By Erica Morris
A British National Party candidate for today’s European election aroused further controversy last week, after a video clip surfaced on YouTube showing her calling “dentistry and plastic surgery” positive outcomes of the Holocaust.
Marlene Guest from Sheffield made the comments during a television interview for Sky One in January of last year, during which she also minimised the number of Jews murdered in the Nazi death camps.
She said: “Now Nick Griffin queried numbers… I’ve read a thing called Did 6 Million Jews Really Die?… If they’d have kept the crematorium going in this little camp for 24/7 for 50 years they still couldn’t have burnt that amount of bodies.”
Guest is standing for the far-right party as its South Yorkshire candidate, acting as the local organiser for the BNP in that area, and has stood as a councillor for the party in five different elections but has never been elected.
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust said: “These comments are pure racism and an insult to the millions who died and survived the Nazi death camps. I encourage people to go out and vote next week and prevent those who espouse racist views from being elected.”
Sheffield Jewish figures Sir Irvine Patnick, former Hallam MP and current vice president of the Orthodox Synagogue, and John Speyer, chair of the Reform Synagogue, said in an open letter: “In a normal democratic party, a candidate who quoted such material would surely be expelled.
“We think the electorate should understand that this party remains a fascist organisation, in the tradition of Oswald Mosley.”
The letter, signed by Jewish residents from across Yorkshire, added: “We believe a party which is so comfortable with neo-Nazi material and denial of the truth of the Holocaust, which decimated Jewish families and communities, is not fit to represent the people of Yorkshire.
“We call on everyone to go out and vote. A high turnout will ensure the BNP’s message of division and hate is rejected.”
Gordon Brown also lent his backing to the anti-BNP campaign, urging Britons to get out and vote to ensure the party is blocked from gaining seats in the European Parliament.
In a letter in The Guardian on Monday, the Prime Minister was joined by sports and entertainment stars including Little Britain’s Matt Lucas and Manchester United defender Gary Neville urging voters to show up en masse and send a clear message rejecting the BNP, who are fielding dozens of candidates in today’s election.
The letter, which is also signed by Shoah survivor Ben Helfgott, says: “The British National Party and its allies are a threat to everything that makes us proud of this country we love. The BNP is working hard to conceal its extremism because it knows that people in Britain totally reject the politics of racism and hatred.”
Meanwhile, French comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala has found a spot on today’s ballot, drawing on anti-Zionist narrative for his campaign which aims at “wiping out Zionism” and condemns “the pro-Israeli lobby and the tyranny of neo-Liberalism”.
Calling for the comic’s party to be banned from standing, France’s National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism said images of a crossed out Israeli flag over a map of France “constitute an insult and a threat to oust Jews from their country”.
Source: www.totallyjewish.com, 4 June 2009
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