Lauren Booth – Incitement to Racial Hatred charge (S.5 of the Public Order Act)?

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• “Spiked” report on the Hyde Park rally & the hatred of Israel & the west

Comment at end

17th January, 2009

Last week this person – Lauren Booth – went beyond the usual ranting and raving of the illiberal Left. Peace campaigners come in all shapes and sizes, and most of them would not dream of inciting racial hatred to further “peace”. But it seems THIS woman does more than dream.  I will confess that this was first brought to my attention by the website of a party I would never support: the racist British Nationalist Party. But in this, they are right to raise it.

There are two videos worth watching. The one below was in London last Saturday at the rally which ended in a riot at which the police were attacked and a Starbucks windows smashed by rioting “demonstrators”.

Lauren Booth at the ‘Stop Gaza Massacre Demonstration’, London Saturday 10 January 2009

Booth says to the crowd, “We are Palestinian.” (You don’t speak for me. Not me, this TONY Blair Supporter. I’m British, and proud of it.)

She also says, “I am proud to be from Gaza”. What? I thought she was from England.

SHAME ON YOU – SHAME ON YOU – SHAME, SHAME, SHAME ON YOU, MS BOOTH

But the secret video filmed by BNP members is even more worrying. It’s “SPOT A WOMAN” day, as was the above video. There seems to be but ONE woman present. And that is the sister-in-law of the FREEDOM FIGHTER Tony Blair. Head covered, of course. She says –

“Israel, you are the fanatics in the Middle East …and you are the criminals that we detest … I tell you, the British government, we are angry and we want Israel OUT of this country”. (She seems to mean MY country, not hers.)

Watch her and her antics here at the BNP’s site. You will have to scroll down the page. (No sound at the beginning.)

It was filmed at the ‘Muslims for Gaza’ rally in Corporation Park, Blackburn, on Sunday 11th January 2009, the day following the London rally. Busy little activist, isn’t this Ms Booth? Here she shamelessly uses her relationship to Mr Blair.  Holding a mobile phone she says she is speaking to someone at Tony Blair’s Jerusalem Office; or so she feigns. She says she has a message from the “British people” whilst goading the hugely male & Muslim audience almost into hysteria for the benefit of Mr Blair’s (probably imaginary) assistant. Her message – “SHAME ON YOU.”

This woman is DANGEROUS. I am no racist nor would I ever support the BNP.  Sadly, unless the government and police DO something about this kind of incitement, VOTING may soon be the last thing on some people’s minds.

It may not be too far fetched to suggest that this woman is attempting to start her very own intifada.

Read the report below carefully and ask yourself why you heard no press reports on this. Press censorship? Surely not!? If so, to coin a phrase – shame on them.

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Special in-depth feature by Nick Griffin on the efforts of the far-left to spark a Muslim intifada on our streets.

Flicking burning matches into boxes of gelignite! That’s the only way to describe the irresponsible antics of the far-left as they use the distant conflict in Gaza as an excuse to wind up young Muslims. Their aim is to spark clashes with the police that would ‘radicalise’ the Muslim community in the hope that they could then be recruited to Marxist revolutionary organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party and Respect.

Just how frighteningly close these white atheist cranks are to sparking riots that could tear many parts of Britain apart can be judged from the two pieces of video footage accompanying this report.

The first was filmed outside the Israeli Embassy in London a fortnight ago. It shows graphically the extent to which the police have lost the ability and the will to face down threats and violence from angry Muslims (compare this pathetic retreat with the truncheon-wielding head-cracking of peaceful Countryside Alliance demonstrators outside Parliament).

The second five minutes of film was shot by an iron-nerved team from BNPtv in Blackburn on Sunday 11th January. As you’ll see the first short section is silent, but still gives a good impression of the scale of the protest.

Despite – or rather, because of – the size of the demo, and its exclusively Muslim nature, none of the broadcast media or national newspapers carried a single word on the story. The BBC in particular gave extensive air-time to rival pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protests in London over the same weekend, and mentioned a left-wing rally in Manchester, but all covered up what was probably the largest Islamic protest march in the UK since the Bradford book-burnings against Salman Rushdie and free speech twenty years ago.

