Israel’s war machine may be recruited to stop impoverished foreigners from reaching the European Union.
A pilotless drone manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) recently took part in a demonstration exercise organized by Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, in Greece. A statement issued by IAI indicates that the drone (or unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV) in question belonged to the Heron range, which was used extensively during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s three-week assault on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. Frontex has put out a call for tenders on drones that can help it identify boats carrying migrants en route to Europe.
Nonchalant attitude to war crimes
This morning I contacted Frontex headquarters in Warsaw, Poland, to ask why it is considering the purchase of warplanes from a company known to have profited from crimes against humanity. “[EU] member states are interested in surveillance technology,” Frontex spokeswoman Ewa Moncure replied. “So we are looking at what is out there. The fact that it has been used for other purposes cannot prevent us from looking at this technology.”
Her nonchalant attitude says much about the relationship between the EU and Israel. Human rights monitors have documented how Israeli soldiers killed 87 civilians with drones during Cast Lead, illustrating how they were one of the main weapons in an offensive that left around 1,300 Palestinians dead. When Herons are the tools of oppression and occupation, it is not acceptable for an official EU body to claim that they have been used merely for “other purposes.”
Business as usual for EU-Israel relations
A few weeks ago, there was a minor ripple of excitement when a paper drawn up by EU diplomats based in East Jerusalem and Ramallah was leaked. It argued that the Union should take steps to prevent the money of European taxpayers from helping the expansion of Israeli settlements.
IAI’s subsidiary Tamam provided equipment installed in Israel’s apartheid wall in the West Bank. As one of the objectives of that monstrosity is to ringfence settlements regarded as strategically important by Israel, the IAI would appear to be the kind of company that the EU diplomats had in mind when they implicitly complained about how the Union is greasing the palms of the occupation’s profiteers. It is significant, though, that other branches of the EU’s labyrinthine bureaucracy -- such as Frontex -- are perfectly happy to consider supporting such companies by buying their wares.
Under the EU’s treaties all of its activities are legally obliged to respect fundamental human rights. Sadly, the memo explaining that fact does not appear to have been sent to Frontex. Last year, Human Rights Watch published the findings of its investigation into the detention of almost 12,000 migrants who entered Greece at its land border with Turkey between November 2010 and March 2011. Guards working for Frontex regularly apprehended those migrants and brought them to detention facilities that were so shabby that they were condemned by the European Court of Human Rights, the report found.
Frontex assists human rights abuses
Attempting to migrate to another country is not a crime. So by taking part in such operations, Frontex assisted in the jailing of people who had not been accused of a recognizable offence. In other words, it abetted human rights abuses by criminalizing the innocent. Yet that didn’t stop the European Parliament from giving Frontex a present of €44 million in September. That sum is additional to the agency’s annual budget, which rose from €6 million in 2005 to €86 million in 2011.
IAI calls human rights workers “stupid”
I also called IAI earlier today to check if the type of Heron being assessed by Frontex was deployed in Gaza. “The Heron is used only for gathering information,” said the company’s representative Hadal Paz. When I pointed out that human rights monitors have amassed credible evidence indicating that civilians were killed with Herons in Cast Lead, Paz responded. “That fact that somebody wrote something in a stupid article doesn’t mean it is correct. I read your website [The Electronic Intifada] very carefully and a lot of the information you have there is incorrect.”
Paz did not, however, provide one specific example of any inaccurate detail in EI’s reporting.
When speaking to Moncure from Frontex, I asked her if she was aware of the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. She didn’t appear to know what I was talking about. It is vital that this knowledge gap be plugged. You can contact Frontex at this email address: frontex@frontex.europa.eu. Please let its management and staff know that shopping around for Israeli weapons is an affront to humanity, regardless of what they want to do with those weapons.
●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 13 February 2012.
Showing posts with label Frontex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frontex. Show all posts
Monday, February 13, 2012
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Treating the world's poor as Europe's enemy
José Manuel Barroso has little time for his critics, judging by a recent speech he gave in Berlin. The European Commission president used his soapbox to rant against “something I often call the ‘intellectual glamour of pessimism’”. Emphasising the EU’s shortcomings, he argued, overlooks how “we have established on this continent, here in our Europe, the most decent societies known to mankind.”
