Eddy Butler, who is challenging Nick Griffin for the BNP leadership this summer, has announced that Nick Cass, the popular former Yorkshire BNP organiser, will be his running mate to become deputy chairman of the BNP in the event of a Butler victory.
In a “BNP TV” video posted on YouTube and some BNP-supporting websites, Cass explains that Griffin does not have the time to be BNP leader because since his election to the European Parliament he is focusing his attention “across the water”. Party members feel that the leadership has become detached from them, he adds.
Cass, 36, says that Butler is asking sensible questions to which members want to know the answers, but the party leadership is ridiculing them. He has been “shocked” by the campaign against Butler. He expected the party, in which he has been an activist for 20 years, to be “straight-talking and honest”, not to come out with smears against Butler.
Cass is helping Butler in the hard task of obtaining the signatures of 20% of BNP members of two years’ standing. He says every senior BNP officer in Yorkshire wants change in the leadership. The BNP’s Liverpool branch, a centre of activity in the region in which Griffin is an MEP, also supports Butler.
It did not take long before Griffin’s supporters went onto the attack on one of the most extreme nazi web forums with a thread –withdrawn after a few hours – titled “Nick Cass Scum Traitor”, in which commenters suggested that Cass might be a Searchlight agent, state asset or, worse from a nazi viewpoint, Jewish.
The insult was ironic. Cass with his wife and three children have appeared on many BNP election leaflets as the typical wholesome white family that votes BNP.
It was also highly unlikely. Cass sports a prominent “tree of life” tattoo on his right arm, between shoulder and elbow. This symbol, also known as the life rune, is a favourite among nazi groups worldwide, several of which have adopted it as their logo. Under Hitler it was the symbol of the SS Lebensborn project, which encouraged SS troopers to have children out of wedlock with “Aryan” mothers and kidnapped children of Aryan appearance from the countries of occupied Europe to raise as Germans. To white supremacists today the tree of life signifies the future of the “white race”.
The tattoo was pictured in Sky TV’s BNP Wives documentary. The same programme revealed that Cass had instructed his wife, Suzy, to insist on a white European midwife when giving birth to their children, which reveals his attitude to women as well as his racism.
This is not the first time that Cass has fallen out with BNP colleagues. It was widely reported in 2007 that Cass was sacked from the job of BNP party manager two minutes before a meeting, after he had been given a role for which he was unsuited. Cass disputes this, saying that he resigned so that he could spend more time with his family.
The announcement of Cass’s support for Butler put paid to malicious rumours from the Griffin camp that Butler was putting forward Lawrence Rustem as deputy leader. Rustem, a former BNP councillor in Barking and Dagenham, suffers from the fatal flaw in the eyes of the BNP’s racist members that he is of part Turkish Cypriot descent.
Griffin supporters have also tried to link Butler with Sharon Ebanks, a former BNP activist who fell out with the party after Griffin reneged on a promise to meet her legal expenses for a challenge to a council election result in Birmingham that the party encouraged her to mount. She is widely derided in the BNP because of her West Indian father.
Meanwhile the anti-Butler blog run by Paul Golding, the BNP’s national communications officer, has listed reasons why Butler is unsuitable to lead the BNP. Butler is accused of being “bland and boring and grey and colourless”, “rude and arrogant”, having “no intellectual ability whatsoever”, “pure repellent”, “defeatist”, a “raging control freak” and, horror of horrors, “arranging the most disgusting food ever served at a BNP event”, a feat that takes some doing, judging by the reports we have received of typical BNP catering.
Griffin, in contrast, has “heaps of charisma”, is an “accomplished writer and intellectual”, “affable”, a “visionary” and “able to command respect and loyalty”. Unfortunately for Griffin, a growing number of BNP members are rejecting Golding’s sycophancy.
Hope not Hate
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Roma arson attack proceedings postponed until September
Ostrava, North Moravia, June 30 (CTK) - The Czech court dealing with the arson attack on a Romany family in Vitkov, north Moravia, Wednesday adjourned the case until September 6.
A baby girl suffered severe burns and her parents were injured as a result of the attack committed in spring 2009. Four right-wing extremists suspected of throwing three Molotov cocktails in the house face life imprisonment if their guilt is proved.
The closely-watched trial was launched on May 11. Originally, it was to continue in August but it was postponed until September due to holidays of the judge, attorney and defence lawyers.
