Why Is Britain Ignoring Its Home-Grown McVeighs?
Britain is facing the real risk today of a bombing campaign that targets random civilians for death - but it is being virtually ignored. When its supporters step closer every day to mass murder, nobody notices. When its perpetrators are caught, there is (at best) a little flick of information in News in Brief, before everyone goes back to talking about the Strictly Come Dancing race row. This silence suggests something dark about us Brits - and requires us to change our behaviour, fast.
The campaign I am talking about is not being planned by jihadis or fringe Irish nationalists but by white "neo-Nazis" who want to murder Asians, black people, Jews and gays in the bizarre belief it will trigger a "race war".
They have struck before. Exactly a decade ago, a 22-year-old member of the British National Party called David Copeland planted bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane (where I live), and a gay pub in Old Compton Street. He managed to lodge a nail deep in a baby's skull, and to murder a pregnant woman, her gay best friend, and his partner. He bragged: "My aim was political. It was to cause a racial war in this country. There'd be a backlash from the ethnic minorities, then all the white people would go out and vote BNP."
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The police are warning ever-more urgently that similar attacks seem to be coming today. The West Yorkshire Police recently launched a huge series of raids against far-right groups and found them in possession of 80 bombs - considerably more even than any jihadi group has been caught with in British history.
Last year, a 43-year-old man called Neil Lewington was arrested "on the cusp" of waging a "terror campaign", it emerged at his trial. He had built a bomb factory in his parents' house which he planned to use to launch attacks against people he considered to be "non-British". He was only caught by chance: he picked a panicked fight with a train conductor, and the police who turned up found he was laden with explosives.
The list of far right-wingers who have been busted for planning violence has spiked up in the past few years. In the home of a BNP election candidate called Robert Cottage in 2008, the police discovered "the largest amount of chemical explosives ever found in this country", they said.
The same year, a thug called Martyn Gilleard was caught with a huge stash of nail bombs, and rage-filled letters in which he declared: "I am so sick of hearing nationalists talk of killing Muslims, of blowing up mosques, of fighting back, only to see these acts of resistance fail to appear. The time has come to stop the talk and start to act." He was only caught by fluke: the police busted him for distributing child porn.
It's not hard to get in on this act. There are dozens of far-right websites that explain - with handy video links - how to make bombs, and then urge you to head to the nearest mosque, synagogue or gay club.
But as the New Statesman's Mehdi Hassan has pointed out, as far as public debate goes, it's as if these crimes never happened. While planned attacks by jihadis (rightly) dominate the news agenda for days, these remarkably similar plans pass unmentioned and unnoticed.
This disjunction exposes a rash of hypocrisy. The parts of the right that gleefully blame all Muslims for the actions of a tiny minority are mysteriously reluctant to apply the same arguments to themselves. If Martin Amis was consistent, he should now declare: "The white community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation. Strip-searching people who look like they're from Hampshire or from Surrey ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."
But of course he won't. It shows the bigotry at the core of these make-all-Muslims-pay arguments: they see brown-skinned people as a homogenous mass who can be collectively punished, while they see white people as discrete units who should only be punished individually.
But these white bomb-makers also blast holes in the arguments put by some small parts of the left, who claim "terrorism" is only a response to "legitimate grievances". We can see that somebody like David Copeland simply had an insane hatred of black, Asian and gay people. It's a form of soft racism to fail to see that the same lunacy can happen to non-white people. The vile Islamist gang who wanted to blow up the Ministry of Sound really did say the women there were "slags" who deserved to die for wearing miniskirts. Sometimes (but not always), the grievances that drive violence are simply deranged and have to be resisted.
While the threat of far-right violence is rising, the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, is going to appear on Question Time, the BBC's flagship political discussion show, next week. It would be easy, and emotionally satisfying, for me to join the many well-intentioned protesters who are saying he shouldn't be there, but I can't do it. There are two reasons - one moral, and one pragmatic.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to say abhorrent and repulsive things, or it isn't worth having. Why is our Britain vastly morally superior to the fantasy island that the BNP dream of building? Because we do not silence them - even though they would silence so many of us.
Then there's the pragmatic reason. The BNP is doing increasingly well in elections because there is a huge gap between the reality of the BNP and how their voters see them. I see this on the run-down estates where many of my relatives live: most of the BNP's voters believe they are a patriotic party who will peacefully defend the rights of the white working class, just as other organisations peacefully defend the rights of other ethnic groups.
