Who would Jesus vote for?
The BNP think it would be them; they’re running a billboard campaign suggesting that Jesus would vote for the BNP. That’s Jesus Christ – believed by Christians to be the Prince of Peace (Isiaah 9:6) – being used by the BNP – that’s the racist, Nazi, Holocaust-denying, criminal British National Party.
I’m guessing this is coming off the back of the responses to the Atheist Bus Campaign, trying to capitalise on misguided Christians who feel that their way of life is under threat. The quote from the Bible used on the poster is from John 15:20:
If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.
No, honestly, no scaremongering there. Christianity is a set of ethical principles based on a set of beliefs about the nature of creation and so on; it should be, as much as anything, a morality and not an identity. The BNP would, I suspect, rather disagree with me on that point, so I will return to the Bible. I can think of three good reasons based on scripture why Jesus would not have voted for the BNP.
Firstly, Galatians 3:28 reads
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus
Gentile is sometimes rendered as Greek; the meaning, though, is clear. God regards us all as equal, regardless of race.
Secondly, Luke 10:27 reads
And Jesus answered, Love God with all of your being and love your neighbour as yourself.
If you need a quick reminder about who your neighbour is, read the rest of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Thirdly, Jesus was a Jew.
xD.
March 31st, 2009 at 10:56 pm
[...] to my last post on the BNP claiming Jesus’ vote, Searchlight are running a petition on their Hope Not Hate [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 7:05 am
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April 25th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Labour (+ Tories) invaded Iraq on the basis on doctored intelligence reports and a pack of lies and killed tens of thousands of Muslims. In contrast the BNP always opposed the war, and have killed ZERO Muslims. Who are the REAL racists?
Re holocaust denial, numerous Muslims deny the holocaust as does one Christian priest.What of it? Why the fetish about holocaust denial? If someone wants to deny the holocaust (or the battle of Waterloo) why not let them?
I have been to a hundred BNP meetings over the last five years and have read hundreds of articles in BNP publications. I have seen nothing about holocaust denial.
April 26th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Well, Ralph, let’s go through that in order.
Firstly, many people – myself included – in both Labour & the Tories opposed the war. You might recall the first standing ovation in the House of Commons since Churchill was for Robin Cook’s resignation speech.
It is quite hard to argue that the international elite wanted to kill Muslims for being Muslims when the same international community (or, rather, subset thereof) intervened in the Balkans to protect Muslims.
The BNP, as shown by their actions, their actions and their words; most recently, this includes the BNP’s Language & Concepts Discipline Manual. Just to refresh your memory, Rule 15 says
In other words, it discriminates between British citizens on the basis of race and says that, because of their race, some people aren’t welcome in the UK. That is a pretty good definition of racist.
I condemn them as well.
Because the holocaust is a historical fact; because those who deny the holocaust tend to be anti-Semitic; because educating people about the Holocaust is the best way to stop it happening again; because explaining to people how and why the Holocaust happened will lead to a society that is more able to look out for the lies pushed by groups like the BNP.
For what it’s worth, I think people should be able to deny the Holocaust if they want; they will be challenged on the facts and on their motivation.
Firstly, “that is hearsay evidence that this court cannot abide”; secondly, Rule 11 of the BNP Discipline Manual that I referred to above says that “it is best to simply never speak or write of Jews at all” (emphasis in original).
In 1998, Nick Griffin said
It is not obvious to me whether you are someone who has been honestly duped into believing that the BNP are not a racist group or someone pretending to be. In the former case, I do suggest you look at the Hope Not Hate and Searchlight websites for starters. However, I rather suspect it is the latter as we do know that the BNP has advised its members to pose as ‘honest’ bloggers.
July 17th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
First, thanks to Dave Cole for his response, which is unusually intelligent by the standards of the BNP’s opponents. The latter normally argue along the lines that the BNP are fascist, xenophobic, Nazi, racist, Islamophobic, anti-semitic, Nazi, fascist, Nazi, fascists. Like others who repeat the same words and phrases ad nausiam (“sieg heil” or “God is great” or “father, son and Holy Ghost”), I suspect these people are no more than robots.
Turning to Dave Cole’s points, he claims “It is quite hard to argue that the international elite wanted to kill Muslims for being Muslims…”
I didn’t argue the above. My point, to expand, is that Labour, ably assisted by G.W.Bush and the Tories bombed an Arab country to smithereens with the objective (according to Alan Greenspan) of controlling the oil. If that’s not racist, I dont know what is. In other words racism comes in varieties other than killing members of another race for being members of another race.
Under the heading “Who are the real racists?” Dave Cole argues that because the BNP does not want non Anglo Saxons in the UK, therefore they are racist. My answer is as follows.
