BNP commentator: "Israel is the model"

Lee Barnes has a rather mind-boggling opinion piece at the BNP website, in which he unreservedly sides with Israel in its fight with Hezbollah. The only rational Western policy towards Hezbollah, he writes, is to seek its destruction. He favorably contrasts Israel's restrained tactics in Lebanon with the bombing of Serbia, where NATO did not first drop leaflets warning civilians to get out of harm's way.

Barnes accuses the British media of being "the European propaganda wing of Hezbollah", a phenomenon which ought to discredit far-right conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media. The media's agenda, he says, is the destruction of nation-states and of nationalism, and Israel is a prime target because "Israel is the model for a nation that understands the importance of putting the interests of the nation and the people before all other factors .... Israel is the only living organic nationalist state on the planet." Thus support for, or at least sympathy with, Israel is convincingly integrated into Barnes' nationalist worldview.

Barnes' article does not represent official BNP policy, and it is fairly clear from comments in the article that his BNP milieu is still teeming with anti-Semites. It is possible to interpret the article as espousing an extreme form of nationalism, unmitigated by considerations of common humanity, which Israel does not in fact exhibit. The article will also be of little comfort to those British nonwhites worried about their fate under a future BNP government. Nevertheless, it seems a hopeful sign that a pro-Israel "maverick" (see Galliawatch) like Barnes is tolerated within BNP ranks.

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