Category: Non-EU Countries

Racist Terror Targets Romanian migrants

More than 100 Romanians have been forced out of their homes in Belfast by racists.

Around 20 families were helped by police in the Lisburn Road area of the city and taken to a nearby church hall. They have since moved to a leisure centre that has been set up as a temporary shelter.

Police, community representatives, politicians and officials from a range of statutory agencies are to attend an emergency meeting in the city to see what can be done for the families.

The meeting at the Chinese Resource Centre on the city’s Ormeau Road will discuss an action plan aimed at making the families feel safe to stay.

But many of the families have now vowed to leave Northern Ireland for good.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown joined condemnation of the attacks and said: “I hope the authorities are able to take all the action necessary to protect them.”

Police and community leaders had earlier condemned racism in the area which culminated in an attack on a rally in support of the east European migrants.

Youths hurled bottles and made Nazi salutes at those taking part in the anti-racism rally.

The men, women and children, including a five-day-old baby girl, first sought shelter in a house where they thought they would be safe.

But the house was not big enough and a local church offered them the use of the church hall for as long as they need.

Pastor Malcolm Morgan said the church was happy to help. “It is a sad indictment of our society, but hopefully we can show them a different side to Northern Ireland and a caring side to Northern Ireland,” he said.

A Police Service of Northern Ireland spokeswoman said: “Police in the south Belfast area assisted several organisations in the temporary relocation of a number of families following consultation with community representatives.

“Families moved to a near-by church and they are being cared for by the appropriate agencies.”

Belfast Lord Mayor Naomi Long urged the south Belfast community to rally round their neighbours following the spate of racist attacks.

One of the Romanians, a mother of two who is now sheltering at the Ozone centre, said the targeted families were still petrified.

The woman said everyone was now adamant that they wanted to return to Romania.

She said attacks had been intensifying over the last two weeks but culminated in the racist thugs breaking into her house and threatening her and her children.

“We are OK, we are safe here now,” she said in the leisure centre.

“But we want to go home because right now we are not safe here in Northern Ireland. We want to go back home to Romania, everybody right now does.”

She said she wanted to leave Northern Ireland as soon as possible.

“I want to go home because I have here two kids and I want my kids to be safe.”

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ITN

June 17, 2009
RACIST RANTS OF ELECTED BNP MAN, ANDREW BRONS, REVEALED

Jamie Doward, home affairs editor

The Observer, Sunday 14 June 2009

Yorkshire MEP Andrew Brons drew up some of the National Front’s most inflammatory policies

British National party MEP Andrew Brons. Photograph: BNP/PA

One of the British National party’s first MEPs’ attempts to play down his past links to the extreme right as “silly” teenage posturing are today exposed as a sham after it emerged that for many years he played a crucial role in shaping the National Front’s most overtly racist policies.

In 1983, when he was in his late twenties, Andrew Brons edited the National Front’s general election manifesto that called for a global apartheid to prevent the “extinction” of whites everywhere.

The Let Britain Live! manifesto was prepared by the party’s policy department, chaired by Brons. It outlined a series of hugely controversial positions, crystallised in one of its opening statements: “The National Front rejects the whole concept of multiracialism. We recognise inherent racial differences in Man. The races of Man are profoundly unequal in their characteristics, potential and abilities.”

The manifesto claimed the UK had been “swamped” by “racially incompatible Afro-Asians” and that “Black muggings of White people, especially elderly ladies, occurs regularly”.

It continued: “The eruptions in Bristol in 1980 and Brixton in 1981 were just two examples of the ‘cultural enrichment’ promised to us by the multiracialists.” And it claimed: “We believe the gradual dismantlement of the Apartheid system over the last 17 years to be retrograde … The alternative to Apartheid, multiracialism, envisages an extinction of the White man.”

Brons was also an enthusiastic contributor in the 1970s and 1980s to Spearhead, a far-right magazine considered so extreme even the BNP tried to distance itself from it. In two lengthy polemics for the magazine, Brons outlined the supposed importance of nationalism and interpreted genetic studies to suggest Europeans had a “greater cognitive ability” than non-whites. He attacked the influence of “people of Jewish ethnic origin” and peddled the myth that a number of predominantly Zionist organisations were controlling the world.