The judge was to hear Wednesday witness Martina Ondrejikova who told the police that one of the suspects took a burn ointment from her a few hours after the attack.
She said previously she thought that the man might be one of the attackers but did not report her suspicion to the police because she was afraid of a possible revenge from both local neo-Nazis and Romanies.
Ondrejikova refused to give testimony though she earlier told the police that she knew two of the suspects and the extremist movement as her husband played in a neo-Nazi band.
The key witness in the case, a local firefighter, who helped police trace the alleged culprits, has received anonymous threats and he fears to testify in court.
According to the prosecution, the act was to make extremist groups more visible and was connected with the 120th birth anniversary of Adolf Hitler.
Prague Monitor
A baby girl suffered severe burns and her parents were injured as a result of the attack committed in spring 2009. Four right-wing extremists suspected of throwing three Molotov cocktails in the house face life imprisonment if their guilt is proved.
The closely-watched trial was launched on May 11. Originally, it was to continue in August but it was postponed until September due to holidays of the judge, attorney and defence lawyers.
The judge was to hear Wednesday witness Martina Ondrejikova who told the police that one of the suspects took a burn ointment from her a few hours after the attack.
She said previously she thought that the man might be one of the attackers but did not report her suspicion to the police because she was afraid of a possible revenge from both local neo-Nazis and Romanies.
Ondrejikova refused to give testimony though she earlier told the police that she knew two of the suspects and the extremist movement as her husband played in a neo-Nazi band.
The key witness in the case, a local firefighter, who helped police trace the alleged culprits, has received anonymous threats and he fears to testify in court.
According to the prosecution, the act was to make extremist groups more visible and was connected with the 120th birth anniversary of Adolf Hitler.
Prague Monitor
BULGARIA'S PRESIDENT FEARS REVIVAL OF HATE CRIMES
The recent neo-Nazi attacks in Bulgaria have caused the Bulgarian Antifascist Union to meet with the country’s President Georgi Parvanov to discuss their fears for revival of extreme ideological incidents in the country, caused by hate and aggression. “There should not be a statesman who does not realize the difference between the conflicts between football fans and the attacks caused by ideological and racist intolerance,” said Parvanov who shared the Union’s fears. At the meeting, the Honorary Chair of the Bulgarian Antifascist Union, Velko Valkanov, and the Chair of the Union, Chavdar Stoimenov, have expressed to the Bulgarian President their fears of xenophobic and neo-Nazi actions in the country. The President said that the Bulgarian society needs to reach a national reconciliation and added that this process happens through reading and understanding of history, as well as through giving a clear political assessment of these actions and not through denial and misinterpretation of the past. He also pointed out that the country should not allow leniency towards the arousing tendency of republication of Nazi and other anti-Semitic literature. Bulgaria’s President has confirmed his position for moral recognition of the contribution of the Bulgarian anti-fascists in the global resistance.
Novinite
Novinite
SUSPECTED ARSONIST CAUGHT ON TAPE PRAISING ‘DUDES’ WHO SHOT HUNGARIAN ROMA (Czech Rep.)
New evidence emerged on Monday at the trial of four neo-Nazis accused of racially-motivated attempted murder after throwing petrol bombs through the windows of the home of a Roma family last year. A two-year-old girl was horrifically burned in the attack, which has received unprecedented attention here in the Czech Republic.
A scratchy police surveillance recording of suspected arsonist Jaromír Lukeš, recorded several weeks after the attack on the Roma family in Vítkov, North Moravia, last year. In the recording - played to Ostrava Regional Court on Monday – the two discuss how well the attack had gone and how the police would never track the group down. A voice – allegedly belonging to Lukeš – then expresses envy at a similar attack in Hungary, where a 27-year-old Roma man and his six-year-old son were shot dead as they fled their burning home: “In Hungary they chucked their petrol bombs in, waited for them to run out, and then shot them. Total dudes they are.” Experts are hesitant to draw any direct link between the attacks in the Czech Republic and Hungary, although from the police wiretaps it appears Czech neo-Nazis could at least have been partly inspired by the spate of race killings in Hungary in recent years. Robert Kushen is the Executive Director of the European Roma Rights Centre in Budapest. On the phone from New York, he told me advocacy groups were still waiting for courts in Central Europe to send a clear signal that racially motivated murder cannot be tolerated. “The trial in the Czech Republic is encouraging, but we have to see what the final verdict is. We’re hoping there will be a severe penalty assessed to serve as a deterrent.
