Tag: The Far Right

“[Muslims] eat each other alive, like the dogs that they are…”

Surfing rabbi tells EDL demo ‘We shall prevail’

By Jessica Elgot and Jennifer Lipman

Rabbi Shifren addresses the EDL demonstration (photo: John Rifkin)

Around 300 members of the far right organisation the English Defence League (EDL) were joined by a US Rabbi associated with the Tea Party at a demonstration “to oppose Islamic fascism”.

Speaking outside the Israeli embassy in London, Rabbi Nachum Shifren stressed he was not here to represent the Tea Party but came as someone “who loves freedom”.

Rabbi Shifren, who is standing for the California state senate, said: “To all my Jewish brothers who have called me a Nazi…I say to them they don’t have the guts to stand up here and take care of business.”

The so-called surfing rabbi said the EDL were the only group in England with moral courage and that politicians would not admit that “because of the Arab petrol dollars.”

Rabbi Shifren with EDL members (photo: John Rifkin)

Rabbi Shifren added that Muslims “eat each other alive, like the dogs that they are.”

He said: “We shall prevail, we will not let them take over our countries. We will never surrender to the sword of Islam.”

Shaking his fist in the direction of the Israeli embassy, he shouted slogans in Hebrew, telling the crowd: “You won’t understand what I’m about to say but you will feel my meaning.”

Police surrounded the crowd, who were shouting chants about Allah. A man claiming to be Tommy Robinson, the EDL’s founder and leader, denied that the EDL was a violent organisation.

But he told the JC: “I will protect myself against anyone and I will stand up to anyone and that’s what you’re seeing.

“It will be lads, you will see lads who are not prepared to back down.”

Although the demonstration was ostensibly to show support for Israel, he said he was there to take on militant Islam.

He said: “This isn’t Mickey Mouse, it’s militant Islam. We’re opposing a fascist murdering ideology.”

Mr Robinson, a carpenter from Luton, said that the counter-demonstrators had been “paid to come by this government” and that critics of the EDL “listen to the propaganda.”

Later in the afternoon, the speech of Roberta Moore, leader of the Jewish division of the EDL, was interrupted by an anti-fascist demonstrator who threw water over the public address system.

Hordes of EDL supporters broke ranks to chase the man down Kensington High Street, followed by police. Ms Moore said: “Someone is trying to silence us, so that means our message is sticking.”

After a brief tussle with some anti-fascist demonstrators, several EDL members were searched by police but no arrests were made.

Down the high street around 30 people, from organisations including Unite Against Fascism, Jewdas, and Jews for Justice for Palestinians, as well as two strictly orthodox anti-Zionists, gathered for a counter-demonstration.

Siobhan Schwartzberg, a student from East London and a member of the Socialist Workers Party was one of the organisers. She described the EDL as an Islamophobic and racist organisation and said the demonstration was a marking stone for the group.

“The EDL invited Rabbi Shifren….to use minorities to get at other minorities. We want to say you do not speak for us, you are not a voice for us.”

“This pretence that they are a voice of Jewish people – they want to say that they are an acceptable organisation and they are not.

“They want to be seen to be making clear bigger political ties that don’t exist.”

Yossi Bartal, an Israeli student living in Brighton, added: “It is very important to make clear that there are many Jews and Israelis against the connection they are trying to make.

“The EDL tries to adopt liberal language, but invite Rabbi Shifren, who wants a religious state. It’s funny that this is the one Jew thy have found that will support them.

“They are fascists and not speaking in our name.”

Stephen Shashoua, director of the Three Faiths Forum, said: “The EDL are always trying to divide communities and this as a really low way to do it.

“What we have to seize is Jews, Muslims and others getting together to fight it, either on the streets, in the papers, and across the board, because this is the society we want together, and they don’t represent anything like that.”

, October 25, 2010

Rabbi Shifren’s speech at the EDL demonstration

“From the minute I set foot in this country I’ve had nothing but abuse and I tell you now, I welcome every single bit of it.

