Friday, May 14, 2010 

10 years to spend thinking about the coming race war...

Ian Davison, the neo-Nazi who succeeded where others failed in producing ricin, must be somewhat relieved at receiving only a 10 year sentence for concocting a chemical weapon along with other terrorist offences, including making pipe bombs, one of which he recorded exploding. After all, Martyn Gilleard, the skinhead who shared a passion for potential race war with a predilection for children, was given an 11-year-stretch for similar offences while only putting together some very rudimentary nail bombs, involving film canisters. Davison's son Nicky, on the other hand, has been given what seems a far harsher sentence of two years detention for only having the almost required Anarchist Cookbook and Poor Man's James Bond manuals, both of which the judge himself noted are available to purchase from Amazon (and still are) despite their possession itself being an illegal offence.

In line with when our jihadist friends have been convicted, the police themselves have come out certain that they've prevented an atrocity, whether or not Davison and his pals in the Aryan Strike Force really were about to set out in the footsteps of David Copeland. There certainly is a parallel with the jihadists cells that have gone on supposed "training" out in the countryside, as the ASF it seems had away days in Cumbria where they seemingly spent most of their time sieg heiling and running around with Nazi banners, but again, whether they were truly prepared to act on their online rhetoric is something different entirely. That Davison had stored the ricin he'd made in a cupboard for two years gives a clue, as does the fact that he like Kamel Bourgass doesn't seem to have any real idea as to use it to its full effect; the only discussion about poisoning anything which the police came across involved the "water supplies of Muslims", which would have diluted the tiny amount of ricin he had even further.

In any event, it does once again show that far from just having a problem with Islamic extremists, there remains a significant if small threat from the very far-right. And unlike with the takfirist jihadists, and indeed the remaining paramilitaries on both sides in Northern Ireland, there are very few resources being dedicated to watching their antics with the caution with which they deserve.

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5/14/2010 08:41:00 pm | |

Friday, April 30, 2010 

Ricin, the Aryan Strike Force and the continuing delusions of the ultra far-right.

It's somewhat odd that the conviction of Nicky Davison on three counts of "possessing records useful in committing or preparing acts of terrorism" seems to be attracting more coverage than the successful prosecution of his father, Ian Davison, did. Davison senior, you might remember, had triumphed where those racially inferior jihadists had failed, managing to produce the poison ricin, which was found in a jam jar in a kitchen cupboard. Despite beating Kamel Bourgass at his own game, Davison sadly didn't reach critical mass in the media, almost certainly as a direct result of having both the wrong skin colour and presumably the wrong religion.

We do though now know just which far-right organisations Davison junior and senior were associated with, having been skirted over during Nicky's father's trial. Both Davisons were members of a tiny neo-Nazi groupuscule calling itself the Aryan Strike Force, centred around the aryansf.com website, currently being squatted by a Wordpress spam blog. Unfortunately there's not much in the way of archives of the site, the Wayback Machine only having caches of the forum set up there from March, April and May of 2008, none of which contain much in the way of material, with just a few threads available to browse. One of the few revelations is that the ASF thought it had struck up an alliance with the better known Racial Volunteer Force, itself a splinter from Combat 18. The RVF has an especially fetching website, and currently has an poster up advertising a gig in London at the end of May, the text appearing on top of a photograph of Rudolf Hess. One of the threads of note on the April cache is titled Enemies, and features poster AngrySoldier getting both the wrong end of the stick and carried away with himself:

Muslims......and believe me there are LOTS in my area, (Hounslow)
The jews are the most important enemy, i personally think we should take out the jews before any of our other enemies as the jews are the most dangrous

This is especially revealing of how the extreme far-right tends to think. While the likes of the BNP and the English Defence League, desperate to banish the bad old Holocaust denying days of the past increasingly focus their efforts on Muslims, those on the outer reaches who find themselves being abandoned by their former brethren continue to obsess themselves with Jews, or in what passes for modern Neo-Nazi ideology, the theory of Zionist occupied government, or ZOG for short. The prosecution in both cases claimed that one of the aims of the Aryan Strike Force was to ultimately overthrow our own ZOG, although few of the pages still available freely now formulate any such out there ideas. More their style it seems was potentially targeting left-wing and anti-racist groups, a large number of their properties being listed in a thread titled "Courtesy of the BPP".

The BPP is presumably the British People's Party, another sect of a sect of a sect, most notorious for previously having Martyn Gilleard amongst their number. Gilleard was convicted back in 2008 of having nail bombs and much the same idea of carrying out the violence which the more respectable sections of the far-right has moved away from, namely bombing mosques. Oh, and much to the BPP's embarrassment, just the 39,000 indecent images of children.