In Hungary for a long time there was no effective action taken against some very serious violent incidents resulting since 2008 in nine deaths. We understand there will hopefully be an indictment handed down some time in the fall, but thus far we haven’t seen it.”
After hearing the recordings Jaromír Lukeš told the judge he had deliberately lied about the attack because he suspected his friend of being a police informer and wanted to catch him out. That argument may not stand up in court, but his lawyer says the wiretaps were illegal and is lobbying for them to be rejected as evidence.
Radio Prague
A scratchy police surveillance recording of suspected arsonist Jaromír Lukeš, recorded several weeks after the attack on the Roma family in Vítkov, North Moravia, last year. In the recording - played to Ostrava Regional Court on Monday – the two discuss how well the attack had gone and how the police would never track the group down. A voice – allegedly belonging to Lukeš – then expresses envy at a similar attack in Hungary, where a 27-year-old Roma man and his six-year-old son were shot dead as they fled their burning home: “In Hungary they chucked their petrol bombs in, waited for them to run out, and then shot them. Total dudes they are.” Experts are hesitant to draw any direct link between the attacks in the Czech Republic and Hungary, although from the police wiretaps it appears Czech neo-Nazis could at least have been partly inspired by the spate of race killings in Hungary in recent years. Robert Kushen is the Executive Director of the European Roma Rights Centre in Budapest. On the phone from New York, he told me advocacy groups were still waiting for courts in Central Europe to send a clear signal that racially motivated murder cannot be tolerated. “The trial in the Czech Republic is encouraging, but we have to see what the final verdict is. We’re hoping there will be a severe penalty assessed to serve as a deterrent.
In Hungary for a long time there was no effective action taken against some very serious violent incidents resulting since 2008 in nine deaths. We understand there will hopefully be an indictment handed down some time in the fall, but thus far we haven’t seen it.”
After hearing the recordings Jaromír Lukeš told the judge he had deliberately lied about the attack because he suspected his friend of being a police informer and wanted to catch him out. That argument may not stand up in court, but his lawyer says the wiretaps were illegal and is lobbying for them to be rejected as evidence.
Radio Prague
Tory MP bids to 'ban the burka' (UK)
A Tory MP has launched an effort to pass a law banning Muslim women from wearing the burka.
Philip Hollobone will attempt to steer legislation through the Commons to regulate the wearing of "certain facial coverings".
The Kettering MP said his Bill would make it illegal for people to cover their faces in public "which would obviously have a big impact for those who wear full-face Islamic veils".
He told the Press Association: "I think it's inappropriate to cover your face in public, whether it's a burka, a balaclava or anything else.
"We are never going to get along with having a fully integrated society if a substantial minority insist on concealing their identity from everyone else."
Mr Hollobone has previously described the burka as "offensive" and "against the British way of life".
His comments have attracted criticism but also a "great deal of support", he said.
The MP said the British public like to smile and greet one another in the street but "you simply can't have that degree of interaction with people if you can't see their face".
The backbencher was one of 20 MPs drawn in a ballot for the chance to get a Private Members' Bill on the statute book.
His Face Coverings (Regulation) Bill had its first reading in the Commons on Wednesday, a formality which allows the legislation to be printed. Because Mr Hollobone was only drawn 17th in the ballot, his Bill stands little chance of progress.
MSN News
Philip Hollobone will attempt to steer legislation through the Commons to regulate the wearing of "certain facial coverings".
The Kettering MP said his Bill would make it illegal for people to cover their faces in public "which would obviously have a big impact for those who wear full-face Islamic veils".
He told the Press Association: "I think it's inappropriate to cover your face in public, whether it's a burka, a balaclava or anything else.
"We are never going to get along with having a fully integrated society if a substantial minority insist on concealing their identity from everyone else."
Mr Hollobone has previously described the burka as "offensive" and "against the British way of life".
His comments have attracted criticism but also a "great deal of support", he said.
The MP said the British public like to smile and greet one another in the street but "you simply can't have that degree of interaction with people if you can't see their face".
The backbencher was one of 20 MPs drawn in a ballot for the chance to get a Private Members' Bill on the statute book.
His Face Coverings (Regulation) Bill had its first reading in the Commons on Wednesday, a formality which allows the legislation to be printed. Because Mr Hollobone was only drawn 17th in the ballot, his Bill stands little chance of progress.
MSN News
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