Athens bomb blast kills one and badly injures two writes David Batty (The Guardian, March 29, 2010). Nobody appears to have claimed responsibility for the blast, but the death is the first for some time from such an explosion. The victims have been identified as Afghani and the location a building housing the National School of Public Administration (EEDE) in the neighbourhood of Patisia, but there are few other details. Most reports place the bombing in the context of anarchist and leftist actions such as those conducted by the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei/Nuceli of Fire Conspiracy (the most recent of which occurred only last week). One thing worth adding which does not appear in corporate/state media accounts is the fact that Greek fascists have also been utilising explosive devices in their struggles.
“We gird for total war against the Jews and the rest of the goddamned mud races of the world — politically, militantly, financially, morally and religiously. In fact, we regard it as the heart of our religious creed, and as the most sacred credo of all. We regard it as a holy war to the finish — a racial holy war. Rahowa! is INEVITABLE. … No longer can the mud races and the White Race live on the same planet.”
~ Creativity founder, Ben Klassen (1987)
OMGWTF. Bizarro White supremacist cult The Creativity Alliance has gotten a guernsey in the local press in Penrith, NSW. Apparently, ‘It’s Alright To Be White’ — which message comes as quite a relief to this Whitey, I can tell you.
White supremacists target Penrith
Omar Hamwi Penrith Press
March 29, 2010
WHITE supremacists are targeting Penrith in a recruitment campaign for a group that first emerged in the US.
The Creativity Alliance has distributed flyers at Glenmore Park and Kingswood and posted a banner on the Kingswood Rd M4 overpass recently.
A Glenmore Park resident contacted the Press about the group, which has a Penrith postal address.
The resident, who asked for his name to be withheld, said he was “disgusted” by the group’s message.
“I saw the flyers and thought they were junk mail,” the 18-year-old said.
“Then I had a good look at one and thought, ‘What’s the point?’.”
He said the contents of the flyers didn’t have a place in Penrith.
After receiving about 10 in the past few months, he saw the banner while driving on the M4.
“I remembered the flyers when I saw the flag,” he said.
“I ripped it down and ditched it in a bush, but someone put it back up.”
On the group’s website, its NSW co-ordinator is listed as Chris Smith.
The Press contacted him by email and he responded to questions.
Mr Smith said the group hoped to educate white Australians about “what is really going on in the world”.
“(We are) helping them see through the everyday hypocrisy of a morally bereft society … rather than relying on a biased media and a corrupt government telling them what, how and where to think,” he wrote. “It is time white people awaken to reality and realise that doing what is best for the white race is best for themselves.”
Asked how many members the group had, Mr Smith refused to comment.
LOL.
Actually, Creativity is pretty awesome. Its founder, Ben Klassen, committed suicide in 1993, while its last ‘Pontifex Maximus’, Matt Hale, currently sits in jail. Here’s a video of a March 24, 2001 meeting Hale and his followers organised four years prior to his receiving a life sentence (for soliciting an undercover FBI informant to kill Judge Joan Lefkow):
The story of ‘Creativity’ — which has undergone numerous schisms since Klassen’s suicide, Hale’s imprisonment, and numerous other, violent incidents — is summarised by the SPLC in its Intelligence Files. In Australia, there’s a bloke in Sydney, and others in Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne. The Melbourne representative is Patrick O’Sullivan, who gained fame in 2002 after being sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail (for stabbing another bonehead), but is otherwise known for plastering White Man Awake! stickers all over town.
In Sydney, followers of a similar (but even tinier) group, known as the ‘Christian Separatist Church Society’, function under the leadership of a bloke called Ken Cratchley. Cratchley, along with several score other racist froot loops, have joined the Humanist Society of New South Wales (Inc.), and in February 2010, one of their number, Mark Pavic, was elected Vice-President of the Association. His election took place after two small public rallies at the Association’s headquarters, Humanist House, in Chippendale last year to protest monthly meetings of racist kooks; a small amount of media reportage; and a rather larger degree of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of non-fascist membership of the group. Finally, note that another Cratchley — ‘Syd’ — stood for the Australia First Party at NSW local council elections in 2004 in Sutherland, where he gained 289 votes.
