Showing posts with label Holocaust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Holocaust. Show all posts

13 June 2008

Anthrax hoax postman jailed

A neo-Nazi postman who targeted the Attorney General in an Anthrax hoax has been jailed for four years.

Brazilian-born loner Jefferson Azevedo, 45, posted packages containing caustic soda and letters filled with "racist and depraved" threats to his victims. Azevedo's targets included Government figures and an elderly man whose family was wiped out in the Holocaust.

One person was slightly burnt by the chemicals stuffed into parcels, another suffered a skin rash, and many people were left "extremely frightened". London's Southwark Crown Court heard how Azevedo also caused traffic chaos with a hoax bomb on a bridge.

He targeted more than 150 organisations and individuals, singled out because of their support for foreign nationals in Britain or opposition to the far right British National Party.

Schools, mosques, churches, restaurants, the Royal Navy's dockyard at Portsmouth and the Voluntary Overseas Organisation were all sent hate mail.

In what the judge called "sheer nastiness", 79-year-old Julius Klein, whose family was murdered by the Nazis, was sent a letter with a swastika.

Alex Agbamu, prosecuting, said Azevedo was obsessed with immigration.

"He wanted to bring what he said was the problem to the wider British public. He said he had the idea from the US when anthrax had been sent through the post to various people in that country."

Father-of-one Azevedo, of Langley Road, Portsmouth, pleaded guilty to 19 charges from February 2003 to March last year, and asked for a further 140 to be considered. One charge related to February 7 last year when he planted an "imitation explosive device" on a footbridge over the A27 in Havant, Hampshire.

Eight other counts detailed "hoaxes involving noxious substances or things" including white powder that was sent to the Attorney General and to St Albans primary school in Havant. The other nine counts, under the Malicious Communications Act, concerned "conveying threatening messages".

ITN

2 March 2008

Yarmouth students visit Auschwitz

Enlightening for students

Great Yarmouth MP Tony Wright and students from East Norfolk Sixth Form College this week returned from a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau vowing to act on the lessons learned from the experience.

The visit was a unique opportunity for students to see what happened, to pay respect for those who lost their lives and to explore the universal lessons of the Holocaust,

They were shown around the camp's barracks and crematoria, and witnessed the registration documents of inmates, piles of hair, shoes, clothes and other items seized by the Nazis.

They were then taken the short distance to Birkenau where a memorial and candle-lighting service was held to remember the six million Jews, the Roma, Sinti, gay, disabled, black people and other victims killed at the hands of the Nazis.

Yarmouth Mercury

4 February 2008

Six Million Dead "just another atrocity" - BNP's mask slips

Some readers of this blog will know that I was a member of the British National Party from its formation until the late 1990s, and that before then I had been a member of the National Front.

Eventually I came to renounce my racist and fascist opinions and joined the fight to expose and combat latter day Nazism, especially that of the BNP.

Soon there will be a post here telling of my journey from darkness to light.

One thing was de rigueur in the British National Party during my time, and that was a flat denial that the Nazi extermination of six million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others ever took place.

Why?

Because the BNP, like other organisations worldwide calling themselves "nationalist", were so closely associated with Nazism (and rightly so) in the public mind that it was necessary to "cleanse" the history of Nazi Germany.

The largest piece of dirt to scrub away was the Holocaust, and the BNP set to work trying to convince the public that this most horrific of events had never happened.

One leading denier of the Holocaust was the BNP's current leader, Nick Griffin.

In 1998, before becoming BNP leader, Griffin wrote:

"I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat... I have reached the conclusion that the 'extermination' tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter day witch-hysteria."

For your benefit, here's Griffin denying the Holocaust again in a 1997 "Cook Report"


So there's no doubt at all what Griffin believed and had believed for years.

He wasn't alone, and it wasn't difficult to be at any BNP gathering when the latest piece of Holocaust denial "evidence" was announced and then discussed into the ground.

But the BNP Holocaust deniers were always in a split mind. On the one hand they denied the Holocaust, but wouldn't have minded at all if it was true.

That's because most of them knew it was true, and quietly approved.

You see they had to deny the Holocaust to make nationalism "respectable", and nationalism had to be made respectable for the BNP to achieve power, and once in power - believe you me - the BNP wouldn't be able to get its own British versions of Auschwitz built quickly enough.

When the BNP's vote began to rise and the party started to win local council seats the question of Holocaust denial became awkward and embarrassing, especially as some BNP councillors openly denied while others floundered hopelessly when put under media inquisition.

Nick Griffin, a man who has done so many u-turns on policy throughout his career on the far Right that he's virtually a walking Spaghetti Junction, then decided that the Holocaust did not happen.

He's never explained why, probably because the day will come when he needs to revert to type. Nobody should underestimate Griffin's eye for the main chance. He wants his highly paid seat in the European parliament (more because it's highly paid than of any use to the BNP) and he doesn't want to put his financial future at risk by sitting in front of the news cameras explaining away the far Right's crankiest dogma to a disbelieving audience.

Thankfully, Jewish organisations and BNP watchers have never believed that Griffin's about turn was anything more than a sprat to catch a mackerel. His followers on the Nazi Stormfront website openly debate whether the political acrobat's change of mind is real or feigned, the hope being that it's feigned.

I think I know which it is.

Unable to openly deny the Holocaust, the BNP has to settle for the next best thing: belittling it.

So when the government announced this morning (Monday) that every school in the country would send two pupils to Auschwitz to learn about and keep alive memories of the Holocaust, the barely supressed Jew-hating side of the BNP couldn't wait to rush out an article designed solely to minimise the sheer scale and importance of the deaths of those six million human beings.

This is part of that article:

Further to elevate just one of the many atrocities Man has inflicted on Man is in itself discriminatory and racist. Emphasis on the lessons to be learned from the horrors of the 1940s concentrates one peoples’ suffering and implies that only Europeans can be guilty of such atrocities. It is racist because it minimises or completely omits from the school curriculum the lessons to be learned from the massacres of Christians in Armenia, the butchering of Serbs in Kosovo, the slaying of Christians (including many of our own forebears) at the hands of Islamic pirates as well as the ongoing ethnic conflicts in Rwanda, Sudan and Burma.

You get the picture?

Back in my BNP days I couldn't have put it better myself. Seething that I can't deny the Holocaust I reduce it to "just one of the many atrocities Man has inflicted on Man" and go on to hit my favourite targets (or second favourites, since the Jews are now off limits), the Muslims, then get in a dig at Africans and Asians.

Somebody at the BNP (Griffin?) worked out that was how others would see it, too, and the article was removed without ceremony. All that remains of it is the snippet published above.

So don't be under any illusions about the BNP. In its poisonous heart it still believes the Jews are its greatest enemy, and now and again, as today, the mask slips.

The BNP is still Nazi and still obsessed with Jews. Never believe otherwise.