To his disgrace, Barroso heads an institution that is actively unravelling the decency he tried to celebrate. After forcing merciless cutbacks in the public services on which millions of Europeans rely, the Commission will this week demonstrate its cruelty towards the poor and oppressed of the wider world. It will do so by formally recommending the establishment of a new border surveillance system, designed to keep people with dark and yellow skin out of the Union.
Of course, the proposal for Eurosur, as the system is called, will not be so blunt in its use of language. Yet once you examine the preparatory work for it, the conclusion that foreigners are being treated as Europe’s enemy becomes unavoidable.
Weapons-producers, the very people whose business depends on violence and human rights abuses, have been centrally involved in the system’s planning. It is closely related to a 42 million euro research project – largely funded by the EU – named PERSEUS (Protection of European Seas and Borders through the Intelligent Use of Surveillance). In a conflict of interests, that project is being coordinated by the Spanish arms firm Indra, which stands to benefit directly from the sale of the surveillance equipment to be used by Eurosur.
Thales, the French “defence” firm, is leading a similar EU research project known as OPERAMAR, which is supposed to address the “insufficient interoperability” between the Union’s “maritime security” facilities and those held by the national authorities of its member countries.
More perilous routes
I would not be surprised if Cecilia Malmström, the EU’s home affairs commissioner, predicts this week that the system will help rescue boats that are in danger of sinking. Any such claim will be misleading; the experience of these kind of surveillance systems is that they push asylum-seekers to take increasingly perilous routes in the hope of giving the authorities the slip.
Spain introduced a 300 million euro system called SIVE to monitor the Strait of Gibraltar in 2002. The effect was that boats carrying asylum-seekers tried to enter Spanish territory via the Canary Islands instead. When SIVE was extended to the Canaries, it emerged that saving lives was not a priority for those operating it. In 2004, a number of small boats sank, causing numerous deaths, in areas where surveillance equipment had been installed. During parliamentary discussions the following year, the Spanish Civil Guard admitted that the system was of a “security” nature; search and rescue was not the primary concern.
The European Defence Agency (EDA), that official body set up at the request of Thales and other arms companies, is also taking an active part in the discussions about Eurosur.
A 2010 report written for the agency by a “wise pen” group comprised of five vice-admirals from different navies advocated that warships should be used for patrolling the EU’s external borders. The same report gave a positive assessment of operations in which boats carrying asylum-seekers were boarded by armed personnel, while still at sea.
It is telling that the vice-admirals did not appear to have any problem with measures that would inevitably increase the anxiety of people who are already frightened. In September 2008, the French naval vessel Arrago intercepted two boats with asylum-seekers in the Mediterranean. The boats were then escorted to the Sicilian port of Lampedusa with the asylum-seekers having guns pointed at them the whole time.
That operation was directed by Frontex, the EU’s border management agency which is also set to be involved in Eurosur. Frontex is legally bound to respect fundamental rights; in practice, it does not.
EU approved child abuse
A few months ago, Human Rights Watch published the results of its investigation into the detention of almost 12,000 migrants who entered Greece at its land border with Turkey between November 2010 and March this year. During that time, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued a judgment, which found that Greece’s asylum system was dysfunctional. The country’s detention facilities were found to be so shabby that they violated human rights laws prohibiting ill-treatment and torture. Guards deployed by Frontex regularly apprehended migrants and brought them to the detention centres, frequently in buses provided by the agency. In some of these centres, unaccompanied children were held for long periods.
This means that an official EU agency helped flout international law. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, all signatories are supposed to guarantee the protection of minors, in particular children who are not accompanied by a parent or another adult.
The Frontex chief Ilkka Laitinen last month made a distinction between “irregular migration” and “bona fide border crossings”. Reading between the lines, it appears that the only difference between the “irregular” and “bona fide” travellers he referred to is that the second group is lucky enough to have documents that immigration officers will accept.
Laitinen should read a passage from Barroso’s Berlin speech: “we believe that if someone is poor, it is not necessarily because it is his fault.”
Trying to enter Europe in order to flee persecution or poverty is not a crime. How dare the EU treat such people as criminal.
●First published by New Europe, 5 December 2011.
To his disgrace, Barroso heads an institution that is actively unravelling the decency he tried to celebrate. After forcing merciless cutbacks in the public services on which millions of Europeans rely, the Commission will this week demonstrate its cruelty towards the poor and oppressed of the wider world. It will do so by formally recommending the establishment of a new border surveillance system, designed to keep people with dark and yellow skin out of the Union.