To all my Jewish brothers who have called me a Nazi, and have asked why I’m poking my nose into England’s business, I say to them they don’t have the guts to stand up here and take care of business…

“There is only one group in England with moral courage. I wish just one politician had the back bone to stand up and agree, but they’ll never do that because of the Arab petrol dollars…

“In those so-called freedom centres, they plot to destroy and kill us. We’re still waiting for the Muslims to make peace with each other. They eat each other alive, like the dogs that they are…

“I’m looking at this crowd of people here in the UK, and I can see Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and yes, even Jews too. We wanted to say to all those liberals who preach multiculturalism why don’t you go to Saudi Arabia and start there…

“I will not stand by and watch the destruction of both of our countries from within…

History will be recorded that on this day, read by our children for eternity, one group lit the spark to liberate us from the oppressors of our two governments and the leftist, fifth column, quisling press, and that it was the EDL which started the liberation of England from evil…

“Today is the first day of the rest of your lives. We shall prevail, we will not let them take over our countries. We will never surrender to the sword of Islam…“

, October 25, 2010

October 30, 2010
Police fear far-right terror attack

• Extremists want to stoke race tensions, officer warns
• Counter-terrorism unit diverting resources to threat
• No specific intelligence of planned strike, sources say

Vikram Dodd

Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command fears that right-wing extremists will stage a deadly terrorist attack in Britain to try to stoke racial tensions, the Guardian has learned.

Senior officers say it will be a “spectacular” that is designed to kill. The counter-terrorism unit has redeployed officers to increase its monitoring of the extreme right’s potential to stage attacks.

Commander Shaun Sawyer told a meeting of British Muslims concerned about the danger to their communities that police were responding to the growing threat.

Sawyer said of the far right: “I fear that they will have a spectacular… they will carry out an attack that will lead to a loss of life or injury to a community somewhere. They’re not choosy about which community.”

He said the aim would be to cause a “breakdown in community cohesion”.

Sawyer revealed that the Met commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, had asked the counter-terrorism command, SO15, to examine what the economic downturn would mean for far-right violence. The assessment concluded that the recession would increase the possibility of it.

Sawyer told the meeting last Wednesday that more of his officers needed to be deployed to try to thwart neo-Nazi-inspired violence. He said the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaida remained the unit’s priority, but said of its far-right section: “It is a small desk … we need to grow that unit.” Sources have told the Guardian that while they believe the neo-Nazi terrorist threat has grown, they have no specific intelligence of an attack.

“There is an increased possibility of violence from the far right. There is a trend,” said one senior source, adding that the ideology of the violent right was driven by “people who don’t like immigration, people who don’t like Islam. We’re seeing a resurgence of anti-semitism as well.”

The meeting at which Sawyer spoke was staged by the Muslim Safety Forum, whose chair, Abdurahman Jafar, said: “Muslims are the first line of victims in the extreme right’s campaign of hate and division and they make no secret about that. Statistics show a strong correlation between the rise of racist and Islamophobic hate crime and the ascendancy of the BNP.”

It is a decade since an extreme rightwing terrorist has used bombs to claim lives in Britain. In 1999, David Copeland struck three targets in London. His attack on a gay pub in Soho, London, killed three people and left scores injured. It followed attacks against the Muslim community in Brick Lane, east London, and the bombing of a market in Brixton, south London.

The senior source said: “When Copeland attacked we did not have the religious tensions with the Muslim community. What kind of schism would a Copeland-type event cause now?”

The far-right threat to Britain’s Jewish communities is monitored by theCommunity Security Trust, which says attempted terrorist violence by neo-Nazis has increased in the past few years. It says nine white men have been “convicted of offences involving explosives, terrorist plots, violent campaigns or threats to carry them out”.

David Rich, of the CST, said: “There’s no one directing people, it’s a mindset” – a reference to the easy availability of extremist right-wing material and information about making bombs.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk, 6 July 2009

July 14, 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