Tag: Holocaust Denial

Turkey protests Swiss probe against minister

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkey on Monday summoned the Swiss ambassador to protest his country’s probe of a Turkish official who is alleged to have denied that Armenians endured a genocide.

Swiss laws criminalizes denying genocide, but Turkey insists there was no systematic campaign in the 1915 killings of 1.5 Armenians by Ottoman Turks.

Turkey’s chief European Union negotiator Egemen Bagis was alleged to have said in Switzerland, “There is no Armenian genocide. Let them come and arrest me.”

A Turkish Foreign Ministry official, speaking anonymously due to government rules, said Swiss Ambassador Raimund Kunz was told Monday the probe was “unacceptable.”

Zurich prosecutor Christine Braunschweig confirmed officials have opened a preliminary investigation into the allegations.

Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag on Monday called the probe “ridiculous.”

“Bagis expressed his view in a country which apparently has no tolerance for freedom of expression,” he said.

Turkey itself is under intense pressure from the European Union to increase freedom of speech and stop prosecuting writers, intellectuals and journalists for expressing their views.

In Turkey, the killing of Armenians is an extremely sensitive issue. Some people, including Nobel Prize winning writer Orhan Pamuk, have been prosecuted for statements on the massacres of Armenians, but charges of insulting Turkey were dropped.

In 2008, a Swiss court convicted three Turkish men of racism for denying the deaths amounted to genocide. The men have been fined but received no jail sentences.

Most historians contend that the killings as the Ottoman Empire broke up was the 20th century’s first genocide, and several European countries recognize the massacres as such.

But Turkey maintains there was no systematic campaign to kill Armenians and that many Turks also died during the chaotic disintegration of the empire. It also says that death toll is inflated.

Turkey’s relations with France have already been strained over a bill that also criminalizes denial that the killings constituted genocide. France’s Constitutional Council has been asked late January to determine whether that bill violates the constitution.

Turkey suspended military and economic cooperation after the French lower house approval of the measure in December. The Senate gave it the green light in late January.

President Nicolas Sarkozy — who personally backed the bill — must sign the legislation for it to become law.

___

Frank Jordans in Geneva contributed.

via Turkey protests Swiss probe against minister.

February 7, 2012
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
BNP wins two seats in Europe

[1]

LONDON (AFP) — The British National Party on Monday won its first seats in the European Parliament, in a major breakthrough for a party reviled by mainstream politicians for its anti-immigration stance.

Party chairman Nick Griffin was elected an MEP in the northwest of England region with eight percent of the vote, hours after Andrew Brons won the BNP’s first ever European seat in the nearby Yorkshire and the Humber region.

Griffin had earlier hailed Brons’ win — with almost 10 percent of the vote — as “a huge breakthrough” for his party, and used the victory to reiterate his party’s anti-immigration and anti-Islam stance.

He denied his party was racist, but said: “We do say this country is full up. The key thing is to shut the door.”

Griffin told Sky News television: “This is a Christian country and Islam is not welcome, because Islam and Christianity, Islam and democracy, Islam and women’s rights do not mix.

“That’s a simple fact that the elites of Europe are going to have to get their heads round and deal with over the next few years.”

The result is a vindication of efforts by Griffin, who was educated at the prestigious Cambridge University, to recast the party since taking over in 1999, emphasising its grassroots activism over extreme-right ideology.

Amid concerns about soaring unemployment and a deep recession and in particular the demise of the country’s manufacturing base, the BNP has pledged British jobs for British workers.

It is opposed to European integration and wants to pull Britain out of the European Union and halt all immigration to the country.

In recent weeks it has also capitalised on public anger over the row over lawmakers’ expenses, which has severely damaged the reputation of parliament and the mainstream Labour and Conservative parties.

Health minister Andrew Burnham described the BNP’s first MEP victory as a “sad moment“, and following Griffin’s success in the northwest, local Labour MP Tony Lloyd said he was ashamed at how some people had voted.

“I am genuinely not just disappointed, I think it is a matter of shame, this country has a deserved reputation for a tolerant society,” said Lloyd, the Labour MP for Manchester Central.

“Their (the BNP) vision for Britain is a nightmare for Britain. I think many people will wake up with some sense of shame.”

Government ministers and the Conservative party had sought to remind voters of the BNP’s policies, which include calls for the immediate halt to all immigration to Britain and the “voluntary resettlement” of all immigrants.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.

Source: www.google.com, 08.06.2009

[2]

Sarkozy: “Islamization is Inevitable”

From the desk of Tiberge on Sat, 2009-06-06 18:36

There is nothing new here. We knew what Sarkozy’s vision of the future was: an “Islam of France”, “métissage” between races and ethnic groups, dissolution of nationalist, regional, and ethnic identities, subjugation to Brussels, openness to socialism, and a Turkey as closely aligned with Europe as possible, etc…

But it’s always sobering to hear it again, from one who knows Sarkozy personally. Philippe de Villiers was interviewed by the weekly Famille Chrétienne. The Catholic blogLe Salon Beige relates part of the interview:

– Why are you so focused on the theme of Turkey and Islamization?

– Quite simply because we will see the first transformations of churches into mosques in the coming three years. At any rate, that is what Nicolas Sarkozy told me.

– When?

– I had an in depth discussion with him at Elysée at the end of last year. He said to me: “You have intuition, I have the figures. And your intuition is confirmed by my figures. The Islamization of Europe is inevitable.” Careful: it’s a process that will not occur overnight, but will take decades.

– Why does this issue appear to be of central importance to you?

– Most politicians have a comforting ignorance of what Islam is and propose transforming Europe into a supermarket of competing religions. Unaware that Islam is not only a religion since, by melding the temporal and the spiritual, it imposes a law. But behind this comforting ignorance of politicians, there are those who know. (…) The reality is that we are headed for a criss-cross [chassé-croisé] with, on one side, Europe and its en masse abortions, its promotion of gay marriage, and on the other, immigration en masse (…)

“Chassé-croisé” is virtually impossible to translate. Originally a choreographic term, it usually refers to a crowded movement in one direction that passes but never encounters a crowded movement in another direction. Sometimes it is just kept as is in English.

– Aren’t you exaggerating the dimensions of the phenomenon?

– No. The crux of the issue is simple: Europe is refusing its own demographic future. And it is working with a fearsome weapon towards this end, written into the Charter of fundamental rights appended to the treaty of Lisbon: the promotion of gay marriage. This in turn is accomplished through the principle of non-discrimination and the disassociation of marriage from the sex of the spouses (which appears in article 7 of the Charter of fundamental rights). In reality, there are two weapons being used by European leaders to kill Europe demographically: the promotion of gay marriage and en masse abortions. And a third: the recourse to immigration that is 80% Islamic in order to replace the people who are no longer there (…)

As usual there are LSB readers who question Villiers’ sincerity and motives. But this time, there are also many who applaud his courage. He is certainly putting more muscle into his words on the eve of the election.

A spokesman for Elysée protested saying: “Philippe de Villiers is not the spokesman for Elysée. He makes multiple declarations on this topic, declarations that obviously need to be regarded with caution.”

Source: www.brusselsjournal.com, 06-06-2009

June 8, 2009