Of course, the proposal for Eurosur, as the system is called, will not be so blunt in its use of language. Yet once you examine the preparatory work for it, the conclusion that foreigners are being treated as Europe’s enemy becomes unavoidable.
Weapons-producers, the very people whose business depends on violence and human rights abuses, have been centrally involved in the system’s planning. It is closely related to a 42 million euro research project – largely funded by the EU – named PERSEUS (Protection of European Seas and Borders through the Intelligent Use of Surveillance). In a conflict of interests, that project is being coordinated by the Spanish arms firm Indra, which stands to benefit directly from the sale of the surveillance equipment to be used by Eurosur.
Thales, the French “defence” firm, is leading a similar EU research project known as OPERAMAR, which is supposed to address the “insufficient interoperability” between the Union’s “maritime security” facilities and those held by the national authorities of its member countries.
More perilous routes
I would not be surprised if Cecilia Malmström, the EU’s home affairs commissioner, predicts this week that the system will help rescue boats that are in danger of sinking. Any such claim will be misleading; the experience of these kind of surveillance systems is that they push asylum-seekers to take increasingly perilous routes in the hope of giving the authorities the slip.
Spain introduced a 300 million euro system called SIVE to monitor the Strait of Gibraltar in 2002. The effect was that boats carrying asylum-seekers tried to enter Spanish territory via the Canary Islands instead. When SIVE was extended to the Canaries, it emerged that saving lives was not a priority for those operating it. In 2004, a number of small boats sank, causing numerous deaths, in areas where surveillance equipment had been installed. During parliamentary discussions the following year, the Spanish Civil Guard admitted that the system was of a “security” nature; search and rescue was not the primary concern.
The European Defence Agency (EDA), that official body set up at the request of Thales and other arms companies, is also taking an active part in the discussions about Eurosur.
A 2010 report written for the agency by a “wise pen” group comprised of five vice-admirals from different navies advocated that warships should be used for patrolling the EU’s external borders. The same report gave a positive assessment of operations in which boats carrying asylum-seekers were boarded by armed personnel, while still at sea.
It is telling that the vice-admirals did not appear to have any problem with measures that would inevitably increase the anxiety of people who are already frightened. In September 2008, the French naval vessel Arrago intercepted two boats with asylum-seekers in the Mediterranean. The boats were then escorted to the Sicilian port of Lampedusa with the asylum-seekers having guns pointed at them the whole time.
That operation was directed by Frontex, the EU’s border management agency which is also set to be involved in Eurosur. Frontex is legally bound to respect fundamental rights; in practice, it does not.
EU approved child abuse
A few months ago, Human Rights Watch published the results of its investigation into the detention of almost 12,000 migrants who entered Greece at its land border with Turkey between November 2010 and March this year. During that time, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued a judgment, which found that Greece’s asylum system was dysfunctional. The country’s detention facilities were found to be so shabby that they violated human rights laws prohibiting ill-treatment and torture. Guards deployed by Frontex regularly apprehended migrants and brought them to the detention centres, frequently in buses provided by the agency. In some of these centres, unaccompanied children were held for long periods.
This means that an official EU agency helped flout international law. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, all signatories are supposed to guarantee the protection of minors, in particular children who are not accompanied by a parent or another adult.
The Frontex chief Ilkka Laitinen last month made a distinction between “irregular migration” and “bona fide border crossings”. Reading between the lines, it appears that the only difference between the “irregular” and “bona fide” travellers he referred to is that the second group is lucky enough to have documents that immigration officers will accept.
Laitinen should read a passage from Barroso’s Berlin speech: “we believe that if someone is poor, it is not necessarily because it is his fault.”
Trying to enter Europe in order to flee persecution or poverty is not a crime. How dare the EU treat such people as criminal.
●First published by New Europe, 5 December 2011.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Military Technology to Track Down Migrants?
Arms manufacturers have been asked to advise an official European Union (EU) body on how their products can be used to stop asylum-seekers entering the bloc’s territory.
Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, will host an event in Spain this coming June, at which several makers of pilotless drones – or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) – will give presentations.
Although these camera-carrying planes have been designed for war and have been used extensively in attacks on civilians in Palestine, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the agency is studying how they can be adapted to border surveillance.
A Frontex source said that none of these drones have been used in its work to date but that is examining what “added value” they can bring to tasks performed by the coast guards of EU member countries. “Special attention” is being paid to drones as they could be capable of monitoring vessels at sea for longer periods of time than equipment now in use by coast guards, according to the source.