Elsewhere, Mick Saunders, Australia First Party candidate for the seat of Lindsay in NSW, reckons that there oughta be less taxes on fuel (he works as a truckie), that the country needs fixing, that his Party is the right man for the job, and that the people of Penrith “need a hospital somewhere” (Libs silent on Lindsay candidate, as Australia First steps up, Caryn Metcalfe, Penrith Press, March 27, 2010).
Move over Patriotik Yoof League, here comes Eureka… Yoof… League
Several years ago now, the Australia First Party initiated a yoof wing, and called it the Patriotic Youth League. It had its moments, but ended with a whimper and having John Drew, a middle-aged gentleman and confirmed bachelor from Brisbane, as its sole member. Chris Smith — the Creative man cited in the Penrith Press — is a fan of the EYL, as is Robert Wills (one of the organisers of the rally AGAINST IMMIGRANTS AND ISLAM in Melbourne on April 9), neo-Nazi bonehead Murray Holmes, and numerous other racists, young and old. (Oddly, the ‘Patriotic Youth League’ brand has also been revived by another, seemingly separate, but overlapping, yoof group.)
Bonus !nataS
I’m beginning to think that Satan Is Real, and that Uncle Kerry Bolton is a man NOT to be messed with. Thus:
1. Kerry Bolton complains that an article in The Press, on 5 December 2009, entitled ‘A Right muddle’ was inaccurate and biased.
2. The complaint is upheld.
Now, if only Dr James Saleam could take a leaf out of Dr Kerry Bolton’s !cinataS Bible…
Anyway, the Devil is in the detail, or so they say, and one detail of Kerry’s complaint I found fascinating is the following:
10. Its response to the matters raised in paragraph 7 above are:
(a) The initial source for its statement that Dr Bolton was a member of the Nationalist Alliance was a document from April 2008 The ANZAC Declaration: Australia First Party and New Zealand National Alliance: Declaration of Common Interest and Future Relations, signed by Dr Bolton. In response to Dr Bolton’s claim that he was not a signatory to the declaration, nor did he have any input into it, The Press says that the document when originally sourced on the “slackbastard.anachobase” website showed Dr Bolton as a signatory but a later document on another website does not show him as a signatory. The Press’s position is that the original page from Way Back Internet Archive shows Dr Bolton’s name as an active signatory on July 19, 2008 and it cannot speculate as to why the declaration has subsequently been altered or by whom. It stands by its statement that Dr Bolton was a member of the National Alliance.
The Press is correct. The original declaration was signed by Bolton; his name was subsequently removed. In addition to the text on my blog, the document also exists on the Australia First Party website. The archived version (July 19, 2008) includes Bolton as a signatory; the version AF currently publishes on its site does not. Obviously, Bolton’s name was removed from the text at some point after July 19, 2008, for reasons which are not provided on the altered document.
Oh noes! I guess this means that there’s a job for the FSB/KGB/All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage after all.
Two explosions blasted Moscow’s subway system on Monday morning as it was jam-packed with rush-hour passengers, killing at least 34 people and wounding more than 25, emergency officials said.
Russia’s top investigative body said terrorism was suspected in the blasts, although there was no immediate confirmation of how the explosions happened…
The evil of sexual abuse has no place in the Catholic Church, and no one should doubt Pope Benedict XVI’s resolve to seeing it eradicated, the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell said this week.
Which kinda begs the question really, which is: if sexual abuse has no place in the Catholic Church, why has it found such a happy home there? Secondly, while Pell certainly has no reason to doubt Ratso‘s claims, nobody else is under any particular obligation to invest them with any more authority than if they were uttered by, say, a child. “Without God we are nothing”, argued Pell recently, but as a speaker at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne stated, it would be more accurate to argue that without God, Pell is nothing.
In the photo, Catholic priest Gerald Ridsdale (left) walks to court, accompanied by his support person (Bishop George Pell, then an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne), when Father Ridsdale was pleading guilty to his first batch of criminal charges in May 1993.
But no bishop accompanied the victims, who felt deserted by the church hierarchy. Therefore, Broken Rites quickly became Australia’s main support group for church-abuse victims.
Broken Rites has supported victims (male or female) from the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church and the Uniting Church, as well as from smaller denominations.
About 90 per cent of the men and women who have contacted Broken Rites Australia have been from a Catholic background.
The researchers and advocates in the Broken Rites Australia executive team all have a Catholic background but we are non-denominational in our outlook.
