Britain: Democracy:0, Neo Nazis:1

Let’s get one thing straight: it is the fault of Labour that the vile BNP is enjoying more success than ever before. It is not because Britain is a land of neo Nazis and racists. Far from it: Brits are a tolerant and amiable lot, far too tolerant, if anything.




Labour is determined to ignore the huge pink elephants in the room; namely, immigration, and islamification. Never mind that the majority of Brits are worried about these issues. Never mind that we have been beseeching our MPs to tackle them. Labour doesn’t give a damn. Enter the BNP – which does address these issues, albeit from awful motives.



You don’t have to be a Hitler wannabe to worry about immigration. We have a tiny country, with a national health service that is on its knees, and schools where entire classes don’t speak English. The Labour immigration policy is a disgrace; we all know full well that thousands of illegal immigrants have vanished into the ether, never to be seen again, let alone be made to contribute anything to the country they now call ‘home’. The benefits system is an equal sham and frankly, if I read one more story about how a Muslim immigrant is getting benefits for each of his five wives, I think I’ll scream.



Nor do you have to be a racist to worry about the gradual islamification of Europe – and how Britain is leading the trend. There are now books we can’t read or buy, because Muslims didn’t like the topic. There are restaurants that have ceased providing non halal meat – meaning customers can’t get ham on their pizzas. There are entire areas of this country that are no-go for non Muslims. Public swimming pools insist that all women wear ‘burkinis’. Churches are being torn down, to make way for Mosques. Muslim protestors insult and bully and take photographs of returning British troops out on parade.



And we don’t like it. We wouldn’t like it if it was Hindus, or Jews, or Sikhs behaving in this manner either. It happens to be Muslims. Acknowledging this does not make one a racist any more than it’s ‘racist’ to note that most serial killers are white males.



But Labour doesn’t care. And so in saunters the BNP. Watching the party leader on Question Time recently was a highly unpleasant experience. You just knew, watching Nick Griffin’s face, that he’s waited years to appear on a mainstream – in fact, a flagship – political programme. When his name was called, along with the ‘other’ politicians, you could just see him inwardly preening.



As for the pathetic BBC argument that it was a matter of ‘free speech’ to allow him onto the show – rubbish. Free speech means you can hold and express your own opinions and no matter how much others might disagree, they can’t prosecute you for them. Free speech does not mean there is any duty to invite known racists such as Griffin onto popular programmes where they get a chance to woo potential supporters.



I guarantee that – given the atrocious performance by Labour in the shape of Jack Straw on Question time - some viewers would have finished watching and then quietly gone to their computers, and paid a visit to the BNP website. And we can thank the BBC for that. The show was a chance for our government to really show its metal – and it failed. Miserably.



Instead, we were treated to the sight of Jack Straw, stammering and stumbling over his words, before finally boasting of his own immigrant credentials by suddenly announcing that he was the grandson of a Jewish immigrant to Britain.



Funny. Mr Straw didn’t seem to give a damn about his ‘jewish roots’ last year when he took every opportunity to stick the boot in and bash Israel for trying to end eight years of Hamas terrorism.



The rest of the panel didn’t fare any better. Bonnie Greer lounged at the end of the table, occasionally half turning to bait Nick Griffin in the manner of a 12 year old schoolgirl taking on a nervous supply teacher.



In fact, the entire thing resembled nothing so much as playground antics. Hardly the way to combat the lure presented by the BNP to a population so desperate to have its concerns heard that it will even embrace the toad-like, Holocaust denying, repulsive little man that is Nick Griffin.



I pray that Labour fails at the next election. I don’t suppose the Tories will be much better, but I’m not sure they could be much worse for the country than the lacklustre Brown and devious Mandelson. Labour’s legacy? Among other things, it may well be a more popular, more powerful BNP, for which we’ll all pray a price.



Here’s Melanie Phillips:


The outrageous truth slips out: Labour cynically plotted to transform the entire make-up of Britain without telling us.



So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened.



Was it through a fit of absent-mindedness or gross incompetence? Or was it not inadvertent at all, but deliberate?



The latter explanation seemed just too outrageous. After all, a deliberate policy of mass immigration would have amounted to nothing less than an attempt to change the very make-up of this country without telling the electorate.



There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.


This astonishing revelation surfaced quite casually last weekend in a newspaper article by one Andrew Neather. He turns out to have been a speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.



And it was he who wrote a landmark speech in September 2000 by the then immigration minister, Barbara Roche, that called for a loosening of immigration controls. But the true scope and purpose of this new policy was actively concealed.


In its 1997 election manifesto, Labour promised ‘firm control over immigration’ and in 2005 it promised a ‘crackdown on abuse’. In 2001, its manifesto merely said that the immigration rules needed to reflect changes to the economy to meet skills shortages.


