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Egging on the BNP



I have stated before how anxious I am at the rise of the BNP on the back of political disaffection in England, but yesterday's pelting of them with eggs, was, as another blogger put it, "a waste of perfectly good eggs." In fact it was worse than that... It will help to reinforce their mythos of being a persecuted minority in "their own" country. The way to counter them is not with violent action, even something as monor as throwing eggs, but with non-violent protest and rigorous public debate.

It was interesting to hear that the policy of the BNP is not to use their MEP windfall to further the cause of the party or to feather their own nests (or build an island in their moats so that ducks can feather their own nests) but to give a tithe to community ventures, such as the celebration of St. George's Day (the celebration of a semi-mythical Syrian soldier in the Roman army) or a Christian Christmas... Skip over to the Unfinished Christian's blog for his take on this and some interesting statistics about the "tide" of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

BNP voters are not necessarily racist. Many of them probably voted for the BNP just to register their frustration with the mainline parties in the wake of economic disaster and the allowances scandal. But the BNP itself undoubtedly is. Their claims that they are no more racist than the "Black Police Officers' Association" and other such racially defined groupings, holds no water. The issue is not (as some have made it) the fact that only British caucasians may join, but the nature of the BNP's manifesto which is entirely hostile to other races and their place in British society. Any minority group banding together for mutual support in the face of institutional racism is entirely understandable, but an exclusive majority group campaigning for the expulsion of minorities is not. Were any exclusive minority group to start promulgating offensive and racist material, THEN they could and should be described as racist.

Despite repeated flirtations with racism, be it in the US or South Africa or elsewhere, Christianity is expressly inclusive, at least on race lines... See Colossians 3: 11 for example...

So would I take a tithe from the BNP to celebrate a "Christian Christmas"? Well, I've taken money from all sorts of strange places to do all sorts of things, believing in William Booth's adage that there IS such a thing as dirty money, but that we can wash it! Were I to be offered such money with no other strings than it was to celebrate a "Christian Christmas" I might have quite a bit of fun inviting a diverse group of people to a dinner to celebrate the birth of a Jewish refugee, who grew up to invite all nations to be his disciples... We could have shredded peking duck pancakes for starters, for the main course we could go Jamaican with rice, gungo peas and curried goat, while for desert we could have the Phillipino Puto Bumbong, washed down with Romanian Palinca. I might even invite members of the BNP, though they may not come, a bit like those in Jesus' day who had an exclusive view of who was welcome at God's table...
But if others were to engage in community tithing, then I perhaps wouldn't need to accept money from such a distasteful source...



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