Just because it’s really easy to ridicule the BNP does not make it wrong. Their councillors have earned a reputation for not always being the sharpest chisel in the toolbox and as if to prove the point this
is what Councillor Pat Richardson, leader of the BNP group on Loughton council, had to say following racist attacks in the Essex borough: “Firebombing is not a British method. A brick through the window is a British method, but firebombing is not a way of showing displeasure“. Read that again!
On one level her honesty is commendable. Part of the BNP’s attraction for some racists is its lack of squeamishness in resorting to violence against anyone who is not part of the master race. If Richardson is doing anything it’s only letting slip what the party’s members really think about racist violence. On the other hand we will have to assume that the other members of her council group selected her as leader because of her greater political sophistication and ability to field tricky questions. Mmm.
Noor Ramjanally is a Muslim chaplain to the Metropolitan Police who has been using a hall near his Loughton home to run weekly prayer sessions. Police are investigating his abduction at knifepoint by two men who tried to intimidate him into ending the prayer sessions. This incident follows a suspected firebombing and hate mail. Noor says that there was a strong similarity between what his abductors said to him and the content of a recent BNP leaflet.
Richardson is indignant and has complained to the police that people are drawing a connection between her party’s literature, electoral success and racist attacks. Confirming that she’s not planning to give Slavoj Žižek a run for his money anytime soon her theory is that the prayers are all a clever scheme to vote out the BNP. “I was wondering whether it was a ploy to attract more Muslims to the area to try and vote out the BNP councillors”. That could take a while since only 1% of people in the area are Muslim, as Richardson remarks of the prayer meetings “It’s not really natural for the area because there are so few Muslims” but you probably don’t vote for a BNP candidate on account of their grasp of the finer detail.
What is genuinely bewildering about Richardson’s remarks is her idea of an acceptable scale of British racist violence. It presumably starts with staring and pointing, moves onto name calling, then to pushing, from that to dog shit through the letter box, bricks through the window, a good kicking. What is the final acceptably British sanction to the people the BNP want rid of?
But these people are no joke. L et’s leave the final word to Abdurahman Jafar, chair of the Muslim Safety Forum:
“The campaign of terror has followed a campaign organised by the BNP whereby they delivered hate literature to locals citing the small Friday prayer sessions as evidence of how ‘the Islamification process is almost complete’.” Recent months have seen a sharp rise in religiously motivated attacks against the Muslim community including attacks on outwardly Muslim appearing individuals, mosques and pogroms directed against the Muslim Community.”
Liam redux 
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