Frontex is one of many bodies in Europe that are eager to use drones for security purposes. Earlier this month, the Merseyside police in England sought credit for the first known use of a drone to arrest a suspected criminal. Yet the affair turned into a controversy, when it emerged that the police did not have a licence to use these planes.
Amnesty International said this week it would be concerned if surveillance technology helped Frontex to erode the right to have asylum applications processed in Europe. “Is this being used to fulfil human rights obligations?” Nicolas Beger, director of Amnesty’s Brussels office, said. “If it isn’t, that’s a problem.”
The EU’s executive, the European Commission, published a plan to strengthen Frontex Feb. 24. Under it, the Union’s governments would be required to ensure that boats and planes are at the agency’s disposal. Frontex, which has mainly performed a coordinating role between national border management authorities of EU states since its inception in 2005, would gradually be able to buy or lease its own equipment.
Cecilia Malmström, the EU’s recently-appointed home affairs commissioner, said that migrants are “not criminals” but “people coming in search of a better life”. Asked why technology invented for military purposes is being tested for migration control work, she insisted that “there has been absolutely no decision” on using drones for those purposes.
She also stated that “fundamental rights must not be infringed” by Frontex and announced that an independent monitor will be present when the agency is assisting with the expulsion of rejected asylum-seekers. “I don’t exclude at all that there have been errors committed (by Frontex in the past),” she added.
In June last year, Frontex coordinated Operation Nautilus, in which a boat carrying an estimated 75 migrants was intercepted off the Italian coast. Using a German Puma helicopter, the operation was the first of its kind in which Frontex succeeded in forcing migrants from the central Mediterranean Sea back to Libya. Human rights organisations criticised Frontex over this operation, contending that it was unable to give guarantees that the Libyan authorities had allowed people on that vessel the possibility to apply for asylum. Under international law, all individuals are entitled to seek protection from persecution in a country other than their own.
Bjarte Vandvik from the European Council on Refugees and Exile, a network of organisations working with asylum-seekers, said that the research on drones highlighted how Europe’s debate on migration issues is being determined by a “security approach”.
“We can’t accept that people are being sent back to possible torture or death without even being given an opportunity to have their claims dealt with,” he said. “People are being turned away from the borders of Europe today without being screened one way or another to see if they are here looking for protection or here looking for employment and a better life, which is not a crime either.”
Despite impressions conveyed by some politicians that the EU is “swamped” with more asylum-seekers than it can afford to accommodate, asylum applications have fallen sharply in the past two decades. When the Union had just 12 member states in 1992, it registered 550,000 asylum claims. Yet in 2008, the number for the EU – which now comprises 27 countries – was 238,000, while provisional data indicates that the number fell to about 223,000 last year.
Amnesty’s Beger said there has been “a lot of myths and scaremongering” about migration in Europe. There is a “very stark absence”, he argued, of any recognition that asylum-seekers and other migrants are human beings. Because the EU’s policy “disproportionately aims at returning people”, rather than upholding the right to asylum, migrants are undertaking ever more hazardous journeys in their attempts to enter Europe.
Alfredo Abad from the Spanish Commission for Refugees accused the EU of a “big hypocrisy” in setting out to build a common system of asylum in recent years, while simultaneously preventing refugees from arriving here.
First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net)
Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, will host an event in Spain this coming June, at which several makers of pilotless drones – or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) – will give presentations.
Although these camera-carrying planes have been designed for war and have been used extensively in attacks on civilians in Palestine, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the agency is studying how they can be adapted to border surveillance.
A Frontex source said that none of these drones have been used in its work to date but that is examining what “added value” they can bring to tasks performed by the coast guards of EU member countries. “Special attention” is being paid to drones as they could be capable of monitoring vessels at sea for longer periods of time than equipment now in use by coast guards, according to the source.
Frontex is one of many bodies in Europe that are eager to use drones for security purposes. Earlier this month, the Merseyside police in England sought credit for the first known use of a drone to arrest a suspected criminal. Yet the affair turned into a controversy, when it emerged that the police did not have a licence to use these planes.
Amnesty International said this week it would be concerned if surveillance technology helped Frontex to erode the right to have asylum applications processed in Europe. “Is this being used to fulfil human rights obligations?” Nicolas Beger, director of Amnesty’s Brussels office, said. “If it isn’t, that’s a problem.”
