The disappearing and reappearing antisemitism: the case of Nick Griffin

The Guardian has obtained documents relating to BNP leader Nick Griffin's 1998 conviction for incitement to racial hatred, that contain examples of the antisemitic attitudes he held at that time:

The papers, from the Crown Prosecution Service, illustrate how Griffin believed the Holocaust did not happen, was convinced that multiculturalism was the result of a plot by international capitalism and Zionism and held the wish to win political power so as to "peacefully and humanely as possible" recreate Britain as an overwhelmingly white nation.

Griffin, who in this month's elections is fighting to retain the European parliament seat he won in 2009, also talks about how the British mass media was "greatly controlled" by what he calls "organised Jewry" and how many of the films made in Hollywood, including Steven Spielberg's, are "anti-white" propaganda.

This is remarkably similar to the view expressed by Griffin in a speech to the European Parliament in March of this year, in which he claimed that "An unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands."

It is no secret that Griffin held these views in the late 1990s: he wrote articles for the BNP magazine Spearhead that openly denied the Holocaust happened and set out conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media. However, Griffin had tried to distance himself, and the BNP, from at least some of these attitudes. Whether this represented a genuine change in thinking or a cosmetic exercise was an important question: in 2000, for example, Griffin advised BNP writers to use “Zionists” as a euphemism for “Jews” when writing articles, to avoid "legal and political suicide."

Dropping antisemitism coincided with a desire to make the BNP electorally respectable. The BNP's electoral high water mark came in 2009, when Griffin and Andrew Brons were elected to the European Parliament, but since then the party has been in sharp decline. As council seats have been lost and members have drifted away, the BNP's antisemitism has returned, as we described in a recent blog post.

Another example was posted on the BNP website just last week, written by "London correspondent" Richard Cley, who argues that the unrest in Ukraine is the result of conspiracy by Zionist bankers and the politicians they control:

Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage, all the BBC approved stooges, do not have one word to say against the illegal slaughter in Ukraine, not one word against the illegal Right Sector fascists in Kiev, and not a word against the Zionist controlled USA who has funded the whole war crime.

Why? Because the entire EU and UK governments do the bidding of Zionists too. They all want war with Russia and are using Ukraine to bait Russia in to doing something rash.

After the collapse of the British / US attack on Syria it is now clear that the Western political elites had a pow wow and decided unanimously to do what they are told, without question, by their Zionist masters, or else.

And all their political hangers on, the trade unions, the media, and most joyfully of all, the western arms manufacturers mostly under control the Zionist fractional reserve bankers, agreed.

Why? Well as you know the UK's national debt is £1.3billion and the US is in even more trouble with even greater debt. Zionist tradition is to screw up every western economy whenever they can. Then force their political puppets to create another major conflict like the First and Second World Wars, and lesser ones like Vietnam, Iraq and of course the big daddy of them all, the war that never was, the Cold War.

From vast wars, killings by the million, as a result of untold suffering, the Zionists can make even more profits and keep their rotten banking system from collapsing. Should the banking system collapse then the world's rich become poor. And along with them Nigel Farage and David Cameron, plus every other evil warmongering politician would become poor too.

While America and their media poodles accuse Russia of seeking to expand Russian control in to what was communist occupied Europe, Zionist USA has expanded her empire right to the Russian border without one word of objection from the EU.

Everything the US accuses Russia of, America is. It is clear that the 2014 Conspiracy of the Western World under orders of the Zionist controlled Muslim President Hussein Obama of the USA is working to a pre ordained plan.

Cley uses "Zionists" instead of Jews throughout this article, but in another article from January Cley writes that "Fascist thugs now rule Europe at the behest of the unrepresentative and unelected leaders of the World Council of Jews, fractional reserve bankers and all the obscene arms manufacturers of the fascist leaders of the western world." It seems that for Cley, "Zionists" and "Jews" are interchangeable terms, just as Griffin suggested in 2000.

Whether Nick Griffin genuinely changed his views in between 1998 and 2014, only to change them back again, is something only he can answer. But whatever the truth of this question, recent evidence suggests that the BNP is returning to its former role as a purveyor of open antisemitism to the British public.