By <a href="mailto:sadeh@haaretz.co.il" class="tUbl2">Sharon Sadeh</a>
The leader of the British National Party talks about Jews, the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
LONDON - Nick Griffin, the chairman of the British National Party (BNP) is a happy man these days. His tiny and marginal party, which has a violent, anti-Semitic and racist reputation, has never enjoyed such media interest.
The generous news coverage began last week, after the leader of the National Front in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen, succeeded in making it into the second round of the presidential elections.
Griffin could not have hoped for better timing, as his party is running in local elections throughout England on May 2. The BNP is competing for 68 council seats (of a total of 5,889) in a number of local authorities, particularly in northern England, that are hard-hit by unemployment and where tensions are high between whites and Asian-Muslim minorities. Despite the BNP's extremist image, Griffin says that he espouses a moderate doctrine devoid of anti-Semitism.
According to Griffin, his organization is no longer connected to the British National Front - an extreme, neo-Nazi group - and during his three years as the leader of the BNP, the party has formulated a new constitution and expelled "problematic" members.
These actions served to rehabilitate the BNP, affording it wider legitimacy and recognition. But the British press has not found this face-lift convincing and believes that it basically remains as it was: a party that primarily attracts people from the lowest socio-economic sectors, with criminal backgrounds, thugs, the unemployed and the illiterate.
The charismatic personality of Griffin, who holds a law degree from Cambridge University, together with Le Pen's success in France, has aroused considerable consternation in Britain. Centrist parties in the UK worry that the BNP may win some council seats due to an apathetic electorate - only about 25 percent of eligible voters are expected to make the effort to cast a ballot. Still, British experts give the party little chance of winning any significant representation at the national level.
During the general elections last year, the BNP was able to garner only 47,000 votes, representing only 0.2 percent of the nationwide vote, thus demonstrating that the BNP is a local, rather than a national phenomomen.
Griffin, 43, is not troubled by criticism and dismisses the pessimistic assessment of his party's chances. He has traveled hundreds of kilometers in recent days in an effort to consolidate his ranks and refute the "lies which are recycled in the smear campaign of the media."
Griffin told Ha'aretz yesterday: "I was clearly encouraged by Le Pen's success in France." There is no formal connection between the two parties, he says, but he hopes to establish closer ties with Le Pen's party if and when the BNP is elected to the European Parliament. He believes that the same issues which won Le Pen support in France will similarly attract British voters to his party.
"We certainly would seek the removal of all people who had come here as asylum seekers, because as far as we are concerned under United Nations law... people are supposed to seek asylum in the first safe country they come to. And we are not next to Afghanistan, Algeria and so on. So none of those people have the slightest right to be in this country, and we would seek to remove them immediately, with much tougher enforcement and legislation".
"We believe that the only people who have a right to live in Britain who aren't already here are people of clear British descent, who had been abroad for some generations, for instance white Rhodesians, or Zimbabweans as it is now called, they have got a right of return here. Other than that [we would accept] people of European stock, individuals who marry people living in Britain. They should be able to be naturalized and become citizens as a matter of routine. Nobody else should."
Griffin warns of the danger of Britain becoming an "Islamistan, because here we are so soft on Islamic terrorism and illegal immigrants." Obviously, immigration is the sexy issue," says Griffin, "but it is much more than that." In reference to the clashes last summer between young Asians and whites in northern England, The British National Party leader declares: "The society is on the verge of collapse, and all those who say that cultural coexistence is possible are simply wrong. We have problems with multinationalism, which is enforced upon us by a system."
Griffin, who was convicted of incitement to racial hatred in April 1998, has called the Holocaust "the hoax of the 20th century" and coauthored a pamphlet alleging that a Jewish conspiracy controls the media, where it provides an "endless diet of pro-multiracial, pro-homosexual, anti-British trash."
But Griffin insists that he did not allege that there's a Jewish conspiracy. "That's absolutely out of the question. What the pamphlet says, and what everybody recognizes, is that especially in America, the Zionist lobby is massively powerful and influential....But also in Britain, if you look at the funding and influence in the Labour Party - again, there's a disproportionate number of Jews involved in that. But that is not to say that either a Jewish conspiracy or that Jews are involved or to blame."
Griffin says the illustration on the cover of the New Statesman showing a Jewish star piercing the Union Jack "a vulgar piece of artwork... I can imagine that to Jews it was thoroughly shocking, and I wouldn't have used it, not least because if we had used it we would be in court for incitement for racial hatred".
But what about the issue of the Holocaust as "the hoax of the 20th century?"
"Fundamentally, I would say that it is something from the 20th century... I am exasperated by the way it was used as a moral club to beat anyone in the Western world who wanted to preserve the Western world. It is an absurd position to use that... I think it is also becoming or should be becoming clear to Jews around the world that basing a large part of one's claim to anything, and basing one's politics in relations to the rest of the world on death camps, is fine until you have a Jenin. And then the moral high ground is no longer there. And I think it is time to put the whole thing behind us."
Griffin argues that the active role the Jews played in such movements as "egalitarianism, feminism, [and] Marxism, of course" served the "perceived Jewish self-interest in breaking up a Western society, making it less homogenous, on the basis that a less homogenous society is less likely to identify the Jews as different... So therefore I understand, and I have changed my position over the years in the sense that I can see from the Jewish perspective, how Jews felt having been persecuted, and why they have a sense of insecurity and fear.
"Now, I think that we are at a point where if white nationalists can understand and forgive that, and if similarly Jews can be less - I should be blunt - paranoid about any manifestation of white nationalism ... it doesn't mean that we want to exterminate you, any more then you want to exterminate us.
"The problem is the pure hypocrisy we get from significant number of Jews who when they are talking about Jewish things, say `yes, we want to preserve ourselves'. Now, I got a suspended sentence for incitement to racial hatred, for saying effectively precisely the same thing about my people, and that's the problem; it appears to be an hypocrisy where it is fine by the Jews, that's good when they want it, but when gentiles want it, that means that they want to exterminate people and establish a fourth Reich. It is simply not like that. We want the same.
"If both sides can give a little bit, then I think that particularly after the September 11 events, I believe that Jews have no choice: they either back the West and accept our right to preserve ourselves as the overall majority or the Jews will vanish, because the alternative is only West or Islam... And it the West goes down, so do the Jews.
Do you believe that there was a massacre in Jenin?
"It isn't something I studied myself and whether there was a massacre or wasn't - it is irrelevant. Either way it doesn't matter, being that the entire Arab and Muslim world believe there was. There is no question that the Israeli Defense Force is capable of massacres, there's no question of that at all; it has been done in the past, in order to terrify other Palestinians into leaving in large numbers; and it is part of a similar strategy now.
"Sooner or later there has to be a two-state solution, otherwise the bloodshed will get worse and worse. And the Palestinian state has to be a viable state, and not some piece of land based on miserable little refugee camps."
At the same time, Griffin says he understands Israelis who believe that the Palestinian leadership rejected peace initiatives at Camp David and Taba because the true aim of the Palestinians is the destruction of Israel. "I can quite believe that view, because the same mentality from these people, or people related to them we have in Britain as well, and we see that. Maybe they just won't compromise.
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