The main camera crew, which included Burnley BNP Councillor Derek Dawson and former Blackburn BNP Councillor Robin Evans, were threatened with arrest and escorted out of the town by the police. A second back-up crew with an amateur video camera, however, were not picked up by the police and managed to attend the protest rally itself. This was held in Blackburn’s Corporation Park and included a short but inflammatory speech by Tony Blair’s sister-in-law Lauren Booth, which was recorded under very difficult circumstances by our brave volunteers.

Self-confessed Marxist

A self-confessed life-long Marxist, Lauren Booth speaks for the far-left front group the so-called Stop the War Coalition. Last year she joined Respect’s George Galloway on a fund-raising stunt for them, which was praised in Socialist Worker.

Ms Booth addressed the almost totally male Muslim crowd with a large part of her hair and head covered with a woolly hat, and she also pointedly made no reference to her thoroughly unIslamic support for feminism, atheism, abortion on demand and the abolition of the family. She did, however, make a fiery speech attacking Israel, complete with what at present appear to be totally unsubstantiated allegations about the women and children of Gaza being ‘blasted’ with chemical weapons. Making things up as she goes along is nothing new for Ms Booth – last year she visited Gaza and claimed that she was forbidden to leave by Jewish soldiers, even though the checkpoint in question was manned by the Egyptians.

Addressing the huge and already wound up crowd in Blackburn, she attacked the authorities for making them meet in the park, and called on the Muslim community to bring 40,000 next time and “go to the centre of your city and stay there” until the Government agreed to close down the Israeli Embassy in London.

“Today we are all Palestinians”, she ranted, “Israel is the nation of hate”. Displaying the coded anti-Semitism which pervades so much of the left, she then used the plural (thus showing she was addressing Jews rather than Israel) “you are the criminals that we detest”.

“Chemical are weapons raining down on Gaza …. we want Israel out of this country”. Not, note, just the Israeli Embassy. She and her Red-Green alliance would like to go much further than that.

The near hysterical crowd loved it all of course. Ms Booth had her few minutes of revolutionary glory and then went home to her posh pad in Islington. The event ended, as far as we know, peacefully.

But the far left are playing a very dangerous game here. They think that their propagandists and ‘spokespeople’ can play on Muslim anger and paranoia, turning it on and off like a tap in a bid for votes, recruits and donations.

Left sparked Bradford riot

This is what they were trying to do in Bradford in 2001 when they seized on the empty threat of a National Front march to bring thousands of young Muslims onto the streets, wind them up into a frenzy with wild tales of threatened racist attacks and alleged official indifference to the mythical ‘threat’ to their community.

Job done, the SWP-run Anti-Nazi League then made their excuses and departed – leaving the angry mob to attack innocent local whites and cause £20 Million-worth of damage in the riot that sparked a wave of unrest, anti-white racist attacks and destruction across northern England.

Note the SWP posters in this video footage; they’re at it again. Whatever their petty internal differences, the various far-left fractions are united in their desire to bring mayhem to the streets of Britain. Their targets? The police, any institution or business with an Israeli connection, and the British National Party. These people provide the organisation and the manpower for the Labour party’s systematic and repeated efforts to undermine and pervert the democratic process by smearing and harassing the BNP at every election in which we stand.

Increasingly frantic over the failure of their propaganda offensives to stop our votes rising, the left’s strategists are seeking to incite their foot-soldiers and ethnic minority allies to use violence in a last ditch attempt to stop us. Unfortunately for them, however, the average crowd of middle class student protesters may think they look menacing when they put scarves over their faces, but in truth couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag. Hence the attraction of trying to recruit young ‘street’ Muslims, who are generally obsessed with martial arts training and weapons.