The EU’s executive, the European Commission, published a plan to strengthen Frontex Feb. 24. Under it, the Union’s governments would be required to ensure that boats and planes are at the agency’s disposal. Frontex, which has mainly performed a coordinating role between national border management authorities of EU states since its inception in 2005, would gradually be able to buy or lease its own equipment.
Cecilia Malmström, the EU’s recently-appointed home affairs commissioner, said that migrants are “not criminals” but “people coming in search of a better life”. Asked why technology invented for military purposes is being tested for migration control work, she insisted that “there has been absolutely no decision” on using drones for those purposes.
She also stated that “fundamental rights must not be infringed” by Frontex and announced that an independent monitor will be present when the agency is assisting with the expulsion of rejected asylum-seekers. “I don’t exclude at all that there have been errors committed (by Frontex in the past),” she added.
In June last year, Frontex coordinated Operation Nautilus, in which a boat carrying an estimated 75 migrants was intercepted off the Italian coast. Using a German Puma helicopter, the operation was the first of its kind in which Frontex succeeded in forcing migrants from the central Mediterranean Sea back to Libya. Human rights organisations criticised Frontex over this operation, contending that it was unable to give guarantees that the Libyan authorities had allowed people on that vessel the possibility to apply for asylum. Under international law, all individuals are entitled to seek protection from persecution in a country other than their own.
Bjarte Vandvik from the European Council on Refugees and Exile, a network of organisations working with asylum-seekers, said that the research on drones highlighted how Europe’s debate on migration issues is being determined by a “security approach”.
“We can’t accept that people are being sent back to possible torture or death without even being given an opportunity to have their claims dealt with,” he said. “People are being turned away from the borders of Europe today without being screened one way or another to see if they are here looking for protection or here looking for employment and a better life, which is not a crime either.”
Despite impressions conveyed by some politicians that the EU is “swamped” with more asylum-seekers than it can afford to accommodate, asylum applications have fallen sharply in the past two decades. When the Union had just 12 member states in 1992, it registered 550,000 asylum claims. Yet in 2008, the number for the EU – which now comprises 27 countries – was 238,000, while provisional data indicates that the number fell to about 223,000 last year.
Amnesty’s Beger said there has been “a lot of myths and scaremongering” about migration in Europe. There is a “very stark absence”, he argued, of any recognition that asylum-seekers and other migrants are human beings. Because the EU’s policy “disproportionately aims at returning people”, rather than upholding the right to asylum, migrants are undertaking ever more hazardous journeys in their attempts to enter Europe.
Alfredo Abad from the Spanish Commission for Refugees accused the EU of a “big hypocrisy” in setting out to build a common system of asylum in recent years, while simultaneously preventing refugees from arriving here.
First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net)
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Nick Griffin's foreign fascist festival
Fresh from agreeing to allow blacks and Asians join his party, Nick Griffin is this week embracing a group of men who have funny names and speak foreign languages. Have his regular trips to Brussels and Strasbourg finally brought out the British National Party chief’s cosmopolitan side?
Of course, they haven’t. Far from sampling the diversity of Europe, Griffin is to share a platform with some of the continent’s most narrow-minded politicians in Ghent on Wednesday.
According to his Facebook fan-page, Griffin is visiting the Belgian city to address a “student symposium”. Yet the poster for the event indicates there will be precious little of the academic chin-rubbing you’d normally expect at an event billed as such. The poster depicts a burqa-clad woman standing in front of a European flag studded with minaret spires.
This crass Islamophobia is typical of promotional material produced by the far-right party Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), whose de facto youth wing, the National Student Association (NSV), is organising the event. Like the BNP, the Vlaams Belang has had to amend its rulebook in recent years after its precursor the Vlaams Blok was banned for flouting anti-discrimination laws. Frank Vanhecke, the Vlaams Belang leader, who is also scheduled to speak in Ghent, is not as openly xenophobic as he used to be – he once denounced an Amsterdam mayor who named a square after Nelson Mandela as a “renegade towards his own people and race”. Yet he has no qualms about inciting hatred against Muslims. Women who wear a veil, he has said, have signed a contract for their deportation.
Another guest in Ghent will be Bruno Gollnisch, deputy-leader of the French National Front. Gollnisch has been helping the BNP finesse its electoral strategy, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. By turning to him for advice, Griffin evidently no longer appears as keen to emphasise that he is “not” an anti-Semite as he was during his appearance on the BBC’s Question Time last year. In 2004, Gollnisch suggested that the Nazi gas chambers may be a myth.