But all this concealed a monumental shift of policy. For Neather wrote that until ‘at least February last year’, when a new points-based system was introduced to limit foreign workers in response to increasing uproar, the purpose of the policy Roche ushered in was to open up the UK to mass immigration.



This has been achieved. Some 2.3million migrants have been added to the population since 2001. Since 1997, the number of work permits has quadrupled to 120,000 a year.


Unless policies change, over the next 25 years some seven million more will be added to Britain’s population, a rate of growth three times as fast as took place in the Eighties.


Such an increase is simply unsustainable. Britain is already one of the most overcrowded countries in Europe. But now look at the real reason why this policy was introduced, and in secret. The Government’s ‘driving political purpose’, wrote Neather, was ‘to make the UK truly multicultural’.


It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions.



It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way.



Spitefully, one motivation by Labour ministers was ‘to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.


Even Neather found that particular element of gratuitous Left-wing bullying to be ‘a manoeuvre too far’.


Yet apart from this, Neather sees nothing wrong in the policy he has described. Indeed, the reason for his astonishing candour is he thinks it’s something to boast about. Mass immigration, he wrote, had provided the ‘foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners’ without whom London could hardly function.


What elitist arrogance! As if most people employ nannies, cleaners and gardeners. And what ignorance. The argument that Britain is better off with this level of immigration has been conclusively shown to be economically illiterate.


Neather gave the impression that most immigrants are Eastern Europeans. But these form fewer than a quarter of all immigrants.


And the fact is that, despite his blithe assertions to the contrary, schools in areas of very high immigration find it desperately difficult to cope with so many children who don’t even have basic English. Other services, such as health or housing, are similarly being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers.



But the most shattering revelation was that this policy of mass immigration was not introduced to produce nannies or cleaners for the likes of Neather. It was to destroy Britain’s identity and transform it into a multicultural society where British attributes would have no greater status than any other country’s.


A measure of immigration is indeed good for a country. But this policy was not to enhance British culture and society by broadening the mix. It was to destroy its defining character altogether.


It also conveniently guaranteed an increasingly Labour-voting electorate since, as a recent survey by the Electoral Commission has revealed, some 90 per cent of black people and three-quarters of Asians vote Labour.


In Neather’s hermetically sealed bubble, the benefits of mass immigration were so overwhelming he couldn’t understand why ministers had been so nervous about it.



They were, he wrote, reluctant to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all to Labour’s core white working class vote. So they deliberately kept it secret.


They knew that if they told the truth about what they were doing, voters would rise up in protest. So they kept it out of their election manifestos.




It was indeed a conspiracy to deceive the electorate into voting for them. And yet it is these very people who have the gall to puff themselves up in self-righteous astonishment at the rise of the BNP.


No wonder Jack Straw was so shifty on last week’s Question Time when he was asked whether it was the Government’s failure to halt immigration which lay behind increasing support for the BNP.


‘No wonder Jack Straw was so shifty… when he was asked whether it was the Government’s failure to halt immigration which lay behind increasing support for the BNP’


Now we know it was no such failure of policy. It was deliberate. For the government of which Straw is such a long- standing member had secretly plotted to flood the country with immigrants to change its very character and identity.




This more than any other reason is why Nick Griffin has gained so much support. According to a YouGov poll taken after Question Time, no fewer than 22 per cent of British voters would ’seriously consider’ voting for the BNP.


That nearly one quarter of British people might vote for a neo-Nazi party with views inimical to democracy, human rights and common decency is truly appalling.


The core reason is that for years they have watched as their country’s landscape has been transformed out of all recognition – and that politicians from all mainstream parties have told them first that it isn’t happening and second, that they are racist bigots to object even if it is.


Now the political picture has been transformed overnight by the unguarded candour of Andrew Neather’s eye-opening superciliousness. For now we know that Labour politicians actually caused this to happen – and did so out of total contempt for their own core voters.


As Neather sneered, the jobs filled by immigrant workers ‘certainly wouldn’t be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley – fascist au pair, anyone?’




So that’s how New Labour views the white working class, supposedly the very people it is in politics to champion. Who can wonder that its core vote is now decamping in such large numbers to the BNP when Labour treats them like this?




Condemned out of its own mouth, it is New Labour that is responsible for the rise of the BNP – by an act of unalloyed treachery to the entire nation.

The War Of Words That Israel Must Start Winning

I almost got lynched last week. My crime? I dared to defend Israel in public. I even — brace yourselves — declared myself a Zionist. I might as well have confessed to torturing tiny animals, given the horrified response.

 

Within minutes, a relaxed dinner party became a veritable contest to see who could most malign Israel. Yep, it’s a tad traumatic being the lone zionist at any gathering these days. Israel-bashing has become a national sport in many countries. 

 

Following  the Israeli strikes on Hamas enclaves in Gaza, the court of public opinion hasn’t just judged Israel ‘guilty’; rather she’s been hung, drawn and quartered. 

