“Muslim charter” UKIP MEP Gerard Batten directly linked to extremist anti-Muslim propaganda network
Original guest post by Jai Singh
Headed by Nigel Farage, a Member of the European Parliament, the UK Independence Party (known as “UKIP”) has made huge gains in local government elections in the UK,
COMMENT:
that of course assumes that you consider that after 20 years that out of 1,750+ seats open for election to have managed to win under 150 seats is a good result, particularly when you note howmany of those elected Councillors hold seats of any relevance and just howmany have lost their seats already due to a variety of reasons but mostly due to extremist and racist comments which are totally contra the values of these United Kingdoms.
Greg_L-W.
and may achieve the support of up to 20% of voters during the impending European elections. UKIP has of course also received scrutiny due to the extreme right-wing (and often explicitly Far-Right) views of far too many of its politicians. These views have received publicity via a combination of media exposure and blunders by UKIP politicians themselves.
Such incidents are continuing to occur. For example, during a recent UKIP conference in Torquay, Nigel Farage was caught enthusiastically applauding racist “jokes” about South Asians along with similarly derogatory “humour” at the expense of Muslims. Furthermore, during the same conference, UKIP tried to ban journalists from a meeting ostensibly to discuss sharia law; the very first question at that meeting was “How can you be both a Muslim and an Englishman ?” Farage himself has also become increasingly outspoken about expressing highly offensive views; in fact, even traditionally right-wing British news outlets such as The Telegraph are now publishing articles describing UKIP as “an overtly racist and extremist party”.
UKIP’S “DECLARATION FORM” FOR CANDIDATES
According to BBC deputy political editor James Landale, writing on 28 February 2014:
If you want evidence of how UKIP is trying to become more professional, look no further than the form potential candidates have to fill out, a copy of which I have obtained at the party’s conference in Torquay.
Wannabe UKIP candidates have to declare the following:
“I never engaged in, advocated or condoned racist, violent, criminal or anti democratic activity.
“I have never been a member of or had links with any organisation, group or association which the national executive committee considers is liable to bring the party into disrepute.
“I have never been convicted of any offence punishable by a custodial sentence, whether or not a custodial sentence was actually imposed. I shall notify the Party Chairman and General Secretary immediately upon being interviewed under caution.”
Later the form asks specifically: “Are you or have you ever been a member of the BNP, EDL or any other organisation that might be of public interest?”
And this is my favourite: “I do not have any ‘skeletons in my cupboard’ that may cause me or UKIP embarrassment if they were to come out during the election.”
Unfortunately for UKIP, the ramifications of this will become clearer immediately below, although not in the way UKIP’s leadership intended.
UKIP MEP GERARD BATTEN AND THE ANTI-MUSLIM PROPAGANDA NETWORK
Another very senior UKIP politician who has recently featured in the British news is Gerard Batten, UKIP’s immigration spokesman. A founder member of UKIP in 1993, he has also been UKIP’s Chief Whip since 2009, and was personally appointed by Nigel Farage. Furthermore, Batten is currently UKIP’s MEP for London and a member of UKIP’s National Executive Committee. Batten was appointed a member of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Security and Defence in 2004; he was appointed UKIP’s spokesman on Security and Defence soon afterwards.
In February 2014, Batten appeared as one of the main participants in several televised political debates on Channel 4 and the BBC, primarily in his capacity as UKIP’s immigration spokesman. As discussed in The Guardian, Batten has also recently received some publicity due to his proposed “Muslim Charter” requiring British Muslims to sign a “code of conduct”; despite the outcry, Batten has refused to withdraw his proposal. (Nigel Farage subsequently disowned Batten’s proposal).
Furthermore, the same Guardian article confirms that Batten is also on record as suggesting a ban on new mosques in British cities; Batten justified this by repeatedly referring to the prohibition on non-Muslim places of worship in Saudi Arabia, which he kept describing as “the heartland” of Islam. Batten is therefore proposing that British citizens who are Muslims should effectively be held hostage to the actions of foreign governments. Bear in mind that the majority of British Muslims do not have Saudi Arabian (or Middle-Eastern) backgrounds and do not even belong to the same religious “denomination” as state-sponsored Saudi Wahhabism.