The now retired college lecturer wrote: “One ethnic, national and religious group whose power and influence has undoubtedly increased has been the Jews. It can be no mere coincidence that the number of people of Jewish ethnic origin to be found in internationalist and multiracialist schools of thought and organisations of action is out of all proportion to their numbers in the population.”

Brons, who was elected as the BNP MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber this month, has tried to distance himself from his National Front days. “People do silly things when they are 17,” he said recently. “Peter Mandelson was once a member of the Young Communist League but we don’t continue to call him a communist.”

But his critics say his relationship with the National Front was more than a youthful dalliance and question the extent to which he has left his past behind. A 1980 edition of National Front News, the party newspaper, carried an article about Brons saying he was prepared to go to jail for his beliefs. It noted that Brons refused a “Negro reporter permission to attend two National Front ticket-only meetings” and explains that Brons, then 29, has “campaigned against Coloured Immigration since he was a teenager” – suggesting his extremist views have been a feature as much of his adult as his teenage life.

Brons seized the NF chairmanship in 1980 when John Tyndall quit to form the BNP. In 1984 Brons was convicted of using insulting behaviour towards an ethnic-minority police officer and left the party, citing family problems.

At the National Front, Brons was a close ally of Richard Verrall, the author of the Holocaust-denial tract Did Six Million Really Die?, who was vice-chairman. In 1981, while Brons was chairman, the NF endorsed We are National Front, a pamphlet carrying an introduction from Verrall. It had photographs of Brons and Verrall as well as a picture of a gorilla and a black man stating: “These two creatures look the same, don’t they?”

Anti-racism and Jewish support groups yesterday described Brons’s failure to condemn his past activities as disturbing. “From a young man until well into his middle age, Andrew Brons was very much involved in a series of viciously antisemitic and racist far-right movements,” said a spokesman for the Community Security Trust, which monitors attacks on the UK’s Jewish community. “It’s hard to believe he has undergone a serious conversion since then.”

Searchlight, the anti-fascist organisation, said Brons was influential in shaping the NF and it was important that those voting for him should be aware of his past views. “The fact that Brons is an intellectual fascist and bigot rather than an ignorant fascist and bigot cuts little ice,” a spokesman said. “We are unimpressed by his claims that his prejudice was a result of youthful exuberance.”

Attempts to contact Brons through the BNP were unsuccessful.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk, June 14th, 2009

June 16, 2009
Killer at Holocaust museum linked to BNP

Man who killed guard at Holocaust museum has links to BNP

• White supremacist injured in Washington gunfight
• Records show 88-year-old was at fundraising events

Matthew Taylor and Daniel Nasaw

F.B.I. investigators examining a bullet-riddled door at the entrance of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, where a gunman entered the building and shot and killed a security guard. New York Times

A white supremacist who killed a security guard at a Holocaust memorial museum in the US has links to the British National party, which gained two MEPs in last week’s European elections.

Thousands of visitors fled the museum in Washington on Wednesday after James von Brunn opened fire, killing a security guard. In the gunfight that followed, the 88-year-old was shot, and is now in a critical condition in hospital.

Yesterday it emerged that Von Brunn, a longtime antisemite, had attended meetings of the American Friends of the British National party (AFBNP), which was set up to raise funds from far-right activists in America.

Mark Cotterill, who ran the US-based organisation before it folded in 2001, said: “He did attend meetings. I have just checked my database and he is down as ‘meetings only’, so he was not a major donor, although he may have put some money on the plate when it was passed round.”

The AFBNP treasurer, Todd Blodgett, also told the Washington Post that he and Von Brunn had attended fundraising meetings in Arlington County. The BNP leader, Nick Griffin, spoke to at least two AFBNP meetings and said the money raised by the organisation made a “significant contribution to the BNP’s [2001] general election campaign”.

Yesterday a spokesman for the party said: “You get a lot of people coming to meetings but I don’t think you can blame us for that. Even if he did go to meetings, it was nothing to do with us.”

However, anti-racism campaigners said Von Brunn’s links to the BNP underlined its extremist agenda. “It is clear that Nick Griffin is at the centre of an international network of white supremacists,” said Dan Hodges, of Searchlight. “The BNP must explain the full extent of his organisation’s links with this antisemitic gunman.”