I think it was maybe a decade ago that the world last heard of the Informal Anarchist Federation, and by way of a very similar stunt… Oh, actually, it was more recent. Anyway, anarchism, terrorism and the Italian state have a history that is very long and quite tortuous (often literally), but Jane reckons ‘The Italian government identified anarchist-insurrectionalists as “the most active and dangerous” force on the domestic subversion scene in its report to parliament on intelligence and security policy for the first half of 2004. That continues to be the case as a heterogeneous galaxy of anarchist groups takes advantage of the political space left empty by the arrest of the latest generation of Red Brigades militants.’
Italy’s postal service intercepted a threatening letter containing a bullet addressed to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, while letter bomb sent to a minister caught fire, police said on Saturday.
A large envelope containing a letter addressed to Berlusconi with the threat “you will end up like a rat” was discovered on Friday in a post office in the Libate suburb of the northern city of Milan…
Update (March 28) : It appears that the ADL has decided that discretion is the better part of valour, as one of two Facebook Event pages promoting the mini-Nuremberg Rally has been cancelled (“This event is no longer available because it has been cancelled”).* Those left holding the bag are Glenn Anderson, Mark Hill, Zowie Hodgson, Brian McCrory and Robert Wills. Oh, and the APP and the SCS have offered their support, but what this means in reality is anybody’s guess. Presumably, a few older men in cardigans and some inebriated boys wearing the Australian flag as a cape may attend.
*Following the publication of an article in the Herald Sun advertising the rally AGAINST IMMIGRANTS AND ISLAM, the ADL — a bloke from Perth called ‘Jack’ — has decided to go back to the drawing-board and, in a stroke of genius, re-titled the protest as one against Sharia Law, which is apparently about to sweep down upon Flinders Street Station. Or something. Presumably, the next step in the ADL’s ideological re-positioning will be the adjustment of its aim from the cleansing of Australia of all Muslims to defending Australia from ‘Islamic extremism’.
It seems like the E, E, EDL’s last ‘victory’ in Bolton has finally inspired local bigots to organise a rally of their own. Sadly for this mob, This Is Boston, not L.A. Melbourne not Bolton, so the likelihood of any further ‘victory’ is pretty slim… although on the other hand, if the organisers can recruit local patriots from the local punk and skinhead milieu, who knows? At least then they’ll have a soundtrack.
In any event, three boofheads have nominated themselves as organisers of the event: ‘Jack’ from the ADL (Australian Defence League), Mark Hill and Robert Wills. It’s being promoted on Facebook (of course), and scheduled to take place on the afternoon of Friday, April 9 @ Flinders Street Station. The rally is then, it seems, supposed to march from Flinders Street to Parliament House on Spring Street, a process which is scheduled to take three hours.
MASS RALLY AGAINST IMMIGRANTS AND ISLAM
Date: Friday, 09 April 2010 Time: 13:30 – 16:30 Location: MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA Street: FLINDERS STREET STATION – PARLI[A]MENT HOUSE SPRING ST Town/City: Melbourne, Australia
Description
LISTEN AUSSIES, IT[‘]S TIME TO HARDEN UP, CLOSE THE GATE, LOOK AFTER OUR OWN AND KEEP OUR COUNTRY AS OUR COUNTRY.
WHO WANTS A WOMAN STONNED [sic] TO DEATH FOR REPORTING RAPE?
WHO WANTS THEIR YOUNG DAUGHTERS CIRCUMSIZED BY [a] DIRTY ARABIC BUTCHER?
WHO WANTS TO HAVE 4 WIVES (1 IS BAD ENOUGH HAHA)?
WHO WANTS THEIR 5 YEAR OLD SON LEARNING TO KILL PEOPLE?
WHO WANTS TO BE EXECUTED IN PUBLIC BECAUSE YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN ISLAM AND [the] QU’RAN?
IF YOU ANSWERED NO THEN WHY WOULDN’T YOU BE THERE??
IT[‘]S TIME TO STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS!!!!
Mad as cut snakes, obviously, but not necessarily unable to bring together a few angry young White men eager to demonstrate their masculinity against the enormous threat posed to them and their women by “DIRTY ARABIC BUTCHERS”. Further, given the disruption which has accompanied the antics of the Little Englanders in The Mother Country, the event is likely to attract the fulsome attention of state authorities — that, and the fact that the rally is scheduled to take place at the busiest public transport thoroughfare in Melbourne.
