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

The BBC's Neocon Propaganda War

The BBC's approach to war and world affairs is, first and foremost, a reflection of the British puppet state's viewpoint. It is questionable that the BBC was ever an independent organization. But, along with the widespread damage to civil and judicial freedoms caused by the noxious Blair de facto dictatorship, the BBC's reputation has dropped to an all-time low of news-whoring.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am constantly warning them that the Mainstream Media (MSM) in both the US and the UK --or USUK for convenience-- is deliberately fuelling speculations that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon and that, for this reason, the US and possibly Israel might carry out a 'preemptive' attack on that country.

The BBC's approach amounts to blatant warmongering. No amount of complaints appear to make the slightest bit of difference. Financed by a compulsory tax in the form of a licence fee, payable by anyone owning a television receiver in the UK, the BBC has huge resources to hand and is a major international satellite broadcaster.

BBC 24 News is received across the planet and many viewers mistakenly believe that it practises a balanced reportage. This is nothing more than a myth which the BBC is, itself, responsible for having perpetuated. The reality is that, particularly under the oppressive Blair regime, the BBC has become a servile tool for the broadcasting of USUK war propaganda.

This was reflected some time ago in comments made by Professor Professor Geir Lundestad, secretary of the Norwegian Nobel committee, when he observed that "media organisations could receive the Nobel peace prize in future."

Prof Lundestad mentioned several contenders, such as CNN, the New York Times, Le Monde and El País.

However, he made a notable exception of the BBC. "Some years ago, the BBC would have been an obvious candidate because it was the international model for news organisations. Nowadays, it is more debatable." He added: "We all know about the problems the BBC has had in recent years," without elaborating.

(The Guardian, 7 October 2006)

What he wouldn't elaborate on was the manner in which Tony Blair had fired the then BBC Director, Greg Dyke, for his daring to criticize Blair on the Irak War and the --to say the least-- dubious circumstances surrounding the 'suicide' of the ex-IAEA inspector, Dr David Kelly, who was scapegoated by the Blair regime.

Ever since Dyke's 'resignation' (he was fired on Blair's instructions) the BBC has taken an extreme lurch to the neocon right and the promotion of the Bush-Cheney-Blair-Zionist war party. Greg Dyke was replaced by a leading zionist, Michael Grade.

Two recent instances of the BBC's highly propagandistic news coverage has been its anti-Chávez reportage on Venezuela and a complete news-blackout on the arrest and trial of two members of the neo-nazi British National Party who were caught with what was reported locally as the largest weapons-haul ever made by the British police.

Not to be unfair, that news-blackout affected the entire British MSM and appears to have been at the behest of Blair.

The above are just two instances taken at random. The actual list of the BBC's right-wing bias would be unending.

PUBLIC HEALTH WARNING!

The BBC is preparing Britain and the rest of the world for US military aggression on Iran. Ever since Bush started his vicious propaganda campaign against Iran, the BBC has meekly followed suit. No doubt, on Blair's insistence.

Just last night on its News 24 programme it screamed out that the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) had 'leaked' a document proving that Iran was 'secretly developing weapons-grade' fissile material. It conspicuously failed to say anything more about this document so I conducted my own search and found this Reuters press release.

Can anyone find any evidence here that the IAEA is warning of Iranian nuclear weapons development? The Reuters/Yahoo article goes on to make the customary speculations but evidence there is none.

That didn't stop the BBC in its headlong rush to serve its neocon bosses in Downing Street and Washington, DC. Not only is the BBC sure that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb but that it threatens the continued existence of that famously peaceable nation, Israel, with the nasty terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, provocatively flying its flags along the Israel-Lebanon frontier.

The BBC then interviewed several Israeli 'experts' who, naturally, spoke in the most objective manner of how Israel was victim to threats from Iran and why a 'pre-emptive' attack against its nuclear reactors would, therefore, be the most sensible thing to do.

Of course, no mention was made by the BBC's jejune reporter, Matthew Price, of the terrible radioactive aftermath to which such an attack would lead, making Chernobyl pale into significance, or the even greater holocaust of a US-led attack using so-called 'low-yield' tactical nuclear weapons.

To get things into perspective, these 'low-yield' tactical nukes are capable of anything between a third to six times the destruction caused by the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs. The US Military now considers this level of destruction to be "acceptable." And so does the BBC apparently which keeps its lips sealed about the US nuclear option.

The BBC has, so far, failed to report on another significant statement from Iran that that country is reluctant to exit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to which it, unlike Israel, is a signatory.

So much for its 'balanced' reporting.

The BBC's approach to war and world affairs is, first and foremost, a reflection of the British puppet state's viewpoint. It is questionable that the BBC was ever an independent organization. But, along with the widespread damage to civil and judicial freedoms caused by the noxious Blair de facto dictatorship, the BBC's reputation has dropped to an all-time low of news-whoring.

Does it care? I doubt it. It and its employees now see themselves sliding down the slippery slope to privatization so, in the meantime, will do anything to ingratiate themselves with Britain's rulers. It's a very sad day when a well-known British dissident (himself a victim of Blair's tyranny), ex-Ambassador Craig Murray, admits to better treatment from Rupert Murdoch's SKY News than from the BBC.

Those in Britain who are concerned at the rapidity their country is being turned into a police state should, without any further delay, launch a popular campaign to expose the BBC's dirty warmongering. A vital part of such a campaign should be the promotion of a countrywide non-payment of the annual licence fee, the BBC's life-blood.

The BBC should also be subject to a mass letter-writing campaign in which it is warned that it and its employees would be held to be war criminals for their further promotion of illegal military occupations by the USUK and for their gleeful promotion of a possible upcoming war against Iran.