For what was such a small grouping, the Aryan Strike Force had tentacles reaching out far into the other tiny neo-Nazi sects. Arrested at the end of last year on separate offences but similar charges also relating to ASF's website were Trevor Hannington and Michael Heaton. Michael Heaton is especially notable for having been heavily active online, under the name "WIGANMIKE", as seen above, as well as off the internet with other far-right organisations. According to Edmund Standing, author of two reports on the far-right, Heaton was the leader of the British Freedom Fighters, a skinhead gang with their own piss-poor blog, not updated since January. Heaton was also formerly active on YouTube under the account NSMIKE266, according to an especially helpful post on Indymedia by Malatesta, which as well as featuring videos of his almost customary Rottweiler, also has clips from various EDL protests he presumably attended. Hannington and Heaton's arrests were noted on the Vanguard News Network forum, where Heaton had also posted under the name WIGANMIKE. In another thread commenting on the progress of the younger Davison's trial, the (slightly) more moderate right-wingers there were especially stinging in their criticism of their more boisterous brothers:

These idiots were told repeatedly by a LOT of people that they were being retards. Did they listen? No. Do they ever? No. Bunch of morons who actually did NOTHING remotely positive or conducive for the cause other than shout about killing Jews on their 'ops' - if these people didn't actually exist the state would HAVE to make them up!

These are the WW2 Fantisists which Griffin did not want in the BNP. Theres a good few of these 40 year old unemployable Mummys Boys sitting at their PC with a Kaiser's helmet at their PC'S claiming to be Aryan Warriors. You have a good few of these Numpties on SFB.

As before, it's difficult to tell just how dangerous the Davisons actually were. One report in the Times claimed that the jar of ricin in the Davison household had sat there for two years. Whether he was truly preparing to go from fulminating on the internet with other like minds to launching attacks with pipe bombs and the ricin he had, or rather doing what other far-right militants have claimed, namely to be preparing for the inevitable race war, is equally uncertain. The conviction of Nicky Davison, simply for possessing the usual array of cock-eyed, out of date and more dangerous to the owner than anyone else explosives manuals, including the Anarchist Cookbook (the reports say Anarchist's Cookbook while the infamous widely distributed book is the Anarchist Cookbook; is there a difference?) which is still freely available from Amazon, while always likely, is especially shaky. His claim to be acting out of allegiance to his father didn't convince the jury, but sounds reasonable. Undeniable however is one of the messages which he left on the ASF forum:

"I know my aims. I don't care if I am fighting an unwinnable battle.

"I would rather die fighting than let the scum of the earth walk over us."


All depends on whether he was truly prepared to put those words into action.

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4/30/2010 08:06:00 pm | |

Monday, March 08, 2010 

Ricin you say? Oh, he's white, we're not interested.

Remember the "ricin plot" where there was no ricin, where the recipe which Kamel Bourgass had could not have produced ricin and where his plan, to smear it on doorknobs and car door handles wouldn't have killed anyone as the poison needs to be either injected, ingested or inhaled to work? It was the first real "terror plot" post-9/11 in this country, came two months before the invasion of Iraq (in the context of which it was used by Colin Powell during his now notorious presentation to the UN), and the press coverage was massive in both response and in its hyperbole, the government doing its best to help it along by not bothering to inform anyone until Bourgass' trial was over that there had been no ricin after all.

You would then expect a case where ricin actually was found to provoke a similar media response. After all, while ricin is not the most deadly of potential "biological/chemical" warfare poisons, it is still usually deadly when used "properly", as in the assassination of Georgi Markov, a cold war precursor to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

It's strange then that almost no coverage whatsoever has been given to the case of Ian Davison, although perhaps that name itself somewhat gives the game away. Unlike Bourgass, Davison actually produced ricin, which was found in a jam jar in a cupboard in his kitchen. He today pleaded guilty to producing a chemical weapon, possessing the usual array of explosives manuals, including the Anarchist's Handbook and the Mudgahein's (sic) Explosives Handbook and preparing for acts of terrorism. It seems, if indeed you needed telling, that Davison is the latest in a string of extreme right-wingers to be brought before the courts on explosive or terrorist charges, although little seems to be known in this instance about what groups, if any Davison was associated with, with the police only hinting when he was arrested that it could be related to "a worldwide terror plot targeting ethnic minorities", something which we should probably take with a pinch of salt. Davison's son is also to face charges of "possessing material containing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing acts of terrorism", after which he'll be sentenced.

Our old friend Kamel Bourgass was sentenced to a quite incredible 17 years for his impossible and implausible plot to kill using the ricin which he didn't have, on top of the life imprisonment he received for murdering PC Stephen Oake. One wonders what sentence will be passed on Davison, considering he actually had ricin in his possession, even if he didn't have the flawed plan which Bourgass has. The Met's then head of anti-terrorism Peter Clarke claimed after Bourgass' conviction, with a straight face, that a "real and deadly threat" had been averted. If it had then, one wonders in what terms a police chief with a similar agenda and a sense for exaggeration would describe Davison's conviction.