On 28 February 2014, during an interview with Sky News anchor Adam Boulton, Nigel Farage insisted that UKIP had already “got rid of” everyone with any links to extremism. During his speech at the recent UKIP conference discussed above, Farage similarly claimed that “We’ve had one or two bad people. We’ve got rid of them”. However, Farage’s claims are demonstrably false: It turns out that Gerard Batten himself has a history of direct involvement with the core extremist international anti-Muslim propaganda network.
For example, in 2007, Gerard Batten personally represented the UK at a major anti-Muslim conference held in Brussels by the aforementioned propagandists. The conference brought together dozens of organisations and individuals to inaugurate the “Counterjihad Europa” network; participants included a number of the main writers at the virulently anti-Muslim website Gates of Vienna, along with Robert Spencer, who is the main writer of the Jihad Watch website and a foreign extremist whom the British Government’s Home Office has now banned from entering the UK. Full details on the conference here and here; Gerard Batten is explicitly named.
Regular readers will recognise the names of many of the people listed, including sources cited by the mass-murdering terrorist Anders Breivik in his manifesto; Gates of Vienna owner Edward May (aka “Baron Bodissey”) is on record as explicitly describing himself as a “propagandist” and admitting that his agenda is to deliberately promote highly distorted information about Islam in order to stereotype and demonise the religion. Subsequent annual conferences have included high-profile participation from the English Defence League leadership.
Gerard Batten is also directly linked to the Dutch Far-Right politician Geert Wilders, and has even held joint press conferences with him. Wilders’ extremely bigoted views on Islam are well-known (see examples via Wikipedia and the Institute for Policy Studies). Batten is on record as describing Wilders as “a brave man trying to defend western civilisation in the face of its own loss of the most basic instinct of self preservation”.
Furthermore, Gerard Batten also has a history of assisting the extremely anti-Muslim “Stop Islamisation of Europe” (SIOE) organisation. He even handed in a petition on behalf of SIOE head Anders Gravers to the mayor of Brussels. SIOE is part of Robert Spencer & Pamela Geller’s SION (“Stop Islamization of Nations”) organisation, and Gravers himself is currently a member of SION’s Presidents Council.
For the UKIP leadership’s benefit and for the public record, it is worth reiterating the following key facts. Robert Spencer is:
(a) an individual with precisely zero academic, professional or linguistic qualifications on the subject of Islam;
(b) an individual whose own alma mater, the University of North Carolina, have publicly condemned his writings;
(c) formally allied to racist white supremacists and European neo-Nazis, and has even organised joint public demonstrations with then;
(d) on record as demonising the entire Muslim population and demonising the religion of Islam as a whole;
(e) on record as repeatedly making false statements about Islam and Muslims, and repeatedly trying to hide the evidence when his actions were exposed;
(f) on record as making false statements about historical Popes and major Jewish figures, and then trying to hide the evidence when his actions were exposed;
(g) one of the most heavily cited sources in the terrorist Anders Breivik’s manifesto;
(h) an ordained Catholic deacon who has publicly admitted that his anti-Islam propaganda campaign is heavily motivated by his [unilateral] agenda for the dominance of the Catholic Church, despite the fact that his actions are in violation of both official Vatican policy and the extensive interfaith bridge-building efforts of the global leaders of his own Catholic sect;
(i) closely linked to influential American Catholic religious leaders affiliated with “Dominionism”, an extreme interpretation of fundamentalist Christianity deriving from “Christian Reconstructionism”, which involves the belief that rule by non-Christians anywhere in the world is sacrilege, explicitly approves of the historical slavery of African-Americans, and openly advocates the replacement of American law with Old Testament injunctions including the death penalty for apostasy and homosexuality; furthermore, according to Dominionism, its adherents have a God-given mandate to infiltrate the highest echelons of power and subsequently impose their beliefs on the entire world;
(j) closely linked to multiple figures who are extremely anti-Semitic as well as anti-Muslim;
(k) on record as denying the Srebrenica genocide, explicitly describing it as “the-genocide-that-never-was” and proposing “the possibility that Muslims could have carried out any deceptive atrocity-manufacturing in the Balkans”;
(l) on record as repeatedly promoting the work & writings of Serge Trifkovic, former spokesman for the Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic; Karadzic is currently charged with genocide during the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia. Spencer and Trifkovic have even held joint interviews and collaborated on an anti-Islam documentary film. Trifkovic openly supports and defends Ratko Mladic, whom the United Nations Tribunal has indicted on 16 counts of genocide and war crimes. Furthermore, Trifkovic has also appeared as a defence witness during the trials of several Serbian war criminals subsequently convicted of multiple crimes against humanity, including genocide, exterminations, persecution and deportations;
(m) on record as joining a genocidal white nationalist Facebook group called the “Campaign for the Reconquest of Anatolia”, whose mission statement openly advocates the ethnic cleansing, mass sterilisation and euthanasia of Turkey’s entire Muslim population, targeting “up to 150 million people”;
(n) on record as making extremely disparaging statements about the prestigious West Point military institution and has described Far-Right terrorists in the US as “ordinary Americans who believe in individual rights”.
