idea that the hour of their final triumph against the ‘Crusaders’ had been signalled by the collapse of the latter’s ‘Zionist outpost’ on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. This would lead as a direct and immediate consequence to:
1) Renewed acts of ethno-religious cleansing against the non-Muslim remnants of the earlier populations of the Dar al Islam (lands which have already submitted to Allah);
2) A fresh confidence in the plan to re-partition India and establish a contiguous ‘Moghulstan’ taking in Pakistan, the Kashmir, huge swathes of northern India and Bangladesh;
3) A stepping up of the pressure through demographics and violence to reconquer further swathes of the Balkans and the southern edges of Russia;
4) Even more strenuous efforts to hasten the conquest - by demography, immigration, conversion, subversion and, when the time is right, force - of Western Europe and, a generation or so later, North America.
While Israel’s no-holds barred self-defence undoubtedly gives Islamist recruiters good material with which to radicalise some of their less motivated brethren, Israel’s extinction would provide them with even stronger arguments in favour of Jihad. The most elementary study of their rhetoric shows that they do not regard Israel as the great enemy, merely as the catspaw of Christendom. They may be right or they may be wrong, but that is what they believe; the destruction of Israel would therefore make them even bolder and more aggressive. Thus while we would oppose any move to entangle Britain in war on behalf of Israel, it is in our clear national interest that it should survive.
Whether that survival is made any more or less likely by responding on such a scale to the cynical provocations by Hamas is another matter, but that judgement is for Israelis to make at the ballot box, and not for us.
Westerners should concentrate on the key matter that concerns us. Our people must understand that Islam is not a mutated version of Christianity with a pacifist core in which the Meek will inherit the earth; it’s a creed of War and the Sword. It is inflamed by victory, and encouraged by successive advances. Once they start fighting, the only thing its followers understand is defeat. The centuries in which Islam has slumbered have all followed massive defeats which shattered the conceit that its date with Destiny and world domination was just around the corner.
Tours, Lepanto, Vienna, and even in its lesser way Omdurman, all show that Islam defeated is Islam tamed. The burning of the ancient Library of Alexandria, the obliteration of Christian North Africa, the Islamist genocides in India, the destruction of Byzantium, the repeated rape of the Balkans, the ceaseless efforts to take Europe - all show that when Islam takes a foot it wants a hundred miles.
That is the nature of the great Beast of our times. It can be defeated and put back to sleep. Its modern prestige and especially the power of the Sunni and Shi-ite fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and Iran is based on one thing. It certainly isn’t military prowess, as the American, British and Israeli machines have all shown over and over again. Nor is it about guerrilla warfare successes of the kind seen in Afghanistan and Lebanon, which may yet emerge in Gaza.
The real motor of Jihad is oil money. The move to a post-oil world will be difficult even for the West, but once it is properly underway the resulting crash in the income of the fundamentalist paymasters of Islamic expansionism and terror will force them to stop worrying about conquering the world and to concentrate on looking after their own people or risk ending up riddled with bullets.
It can’t happen too soon, and developing the technologies and economic model needed to wean ourselves off oil, and the perpetual growth superstition it has fostered, is the very best way to deal with the instability of a Middle East that should have nothing to do with us. In the meantime, we will go back to ignoring Gaza and concentrate on the things that matter to our people.

Israel mounts PR campaign to blame Hamas for Gaza destruction

Israel has mounted a public relations campaign to convince international hearts and minds that Hamas is to blame for the death and destruction they are seeing on their television screens.

Stung by the wave of international criticism earlier this year when Israel invaded Gaza to stop militants firing rockets, in an operation dwarfed by its current attack, Israel decided to go on the offensive.

"In the past our prime minister received phone calls from high-ranking officials and politicians. When he said, 'Surely you understand about the rocket fire', they said, 'What are you talking about?'" foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said.

So, while the military marshalled its forces, the foreign ministry honed its message and amassed its staff, ready for Saturday's attack.

Israeli diplomats were recalled from holidays and ordered back to work and in the rocket-bombarded southern Israeli town of Sderot, on Gaza's northern perimeter, it opened a multilingual media centre to brief foreign journalists.

Then when the time came, the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, reportedly picked up the phone, dialing Britain's foreign secretary, David Miliband, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana along with the foreign ministers of Russia, China, France and Germany.

Yesterday she also briefed two buses of up to 80 international representatives and dignitaries in the Sderot media centre.

"We thought it was essential to show the context in which Israel's decisions are being made and that there is a sequence of events," Palmor said.

For Israel, the chain of events leading up to this attack begins not with its occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967, which is the Palestinian view.

Instead it begins three years ago with its decision to withdraw its military barracks and civilian settlements from inside Gaza.

"We could start in 1948 [with the partitioning of historical Palestine to create Israel] but if we want to limit ourselves to the current situation, I would begin with the pull-out of 2005," Palmor said.

Palestinian militants claimed the evacuation was a victory due to their rocket-launching campaign and continued firing rockets on to Israeli southern towns.

Having built a wall around Gaza before disengagement, Israel then imposed a progressively tighter blockade, by barring Gazan labourers from entering Israel in late 2005, then by banning Gazan commercial trade in 2006 and finally in mid-2007 by squeezing humanitarian aid.

Asked whether the campaign was working, Palmor said it was too early to tell.
Still, as the attack was beginning yesterday on , the message, whether due to Israel's campaign or not, was being publicly repeated around the world.

Rice blamed Hamas "for breaking the cease-fire and for the renewal of violence" while the Palestinian Authorityís President, Mahmoud Abbas, said the attack could have been avoided.

"We have warned of this grave danger and said that we should remove all the pretexts used by Israel," Abbas said yesterday as the attack on Gaza continued.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/28/israel-gaza-hamas