Islam is 'a vicious faith'
2006-11-03 20:45
London - British National Party leader Nick Griffin told his supporters Islam was a "wicked, vicious faith" that was turning the country into "a multi-racial hell-hole", a court heard on Friday.
In a 2004 speech in Keighley, West Yorkshire - being secretly filmed by the BBC - he urged a crowd to vote for his far-right party to help stop what he described as a campaign by Asian Muslims to take over the country.
The 46-year-old BNP chairperson and fellow activist Mark Collett, 26, are charged with using words or behaviour intended to incite racial hatred. Both deny the charges.
Griffin, a Cambridge University graduate from mid-Wales and Collett, from Leicestershire, were charged in April 2005 after the BBC screened its covertly filmed documentary The Secret Agent in July 2004.
Prosecutor Rodney Jameson showed the jury at Leeds Crown court tapes from the programme of speeches made by the two men at a series of meetings in West Yorkshire.
Referring to Islam, Griffin said: "This wicked, vicious faith has expanded from a handful of cranky lunatics about 1 300 years ago, to it now sweeping country after country before it, all over the world."
Part of plan to conquer world
The speeches also included allegations of violence and rape by Asian Muslims against whites.
Griffin said Muslim community leaders failed to stop it because "it is part of a plan to conquer the world" and that they would take over the whole of the UK "as the last whites try and find their way to the sea".
At another meeting, Collett accused Asians of "planned aggression against white British people".
"They hate us and are trying to wipe us out," he said, calling them "cockroaches".
Jameson said Griffin and Collett repeatedly aimed to encourage fear and resentment of Asian people, creating a nightmare vision of crimes against whites.
The trial was adjourned till Monday.
The BNP, which took over as Britain's most prominent far-right party after breaking from the National Front in 1982, has won 54 local authority seats, mainly in poorer areas with large multi-ethnic populations.
- Reuters