What they either don’t realise, or don’t care about, however, is the fact that anti-Kuffar racism and hatred is so strong among the new generation of young Muslims that any trouble that starts as a protest against Israel or the British National Party has the very real potential to become a pogrom against all non-Muslims and the detonator not for a Marxist-style popular uprising but for a Muslim intifada and communal violence on a truly horrific scale

If the far-left don’t grow up and get responsible, if the police fail to put a stop to their provocations and incitement, and if the liberal-left TV companies don’t temper their nightly one-sided propaganda orgy of dead and injured Palestinian school-children, this could all end in blood as well as tears.

Lesson from Brixton

Indeed, it may already be too late to stop – the circumstances were rather different, but we’ve been here before. On 18th January 1981, a reveller who had been thrown out of a party in New Cross, South London, returned and set fire to the house. Thirteen innocent black youngsters were burned to death, in what the (mainly white) far-left set about insisting was a racist attack.

On 2nd March, 10,000 angry black protesters marched, with about 1,000 nervous white leftists bringing up the rear, from Lewisham to central London. I joined the march about a mile south of the Thames and watched as groups repeatedly broke off to raid building sites and skips to collect bricks and lumps of wood. The police took no action, marching stony-faced to their front, increasingly covered with gobs of spit.

Only as the angry mob reached Blackfriars Bridge did the police try to stop them going any further, with a three deep police riot shield line blocking the bridge. As the mood grew more and more ugly, every last one of the leftists vanished, leaving me as virtually the only non-uniformed white face to watch as a big lorry carrying a Rasta sound system smashed through the police lines and the huge crowd poured in to the City of London. “Babylon must fall! Murder, murder, Babylon must fall!”

Fleet Street was quickly strewn with the empty wallets of mugging victims, and jewellers and other shops were later looted in the West End. All the police either could or would do was to keep the mob out of Whitehall and Downing Street. The authorities were beaten and humiliated, the mob swaggered, drunk on power.

The next morning I gave my eye-witness account to the colleagues with whom in those days I produced the monthly magazine Nationalism Today. I also predicted that the scale of the young black community’s victory over the Metropolitan police was such that it guaranteed an explosion of further violence within a matter of weeks. Having beaten brushed aside the police of the English ‘Babylon’ like bluebottles, it was obvious that the angry black ‘street’ would now apply its new-found confidence by using force to stop the hated police Stop and Search routine. It was only a matter of time before the attempted arrest of one young black lad would draw a crowd and spark serious trouble.

A few weeks later, this was precisely what happened. The Brixton riots of April 1981 left hundreds of policemen injured, saw enormous damage to looted and firebombed shops and pubs, and sparked off a wave of riots in Afro-Caribbean communities all over England.

Urban uprising?

Now the far-left hope to inflame young Muslims into being their shock-troops for an urban uprising that would far outdo the troubles of 1981. If a fresh truce in Gaza removes that particular excuse for mass mayhem, then they will switch to Plan B – using scare-stories and demonstrations about the BNP’s European Election campaign to mobilise and excite the mob, sparking attacks on the police which are all too likely to spill over into attacks on local white residents and Jewish-owned businesses

In an effort to hamper this cynical exercise in provocation, and to press for the law to be applied equitably, I have today written to the Chief Constable of Lancashire Constabulary making an official complaint against Lauren Booth and her speech, which was clearly likely under the circumstances to incite racial hatred against members of the Jewish community in Britain.

Time for Action

If a spokesman for a group on the neo-Nazi fringe had made such a speech to an angry crowd of ten thousand working class English football fans, describing the entire Pakistani community as “criminals” who should be driven from Britain, then he would be in court faster than you can say ‘race hate’. Why should Lauren Booth be allowed to get away with inciting violence just because she is the sister-in-law of Tony Blair and her targets are Jewish?

Finally, while on the subject of big-mouthed Marxists, if Jo Brand and the BBC programmer responsible for her Saturday Night Live at the Apollo comedy slot think that they can incite people to send ‘poo’ to BNP members without incurring consequences, they’ve got another think coming. We’re organising at a new level now, and part of that involves a determination to ensure that anyone who tries to persecute our people will find that there is a serious price to pay for doing so.