 

The Arab nations may have failed, thus far, to destroy the physical Israel, but their revisionism of Middle East history is winning hearts, minds and newspaper columns across the globe.

Slowly but surely, the world is coming round to the Arab lie that Jews are the ‘aliens’ in the Middle East. Tell most people that the very term ‘Palestinian‘ always included the Palestinian Jews who have inhabited the region for 3,500 years — continuously — and they’ll just smile pityingly, and claim you’ve been hoodwinked by ‘zionist propaganda’.

And oh, the bitter irony of this particular slur! Because by any objective standards, Israel’s PR is dire. It has been for a while, actually. Back in 2002, the Jerusalem Centre For Public Affairs published a detailed report, in which it noted:

 

The Israel State Comptroller’s report released on October 7, 2002, levelled unprecedented criticism on Israel’s public relations efforts.

The State Comptroller revealed that ’since its establishment in 1948, Israel’s intelligence organs have not succeeded to respond to the broad-based propaganda and incitement by the Arab world.’

During Operation Cast Lead, I sat with my head in my hands, as a series of increasingly inarticulate figures ‘represented’ Israel. Do the powers-that-be scour the streets to find the least sympathetic, least sophisticated, least effective spokespeople? It would almost appear so.


As the Jerusalem Centre report notes:

Leading U.S. media relations experts sent to Israel by private sponsors in May 2002 described Israel’s PR efforts in the United States as “disastrous.”

Israel’s Consul General in New York, Allon Pinkas, complained that Israel’s image in the U.S. suffered from a lack of clear and “disciplined” messages.

International media consultant Lillian Wilder, a media advisor to former U.S. President Richard Nixon, noted in an interview that Israelis are often unprofessional and “wordy” on television.

Now at this point, some of you will roll your eyes and stop reading. After all, doesn’t the tiny Jewish nation have enough to cope with, given the spectre of a nuclear Iran, and the ghastly sight of an American President openly wooing Islam? 

What, is Israel also meant to fret over what ill-informed folk in other lands believe??

My answer? Hell yeah!


Yes, Israel does need to argue her case more effectively on the world stage. Because when hatred of the Jewish state was confined to the Arab and Muslim worlds, that was one thing. Alarming? Sure. Surprising? Hardly, given what Islam says about ‘infidels’ and Jews in particular.


Now, though, the loathing for Israel that has festered in Arab and Muslim hearts for six decades is being exported by Islam as it goes marching unfettered through Europe. It is no coincidence that in nations with large influxes of Muslims, hating Israel is now de rigueur.


Take Britain. During the Gaza Operation at the end of last year, Britain went berserk with rage towards the Jewish state. Thousands marched through the streets, brandishing banners that read ‘Death to Israel!’, while they chanted ‘We are all Hamas now!’


And please recall that Britain itself suffered a terrorist attack in 2005.


So why did not one Israeli spokesman make the vital yet basic point that terrorist attacks in Israel are the same as terrorist attacks in America and Britain? 

And that, unlike both these countries, Israel suffers terrorism on a regular basis?


Let me make it clear: I supported Operation Cast Lead. I defended Israel passionately — at work, online, in restaurants, at parties, to friends and colleagues and strangers alike. 

Like many fellow diaspora Jews, and our Gentile friends who love Israel, I wrote letter after letter to the British press, trying to counter the unfair bias against Israel.


 It was like trying to stem a tidal wave with your thumb.



In the UK, physical attacks on Jews increased. Some Israelis in Britain found themselves being refused service in pubs, clubs and other venues. One Israeli family was actually forced into hiding, so intense was the hostility directed at them.


In north London, one Orthodox Jewish man was dragged out of his car, in broad daylight, and beaten. Shops that were — wrongly — linked with Israel had their windows smashed. 

Supermarkets stocking kosher or Israeli products were threatened with boycotts. Tescos, one of the largest UK supermarkets, was swift to create a special ‘helpline‘ for customers wishing to avoid Israeli goods. 

(Suffice it to say that I, along with many others, am now boycotting Tescos.)


In schools, colleges and University campuses across the country, Jewish and Israeli students found themselves marginalised and verbally abused. At Cambridge and also the LSE (London School Of Economics) students staged mock ‘occupations’ to express their ’sympathy’ with Gaza. 

The fact that Gaza had been under Palestinian control for several years by this time was a mere detail.


Nor was this anti Israel sentiment confined to the ‘ordinary’ person in the street. The Arab propaganda has a vice-like grip on the British media, with the BBC, the Guardian,and The Independent cheerfully leading the charge.

These media outlets ignored the fact that Israel had endured years of Palestinian terrorism, and instead chose to portray Israel as the sole aggressor in the conflict. False accusations against Israel appeared daily, with no corrections — let alone apologies! — when the true facts later emerged. 