At a more general level, public hysteria, such as it is, regarding the supposedly corrosive effects of IMMIGRANTS AND ISLAM on Australian society is one, perhaps inevitable by-product of the relentless torrent of propaganda from the state and corporate sector regarding the threat posed by Islamists. While this is a message still strongly associated with the former HoWARd Government, which effectively used it, among other other phobias, to prolong its rule, it’s also a factor capitalised upon by the KRudd Government. Last month, KRudd re-emphasised the threat Islamists still pose to the Australian public (Homegrown terrorism an increasing threat, says Rudd, The Age, February 23, 2010) as a means of justifying, at least in part, policies which are only marginally distinguishable from his predecessor.
Leaving the context for such performances aside, the last occasion upon which local (Melbourne) bigots attempted to capitalise upon unease with the presence of Muslims in Australia was, by comparison to the antics of the ADL, relatively moderate, even if the action itself was exceedingly bizarre. Thus in December 2006, a handful of concerned suburbanites declared their intention to organise a contingent of bikini-clad women to descend upon a mosque in Brunswick; not unexpectedly, the organisers abandoned their plans soon after it became clear that: a) there was nobody actually willing to execute it and; b) a tiny number of local fascists declared their support for the proposal (see : It’s Official: ‘Chicks in Bikinis’ prefer Beaches to Mosques, December 10, 2006). In the end, the mosque declared an Open Day and hosted a community BBQ, no bigots were stoopid enough to march, and the day passed peacefully into posterity as one of the more bizarre examples of massively misguided community activism.
The ADL, then, has a difficult job ahead of it, which is partly why it’s attempting to secure support from, for example, racist yoof belonging to the Southern Cross Soldiers, and a myriad of other tiny bands of bigots. (Of course, it would welcome support from just about any quarter in the fight against IMMIGRANTS AND ISLAM.) Regardless of the level of support it does secure, local anti-racist activists have organised a meeting to discuss the event, and what might be the most appropriate response to it. Given that this is the first occasion upon which the ADL has attempted to organise such a provocation, it is also a unique opportunity to ensure that it is met with strong opposition.
Meeting to plan actions against racist rally
6pm, Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Trades Hall, Cnr Victoria & Lygon Sts, Carlton
José Manuel Flores Arguijo, a teacher, writer and trade unionist, was assassinated at his workplace (the Instituto San José del Pedregal) in Tegucigalpa, Honduras on the afternoon of March 23, 2010. His killing appears to be one of a growing number of recent murders of opposition activists in Honduras, a country which currently enjoys the leadership of Porfirio Lobo, a rich and therefore good man elected under slightly, er, questionable circumstances in November 2009 after a military coup ousted the previous leader, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, in June. In early March (2010), Hilary Clinton announced the US Government would restore ‘aid’ to Honduras as a further step towards normalising Lobo’s regime (the legitimacy of which has been questioned by some, probable Communists).
The US state has always had a pretty sweet relationship with Honduras, although it had to battle with the United Fruit Company for control of it in the 1920s. In the 1980s, the country served as a base for the US-sponsored contras — the brave men who fought Communism across the border in Nicaragua by kidnapping, raping, murdering and torturing thousands upon thousands of civilians: men, women and children. Currently, Lobo’s government serves, along with that of Chile, as a rebuff to a resurgent ‘left’ in Central and South America, but continued opposition will presumably result in larger piles of bodies, and perhaps even some mildly embarrassing questions for nice people like Hilary.
Update : Racist police emails ‘disturbing and gross’, says Overland, Thomas Hunter, The Age, March 25, 2010. “A series of racist and pornographic emails shared among Victoria Police officers are too shocking to ever be released publicly, the state’s police chief says.” OMGWTF. Next thing you know, someone will suggest that political parties contain racist elements.
A LEGAL framework to prevent cosy relationships and career swaps between top members of Victoria’s Office of Police Integrity and the organisation it is responsible for investigating, Victoria Police, is urgently needed, according to the author of a report on police racism.
Tamar Hopkins told The Australian yesterday that career moves such as that of the OPI’s former deputy director, Graham Ashton, to a top role at Victoria Police, created an unhealthy public perception of “agency capture” for a watchdog body in desperate need of public confidence in its independence…
UP TO 100 police are under investigation over a racist email.
One detective sergeant faces the sack after he was notified he had lost the confidence of the Chief Commissioner and must show cause why he should not be dismissed.