(o) an individual whose SION/SIOA/AFDI organisations’ leadership is directly assisted by David Yerushalmi, the head of an organisation whose mission statement explicitly declares that its (currently unidentified) members are “dedicated to the rejection of democracy”.
[Note: Extensive further information regarding these facts along with a range of other matters involving Robert Spencer and his inner circle is available in this recent article.]
EDL ex-leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka “Tommy Robinson”) was a member of SION’s Presidents Council until his unconvincing “defection” to the Quilliam Foundation in October 2013. Speaking to various international outlets, especially a Far-Right source, Yaxley-Lennon has admitted the real reasons for his involvement with Quilliam. It is worth noting that Yaxley-Lennon has repeatedly stated that there has actually been zero change in his extremist views, and that he continues to support Robert Spencer. Yaxley-Lennon is also on record as publicly endorsing UKIP.
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UKIP’S LINKS TO INTERNATIONAL FAR-RIGHT PARTIES
As confirmed by the New Statesman:
Ukip is part of the group Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD). The group includes representatives of the Danish People’s Party, the True Finns Party, the Dutch SGP and the infamous Italian Lega Nord – all of them far-right. Nigel Farage is co-President of the group along with Lega Nord’s Francesco Speroni, who described multiple murderer Anders Breivik as someone whose “ideas are in defence of western civilisation.”
Mario Borghezio, another member of the group, declared in a radio interview that Breivik had some “excellent” ideas. Farage’s reaction was to write a strongly-worded letter to Borghezio, asking him to withdraw his comments or Ukip would pull out of the EFD. Borghezio not only did not apologise, but responded with an extraordinary speech in which he raged: “Long live the Whites of Europe, long live our identity, our ethnicity, our race… our blue sky, like the eyes of our women. Blue, in a people who want to stay white.”
Nigel Farage did not withdraw from the EFD. He continues to co-preside over it, along with the leader of the Lega Nord. MEP Nikki Sinclaire, however, was expelled from Ukip for refusing to take part in the EFD because of their “extreme views”.
UKIP AND BRITISH FAR-RIGHT PARTIES
Via the aforementioned New Statesman article:
“Ukip has no links to the BNP,” explained Farage in 2007. The first line of any description of Ukip calls it “a libertarian, non-racist party”. What party, other than one skating close to the lines of taste and decency, needs to describe itself as “non-racist”? Farage boasted on The Andrew Marr Show (20 January 2013) that “Ukip is the only UK party to explicitly ban BNP members from joining”. What party, other than a party whose policies are attractive to such organisations, would need to do that?
…..More recently, however, Farage refused to vote to oppose moves for the European Union to fund the BNP.
The founder of the party, Alan Sked, says it has become “extraordinarily right-wing” and is now devoted to “creating a fuss, via Islam and immigrants”.
Furthermore, as confirmed by the Huffington Post on 28 February 2014, it turns out that UKIP’s “new” “Love Britain, Vote Ukip” campaign slogan is actually a rehash of the Far-Right BNP’s own slogan. A BNP spokesman subsequently complained “They’ve stolen our policies and now they’ve stolen our slogan”.
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FURTHER INFORMATION
1. For interested readers, UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s Twitter address is @Nigel_Farage.
2. UKIP “immigration spokesman” and “Chief Whip” Gerard Batten’s Twitter address is @GerardBattenMEP.
3. BBC deputy political editor James Landale’s Twitter address is @BBCJLandale.
4. Sky News anchor Adam Boulton’s Twitter address is @adamboultonSKY.
5. Huffington Post UK Political Director / New Statesman contributor Mehdi Hasan’s Twitter address is @mehdirhasan.
Greg Lance - Watkins (Greg_L-W)
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By Charlotte Meredith Posted: 13/03/2014 15:57 GMT | Updated: 13/03/2014 17:59 GMT