Case in point: I went to an ostensibly left forum with Angela Davis. I heard about “feminist strategies to contest power in museum curating” (OK, so it was held at an art school) and Davis ramble incoherently about the oppression facing transpersons every time they have to fill out a form where gender is indicated. Not a word about the thousands of foreclosures and layoffs going on.

The result? While the left timidly wanted (and many still want) to give Obama “a chance”, afraid of being seen as “racist,” a new populist right has seized the rage and misdirected it in the Tea Party movement, an incoherent and unstable coalition which mingles genuine grievance with a peculiarly and oh-so typical American conspiracy and paranoia. Does this scenario sound familiar? It’s exactly what the IWCA predicted would happen with Blair in 1997. And if I hadn’t followed the IWCA discussion at the time maybe I would have had the same illusions too. But I knew from your UK experience that the same thing would happen over here. As the saying you all put out went, “politics abhors a vacuum.”

It’s not that the conservative left is indifferent to the economic crisis; they will make the right noises.
But few of them are affected by it, since the liberal/left here is drawn almost exclusively from the more privileged and degreed upper middle class. It’s an abstract sympathy from up high, not along side those affected, the response of what a hostile but not inaccurate critic referred to as “the gentry left,” concerned about its PC lifestyles and consumer choices not “unglamorous” issues like class.

Not sure what this has to with multiculturalism but there you go!

Napier - The IWCA may be small at the moment but it is certainly not irrelevant. BNP activists may do some good local work but the long term vision is just garbage. There is an issue with Islam and the answer is total opposition to the Islamists, Sharia tribunals, ritual slaughter (and general exemptions for all religious law) and so on. It is not the BNP route of dovetailing the mainstream parties and press on the issue.

Just as the EDL wildly exaggerate the “threat” posed by idiots like Anjem Choudary, they also wildly exaggerate their own strength. At even their best turn-outs they’ve have been outnumbered at least 2 or even 3 to 1 by Anti-Fascists, the EDL drew TENS of supporters to protests in Swansea, Wrexham, Harrow and Glasgow, and the worst of their demos have been completely cancelled owing to total lack of support, ie - Newport. As to “state honey trap”, again there’s no need for conspiracy theories they’re funded by internet tycoon Alan Lake.

In a number of places like Kardjali and Ribnovo this idiocy led to bloodshed. Anyway, the upheaval in the USSR and the political change in Bulgaria led to an end to this silliness.

Actually, the Greeks did the same in Greek Macedonia, insisting that Dimitri become Demetrios and so on.

An oddity: in the USA and elsewhere, some westerners like Omar Bradley and innumerable women called Leila, bear ‘Muslim’ names. Just a thought!

* Pomaks are blood-and-bone Slavs whose forbears converted to Islam voluntarily, or who were converted to Islam at the point of a scimitar, centuries ago. They live in the south of Bulgaria.

One final point. The BNP refrains from all this left-wing right-wing nonsense. We focus on policies, strategies, and most important of all, outcomes. From a technical point of view the BNP is a syncretic party but our members know that the general public has no time for such technical terms. What they want are solutions to their problems and they are more interested in how they can benefit from the BNP rather than where it is placed in the political spectrum.

“Give over napier you anti-semite - shame on the website for allowing this stuff”

You’re right, we haven’t been quick enough on the ball and we should have pulled him up on it before now.

Napier:

The comments section of this site is for discussion of the IWCA article in question. While dissenting views are welcomed (it’s why you’ve been tolerated this long), it is not a platform for trolls and social inadequates with their own agenda to spout right-wing crap. You’ve already derailed the economic democracy thread with your garbage about home schooling, on this thread we’ve had your nonsense about a list of approved British names and now it’s Zionists controlling the EDL. You can consider this your first yellow card. One more infraction and you’re barred.

Check out http://www.borderland.co.uk/preview_002.htm

I’ve met the EDL and they are mix of classes but mostly working class, largely white, wholly disgruntled at the pass given to radical Islam in the uk… then again, who sensible wouldn’t be?