The investigation centres on a graphic image of an ethnic man being tortured…
Terms of Art
Conor Gearty London Review of Books
Vol.32, No.5, March 11, 2010
…To defend the status quo as the Home Office did after the Middleton inquest was to reckon without the Human Rights Act, which was passed by Parliament in November 1998 and brought into law nearly two years later. In early 2004 Mrs Middleton finally got what she wanted: the law lords ruled that when the Coroners Act said an inquest must rule on ‘how’ a person came by their death, the word ‘how’ in fact meant ‘by what means and in what circumstances’, and so it was appropriate to go into the details of what had happened and in particular to look at any official dereliction of duty that might be thought to have been causative. No doubt their lordships were much influenced by the statistics on prison deaths: in the years between 1990 and 2003 there were 947 self-inflicted deaths in prison, 177 of them of detainees aged 21 or under. At the time the case was heard more than a third of the deaths – there were very nearly two a week – were of people who had not even been convicted of an offence. One in five of those who killed themselves were women, a proportion far in excess of the female prison population, and two-fifths of the deaths occurred in the first month of custody.
Parliament’s effort to narrow the scope of inquests was undone by Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This ‘right to life’ provision had been interpreted by the Strasbourg judges as involving not only a prohibition on state killing but also a positive obligation properly to investigate killings that occur in suspicious circumstances within a state’s jurisdiction: cases in which the state’s negligence or reckless indifference may have been partly or wholly responsible for the death. (This can include killings by third parties as well as suicide: the year before Middleton, the law lords extended Article 2 to cover the death of Zahid Mubarek, a 19-year-old Asian prisoner murdered by Robert Stewart, with whom he shared a cell. Stewart was a violent racist – as the authorities knew when they allocated him a cell with his eventual victim.) The authorities had to act in accordance with Article 2, which meant, crucially for the outcome in Middleton, that judges could interpret pre-existing law in a way that was compatible with the convention rights if this was, as Section 3(1) of the Human Rights Act put it, ‘possible’ (not ‘reasonably possible’ or ‘probable’ or ‘practical’, but merely ‘possible’, which is almost the same as ‘not impossible’). This allowed the law lords to play around with the word ‘how’ in Middleton without exposing themselves to allegations of usurping the legislature.
Since this decision, in case after case, concerned relatives have been able to pursue the authorities – sometimes the police, often the prison service and occasionally local NHS trusts – to find out what had really happened to a family member. When the Iraq war began, coroners started to find that the bodies of members of the British forces were being returned to their jurisdiction with controversy raging over the manner of their death. These cases too have now been brought within Article 2’s remit. In a court of appeal case on 18 May last year (soon to go before the Supreme Court) the death from heatstroke in an Iraq military camp of Private Jason Smith in August 2003 was held – rightly – to be a matter for investigation by the assistant deputy coroner for Oxfordshire, into whose territory the body had been returned. Smith had had to endure shade temperatures in excess of 50ºC without air-conditioning. He had been sick in the days leading up to his death, despite which it appears he was given no adequate support of any sort. The appeal judges did not see why the possible culpability of the state should not be investigated merely because his death had occurred in Basra rather than Britain…
See also : Coercive Solutions, Ross McKibbin, LRB blog, February 26, 2010.
JAYAPURA, Papua: The police apprehended 15 activists from the West Papua National Committee protesting outside Waena Expo complex in Jayapura on Monday.
Deputy chief of Jayapura Police, Adj. Comr. Amazona Pelamonia, said the protesters had requested a permit to stage a protest related to US President Barack Obama’s visit but their speeches had called for a referendum instead. “Since Obama’s visit has been postponed, the protest is no longer relevant. Besides their speeches call for referendum, so it’s a totally different agenda,” he said.
“Although they have a permit, their protest disrupts public order so we have to break it up.”
According to Bintang Papua, at least 28 Papuans were arrested for taking part in a demonstration in Jayapura [on] 22 March. It also reported that demonstrations were also held in several other cities, Sorong, Manokwari, Wamena and Serui.
It was an action co-ordinated by the KNPB, the National Committee of West Papua. The chairman of the KNPB, Buchtar Tabuni, who is serving a three-and-a-half year sentence in Abepura Prison, was reported as saying that these were peaceful demonstrations which had taken place according to the organisation’s intentions. ‘They are taking place according to my directives. If the police need any clarifications, they should ask me,’ he said…
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
