Derek Holland, Richard Williamson and the British Far Right

Christopher Pryor writes that Far Right Catholic Integrationalist Derek Holland is a fan of unrepentant SSPX Holocaust denier Richard Williamson.

Derek Holland helped introduce Christianity to the British Far Right at a time when he was in the National Front alongside current BNP leader Nick Griffin. Both men are featured in this video:

This is in part why I don’t believe the BNP when they claim to be Christian.

Emails show Bishop Williamson continues to deny the Holocaust

From Spiegel Online:

Bishop Richard Williamson has again denied the Holocaust. While the arch-conservative SSPX movement [the Society of St. Pius X, to which Williamson belongs] is directly negotiating with Pope Benedict XVI on matters of faith, the British man remains unrepentant.

A year ago Williamson plunged the Catholic Church into a deep crisis with his views . From internal SSPX emails, it is apparent according to information obtained by SPIEGEL that Williamson continues to say that “the six million gassed”is “a complete lie”.

[Williamson also asserts that] “on this “fact” a “whole new world order” has been established.” According to the priest, who is due to appear in court in Germany this April charged with inciting racial hatred, “the Jews have found a substitute redeemer through the concentration camps.”

Williamson has also claimed that the “1.3 million deportees” from the camps at Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec and Sobibor were not gassed, but were moved to the parts of the Soviet Union occupied by Germany.

The bishop apparently has further contact with leaders of the revisionist scene, like the Swiss Jurgen Graf.

Whilst the SSPX believe the Englishman to be “a ticking time bomb”, they have not wanted to expel him as he is considered to have many merits. In addition, the SSPX fear that Williamson could consecrate new bishops if he were expelled, and so form a separate church.

Hat-tip: Cathcon, Christopher Pryor

Irish archbishop speaks out against Holocaust denial

Read here.

Ben White and the Bethlehem Bible College

On the Israeli Apartheid Guide website, we find a recommendation of White’s new book from Rev Alex Awad of the Bethlehem Bible College. Awad writes:

“In this book, Ben White, provides important insights on the history and emergence of the state of Israel while simultaneously documenting the suffering, dispossession and dispersion of the Palestinian people from lands they controlled for hundreds of years. For the earnest scholar and serious student of the Israel/Palestine question, his research will prove most valuable.”

This is not the first association White has with the college, having spent a summer in Bethlehem teaching English in Bethlehem Bible College. I noted here that Awad, alongside Stephen Sizer, shared a platform with Holocaust denier Fred Tobin and representatives of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah in order to denounce Israel.

Recently Jonathan Hoffman reported that at Ben White’s book launch, he was told by a young man that “the Nazis should have finished the job,” whilst his friend was jeered upon announcing her Jewish-sounding surname.

Big Questions for Stephen Sizer

Here.

Michael Hoffman distances himself from James Von Brunn

On his Revisionist Review blog (warning: link to far right hate site), Holocaust denier Michael Hoffman draws attention to a particularly vile anti-Christian rant by James von Brunn.

Hoffman himself has previously said of the Holocaust:

The ‘Holocaust’ is a religious cult masquerading as history. It is a means for Judaizing the West. …

Hoffman prefixes the Von Brunn article thus:

The following anti-Christian rant has been attributed to James von Brunn, the accused assailant at the “Holocaust Museum.” As Christians we are publishing this disgusting statement alleged to be his (from a website called antichrist.net) not because we endorse it (in fact we utterly condemn it) — but to demonstrate that the seeming Manchurian Candidate James von Brunn was not part of our movement and his deeds cannot be attributed to Christian revisionists.

If this is in fact Von Brunn’s authentic writing, then he extols race as much as any rabbi. Strange indeed is the degree to which he allegedly fired his gun on cue, timed to support the game plan of the Cryptocracy.

So what’s the problem with Von Brunn? Not that he has murdered an innocent man in a Holocaust museum, but that he hated Christianity – a religion which Hoffman routinely attempts to make a mockery of by dressing up his hatred of Jews with theological language.

It would be appropriate if Stephen Sizer and Anthony McRoy could put distance between themselves and Hoffman, having both linked to his work.

UPDATE: Modernity picks up the link between Von Brunn and Carto. See here and here for more on Carto, Hoffman and the American Christian Far Right and its possible influence in certain British theological circles.

Stephen Sizer accuses Evangelicals Now of equivalent to Holocaust Denial

This is now a guest post on Harry’s Place.

