The Guardian diarist, Hugh Muir, writes gleefully that Nick Griffin, the chairman of the neo-fascist BNP, has referred to me as
one of the few columnists capable of ‘rational, independent thought’
over my criticisms of the Stern report on climate change. This is the Guardian’s idea of a smear. How unfortunate for Mr Muir, therefore, that he appears unaware of the fact that the same Nick Griffin here draws extensively and admiringly upon the Guardian, no less, to support his antisemitic fantasies about global Jewish power and the cabal around President Bush:
The extent of the influence of the White House Zionist lobby was exposed in The Guardian on 3rd September, in an article entitled ‘Playing Skittles With Saddam’: “The ’skittles theory’ of the Middle East - that one ball aimed at Iraq can knock down several regimes - has been around for some time on the wilder fringes of politics but has come to the fore in the United States on the back of the ‘war against terrorism’. \ “Its roots can be traced, at least in part, to a paper published in 1996 by an Israeli think-tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Entitled ‘A clean break: a new strategy for securing the realm’, it was intended as a political blueprint for the incoming government of Binyamin Netanyahu. “The paper set out a plan by which Israel would ’shape its strategic environment’, beginning with the removal of Saddam Hussein . To succeed, the paper stressed, Israel would have to win broad American support.”
Furthermore, the paper made it clear that Iraq was only the first of a number of Middle Eastern skittles that Israel should aim to knock down; it explained how Syria and Lebanon would also be dealt with once Saddam Hussein had gone. The full significance of the document, however, isn’t so much what it said, as who produced it. The Guardian explains: “The leader of the ‘prominent opinion makers’ who wrote it was Richard Perle - now chairman of the Defence Policy Board at the Pentagon. Also among the eight-person team was Douglas Feith, a neo-conservative lawyer, who now holds one of the top four posts at the Pentagon.” Two other opinion-makers in the team were David Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav. David Wurmser is now at the State Department, as a special assistant to John Bolton, the under-secretary for arms control and international security. “With several of the ‘Clean Break paper’s authors now holding key positions in Washington, the plan for Israel to ‘transcend’ its foes by reshaping the Middle East looks a good deal more achievable today than it did in 1996. Americans may even be persuaded to give up their lives to achieve it. “The six-year-old plan for Israel’s ’strategic environment’ remains more or less intact, though two extra skittles - Saudi Arabia and Iran - have joined Iraq, Syria and Lebanon on the hit list.”
The uncomfortable fact for the Guardian is not just that their visceral hostility towards the war in Iraq is echoed by the BNP, but that the BNP’s antisemitic fantasies about the alleged Jewish conspiracy of neocons stretching from Jerusalem to Washington are regularly echoed in the Guardian’s own pages.
No wonder Nick Griffin is clearly a keen Guardian reader.
