BNP exploiting murder victims

Families of murder victims have spoken out on Newsnight about the BNP’s attempts to exploit the deaths of their loved ones as part of their ‘Racism Cuts Both Ways’ campaign. You can watch the report here.

Hope Not Hate have analysed the ‘Racism Cuts Both Ways’ pamphlet and found that the BNP claims that 167 white people have been the victims of racist murder over the past years but its evidence is totally inaccurate.

- FACT In only a handful of the 167 cases is there any clear indication of a racial motive.
- FACT In several cases the perpetrator was in fact white not black.
- FACT In other cases the perpetrators were part of mixed race groups, including whites, but the BNP only focuses on the white victims and black perpetrators.
- FACT The list includes several supposed racial murders where the alleged perpetrator has not actually been convicted.
- FACT Much of the BNP research was copied directly from the National Front website.

The BNP has twisted facts to make them fit its warped racist agenda. It doesn’t care that it causes distress and anger to the families.

Looking at the Racism Cuts Both Ways site, the absurdity of the BNP’s claims are quickly apparent.

Take the case of Kally Gilligan, for example. Here’s how the BNP presents the story of this ‘forgotten victim’ of ‘racism’:

A brilliant GCSE student, Kally Gilligan was blonde, beautiful and just 15 when her black, 18-year-old boyfriend, Joshua Thompson, shot her (in the head and neck) then killed himself with a sawn-off shotgun.

The couple had met at Salford’s Albion High School. They had been together for some two years when, two weeks before she died, Kally ended the relationship. Thompson could not accept her rejection and was heard, during an early hours row before the shooting, telling her that if he could not have her no-one else would.

Thompson appeared with a shotgun outside Kally’s home while she was washing the family car on 10th June 2006. Another argument began but this one ended with Thompson shooting first Kally then himself.

According to the BNP, this was an anti-white racist murder. But the facts are:

1. Gilligan had been in a relationship with a black man (Joshua Thompson) for two years.
2. When Gilligan ended the relationship, Thompson ‘could not accept her rejection’ and said that ‘if he could not have her no-one else would’.
3. Thompson shot Gilligan and then himself.

There is absolutely no possible way in which this tragic story can be interpreted as having anything to do with racism, yet the BNP claims it as a ‘racist’ murder simply because the victim was white and the killer was black, even though they had been in a long term relationship with each other and this was clearly a crime of passion.

There are no depths to which the BNP will not sink to promote their twisted agenda.

By Edmund Standing