When they find out the BNP leaders have in fact praised Britain's greatest enemy, Adolf Hitler, derided the Holocaust as "the Holohoax", had violent maniacs in their senior ranks, and want to deport many of our national heroes like Ashley Cole and Trevor McDonald, they are disgusted, and withdraw their support. There is only a very, very small constituency in Britain for Holocaust denial, mass "repatriations", and the mongering of "race wars".
So how do we close this perception gap? Shutting the BNP out of debate hasn't worked. They have been shut out and they have grown. In the darkness, the fungus can spread. The greatest disinfectant is sunlight, shone straight into Griffin's face. The only people who should fear free speech are the BNP, because when the British people hear what they have to say, and their lack of answers to basic factual questions, they are repelled.
One of the areas where everyone should see Griffin being challenged is over this question of far-right violence. He claims he is "strongly" opposed to these freelance attacks - yet he has kept violent attackers in his senior team.
His chief lieutenant for years was a man called Tony Lecomber, who was jailed for three years in the 1980s for plotting to blow up the offices of a left-wing political party. After he was released, he and a gang then beat a Jewish teacher unconscious. When he was freed after another three years inside, he was swiftly promoted through the BNP ranks. He was only ditched after he approached a Liverpool hitman to discuss how they could "take out" a cabinet minister.
One of the leading figures in the BNP's online operation, Lambertus Nieuwhof, tried to blow up a mixed-race school in South Africa in 1992. The BNP is happy to have him nonetheless. Nieuwhof says: "Everybody should be allowed to make a mistake."
The BNP is not directly organising violence, but it has tolerated violent madmen in its midst, and its arguments have encouraged violence. Griffin has demanded "rights for whites with well-directed boots and fists". He reacted to the Soho nail-bomb by one of his own party's members by attacking the victims, saying they were "flaunting their perversion in front of the world's journalists, [and had] showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures disgusting".
Let Griffin speak his filth to the nation, and sweat under David Dimbleby's forensic questioning. He will only discredit himself.
But the country also needs to start acknowledging the danger of bombs thrown from the far right. David Copeland came from within the ranks of the BNP; so might the next one. The police need to monitor neo-Nazis as closely as jihadis, and the Government projects to prevent violent extremism should be working with white kids as well as Muslim children. We need to prepare ourselves now: the next person to bomb Britain might not look like Mohammed Sidiq Khan - he might look like me.
You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johannhari101
He is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com
Follow Johann Hari on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johannhari101
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"until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."
Isn't that where all the roads to conflict resolution begin though? Prevention of ignorance through enlightenment of the youth? Look at the Israel-Palestine conflict and the rise of neo-nazis in the US and EU. Most(if not all) of this comes from word of mouth, from somebody's dad or uncle or from kids at school(who learned it from their dad or uncle). And then a decade later you've got a little homegrown bastard ready to throw his(or usually others) life away in the name of a ridiculous and completely futile cause. If children of the world can be reached clearly, and the hate from a dead generation halted from permeating their mentality, then we can avoid this counterproductive and grossly incompetent method of getting ourselves heard. Hey great article Johann, yet again you hit on a real issue that is not really in a lot of the news but rightly should be. Peace and love.
Excess of anything is bad.
Britain has excess of Freedom.
Hizbu-Tahrir is such a idiotic organization , i don't know why they are allowed to even roam freely in Britain.(I speak as a muslim)
and the same goes for BNP.
Time to kick their A$$es.
There can be no such thing as "excess of freedom".
Over the last couple of decades the extreme right has developed a policy of "lone wolf" activism, where potential terrorist actors are cultivated but finally sent off to act entirely on their own, leaving the main groups with plausible deniability of involvement, while Islamist terrorists, with their continued reliance on old-style cell groups, immediately look more like conspiracies So it is easier for the extreme right to claim the likes of Copeland as rogues who have misunderstood the BNP basic message of racial harmony and brotherly love while ordinary Islam is more tainted by the actions of extremist groups, precisely because they are groups.
That said, the BNP do remain rather an old-fashioned fascist group in comparison with some of their European counterparts.
We know what the new fascism will look like in Europe; the likes of Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders have shown us. It will paint itself as the defender of European values, supportive of women's rights and gay rights, a soft free-market populism in economics, libertarian on most social issues but authoritarian on law and order, tolerant even of racial diversity but hostile to cultural diversity, and savagely anti-Islam. The BNP, with its continuing focus on race, with its corporatist economics, its reactionary attitudes on gender and sexuality, and its across-the-board authoritarianism is a blast from the fascist past.
We do not need to be afraid of Griffin. We do need to be afraid of Wilders.
