Israel's Prime Minister in Germany
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel are holding talks in Berlin to symbolise their strong bond 60 years after the Holocaust. The two nations’ cabinets will convene for the first time in history.
Lee Barnes, BNP's Legal Director
As the Independent notes: “The focus, though, was not on threats gone by but on one that may loom in the future — the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran.”
The symbolic meeting to commemorate the Holocaust of Jews during World War Two has, however, been angrily criticised by Europe’s neo-fascist network. In Britain, Lee Barnes, legal director of the BNP, has described the event as “sickening” and accused Israel of using the Holocaust for “warmongering”. Echoing Germany’s neo-Nazi party the NPD, Barnes said the German government’s decision to hold a joint cabinet meeting is a “betrayal not of Germany and the German people but all morality.”
Griffin with NPD officials at Front National's 2005 RWB
The NPD’s Deputy-Chairman, Karl Richter, has called Mr Natenyahu’s scheduled appearance at the German Parliament as “monstrous”, calling it a “blatant affront to Germany and German interests”. Interestingly, NPD refers to the German Parliament as the Reichstag, the old imperial name of the Parliament, even though the name was changed to the Bundestag after the Allies defeated the Nazis in 1945.
“The 18th January is inextricably linked in the minds of the Germans of the Reich of 1871, ” said Richter. “A meeting of the Israeli Government on that date at the top of the Reichstag is a symbolic appropriation of the German political right, as it has elsewhere, the Chancellor has repeatedly pre-formulated. That is a monstrous and unprecedented in our history process. The Chancellor must ask themselves whose policies they actually operates – German or Israeli? “
On the Holocaust, Richter stood by it happening as a historical event, but said he did not accept the “ritual stigmatization” of Germany as a nation of “offenders”. However, he did attempt, as most European neo-fascists who support the Nazis do, to draw an equivalence between the Allied bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima to bring a speedy end to the War and the attempted mass extermination of Europe’s Jewish population.
Richter says:
“[the] Holocaust is multifaceted and includes the burned and murdered by Dresden and Hiroshima, the victims of the Holocaust, the Ukrainian famine-thirties and the expulsion of the victims after 1945 as well. Israel does not have exclusive rights to the Remembrance of the Holocaust!
Over the years Germany’s NPD and the BNP have built up relations and have even attended conferences in Sweden and France to discuss best practice. Nick Griffin has attempted to attend NPD conferences and several BNP officials have close links to the German neo-Nazi party. Most recently, in February 2009, the BNP’s Youth leader Mike Howson attended Sweden’s neo-fascist National Democrat’s Youth Conference in Sweden along with other fascists from the Czech Republic and Sweden. A video of the conference can be seen here.
Despite the BNP’s new found “appreciation” towards Israel (although it hasn’t stopped Griffin from agreeing to sign a joint statement with Jobbik’s Csnand Szegdi MEP on Israel’s business activity in Hungary – for a translation please see our briefing note here), Europe’s network of fascists still regard it as an enemy, aggressor and puppet master of American neo-colonialism. It is worth reminding ourselves the company the BNP keeps.
Maurice Cousins
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