24
Oct
The British National Party – Scarier than Swine Flu
by Carrie
0 Comments | Posted by thatgirl in 21st Century Bellist
For those of you who haven’t noticed, it’s 2009. Many of us consider ourselves to live in societies of relative freedom, tolerance and acceptance — where people of all colors and creeds can live and work side by side in harmony.
On June 8th this year, the far-right political group, the British National Party (BNP) won two seats in the European Parliament. No big whoop, yeah? What are two seats in an organization of that size? When the Party’s immigration policies include offering financial incentives and political pressure to persuade legal immigrants to leave Britain and return to their countries of origin — no matter how long they have been settled in Britain — and their membership excludes people that are not of direct white, British descent, then I think there is some serious cause for concern.
Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, is an incredibly outspoken individual with some seriously scary points of view. In a recent television interview about immigration from South Saharan Africa, Griffin said a way of tackling the problem would be to sink the ships bringing the immigrants. Another comment that jumped out was Griffin’s musings about Third World Aid, when he stated he did not believe Britain should be “obliged to subsidise the incompetence and corruption of Third World states by supplying them with financial aid.” This kind of open hatred is seriously troublesome in the early 21st century.
Most controversially, members of the BNP have publicly expressed incredibly controversial views regarding the Holocaust. While most members may not openly engage in Holocaust denial, they have made insane claims regarding the numbers of Jews killed in the atrocities. Griffin has previously made comments such as;
“I am well aware that orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into soup and lampshades. I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria.”
“There is no doubt that hundreds, probably thousands of Jews were shot to death in Eastern Europe, because they were rightly or wrongly seen as communists or potential partisan supporters. That was awful. But this nonsense about gas chambers is exposed as a total lie”
However, the population of the UK are not just sitting back and doing nothing to protest against the unacceptable views of this far-right party. The Hope Not Hate campaign, fronted by Nick Lowles is at the forefront of the crusade against the BNP, and social networking sites such as Facebook have provided the campaign with a platform to encourage the public to show their support. The Hope Not Hate group has over 18,500 members, and the 1,000,000 United Against the BNP group has just under 600,000 members on Facebook alone.
Watch the now infamous “sink the ships” interview. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8141069.stm
She spent 100 days in prison and still doesn’t know why. But journalist Roxana Saberi doesn’t feel she did anything wrong because all she really was looking for was information.
Saberi had been living in Iran for six years and was collecting research for a book she was writing on Iranian society. On Jan. 31 of this year, she was arrested and, according to her, made a false confession to her Iranian interrogators that she was a U.S. spy in hopes she would be freed. Saberi’s eight-year sentencing led to a hunger strike. She was released on May 11 after an appeals court cut her jail term to a two-year suspended sentence — and after thousands protested around the world for her release.
Even though Saberi is now home, what does her experience say about the availability of information and the freedom of journalists globally? Well, it depends on where you are.
The United States’ Freedom of Information Act allows the disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the government. Laws like these allow citizens and journalists in the U.S. to examine government activity and have an input in decisions that affect them. Not all countries have journalistic protections, however.
Saberi’s case in Iran (as well as the case of Laura Ling and Euna Lee on trial in North Korea for alleged spying) shows that even as an American journalist, problems can arise when searching for information abroad.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1981, Iraq is the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist. Their statistics also show that from 2000 to 2008, 125 journalists have been imprisoned worldwide with China having the most at 28. From January 1992 to April of this year, approximately 734 journalists have been killed around the world — 32% of the suspected perpetrators in the murders were traced back to political groups.
Even though the U.S. has protections for journalists, it’s still not perfect. The CPJ wrote a letter to President Barack Obama on June 1 urging him to address issues of journalistic freedom, and in particular that of Reuters freelance photographer, Ibrahim Jassam.
According to the letter, Jassam “was detained by U.S. forces at his home just outside Baghdad on September 2, 2008. A November 30 Iraqi Central Criminal Court decision found that there was no evidence to hold Jassam, and an order that U.S. forces release him was rejected by U.S. military authorities, who concluded that he ‘continued to pose a serious threat to the security and stability of Iraq.’” The exact threat is unknown.
When reporters and ambitious researchers try to delve into a more controversial and covert world, things can get messy. Although the persecution and cover-ups will most likely continue, the pursuit of truth far outweighs the risk for many journalists.
photo by steve rhodes