The far-right party gained its first two MEPs in last week’s European elections – Griffin in the north-west and former National Front leader Andrew Brons in Yorkshire and the Humber.

During the campaign, photographs emerged of Griffin alongside the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Stephen “Don” Black, who was banned from the UK by the then home secretary, Jacqui Smith. He was also criticised for defending a BNP leaflet that said black and Asian Britons should be referred to as “racial foreigners”.

Yesterday Von Brunn was charged with murder and killing in the course of possessing a firearm at a federal facility, both capital offences under US federal law; police said hate crime charges were also possible.

At a press conference in Washington, Cathy Lanier, the Washington police chief, said security guard Stephen Johns was shot when he opened the door of the museum for Von Brunn. Other guards opened fire, and Von Brunn slumped to the ground.

In his car, officers found a notebook with a handwritten note saying, “You want my weapons, this is how you’ll get them. The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews,” according to a court affidavit.

Von Brunn’s .22-calibre rifle held 10 more bullets and investigators found more in his car and at an apartment in nearby Annapolis, Maryland, that he shared with his son and his son’s fiancee.

Joseph Persichini, assistant director of the Washington FBI field office, said Von Brunn was known to the police as an antisemite and a white supremacist, who had a website that espoused hatred against African-Americans, Jews and others.

“We know what Mr Von Brunn did at the Holocaust museum. Now it’s our responsibility to determine why he did it,” said Joseph Persichini, assistant director of the Washington FBI field office. “We have to ask ourselves did all these years of public display of hatred impact his actions.”

A self-described artist, advertising man and author, Von Brunn wrote an anti-semitic treatise, Kill the Best Gentiles, decried “the browning of America” and claimed to expose a Jewish conspiracy “to destroy the White gene-pool”.

In 1983 Von Brunn was convicted of attempting to kidnap members of the US federal reserve board. At the time, police said he had wanted to take the members hostage because of high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties. On the website, Von Brunn blames his six-year imprisonment on “a Jew judge” and “Negro jury”.

Last night civil rights groups said they had been monitoring Von Brunn for decades.

Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s intelligence project, said: “He thinks the Jews control the Federal Reserve, the banking system, that basically all Jews are evil. He’s an extreme antisemite.”

Source: www.guardian.co.uk, 12 June 2009

June 13, 2009
Protesters break up BNP news conference

By Adrian Croft

LONDON (Reuters) – Scores of protesters throwing eggs and shouting “Nazi scum, off our streets” broke up a news conference on Tuesday by the British National Party which has just won its first seats in the European Parliament.

BNP leader Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, who both won European Parliament seats in the north of England in last week’s vote, had just started giving an open-air news conference outside parliament when they were charged by protesters.

They threw eggs which broke on Griffin’s shoulder and at least one protester hit him with the stick of a placard, a Reuters photographer on the scene said.

Chased by the protesters, Griffin and Brons fled in waiting cars. Demonstrators struck the cars with placards, which bore the slogan “Stop the Fascist BNP,” as they accelerated away.

A police spokeswoman said two people had been taken to hospital after the protest, but she had no more information about them or their injuries.

Police were looking into an allegation of assault on a woman at the protest and investigating reports of a road collision linked to the demonstration, she said. No one had been arrested.

Police guarding parliament did not intervene in the protest.

The BNP, which campaigns for a halt to immigration, voluntary repatriation of immigrants and British withdrawal from the European Union, has won local council seats but is not represented in the British parliament.

It is shunned by mainstream parties which regard its policies as racist. But it has gathered support in urban areas among a working class hurt by the worst recession in decades and competing for jobs and services with immigrants.

It won more than 940,000 votes in last week’s European elections, enough to give it its first two deputies under a proportional representation system.

Griffin said the protesters were a “mob for hire” that included supporters of the Labour Party.

“This is a mob of students, lecturers, probably a few civil service parasites … and hardcore activists and supporters primarily of the Labour Party,” he told the BBC.

An official of Unite Against Fascism, set up in response to what it sees as the rising threat from the extreme right in Britain and which organised the protest, was unrepentant.

“I say to all those people that voted for them: They voted for the wrong thing. They voted for civil war, destruction and conflict in communities and surely that is a terrible thing to happen,” Weyman Bennett, the group’s national secretary, told reporters.

