The BBC’s Phantom Menace: a 'Far Right' Terror Threat

Last July, shortly after the atrocity committed by Anders Behring Breivik, I concluded my piece on his crime with the following words:

Breivik may claim that his acts of murder were intended to defend the Norwegian nation and Western civilisation, but in reality this man has done nationalists and counterjihad activists across the whole of Europe a massive disservice: he has handed our enemies a huge propaganda coup. Although we have nothing to do with him and roundly condemn him, we will be stigmatised by association no matter how tenuous and unfounded it may be. Just as the Stephen Lawrence case was used by the last Labour administration to implement and embed its anti-indigenous racist kulturkampf in the UK, so will the advocates of multiculturalism and appeasers of Islam across Europe use Breivik’s atrocity as a means to accelerate and embed their multiculturalist project. This is happening already, as Channel 4 reports that the Metropolitan Police are to launch an investigation into Breivik's claimed links with the EDL. There is thus a considerable risk that the flimsiest of pretexts will be employed to limit the operations of the EDL, or even to proscribe it. How much further might our liberties be whittled away as we become a new phantasmogorical enemy within to which our security agencies will misguidedly devote their attentions?  Breivik, contrary to his self-professed objectives, will thus go down in history as an enabler of the Islamisation of Europe.

My analysis and prognosis appear to have been correct, although for the time being the EDL continues to operate as a legal protest group. That said, two key figures in the development of the EDL – Alan Lake (Alan Ayling) and Aeneas (Chris Knowles) - have recently been suspended from their jobs for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Leeds Children’s Services Department, with the latter citing Knowles’s seeming contravention of the Councils ‘equality and diversity’ policy as the reason. Both Ayling and Norwegian blogger Fjordman – Peder Jensen – have been investigated for alleged links with Breivik. Neither of course belonged to Breivik’s fantasy reconstructed order of the Knights Templar, but this has not stopped the post-Breivik witch-hunters from employing Breivik’s crime as a pretext to call for security agencies to focus upon the activities and opinions of critics of Islamisation and other members of what they purposely misrepresent as the ‘far right’.

It is against this backdrop that the sinister implications of an interview on this morning’s Today Programme on Radio 4, together with a companion piece in The Guardian, should be considered. Matthew Goodwin, an academic from the University of Nottingham claiming to be a specialist in ‘far right’ politics, made it known via both his interview and the printed article that he believed in state censorship of the internet – with specific reference to blog content – to prevent the dissemination of ‘right wing extremism’. He claims that such blogs engage in ‘narrowcasting’, focusing upon topics such as the ideological and demographic Islamisation of European societies, and then makes a massive leap from criticising what he believes to be a paranoid Eurabian fantasy to claiming that such analysis of our current situation gives birth to ‘far right [by which he does not mean Islamist] extremism and terrorism’. When asked to provide examples of this ‘far right’ phantom menace, Goodwin named Breivik and Timothy McVeigh. Neither of course have anything to do with nationalist parties or movements in the UK or elsewhere in Europe, and are also roundly condemned by the Counterjihad movement. Goodwin states:  

"What we simply know much less about is violence and also terrorism from within the extreme right wing subculture, and also the interplay between these different forms of extremism."

We don’t know about it because it doesn’t exist. It seems to me that Goodwin needs to invent this fantasy threat in order to secure funding to continue his academic research at the University of Nottingham. This story has more to do with his personal interest in career advancement and securing a research grant than in combating any putative ‘far right’ threat. To have slandered the EDL, the Gates of Vienna blog and others who share their concerns about Islamisation as potential ‘terrorists’ and ‘violent extremists’ is not only deeply distasteful, but intensely alarming. The question this poses is: for how much longer will any semblance of free speech be permitted on the internet in the UK and Europe?

We have already witnessed Ayling, Knowles and Jensen lose their jobs because of their political stance. How long will it be before others sharing their dissident analysis with respect to Islamisation and mass immigration are deprived of their livelihoods, misrepresented and transformed into pariahs? Might this not be linked to the huge amounts of Saudi and other Muslim petrodollar finance being sought to prop up the collapsing European economies? George Osborne, it would seem, has a $62 billion reason for allowing the Saudi proselytisation of Wahhabism in Britain, and who is to say that he, along with other members of his political clique, might not engage in a little censorship of domestic criticism of Islam for the sake of keeping the Saudis sweet?