Recently there appears to have been a somewhat public spat between the Reverend Doctor Stephen Sizer PhD and the British Christian newsletter Evangelicals Now. This follows a book review in this month’s paper of Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
The review concludes:

Under the unimaginable stresses and pressures of a struggle to survive, even the most civilised armies are capable of barbaric acts, but Ilan Pappe wishes us to believe that barbarism was the stock in trade of David Ben-Gurion and his cabinet. If you have half a mind to believe that in the space of six months the fledgling state of Israel was able to wipe out over half its Palestinian population under the noses of international reporters and UN observers and leave no trace, that’s all you’ll need.

I have criticised Evangelicals Now for its coverage of Israel-Palestine before, and, credit where credit’s due, there seems to have been a conscious attempt to redress the balance somewhat.

But not everyone’s happy.

A bemused Rev Dr Sizer PhD wonders aloud:

I was saddened but not surprised to read Mike Moore cynical ‘review’ of Professor Ilan Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” in last month’s Evangelicals Now.

It is strange to find a book by a Jewish author about the Palestinian Nakba reviewed in an evangelical paper. Was the review commissioned or sent unsolicited and used to fill a gap?

Here is Sizer’s argument about Holocaust denial:

Thankfully it is a crime in some countries to deny the Holocaust. It is a shame that it is not yet a crime to deny the Palestinian Nakba as Moore does.

The events of 1948 cannot simply be laid at the feet of Ben Gurion and his Zionists. Ben Cohen recently discussed the trappings of the ‘Nakba narrative’, noting that Palestinian literary critic Hassan Khader himself sees contradictions and flaws in the traditional Nakba narrative.

But, in any case, what is happening here?

Sizer himself has denied knowingly forwarding material from Holocaust deniers (which he appears to have done), and is now trying to accuse Evangelicals Now of an equivalent to denying the Holocaust (which they haven’t).

Of course, criticisms of Israeli policies, Judaism and Zionism are not inherently antisemitic. Yet there are some people for who (for whatever reason) use criticism of Israeli policies, Judaism and Zionism as channels for their own anti-Jewish prejudices.

As such it has been distressing to see many of the leading theologians in the Christian anti-Zionist movement use the theology of anti-Judaic white supremacists, and associate themselves with Holocaust deniers. Examples include:

*Both Stephen Sizer and Dr Anthony McRoy (evangelical lecturer on Islam) have drawn attention to the writings of American Holocaust denier Michael Hoffman.

*Journalist Ben White, who has written for the Church Times and Fulcrum, tried to contextualise Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial.

*Stephen Sizer, representing The Institute for the Study of Christian Zionism, shared a platform with Holocaust denier Fred Tobin in Indonesia.

*Stephen Sizer has previously hosted an article by Israel Shamir on his website, and is on first name terms with him.

*American Christian anti-Zionist Don Wagner gave an interview to Holocaust-denying David Duke fan Hesham Tellawi (Wagner, interestingly enough, oversaw Rev Dr Sizer PhD’s PhD thesis on Christian Zionism).

McRoy, Sizer and Wagner are academics. They criticise both the excesses of theological Christian Zionism and the pitfalls of political Christian Zionism. Fair enough, but there are also extremists who associate themselves with Christian anti-Zionism.

In March 2004, Searchlight Magazine, in an article entitled Faith based fascists bridging the waters, warned of the dangers of Catholic ultra-traditionist theology as espoused by International Third Positionists (I have previously noted the influence of this phenomenon on the BNP’s theology here and here):

With the internet and numerous conferences, seminars and pilgrimages around the world, Catholic ultra-Traditionalists – numbering as many as 100,000 in the United States alone – form a global network that is infested with religious antisemites, Holocaust deniers, Old School fascists, white nationalists, faith-based Third Positionists and anti-democratic clerics.

“We intend to pick up where the Distributist, the Solidarist, the Corporatist Catholics of all nations left off before the war, and, God willing, to deliver to the world once again the hope of a peaceful and fruitful existence, free from both the excessive power of the state and the ruthless injustice of an untamed market.”

So stated the Catholic IHS Press on its website launch two years ago. The man behind this enterprise and these words is John Sharpe, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, former submarine officer and media spokesman for the Atlantic Fleet. He is also a radical Catholic Third Position polemicist with ideological and business ties to Roberto Fiore’s International Third Position/Forza Nuova network.

Sharpe’s other, more radical enterprise, the Legion of St Louis (LSL), based in Norfolk, Virginia, serves as the US distributor for the St George Educational Trust (SGET) catalogue of antisemitic and British fascist classics. The Board of Directors for the Trust includes convicted terrorist Roberto Fiore, former National Front political solider Colin Todd and Society of St Pius X (SSPX) priest Fr. Michael Crowdy.

