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The British National partytoday voted to scrap its whites-only membership ­policy in a move dismissed by anti-racist campaigners as “cosmetic”.

At an extraordinary general meeting held in Essex, members of the far-right party voted in favour of changes to its constitution that would theoretically allow black and Asian people to join.  Following the result, the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, said he expected a “trickle, rather than a flood” of applications. “Anyone can be a member of this party. We are happy to accept anyone as a member providing they agree with us that this country should remain fundamentally British,” Griffin told Sky News.

BNP spokesman Simon Darby said that of the “300 to 400 people” who attended the meeting, just five voted against the motion.

Rajinder Singh, a Sikh, can’t wait to become a member,

Rajinder Singh is flicking through the Pakistani channels on his Sky box from his sofa in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. Dressed in a crimson turban, he sits a metre from the ­enormous screen, translating the odd phrase for my benefit. He’s trying to show me why he’s determined to join the British National Party – the only party he considers “brave” enough to “break out of the burkha called ­political correctness”.  Last year, the Equality and ­Human Rights Commission forced the BNP to change its constitution on the grounds that restricting membership to ­”indigenous Caucasians” broke the Race Relations Act.More

The new constitution, which is not yet publicly available, will be sent to the Equality and Human Rights Commission for final approval. The BNP will give the EHRC seven days to respond, said Darby.

The meeting was hastily arranged after the Central London county court last month told the BNP to amend its constitution to comply with race relations laws or face legal action by the EHRC. After the hearing on 28 January, the BNP rushed out letters to its 14,000 members in order to allow for the 14 days needed to alert them to the proposed changes.

Anti-racism campaigners have said the constitutional change would make no difference to the BNP’s racist ideology. Weyman Bennett, national secretary of Unite Against Fascism,More from source

Götz Aly, the popular historian, accused black Allied soldiers of the systematic rape of German women during the Second World War.

He also dismissed their contribution to defeating the Nazis on the grounds that they were forced to fight.

Mr Aly, the author of the controversial Hitler’s Beneficiaries, made the remarks during a press conference at “The Third World in the Second World War”, a Berlin exhibition aimed at recognising the role of thousands of Africans and Asians in defeating Nazism.

Though he was invited to speak, Mr Aly dismissed what he called a “politically correct” version of history and argued that, in fact, people from colonised countries had a “parallel interest” with the Nazis in defeating imperial nations such as Britain and France.

He compared the behaviour of Britain and France’s black soldiers to the notorious mass rapes by the Russians in eastern Germany and Berlin.

“Every town in southwest Germany could tell stories of rape by black soldiers”, which was “no different to the Russian” practice of systematic rape, Mr Aly claimed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/6140002/Mahatma-Gandhi-was-one-of-Nazis-greatest-friends-German-historian-claims.html

Some pupils are spending just an hour of their school lives learning about the Holocaust, according to research which suggests there is too much variation in how the events of the second world war are taught. The survey of 2,100 teachers, funded in part by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, reveals that, despite it being a compulsory part of the national curriculum, some schools are skimming over the Holocaust while others dedicate 20 lessons to the subject. The survey comes after a report from the Historical Association this week questioned the quality of history lessons in state secondaries more generally, finding that thousands of pupils were being allowed to drop history at the age of 13 with the curriculum being squeezed into two years. Today’s report concludes that pupils are receiving on average six hours to learn about the Holocaust, but that figure masks a far greater variation. The survey was conducted by the Holocaust Education Development Programme (HEDP), part of the Institute of Education, University of London. Paul Salmons of HEDP said: “Teaching of the Holocaust varies a great deal across schools and classrooms – some teachers are spending 20 [lessons on it], others just a single lesson. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/sep/16/holocaust-teaching-survey

AMSTERDAM (AP) – Dutch prosecutors said Wednesday they will charge an Arab cultural group under hate speech laws for publishing a cartoon that suggests the death of 6 million Jews during World War II is a fabrication.

The public prosecutor’s office in the city of Utrecht said the cartoon insults Jews as a group and is therefore an illegal form of discrimination.

Prosecutors plan to press charges for “insulting a group and distributing an insulting image.”

Spokeswoman Mary Hallebeek said the maximum punishment is a year in jail, but a fine of up to euro4,700 ($6,700) is more likely, given that the charges are against the group.

The Dutch arm of the Arab European League said it doesn’t deny the reality of the Holocaust, but published the cartoon on its Web site as an “act of civil disobedience” to highlight a double standard.

AEL chairman Abdoulmouthalib Bouzerda argued that prosecutors had not pressed charges against Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders for his film that included cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=105&sid=1753373

GAZA (Reuters) – Hamas condemned the United Nations Sunday, saying it planned to teach Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip about the Holocaust — but the U.N. agency which runs schools in the enclave would not confirm any change.

Branding the Nazi genocide of the Jews “a lie invented by the Zionists,” the Islamist movement which runs the Gaza Strip wrote in an open letter to a senior U.N. official that he should withdraw plans for a new history book in U.N. schools.

A spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which educates some 200,000 refugee children in Gaza, said the Holocaust was not on its current curriculum. He would not comment on Hamas’s statement that it was about to change.

Palestinians resent the way world powers reacted to the Holocaust by supporting the establishment of Israel in 1948, a move that left half the Arab population of then British-ruled Palestine as refugees in Gaza, the West Bank and abroad.

Hamas said it believed UNRWA was about to start using a text for 13-year-olds that included a chapter on the Holocaust.

In an open letter to local UNRWA chief John Ging, the movement’s Popular Committees for Refugees said: “We refuse to let our children study a lie invented by the Zionists.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsMaps/idUSTRE57T1JW20090830