The How, the Why and the Wherefore ...

or something like that.

I am a Jew. Not orthodox, not even all that practising but a Jew never the less. I thought I’d better let you know right off the bat because as soon as the comments start coming in, I am sure that one of the dear 'lamentables' will point it out. It is not something I am proud of particularly. After all I haven’t done anything to warrant the distinction. I was born a Jew because my mother was born a Jew etcetera and so forth. I am proud of being me though and part of being me is being a Jew.

I first got involved in local forums a few years ago. It was just my local newspaper forum. You can see a link to that at the bottom of this blog. It isn’t a big paper you understand but it was our local paper. The forum when I joined it sometime in 2003 was a lively little community. We had our forum regulars, including the requisite characters such as the forum clown, the village idiot and our very own ‘Victor Meldrew’. We had some lively debates about various issues, local, national and international. We would bicker and banter and sometimes we’d fight like cat and dog on one subject, agree wholeheartedly on another. We had posters from across the political spectrum and not all local to Brighton either. Some were from abroad, others from different places in England; though all had some connection with Brighton.

Just before the cycle of Local Government elections in 2003 we got a contingency of rather brash posters. It was the first time ever I came across the naked face of the BNP. Oh, I had met nationalists before. I had come across racists before. Both open and above board racists and, perhaps more frequent then most people are aware, the unaware racist. But I had never before come across the naked face of the BNP. The vile base comments and posts all claiming legitimacy on the basis of ‘Free Speech’. Whilst relying however on the anonymity of the internet to absolve their authors from accountability which is the very foundation of ‘Free Speech.

When it first started opinions regarding how we were to deal with this influx were divided. Some were of the opinion that if we just ignored them, they would eventually go away. Others thought that we could talk to them as one would with any rational human being. It became a dirty, nasty war of attrition. Slowly the number of regular posters dwindled. What had been a lively little community became a handful of posters. The more bloody-minded handful that was not going to have ‘our’ forum dragged down to the slimy swamps of decayed imbalance that is the BNP and White Nationalist world view.