LSL offers an SGET booklist that includes works by the British Union of Fascists leader A K Chesterton, the Irish fascist and antisemite Fr. Denis Fahey and his American protégé “radio priest” Fr. Charles Coughlin along with Holocaust denier Michael Hoffman’s Strange Gods of Judaism and Henry Ford’s The International Jew.

You will notice the mention of Michael Hoffman, whom I mentioned earlier in the post as having been linked to by Sizer and McRoy.

Hoffman says of the Holocaust:

“The ‘Holocaust’ is a religious cult masquerading as history. It is a means for Judaizing the West. …

It appears that Hoffman is being lent credibility here in the UK, not merely through Catholic ultra-traditionalists and Third Positionists, but also through respected Christian academics like Sizer and McRoy. Whilst Hoffman’s views on Holocaust denial are not promoted by Sizer or McRoy, his views on Judaism and Zionism have been. Until this controversy is cleared up, we should remain concerned.

Dr Anthony McRoy article links to Holocaust denier’s website

Dr Anthony McRoy, lecturer at the Wales Evangelical School of Theology, frequently comments on Premier Christian Radio. Speaking of the appropriate British response to the murder of Edwin Dyer by Al-Qaeda operatives, McRoy told listeners:

“We must never ever give in to terrorists of any description. This is one of the big mistakes we made in Northern Ireland, partly because I’ve got to say of US pressure responding to the Irish-American lobby. We mollycoddled them, we agreed to ceasefires with the IRA. We must never give way and, as hard as it is, even when it is a fellow Briton, we must never ever give in to terrorists, we must never ever agree to ransom, because the moment we do this the floodgates open.”

The IRA indeed was a terrorist group, as too are Al Qaida, and as were also the Kahanist Jewish Defence League, responsible for the murder of Palestinian-American Alex Odeh.

In McRoy’s article about Odeh, we read:

(Photo of Odeh at http://www.hoffman-info.com/pales

Effectively, US Government foot-dragging on the Odeh case sends a message to bin Laden; if he is searching for a new safe haven, he need only convert to Judaism and migrate to Kiryat Arba, where the Zionist regime will shield him and any other Jewish terrorist killing American citizens, and the US Government will quietly forget his case. Alex’s brother Sammy Odeh, told me that the family wanted ‘closure’, which could only happen when the perpetrators are brought to [justice])

Indeed, Odeh’s killers must be brought to justice. Yet there are surely saner critics of JDL terrorism than Hoffman-Info.

The Hoffman Info site was the homepage of Michael A. Hoffman II, infamous for his views on the Holocaust and links to the Far Right. (In drawing attention to a Hoffman internet article, perhaps McRoy finds yet more common ground with Stephen Sizer).

Hoffman was the editor of the Historical Review Press. You can get a feel for its ‘Jewish studies’ section here, with articles contributed by Hoffman. HRP includes, among many other vile pieces, an article by David Duke on ‘Jewish involvement in pornography’.

So, why did McRoy’s article link to Hoffman-Info?

Would it be acceptable, for example, to link to the BNP website if you wrote an article about Islamism and 9-11? Of course not.

But, as Lucy Lips discovered this week, getting academics to explain people’s concerns that some of their rhetoric appears to legitimise Far Right conspiracy theorists is a tricky business.

Chronicling the inferno

Normblog on Patrick Desbois.

Cancer or Bacillus?

This week, Stephen Sizer has reposted his interview with Alan Hart on his blog. Come to think of it, quite why he posts all his interviews is a mystery – much of his talks are very similar, and cover the same material, and have been written for the era in which George W Bush was still the US President.

But anyway, Sizer describes Hart of the Matter as:

“a programme committed to telling viewers the truth – the truth about who must do what and why if the Palestine problem, the cancer at the heart of international affairs, is to be cured before it consumes us all.”

Now, ordinarily I would be reluctant to make the link, but given that Rev Dr Sizer PhD cites a Holocaust denier in the interview, I am reminded of this:

“Only when this Jewish bacillus infecting the life of peoples has been removed can one hope to establish a co-operation amongst the nations which shall be built up on a lasting understanding.” quoted in N H Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, Oxford University Press, 1942, Volume I, pp.743

I had hoped that Rev Sizer’s seemingly newfound respect for human rights would lead him to distance himself from Crowley, but I guess not.

This is not to suggest that Rev Sizer has a similar outlook on life, but surely this language is insensitive at best. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as tricky enough without it being blown out of proportion or associated with hateful rhetoric.

And when Stephen Sizer praises the Iranian state’s Press TV-commissioned Hart of the Matter for its coverage of ‘the Palestine problem’, what message does that send to those who do actually care that the Middle East doesn’t turn into a nuclear wasteland?