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3/08/2010 10:10:00 pm | |

Friday, January 15, 2010 

Hurrah for the Blackshirts!

Via Next Left, it's 76 years to the day since the Mail declared its support for those ahead of their time left-wingers known as the British Union of Fascists. By coincidence, the latest far-right nutjob to be found in possession of "improvised explosive devices", joining the ranks over the last few years of Neil Lewington, Robert Cottage and Martyn Gilleard was today convicted and sentenced to 11 years.

Unlike the others, whom were either connected to different far-right groups or whose membership to the British National Party had lapsed, Terence Gavan was a fully paid up member of the party, as the last leaked membership list makes clear (XLSB), a Mr Gavan appearing on the list from West Yorkshire with the postcode WF17 7HQ, which covers Healey Lane in Batley. Indeed, Gavan wasn't just a normal member but rather a "Gold" member, having opted to pay the £60 fee in return for his spangly yellow party badge. Still, the BNP, despite being unwilling to admit that Gavan was what they call an "elite" member, with the news being strangely absent from their current home page, admitted that the charges against him were "serious" and that the sentence passed "correct". Whether the members themselves agree is another matter.

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1/15/2010 09:33:00 pm | |

Wednesday, July 15, 2009 

The neo-Nazi "threat".

What are we to make then of Neil Lewington, the latest in a string of neo-Nazis to be convicted of terrorism offences? There is one constant between Robert Cottage, Martyn Gilleard and Lewington, which is either reassuring or worrying, depending on your view: despite their world view, whether it be imminent race war, or the intention to try to start one, all were only interested in "small" explosive devices. Gilleard had film canisters with nails wrapped around them, intended to be used like grenades; Lewington went instead for tennis balls which he "converted" into shrapnel bombs. Neither was suddenly going to become the next David Copeland, although it appears that Copeland was someone that Lewington admired, along with the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh, the latter being the most "successful" of the three.

Lewington was arrested, somewhat fortuitously on his way to meet the latest woman he had contacted either over chat lines or the internet, having verbally abused a train conductor and then urinated on the platform at Lowestoft station. In his bag were two of his converted tennis balls, which were deemed "viable" explosive devices. Whether he was actually intending to attack somewhere with them is unclear; other female witnesses said that he had boasted to them of making such devices. He might just have been taking them along on his date to show them off, and his refusal to answer any questions has not shone any light on anything in the case at all.

While much about him is shrouded in mystery, what does seem clear is that he was the archetypal loner, a social failure, an alcoholic, who probably blamed everyone other than himself, especially the "non-British", while he fulminated in his room, still living with his parents at 42, although he apparently hadn't spoken to his father in 10 years. Unlike Islamic extremists, where the internet has been key, both in providing them with information for bomb-making and the kind of social encouragement and moral support which leads to them putting thoughts and prejudices into action, Lewington doesn't appear to have had a computer at home, although he may have had a laptop at some point, and must have used the internet elsewhere to meet some of the women who gave evidence against him. Indeed, he also doesn't seem to have been an actual member of any far-right or neo-Nazi organisations (there appears to be confusion over whether he belonged to the National Front), although he had some material from the Blood and Honour grouping, which mixes music with white nationalism. The other main find was the "Waffen SS UK Members Handbook", which doesn't seem to be recognised by anyone with any expertise on neo-Nazis, and may well have been of Lewington's own creation, even if the material within bore resemblance to some of the manuals distributed by the likes of Combat 18.

Most puzzlingly of all, it doesn't even seem that his defence bothered to put much of one up. They called no witnesses, produced no material, and Lewington himself didn't give evidence. David Etherington QC seems to have simply depended on the "lonely, pathetic fantasist" angle, which might well have washed prior to Copeland and prior to 9/11 and 7/7, but not now. It makes you wonder whether perhaps this was to protect others that Lewington was associated with, yet there was little to no evidence that he was connected with anyone. Again, this depends on perspective: are the loners the most dangerous, or is it those who have connections with formed organisations that provide the crucial confirmation that their views aren't lonely or strange?

Whatever the case, and however serious Lewington was, few are going to quibble with the custodial sentence he is undoubtedly facing. More worrying is that, as pointed out, this is only the latest in a series of such prosecutions. While mainland Europe in the past had problems mostly with left-wing terrorism, something that we avoided, having our fill provided by the IRA, we now seem to face twin threats from jihadists, and although they are diametric opposites in ideological terms but actually have much in common when it comes down to it, race war baiting neo-Nazis. In essence, they want the same thing but target the opposite communities: jihadists want Muslims in Western countries to face isolation, humiliation and suspicion to such an extent that they themselves become radicalised; neo-Nazis aim to get a response from those they target similar to that which triggered the race riots of 2001, fomenting the race war which they believe they will emerge triumphantly from. Both are deluded, both are dangerous, but we only focus on the former rather than the latter. That ought to change.

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7/15/2009 09:13:00 pm | |

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