The Guardian, especially, delighted in publishing grotesque cartoons which painted Israel as a brutal Goliath, hell-bent on destroying the weaker, Palestinian David.



The effect of this British media bias against Israel? During Israel’s anti-Hamas strikes, Jews and Muslims met — separately — with their respective MPs. My local MP explained that in the House Of Commons, Israel was being demonised on a daily basis. Several government members were demanding that Britain instigate an arms embargo on Israel. 


This same MP told us that every single member of Parliament was ‘being bombarded’ by their Muslim constituents, who were insisting that they condemn Israel and then sever all ties with it.


And fuelled by the BBC, and the Guardian, many non Muslims added their voices — and of course their potential votes — to this anti-Israel agenda.


We should note that the BBC took to bashing Israel with a vengeance. This surprised no one. Indeed, the accusations of bias against the BBC go back several years. Keen to disprove them, the corporation even organised its own review, the Balen Report, in 2004.


And the findings?


We don’t know. The BBC has refused to make them public. It has, in fact, spent a whopping £200,000 [$328,560] to keep the report private. A London solicitor is pursuing the BBC through the courts in a bid to bring the Balen Report into the public domain. 


As the Sunday Telegraph noted:

The BBC is mounting a landmark High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the Act to pursue their journalism.

 The action will increase suspicions that the report includes evidence of anti-Israeli bias in news programming.

Now, in light of all this, consider an item that appeared a while back at the superbHonestReporting:

Israel’s Finance Ministry shot down an idea for a ‘Jewish Al-Jazeera’. Isaac Herzog has been quoted as saying: ‘We considered establishing a Jewish Al Jazeera, especially one that would broadcast in Arabic and Farsi. But it was torpedoed by the Finance Ministry’.

Hamas has a huge advantage precisely because of Al Jazeera, since the station is also watched by the English speaking world. 

Compare this to Israel, which has to filter reports through foreign journalists. A ‘Jewish Al Jazeera’ which offered reports in English, would be a massive help.


And think about how simple the Palestinian propaganda is. It concentrates on one clear, albeit deceitful and historically inaccurate message: We were here first. The Jews kicked us out. We’re the victims.



The 2002 Jerusalem Institute report noted an interesting example where Palestinian propaganda excelled while Israeli PR failed miserably:

Losing the “Al Aqsa” Brand War

 Naming the current war the “Al Aqsa intifada” proved to be a stroke of Palestinian PR genius, as much of the Western news media adopted this Palestinian brand name that casts the conflict internationally in the image Arafat sought.

For its part, Israel’s failure to “rebrand” the conflict on its own terms to reflect the conflict’s true nature — a pre-planned war of terror against Israeli citizens — placed the Jewish state on the defensive in the international court of public opinion from the first day of the conflict.

 
Yet, a full seven years on, it seems that Israel has not learned anything about how to improve its PR and indeed, empower those of us in the diaspora who are passionately putting its case. Israel is still miscalculating.  Badly.


Witness what happened recently when Israeli tourism posters appeared around London. Anti-Israel groups quickly began lodging official complaints.


Result? The posters were all removed. It’s clear that pictures of golden beaches and bronzed bodies won’t cut it.


Instead, Israel needs to remind the world that she is the sole democracy in the region.


And where are the images of Palestinians being treated in Israeli hospitals?

Where are the maps illustrating how tiny Israel is compared to the 99.9999% of the Middle East that the Arabs control?



Where are the public roll-calls of all the Israelis who have lost their limbs, loved ones and lives to Palestinian terrorism?

And yes, I realise that antisemitism lies at the heart of much unfair bias against Israel. No doubt about it. But that’s even more reason why Israel needs to organise some decent PR.



This begs the question: why doesn’t Israel just take a leaf out of the Palestinian book?

After all, the world is bombarded with images of wounded Gazan children, even when those children are suffering purely because of Hamas aggression.


Why are there never any images of Israeli children as they lay injured on the ground following a Hamas attack?

Where are the public roll-calls of all the Israelis who have lost their limbs, loved ones and lives to Palestinian terrorism?


It’s time to play by some of the same rules as the Palestinians, unpalatable though this may be.

Either that, or Israel continues to be unfairly and insanely singled out as the villain of the piece.




Finally, I’d like to suggest that there is one bit of rebranding that we can and must all do, right now.


And that is to reclaim the word ‘Zionist‘. We have to stop allowing the Arabs and Muslims to hijack this word and turn it into an insult. So next time you hear someone using ‘Zionist’ as a pejorative term, make this clear:

A Zionist is simply anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist.

After all, we don’t hear people bashing Muslims for supporting the existence of their twenty-two Islamic nations, do we…?

This piece is cross posted at EMET NEWS – it’s a superb site, I urge you to check it out; just click here!