Perhaps you could give the folks named McVeigh a break on the terrorism rap? Or maybe you could specify Timothy McVeigh rather than suggesting homegrown McVeighs might be a problem? (Even though you neglect to mention anything about him, its all innuendo.) Or perhaps we should consider all the homegrown Hari's might be spies and guilty of espionage?
At least in the UK the far-right kooks are in the obviously fringy BNP. Unfortunately, in the US that same type have taken over one of the two main parties. Imagine the head of the BNP. Now imagine him as the head of the Conservative Party. It's a whole different level of scary and that is where the Republican Party is right now.
I still say that all the right-wing nut-jobs from around the world should move to the southeast US so that it can secede and become the worldwide haven for hate-filled individuals. It would soon collapse.
Johann:
You wrote: "the next person to bomb Britain might not look like Mohammed Sidiq Khan - he might look like me."
The problem is that he may look like you and will be a neo-con, but Gordon Brown will make you look like Mohammed Sidiq Khan, will somehow find that you trained in Pakistan for 3 hours back in 1988 and will blame Pakistan for everything.
Reason: the agenda he has been handed down from Tony Blair. Blame everything on Pakistan, paint it in the black, destabilize it and then finally get to the GOAL: defanging it of nukes.
While at it, please do let us know if he was able to find anything substantial against Pakistani students studying in UK that he arrested few months back and accused them of planning something very very terrible?
One could just wish that he addressed the menace you have pointed out here.
I did hear that when the leader of the BNP appears in public, people throw eggs and rotten tomatoes at him. Let's hope the common sense of the British prevails. Unfortunately, right wing militia groups are on the rise everywhere--contact The Southern Poverty Law Institute for what is happening in the U.S.
The Brits are going to learn the hard way. If you give far right lunatics access to the air waves they will use it to embolden the authoritarian lemmings who exist in every society. Authoritarian lemmings are weak and helpless because they feel isolated and alone. Once you put authoritarian leaders on the airwaves it reduces that sense of isolation and empowers the lemmings to act.
I noticed that Rupert Murdoch has never allowed his media empire in Britian to ever acquire the same hate filled rhetoric that Fox "News" has been allowed to manifest.
Perhaps because Murdoch's children and grandchildren live in the UK. Rupert has no problem destroying America with right wing extremism on the other hand.
Murdoch has a lot of competition in Britain, he's quite subdued.
These guys are truly sickening, and the way Nick Griffin presents himself reminds me of David Duke and the way they've used children (singing traditional folk songs) reminds me of Klan indoctrination. If you don't pay much attention to British politics or hate groups, this BBC documentary on the BNP is a good start:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77p1ZCKT5KQ
Of course, American History X is probably an adequate substitute.
And how long has Britain been getting dumbed down and polarized by Murdoch?
http://www.light-to-dark.com/murdochs_enslaved_red_states.html
Agreed. Light is the only remedy. 24/7.
Please hear me. Johann, I truly respect you and your columns are most always quite incisive and insightful. The current rise in anti-Semitism is like a canary in a coal mine. When the Jews are so easily scapegoated and easily targeted, when anti-Semitism is disguised as "anti-Zionism" or "anti-Israelism," one can be sure that it's a tacit attempt to let racist hatreds into the public discourse through the back door--and once the Jews are targeted, other minorities will be, too--gays, Muslims, freethinkers, etc. We are slipping into dark times in the West, and I fear for once-robust democracies such as Britain and other Western countries. Perfect they are not--but the Western nations offer much hope for humanity. May the racist BNP and other hate groups wither into obscurity.
Not all "anti-Zionism" is the result of any particular animosity towards Jews. There are even some (non self-hating) Jews who aren't too happy about the results of Zionism.
Most of the "white" people who hate Jews probably have an equal hatred for Palestinians and just wish they were doing a better job of killing off each other.
That those people feel relatively more free nowadays to express that hatred *is* a canary in the coal mine.
Why do you people always bring up anti-semtesim.
Anger against I srael & it's backers is justified.
If those backers are M uslims so be it.
If those backers are C hristians so be it.
If those backers are J ews so be it.
If those backers are Z ionist so be it.
If those backers are N eocons so be it.
Give me a break......If you don't support Israel , get out of the way who are against it.
"You people"....Thank you. You have written it yourself for all to read.
Take the skin heads bowling (use them as bowling balls).
Goodness there are some b@t $h!t cr@zies all over the world. (Although I still contend we have the copyright on them here in the Bible Belt.)
Blessings to you British people. You have much work ahead of you.
America is ignoring it's McVeighs, so it sounds like Britain is just "staying the course" set by GWB.
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