Absolutely central to the Concise Oxford dictionary definition of racism is the notion that one race is superior to another. The fact of wanting to preserve British culture, traditions and the Anglo Saxon race does not prove the belief that one race is superior to another. Ergo, you cannot argue that the BNP is racist on the above grounds.
(Curiously, the BNP’s opponents never object to the highly restrictive immigration or citizenship policies of Saudi Arabia, Japan and numerous other countries. In effect the BNP’s opponents are pursuing policies that will destroy the UK and more generally the West by swamping them with immigrants. In adopting this objective, the BNP’s opponents are revealing themselves to be little more than robots or dupes programmed by the founders of political correctness, the Frankfurt school of Marxists.)
Moreover, it is blindingly obvious that some races ARE superior to others. What have Australian Aboringees achieved? Zero literature. Zero inventions. And they aren’t saints: rape, domestic violence and child abuse are at catastrophic levels in Abo communities and always have been. So what’s wrong with racism (in that it consists of the above belief)? Of course this must not lead to racism in the sense of mistreating Abos or anyone else.
I believe dogs to be inferior to humans, but I wouldn’t dream of harming a dog. I love dogs.
I claimed above that “I have been to a hundred BNP meetings over the last five years and have read hundreds of articles in BNP publications. I have seen nothing about holocaust denial.”
Dave Cole answers by saying “that is hearsay evidence that this court cannot abide”.
Is Dave accusing me of lying?
As to BNP publications, I notice that Dave fails to direct us to BNP publications or articles where the holocaust is denied. Is this because he cant?
Dave then quotes the BNP disciplinary manual (which I’ve never seen) which allegedly says “it is best to simply never speak or write of Jews at all”. Well, do the authors of material in BNP publications deal with Jews and the holocaust or not. If they do, then they are disobeying the “manual”, which is presumably unlikely. If they dont, then I’m right in saying the holocaust is scarcely ever mentioned in BNP publications.
Finally, Dave suggests I look at “Hope not Hate” web-sites. I have. They’re drivel. They’re very much along the lines of the above “nazi, fascist, nazi, fascist, nazi, fascist” stuff. I’d rather listen to a gramophone record stuck in the same groove.
We BNP members have been puzzled for a long time as to who it is that we hate. But all was revealed a few weeks ago when the Hope not Hate bus came to Co Durham. A BNP member asked the Hope not Hate representative who it is that we hate. “Women” came the reply. To which the BNP member said “But I’m married to a woman, as is my brother” – who is also a member.
This had the Hope not Hate representative puzzled. Not only that, but Hope not Hate have been distributing an A4 leaflet locally ( and nationally for all I know) all about the BNP’s hatred of women. All very puzzling, considering about 10% of people at BNP meetings are women. I conclude that Hope not Hate are nutters. (Incidentally, the Labour Party, like Hitler and Mussolini, tends to have people sacked from public sector jobs where the latter’s political views are not approved of in Labour circles. The above BNP member was one of these unfortunates.)
Also at the top of every Hope not Hate site it says “exposing the extremism behind the BNP”. Well, whoopee. What’s wrong with extremism? It used to be extreemist to claim the Earth is round. Presumably Hope not Hate fans think the Earth is flat.
Near the end of his piece, Dave says “It is not obvious to me whether you are someone who has been honestly duped into believing that the BNP are not a racist group or someone pretending to be.” All very conspiracy theory. I’m neither of the latter two. I’m someone who is not happy with every aspect of the BNP, but the latter is nothing compared to my contempt for 1, the politically correct, 2, Islamofascism, and 3, the moronic economic arguments for immigration that appear in the left of centre press. So the BNP has had my support for several years, and will continue to do so, unless Nick Griffin does something silly like adopting the racist policy of invading an Arab country on the basis of doctored intelligence reports and a pack of lies.
.-= Ralph Musgrave´s last blog .. =-.
July 20th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I will respond point by point:
While it is true, as Mr Musgrave says, that
you can change the word ‘killing’ and still have it as racism but you cannot change ‘for being members of another race’. The point is that racism discriminates on the basis of race; if race is not the determinant, it cannot by definition be racist.
You can say lots of things about the Iraq war. You can say it was a good idea or a bad idea, both for various reasons, and you can say it was well or badly done, and so on and so forth. You can even say that it was done solely for oil (I don’t believe that, for the record). Even if you accept the premise that ‘we went into Iraq for oil’, it does not follow that ‘we are racist’ or even ‘this action was racially motivated’. There is a hole in your logic.
I’m afraid I don’t have access to the COD, but the Compact OED defines racism as
In any case, I wouldn’t agree with the OED’s definition if it were as you suggested; I would take a more functionalist view and add that this is likely to be the acceptable rationalisation of a desire for apartness or, if I switch into Afrikaans, apartheid.