Griffin is no “gravy train or career politician”, a message directed at his constituents in north-west England recently declared. How then does he explain his use of a budget that is supposed to be reserved for parliamentary researchers and secretarial help to pay his bodyguard? Or how he uses the European Parliament chamber to score the most parochial points imaginable? During a debate on the Haiti earthquake in January, he argued that no humanitarian aid should be given to its victims because the disaster had happened “in somebody else’s backyard”. Griffin quoted the Bible to claim that EU governments only had duties to their own citizens. The central teaching of Christianity – “love your neighbour as yourself” – is conveniently omitted when fascists interpret scripture.
It would be comforting if Griffin and his ilk were confined to the political margins. But the truth is that “mainstream” parties and European institutions have happily stolen many of the extreme right’s clothes and invariably wear them with greater ease. Griffin’s wish for boats carrying asylum-seekers to be sunk is not far removed from what Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, is already doing, for example. Last summer this agency helped the Italian authorities force a vessel to land in Libya; in contravention to international law, the people on board it were not granted the possibility to apply for asylum. Frontex is also planning to use pilotless drones – the type of warplanes that have caused numerous civilian deaths in Palestine, Afghanistan and Pakistan – in future operations designed to prevent migrants entering Europe.
If there is one thing more nauseating than Nick Griffin himself, it is how “respectable” politicians pander to his agenda.
Originally published by The Samosa (www.thesamosa.co.uk)
Of course, they haven’t. Far from sampling the diversity of Europe, Griffin is to share a platform with some of the continent’s most narrow-minded politicians in Ghent on Wednesday.
According to his Facebook fan-page, Griffin is visiting the Belgian city to address a “student symposium”. Yet the poster for the event indicates there will be precious little of the academic chin-rubbing you’d normally expect at an event billed as such. The poster depicts a burqa-clad woman standing in front of a European flag studded with minaret spires.
This crass Islamophobia is typical of promotional material produced by the far-right party Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), whose de facto youth wing, the National Student Association (NSV), is organising the event. Like the BNP, the Vlaams Belang has had to amend its rulebook in recent years after its precursor the Vlaams Blok was banned for flouting anti-discrimination laws. Frank Vanhecke, the Vlaams Belang leader, who is also scheduled to speak in Ghent, is not as openly xenophobic as he used to be – he once denounced an Amsterdam mayor who named a square after Nelson Mandela as a “renegade towards his own people and race”. Yet he has no qualms about inciting hatred against Muslims. Women who wear a veil, he has said, have signed a contract for their deportation.
Another guest in Ghent will be Bruno Gollnisch, deputy-leader of the French National Front. Gollnisch has been helping the BNP finesse its electoral strategy, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. By turning to him for advice, Griffin evidently no longer appears as keen to emphasise that he is “not” an anti-Semite as he was during his appearance on the BBC’s Question Time last year. In 2004, Gollnisch suggested that the Nazi gas chambers may be a myth.
Griffin is no “gravy train or career politician”, a message directed at his constituents in north-west England recently declared. How then does he explain his use of a budget that is supposed to be reserved for parliamentary researchers and secretarial help to pay his bodyguard? Or how he uses the European Parliament chamber to score the most parochial points imaginable? During a debate on the Haiti earthquake in January, he argued that no humanitarian aid should be given to its victims because the disaster had happened “in somebody else’s backyard”. Griffin quoted the Bible to claim that EU governments only had duties to their own citizens. The central teaching of Christianity – “love your neighbour as yourself” – is conveniently omitted when fascists interpret scripture.
It would be comforting if Griffin and his ilk were confined to the political margins. But the truth is that “mainstream” parties and European institutions have happily stolen many of the extreme right’s clothes and invariably wear them with greater ease. Griffin’s wish for boats carrying asylum-seekers to be sunk is not far removed from what Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, is already doing, for example. Last summer this agency helped the Italian authorities force a vessel to land in Libya; in contravention to international law, the people on board it were not granted the possibility to apply for asylum. Frontex is also planning to use pilotless drones – the type of warplanes that have caused numerous civilian deaths in Palestine, Afghanistan and Pakistan – in future operations designed to prevent migrants entering Europe.
If there is one thing more nauseating than Nick Griffin himself, it is how “respectable” politicians pander to his agenda.
Originally published by The Samosa (www.thesamosa.co.uk)
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