The fascist British National Party has produced a “briefing” on Unite Against Fascism. The document employs the now familiar tactic, adopted by the BNP in imitation of Le Pen’s Front National in France, of turning the accusations made by its political opponents against the accusers themselves.

Thus the BNP condemns UAF as “a racist organisation” whose members are “prepared to to embrace movements (or representatives of those movements) whose ideological roots are fundamentally based on fascistic ideology, and which have close and extensive historical links to Nazism”.

This sets a new standard in brazen hypocrisy, coming from a party whose constitution requires that all its members must be from the “Indigenous Caucasian” racial group and commits it to “stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration” and to restoring “the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948” – a party, moreover, whose founder and long-time leader was the notorious Nazi admirer John Tyndall (standing on the left of the photograph).

Who are the “fascist groups” that UAF has supposedly embraced? Predictably, they are grouped by the BNP under the heading of “Islamo-Nazism” – a category which, according to the BNP, prominently features the Muslim Council of Britain, the largest and most representative Islamic organisation in the UK. The BNP informs us that “the historical link between extremist Islam and Nazism is well known”, the “evidence” for this assertion being the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s attempts to build an alliance with Nazi Germany.

But where does the BNP get all this nonsense about “Islamic fascism” from, and the fantasy about the MCB being an extremist organisation? Well, the main source they cite is none other than Martin Bright. They footnote both his Observer article from July 2006, “Right showing left the way on radical Islam”, and his pamphlet When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, published in 2006 by the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange. (As we commented at the time: “When it comes to treating with reactionaries, Bright can evidently speak from first-hand experience.”)

Bright, of course, has used the fascists’ own tactic of generating a smokescreen by accusing his opponents of the very political crimes for which he himself is responsible. A piece on his New Statesman blog, entitled “Where the hard left and extreme right meet”, drew a bizarre parallel between the Holocaust denier Michele Renouf and Islamophobia Watch. In response we pointed to the BNP’s support for Bright’s views and argued that it was more a case of “where liberal Islamophobes and the extreme right meet”. The fascists’ endorsement of Bright’s writings in their latest anti-Muslim rant reinforces that point.