News Flash: Chemical Weapon Terrorist Plot Thwarted in the UK!

by Chris Floyd

Written by Chris Floyd
Wednesday, 04 July 2007

British authorities thwarted a plot by UK-born extremists – including a medical professional – to manufacture chemical bombs to be used in fomenting a “civil war” between Muslims and Christians in the UK, the Guardian reports, and the alleged perpetrators are now on trial.

But why are we telling you this? Surely, it’s been splashed 24-7 across CNN and Fox News. You have doubtless seen every detail of the conspiracy and its nefarious plotters ricocheting around ABC, NBC and CBS. You have probably already devoured mountains of newsprint about the story served up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP and Reuters. And you have certainly been pixelated with thunderous on-line commentary from PowerLine, Drudge, Instapundit, Malkin, etc., about this sinister attempt to destroy our Western way of life and impose an alien ideology on a free people by force.

I mean, it’s not every day that you have a dramatic court session about a WMD plot by white neo-Nazis – what? You mean you haven’t heard about it? It wasn’t on CNN? Glenn Beck wasn’t raging about it? Michelle hasn’t jumped all over it like a duck on a june bug? George Bush hasn’t cited it as yet another reason to keep waging the “War on Terror” in Iraq?

But how can that be? I mean, look what we’ve got here: Chemical weapons. Violent extremists. Healers unmasked as haters. Devotees of Hitler, for God’s sake! (The real Hitler, not all the “new Hitlers” that pop up every time the Pentagon wants to go for an outing). Why isn’t news of this plot saturating the media, which is normally so ravenous for scaremongering terrorist copy?

Could it be because the alleged plotters are good and godly Anglo-Saxons, just like mother used to make?

Robert Cottage, 49, a member of the British National Party, is standing trial in Manchester for amassing material for chemical bombs – and instructions for making them — in his home. The prosecution said Cottage was acting on the instructions of a fellow BNP cadre, David Jackson, a respectable 62-year-old dentist from Lancashire. Cottage’s 29-year-old wife testified against him, having originally reported his alleged plans to test chemical bombs to a social worker – the tip that led to the men’s arrest.

Cottage had been an unsuccessful BNP candidate for his local town council – although many of his culture-war comrades have won seats in local governments throughout England. His failures didn’t damage his stature in the party, however; indeed, his wife said Cottage had risen through the ranks to become friends with the party’s leader, the Cambridge-educated Nick Griffin. (Griffin of Cambridge; Bush of Yale and Harvard: poster boys for the virtues of elitist education.)

Cottage and Jackson found common cause in their enthusiasm for the carefully muffled racism of the BNP, which has repackaged itself as the voice of the neglected working class – an opening given to them by the Labour Party’s cynical abandonment of working people in favor of corporate tycoons and private equity barons (the UK version of the DLC strategy, in other words). The BNP thus preys on genuine grievances in England’s equivalent of the “rust belt,” and has gained small footholds across the country, even in London. But while the media-savvy Griffin soft-pedals the party’s core racism for public consumption, the insiders know the real score. As Mrs. Cottage testified, her husband and Jackson were “’solid friends who met regularly to chat about politics, the BNP and Hitler,” the Guardian reports.

The two allegedly planned the chemical bomb attacks as part of a “war between the Asian culture and the White culture,” Mrs. Cottage testified. In the UK, “Asian” is used to denote those of Pakistani origin – overwhelmingly Muslim – and by extension most other Muslims of less-than-alabaster hue.

In private talks to party members, Griffin tells his followers that the BNP is “just one crisis away from power.” (Obviously, a few chemical bombs aimed at fomenting race war might constitute provoke a useful crisis.) And in fact, for all its pretensions at electorally representing the plight of neglected workers, the BNP is not really interested in politics or governance at all. Like some other rightwing parties we could mention, their only concern is grabbing power and imposing the views of their tiny, radical base on the nation as a whole.

Griffin — whose published Holocaust denial far outstrips that of, say, the Iranian president — spelled out the party’s true goals during a fundraising tour in the United States, as the Guardian reported last year. (The BNP gets a good deal of money from fellow travellers in the States – secret slush funneled through a front organization, as there are strict limits on British parties raising money overseas.) The Guardian’s Ian Cobain, who went undercover as a BNP activist for several months, heard a revealing tape of Griffin speaking in New Orleans – homeground of his American doppelganger, David Duke:

Then I heard a recording of a speech Nick Griffin gave to a closed conference of white supremacists in New Orleans last year. In it he spelled out the party’s strategy - and made clear that winning votes is not an end in itself.

After his almost-casual denigration of British Muslims - “the most appalling, insufferable people to have to live with” - Griffin revealed his belief that a period of prolonged recession was certain to engulf the developed world as a result of fuel shortages and global warming. This, he said, would happen soon but it would not be a disaster, rather “a once-in-200-years opportunity”.

Far-right parties needed to prepare for this moment of crisis by ensuring that enough people were aware of their policies and had discovered that they were “not crazy-eyed lunatics”, he said. If people had considered voting for the BNP, he argued, they would be more likely to turn to the party during a time of immense crisis.

“It will be the beginning of an age of scarcity, an age in which a well-organised nationalist party could really make an impact. And that’s the key word - organised. In Britain, we are almost there: we have got this solid 5% block [of support]. Other radical movements in the past, far left or far right, whatever, a couple of years before a crisis have had far less than 5%, so as far as I am concerned, that is fairly satisfactory.”

So there it is: the BNP’s leaders believe that the time will soon come when power will fall into the street, and at that moment, with significant sections of Britain’s white population cheering them on, they will be able to scoop it up.

While 5% support is a good starting point, Griffin told his audience, the Front National [of Jean-Marie Le Pen] has an 18%-strong block of support, and almost half the white voters in France had voted for the party at some time. If the BNP was to enjoy that level of support, it would not be consigned to the political margins for much longer. It would, Griffin said, be just “one crisis away from power”.

Now here we have a duly accredited political party — its members sitting in local governments, its leader often appearing on national television to debate the issues – whose activists are on trial for allegedly conspiring to use chemical bombs as part of a “culture war” to plunge society into crisis and take power. As such plots go, this one is far more credible than the “liquid explosive” scare last year that threw the entire global air travel system into panic and disarray. You think it might rate at least a mention somewhere in the terror-haunted house of horrors that is the American media.

Of course, it’s only natural that the recent Glasgow-London car-bomb incidents have drawn more headlines than the BNP chemical bomb trial. After all, those car bombs actually got built – albeit in such a slapdash fashion that they were scarcely workable – while the alleged BNP bombs were still in the planning stages. But the disparity in coverage between “Muslim” terrorism and “Christian” terrorism is remarkable (as Dave Neiwert continually notes at Orcinus). Yet a bomb launched by a white Christian is every bit as deadly as one set off by a swarthy Muslim; just ask the tens of thousands of Iraqis buried under George Bush’s bombs – or indeed the people of Britain, where white Christians from Ireland have claimed far more victims, including a member of the royal family, than “Asian” Muslims ever have.

NB: For unknown reasons, Chris Floyd's site, Empire Burlesque, is down or inaccesible. This article was copied from Dandelion Salad