BNP chief claims acquittal is his victory for freedom
Nov. 11, 2006
timeonlineUK
Nick Griffin said that the race-hate trial was the Establishment’s attempt to silence him
NICK GRIFFIN hailed his unanimous acquittal on race-hate charges yesterday as a vindication of his belief that parts of Britain have become “a multi-racial hell hole” in which Asians drug and rape white schoolgirls as part of a Muslim plot to conquer the country.
The BNP chairman, 47, told a cheering crowd of more than 200 on the steps of Leeds Crown Court that he had won a victory for freedom. He claimed that the decision to bring him to trial had been an attempt by “the corrupt political establishment” to silence the BNP for speaking the truth.
Mr Griffin told the BNP supporters: “We’ve shown Tony Blair and the Government and the BBC that they can take our taxes but they cannot take our hearts, they cannot take our tongues and they cannot take our freedom.
“It took 12 ordinary, decent, common-sense Yorkshiremen and women less than three hours to find us not guilty on all charges. This shows the enormous gulf between the ordinary, real British people and the multicultural fantasy world our masters live in.”
He claimed that the failed prosecution had cost more than £1 million. Mr Griffin and Mr Collett, the BNP’s publicity director, faced charges linked to speeches that they had made before the 2004 local elections.
The speeches, to gatherings of BNP supporters at pubs in Keighley, West Yorkshire, were secretly filmed by an undercover BBC journalist and later shown in a television programme, The Secret Agent, which was watched by 4.5 million people.
In the 2004 speech that led to a charge of conduct intending or likely to stir up racial hatred, Mr Griffin told his audience that Asian men were seducing under-age white girls because of a Koran-inspired command to turn Britain into an Islamic republic.
Mr Collett, in two speeches, compared asylum-seekers to cockroaches and said that Asians were attacking whites “in a controlled, systematic way” because they “hate us” and “want to wipe out white people”. He urged the meeting to vote BNP to “show these ethnics the door in 2004”.
The prosecution argued that both men had been seeking to build fear and resentment of Asians by creating a nightmare vision of rapes and muggings, which they sought to blame on the entire Asian population.
Mr Collett told the jury that he had merely been trying to convince party members to take part in legal and democratic campaigning. Mr Griffin said that he had not been attacking any ethnic group: his target had been the “wicked, vicious” Islamic religion.
The men were first tried in January on charges linked to two speeches by the BNP leader and four by his co-accused. When that jury acquitted them on some of the race-hate charges — one of Mr Griffin’s speeches and two by Mr Collett — but failed to reach a verdict on the remaining speeches, the Crown Prosecution Service pressed ahead with a retrial.
At a time of particular sensitivity over Muslim issues in Britain, both trials gave Mr Griffin a public opportunity to place Islam in the dock by presenting detailed evidence from the Koran and the Hadith to justify his view that it was an evil religion.
As Mr Griffin addressed supporters through a loud-hailer yesterday, his words were almost drowned out by a small but vociferous group of antifascist demonstrators who hurled abuse at the BNP chairman, chanting: “The BNP are a Nazi party; smash the BNP.”
Mr Collett shouted “BNP 2, BBC 0” and accused the corporation of abusing its position and wasting taxpayers’ money to target “a legal, peaceful, democratic political party”. The BBC’s investigation is thought to have cost £300,000.
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Originally Posted by perfectbeast2001
