I manage not to notice the death of Joerg Haider until three days after it happens. I have been so much up to my eyeballs in Guattari, Deleuze and friends of theirs that a dead fascist would have to be lying on my office floor (sadly not the case) decomposing for the length of time it normally takes Estates to deal with things like that before it would impinge on my consciousness.

In all seriousness, I'm not exactly celebrating here. Not because I mourn Haider's passing, I hasten to add. I find it hard to be upset when a whole swathe of my family wouldn't exist if certain of his heroes had had any say in things this side of the Channel. On the other hand, there have been suggestions that the death of a leader apparently responsible for the original split might go some way to uniting the main right-wing parties in Austria, which would obviously make for a larger entity with a greater share of votes even if this is negated by the loss of his personal brand of charisma.

The email inbox of an animal rights campaign does attract really cranky, bizarre stuff. Most of it is harmless. But today i came across the worst one ever.

( Cut for anti-semitism and gory stuff. Do not click if you are feeling remotely fragile, sensitive or likely to be sick at the slightest provocation.Collapse )

The worst bit isn't that I saw it, or that any of the hundreds of people on this wankstain's list who are sensible and horrified by such things saw it. The worst bit is that some people - like the paranoid guy who spouted anti-semitic crap at an animal rights meeting about a year ago and put me (and possibly other people) off going to the meetings for ages and who was for months the *one* person i outright refused to work with on Veggies events - see this shit and believe it. Some of the people on the list will have paranoid tendencies, or be young and impressionable, or any number of other reasons why they might take this crap seriously. And this is why i bother to take this crap seriously and bother to argue with it.

An undercover reporter for the Grauniad managed to infiltrate the BNP. Some highlights of his report here, here and here.

As an added bonus - since it comes up on the same page and i don't have to search far - here is the Grauniad's take on Irving's early release: . Oh yeah, and he's back in Britain. How delightful.

I'd decided i was too knackered after the last couple of days to think/blog about the Shoah deniers' conference currently going on in Iran. Then the subject invaded my airspace on the car radio this morning, pulling my mind away from the suckitude of Welwyn Garden City. (yeah, i know the idea of a garden city has anarchistic origins, but Welwyn in practice is one of my least favourite places. The part i know best is the hospital, which may be why.) I was absolutely charmed to hear about Iran's brilliant record on freedom of speech: so nice to know that, even though Iran locks up and tortures a wide range of dissenters, the voices of assorted anti-semitic liars will always have a haven from the tyrannies of countries such as Germany which are strangely touchy about the denial of events which have left lasting scars on their physical, political and psychological landscapes. And how heartwarming to see such a multiracial, multicultural gathering of people united by that one shared racial prejudice and the fragile tissue of the gigantic lie which holds them together. Now there's diversity. I may have to go and vomit.

Coming across David Irving and his ilk on the internet is like driving past an accident. You don't want to look, know you will be horrified by what you see, but it is difficult nonetheless to tear your eyes away. I won't link his site because quite frankly i don't want to appear on his referral stats, but should you wish to see it the domain is eff pee pee .co.uk. (say it out loud. Come on, even antifascists are allowed to be puerile sometimes...)

Anyway, for your viewing pleasure, i reproduce here some advice given by Irving to children of 10 and 11 who have contacted him asking for advice on school projects. Nice to see that such a busy man can take time out of whining about the Chief Rabbi peeing on his lawn or whatever (seriously, it does pretty much stoop to that level at times) in order to mess with young folks' minds. So here goes:

I want you to be very, very careful about what you do, say, and write about these things -- the world is full of evil people, who will upset and harass you for the rest of your life if they suspect that you are thinking for yourself and not believing all that they tell you. So it is often necessary to keep to yourself the things you find out and believe.

I HAVE no interest whatever in the commercial package now marketed as The Holocaust. I find it boring.

Don't you find it odd, shameful even, that "In 8th grade students are required to learn about the Holocaust and Anne Frank's Diary"? Doesn't that smack of propaganda?

And best of all:
Fortunately these "eye witnesses" are dying out, and documents will take over, and the Holocaust legend will have a harder time surviving.

These are such perfect gems of bullshit that i can't bring myself to despoil them by adding commentary. I may, however, have to go and wash my hands and administer eyedrops as a result of having read and pasted them. (choice of icon is due to needing to gaze upon fluffy ducks as an antidote, mmkay...)

Martin Hart, a squat right-wing Jewish astrophysicist who has attended all the American Renaissance conferences since 1996, took umbrage to this, not least because he had only just reassured Hershel Elias, a new initiate to the American Renaissance circuit from Philadelphia, that although the conference was “infiltrated by Nazis and Holocaust deniers” this should not detract from his enjoyment of the gathering. “You fucking Nazi, you’ve disgraced this meeting,” Hart shouted at Duke before storming out of the hall followed by boos and catcalls. As one can tell from a glance at the Stormfront forums Hart appears to have woefully misjudged the audience!

Gotta love how long it took to work that one out! Another reassuring glimpse of how messed-up the fash are - for a start, they have a slight problem hanging on to friends. (The morbidly curious part of me wishes to start a sweepstake on how long the Armenian BNP candidate will last. The sensible part can't be bothered.)

BNP leader Nick Griffin is really a bastion of fluffy liberal tolerance. Most reacently he has stirred up controversy within the ranks by allowing a "totally assimilated Greek-Armenian" to stand as a candidate. Other party members have criticised the move, questioning what the point is of joining a party of racist scumbags if one is not allowed to be fully racist. Mr Griffin then announced the engagement of Mr Gawad to his daughter, ending months of speculation regarding her alleged relationship with the poetic offspring of Holocaust denier David Irving.*

*Ok, I made that last bit up, but only to show how little this story needs its ludicrousity rating brought up.

The best of the worst:

Yesterday the BNP admitted it had received a number of calls from angry members and that a hardcore had refused to accept Mr Gawad's candidacy on race grounds "even when it was explained that he was not a Pakistani Muslim".

The BNP says Mr Gawad was named after the actor Omar Sharif because his mother was a fan, and that his grandfather was an Armenian Christian who fled to Britain as a refugee.

Too gobsmacked/disgusted to do more than agree with DK that anti-Semites are fuckwits.