The following letter has today been emailed and posted to Chief Constable Steve Finnigan at Lancashire Police HQ, Preston.

For Urgent Attention, Chief Constable, Lancashire Constabulary
Police HQ
Hutton
Preston
PR4 5SB

17th January 2009

Dear Chief Constable Finnigan,

I wish to make a formal allegation of incitement to racial hatred, contrary to S.5 of the Public Order Act, whereby it is an offence to use words intended or, having regards to all the circumstances, likely to incite racial hatred.

The offence was, I believe, committed by Lauren Booth in the course of her speech to the Muslims for Gaza rally in Corporation Park, Blackburn, on Sunday 11th January 2009, a copy of which may be found on the BNPtv footage posted together with my analysis of the speech and situation on the main news section of http://www.bnp.org.uk on Saturday 17th January.

As you should already be aware, this rally was attended by many thousands of mainly young Muslim men, already in a high state of anger as a result of media coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Gaza. As one of Britain’s leading experts in this particular piece of legislation, I have no doubt whatsoever that there is a prima facie case against Ms Booth. In particular, her use of the plural in the phrase “you are the criminals we detest”, juxtaposed with comments such as “we want Israel out of this country”, (not, please note, “the Israeli Embassy”, but simply “Israel”) are clearly likely – if not intended – to be taken by those present as a green light for hatred, indeed quite possibly actual physical violence, against individual Jews and against Jewish businesses in our High Streets.

That she intended mischief is indicated by her deliberately setting out to enrage the audience with stories – totally fictitious as far as any news reports coming out of Gaza would suggest – of “chemical weapons” being used by Israel in the targeted attacks on Hamas terrorists which she presents as random attacks aimed at innocent women and children.

Given the deep-rooted traditional hostility to Jews, simply on account of their being Jews, in the Koran and the Haddith, to make such a speech to a large Muslim audience can only incite hatred against Jews; the legal threshold of ‘likelihood’ cannot fail to be crossed.

If it should be that a ‘softly softly’ policing policy meant that you did not feel able to station a police video team in the park to capture speeches as evidence in the event (clearly foreseeable under the circumstances) of incitements to violence or racial or religious hatred, then you only need to ask and BNPtv will supply you with the original footage recorded by our camera crew in the park. Although it is shaky it is clearly audible throughout and the speaker can be very clearly identified.

I am also told that Wayman Bennett of the criminal conspiracy operation ‘Unite Against Fascism’ addressed the same rally and said, among other provocative statements that “Israeli Jews should go back to wherever they came from – New York or wherever it is”. I have not seen this footage myself, but urge that you also investigate this.

As the Gold Commander during the 1981 Burnley riots, you must have a very good appreciation of the very serious danger involved here, with outside agitators doing their very best to increase tensions in Blackburn. Should the situation in Gaza not be permanently resolved very soon, it is highly likely that Ms Booth’s call for a far larger demonstration in the town will be answered. That being the case, it is vital if the peace is to be maintained and the law upheld that the police force take action now to show that incitement to racial hatred and violence is unacceptable not only if the alleged victims are Pakistani Muslims, but also members of other races and religions.

I look forward to hearing that you have set in motion the appropriate action very shortly, not least because – as my analysis which accompanies the video makes clear – we do not have much time left in which to damp down the growing hysteria and alienation being produced by agitators such as Ms Booth.

Yours sincerely
Nick Griffin

PO Box 14
Welshpool
Powys
SY21 0WE

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You can see the BNP tv footage from Blackburn (note that the first section is silent). Go to the BNP site here to view their videos

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MY THOUGHTS:

This person, Lauren Booth, has form on this. After the Lebanon war where some in the Labour party turned on Tony Blair for not speaking out against Israel’s action, she spoke at a rally telling him it was “time to go.”

Well, he went.

NOW what’s your excuse, Ms Booth? Anti-semitism?

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Tags: 1. Tony Blair, blackburn lancs, Gaza, i am proud to be from gaza, incitement, Israel, lauren booth, Middle East - Countries/Issues, Peace Envoy, sharia law, support Gaza, we are palestinian