The BNP was helped in last week’s election by a low turnout and protest voting after the major parties were tarred by a scandal over politicians’ perks.

(Additional reporting by Stephen Hird; writing by Keith Weir; editing by Richard Balmforth)

Reuters

June 10, 2009
US intelligence rivalry flares over British connection

John Stokes

The CIA station in London is at the center of a bitter fight between different branches of the US intelligence community in Washington DC.

For years, the CIA has had the right to appoint the station chief who runs US intelligence operations in London and liaises with MI6 and GCHQ. Now, the National Security Agency is arguing that they and not the CIA should run intelligence operations in the UK because they have more people on the ground and the work they do has far greater value to both countries.

NSA have found useful allies in both Admiral Denny Blair, the Director of National Intelligence and General Jim Jones, the National Security Adviser who have been very receptive to the argument that intelligence form should follow function and reflect the realities of the 21st century.

Last month, Blair wrote a memo to US intelligence chiefs saying that in future the DNI would appoint Heads of Stations overseas. It was a clear directive from the man who runs all US intelligence and is appointed by the President and Congress to do so. However, Leon Panetta, who heads the CIA and is the former Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton, wrote his own letter to top CIA officials saying they could disregard Blair’s note.

Panetta is a famous Washington bruiser and is well known for his take no prisoners style but such a confrontation has infuriated Blair who sees it as a direct challenge to his authority and battle has been joined. For once, Panetta may have misjudged the political winds as Congress is pushing hard for real intelligence reform and the CIA has fewer friends and less influence on Capitol Hill these days.

It is no coincidence that those pushing for change in the Obama administration have a military background and that the NSA is run by one of their own, General Keith Alexander. It’s also true that for decades NSA has chafed under CIA’s apparent seniority and the two agencies have been arch rivals for generations. As recently as the Bush administration a major joint operation between CIA and NSA which all involved agreed was vital to the future of US security was stopped after a senior CIA official refused to implement the project which he thought gave unnecessary influence to NSA.

The information revolution has placed further strains on the relationship. Twenty years ago, there was a clearer division of labour with NSA intercepting data on the move (email, faxes, phone calls) while the CIA targeted data at rest (documents, burglaring buildings). But recently the CIA has made a major push into the data gathering business arguing that the ones and zeros of the computer age are data and thus are fair game whether at rest or on the move.

There are thousands of Americans based in Britain who work for NSA and work closely with GCHQ. By comparison, the CIA station, based in the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, is important but a mere shadow of the NSA’s presence. Reality on the ground suggests that NSA will win this fight.

Spectator

10th June 2009

June 10, 2009
BNP success ‘damaging’ to Britain

The UK’s international reputation has suffered “real damage” as a result of the British National Party gaining their first seats in the European Parliament, politicians, unions and race relations groups said.

Labour MEP for London Claude Moraes said that a threshold had been crossed after the far-right party won two seats.

BNP leader Nick Griffin picked up the seat in the North West of England region and Andrew Brons won a seat in the Yorkshire and Humber region.

Peter Hain, the newly-appointed Welsh Secretary, released a statement via United Against Fascism which read: “It’s a shameful stain on Britain that we now have racists and fascists representing our country.

“It is vital that everyone now isolates and confronts the BNP and works with United Against Fascism to defeat them.”

At a Unite Against Fascism press conference in Westminster, Mr Moraes went on to acknowledge that the BNP had “jumped upon” Gordon Brown’s slogan “British jobs for British workers” during the election.

He explained: “That phrase was jumped upon by the BNP, they are trying increasingly to look at what mainstream politicians say to embarrass the politicians as a way of getting support.

He added: “There is real damage here to Britain because we have never elected fascists in a national election. Fascists in the European Parliament where I sit have long wanted members from Britain to join this transnational group so for those reasons there is deep concern that we have now crossed that threshold.”

He said that many people would be viewing Britain as a “nastier” place than they had prior to the election. The BNP wins came as the party appeared to attract significant numbers of disaffected Labour voters.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people voiced their anger at the election of the two BNP members to the European Parliament. Simultaneous protests took place in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Preston and York in the wake of the far-right party’s propulsion up the political ladder.

Press Association

June 9, 2009