In any case, I would give a slightly more nuanced view of the BNP’s leitmotif. It is not just about Anglo-Saxons. Section 2.1 of the BNP constitution (9th ed) purports that the BNP represents the
This is a creation of a gestalt nationalism that contradicts the rest of the BNP’s ideology unless you take it as wanting racial separateness. I don’t think that any given ethnie has an a priori right to a given area of land
On your blogs, you say that ‘We Should Print Money’, ‘Marginal Employment Subsidies Don’t Work’, ‘Governments should stop borrowing’ and ask about ‘Why does money have value?’ and ‘Government as employer of last resort?’ and nothing else, so far as I can see. Because you have not written about swine flu, I must assume that you want everyone to contract it. Just because I don’t write about a particular issue here, doesn’t mean I don’t have a position on it.
You assert that immigration ‘will destroy the UK’; I disagree. I might equally say that freedom of movement has destroyed Somerset; it has changed it, but not destroyed, but in any case it is not a phenomenon that can be stopped, even if it can be curtailed, without draconian measures and
So after saying you’re not racist, you assert racial superiority. You’re a racist.
It took me (I timed it) 17 seconds to find this list of Indigenous Australian writers. Not far away is a category on bushcraft.
I would contend that the social problems faced by Australian Aboriginal communities are due to economic factors stemming from the nature of the implantation of the Western economic model in Australia, the smallpox brought by Europeans and, more particularly, the racist attitudes of certain sections of the white community and law towards Aborigines, notably including the abrogation of native title by the Gove case and, of course, the Stolen Generations from 1869 to 1969 and the White Australia policy.
If it is necessary to spell it out: the attitude you set out towards Aborigines (which you admit to be racist) led to many of the problems faced by Aboriginal communities today and, as has been shown time and time again, the idea of separation not leading to discrimination is false.
What do you want me to say in response to that? Do I have to spell out that I think members of the species homo sapiens are substantially morally equal?
I believe the BNP to be a racist party trying to obfuscate its racism. I do not take anything you, as a BNP partisan, say on the subject at face value, particularly when you ignore the links I gave.
As I have said, the BNP is trying to obfuscate its racism. I doubt the party, under Griffin, would be overt about it. However, the history of the party from its foundation and actions of its senior members (for instance, Mark Collett talking about the Jews while head of the youth section).
The BNP Language and Concepts Discipline Manual can be found online at bnp.org.uk/organisers/store/general_guides/language_discipline.pdf. The quote mentioned, and rule 15 which I mention above, have been removed. The original is still at Wikileaks.
In official, public-facing publications the BNP do not talk about the Holocaust, but senior members of the BNP have in the past called it a ‘Holohoax’ (and not explained how they came to, as they claim, recant their opinions) and would appear to continue to hold those opinions, as I link to above.
As you mentioned later in your post, I thought it possible you’d been honestly duped into believing the BNP not to be racist and so suggested those sites for you to get a different opinion. Clearly, I was wrong, but I would urge you to look into the attitudes that the leadership of your party have demonstrated and continue to demonstrate and ask yourself whether their – and your – worldview is in tune with the bulk of the population or, indeed, reality.
Couple of things. As reported by the Daily Mail, former BNP GLA candidate Nick Eriksen thought that ‘Women are like gongs – they need to be struck regularly’.
More importantly, though, is the BNP’s attitude towards the family. While it describes itself as favouring a ‘traditional’ extended family, I surmise that what it desires would lead to a rolling back of women’s liberation over the past decades, seeing women having to give up work to stay at home. Hate, in this instance, could be taken as shorthand for oppression.
This old chestnut? My answer is here
Extremism isn’t, I suppose, wrong per se. Racism and bigotry might be better term.
Perhaps I made a mistake in my assumptions about you.
If you have such contempt for the politically correct, why do you visit my blog? After all, I went through the fifty-odd pages of my student union’s constitution removing every instance of gendered language. The manner in which we use language has a political content; my use of language reflects my politics.
I dislike the word ‘fascism’; some thoughts on why are here. Ultimately, I think it is of minimal descriptive or predictive value. Bolting the prefix ‘Islamo-’ doesn’t change that as there are various different strands of thought within takfiri thought and what I believe you would include in the term goes far beyond takfirism.
I don’t argue for immigration solely on economic grounds (though I think they are valid), but against the stance you take because the evidence available contradicts your position.
xD.
.-= Dave´s last blog ..The BNP Language and Concepts Discipline Manual goes down the memory hole =-.
July 20th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
[...] = 'mattwardman'; I wrote here, in passing, about the BNP’s Language and Concepts Discipline Manual which included Rule #15. [...]