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Posted on May 4, 2008
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Pauline Hanson accused of taking money from party

Posted on April 30, 2008
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Pauline Hanson has been accused of siphoning off more than $200,000 in taxpayers’ money from the bank accounts of her own party. In a recorded telephone call between the former MP and her party treasurer, Ms Hanson admits taking funds because she was not “going to put the money in the hands of anyone else”.

The tape (listen here), heard by The Sunday Telegraph, is likely to increase pressure on the Federal Government to crack down on serial campaigners like Ms Hanson.

The $202,440 was paid into the accounts of Ms Hanson’s United Australia Party - the vehicle for her Senate candidacy last year. Bank records, sighted by The Sunday Telegraph, show transfers of Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) funds out of an account controlled jointly by party officials and Ms Hanson, into another account controlled by Ms Hanson and a close friend.

Citing privacy laws, Suncorp Bank refused to explain how Ms Hanson was able to transfer funds out of an account that required two of the three signatures of the party treasurer, Graham McDonald, his wife Jan and Ms Hanson. Mr McDonald, a Brisbane businessman, told The Sunday Telegraph he now believed Ms Hanson stood at the election in order to receive public funding.

“I’m so disappointed,” he said. “She never really put the effort into the campaign. If she’s not going to run (again), what’s going to happen to the money? You just don’t have this money as a gift. I thought she’d changed. I feel just stabbed in the back. I feel more sorry for the members. We paid most of the bills. So whatever she ran up in expenses, I don’t know. But they should have all been done through the party. I should have receipts for them and pay them out.”

Mr McDonald said he hadn’t seen one receipt from Ms Hanson. He recalled a “threatening” visit after the election by Ms Hanson and three men, including her Queensland Senate running mate, David Saville, when they demanded that he hand over all party bank records, membership lists and cheque books.

He refused and told Ms Hanson’s ex-adviser, John Pasquarelli, of the visit. Mr Pasquarelli notified Australian Federal Police.

Confronted by The Sunday Telegraph, Ms Hanson claimed she and close friend, Bronwyn Boag, who earlier stood as a Tasmanian One Nation candidate, had put the money into another party account. She refused to say who controlled that account. She said Ms Boag was the party “designated agent” with the AEC and the funds had been put into the wrong account by the AEC. Ms Boag had alerted the AEC, which rectified the “mistake”.

An AEC spokesman denied this: “Once the monies have been disbursed in the first instance, the AEC has no further involvement”.

An angry Ms Hanson told The Sunday Telegraph: “Everything’s above board. I’m not going to justify myself to you. I’m not going to have discussions with you and the media. You’ve reported s***. You’ve given me bloody hell.”

But the taped phone recording reveals Ms Hanson admitting she now has the money.

Responding to Mr McDonald’s warnings that this is “not the right way” to do things because the money belongs to the party, Ms Hanson responds: “I’ve haven’t put all this bloody hard work in to hand control over to it (the party). I’m not putting the money in the hands of anyone else. I haven’t even drawn any money out of the account myself, as yet. My bills are still sitting there. There’s nothing illegal about it. It’s not going to happen to me again. I’m not going to be just out there, just pushing the wheelbarrow for everyone else. I’m sick of all these bloody idiots around me.”

Mr Pasquarelli said: “The unauthorised removal of the election funding monies from the (party) account is beyond belief, inexcusable and possibly punishable under the criminal law. These monies do not belong to Pauline Hanson, but to the party, which is a properly constituted and recognised body. This sorry mess will result in urgent and drastic corrective legislation. Taxpayer funding of elections should be abolished, but the big parties would never agree to this.”

Daily Telegraph (Australia)

AEC denies Hanson money error

EXPLOSIVE new documents contradict Pauline Hanson’s explanation for “siphoning” $213,000 from her party’s bank account.

In an explanation on her website, Ms Hanson said the cash was transferred because the money was not deposited into the nominated account. However Australian Electoral Commission records seen by The Courier-Mail reveal party agent Bronwyn Boag personally provided the AEC with the nominated account.

The AEC has denied making an error and said it deposited the cash in the account nominated on an electronic funds transfer form sent last November. The one-page document, signed by Ms Boag, directs the funds into Pauline’s United Australia Party at Suncorp’s Burpengary branch.

Ms Boag is a personal friend of Ms Hanson and a former One Nation candidate.

Furious party treasurer Graham McDonald said at least two signatures were needed to transfer the money. Mr McDonald, his wife Jan, who is secretary of the party, and Ms Hanson have signatory power.

It comes as party members claim Ms Hanson has obtained the money by deceit. They will lodge an official complaint with the Australian Federal Police. Special Minister of State John Faulkner has also asked the AEC to investigate.

On her website, Ms Hanson said: “When the funding was deposited by the AEC to the bank, the bank deposited the funds in Pauline’s United Australia Party’s working account and not into the nominated account.

“I have been imprisoned once on trumped up charges and lies. Does anyone truly believe that I would give the establishment any reason to imprison me again?” she said.

Ms Hanson did not return calls yesterday.

The Australian

Le Pen insists death camps were ‘detail’ of history

Posted on April 27, 2008
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PARIS: Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen sparked a chorus of outrage in France yesterday by repeating an incendiary claim that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail of history”.Anti-racism and Jewish groups threatened immediate legal action against the National Front chief - who already holds several similar convictions - after he made the comments in a magazine interview.

“I said the gas chambers were a detail of the history of World War II: that, to me, seems so obvious,” the 79-year-old Le Pen told Bretons magazine. Le Pen was fined 1.2mn francs ($290,000) for making the initial remarks in a radio interview in 1987.

When the Bretons journalist told him that the Nazis “deported people to camps simply to kill them”, Le Pen replied: “But that is what you believe. I don’t feel obliged to adhere to that view.”

“I observe that in Auschwitz there was the IG Farben factory, there were 80,000 labourers working there. As far as I know they were not gassed, anyway, nor burned.”

The French Council of Jewish Institutions (CRIF) accused Le Pen, whose political fortunes have recently slumped, of “going even further down the road of revisionism… to draw attention to himself”.

SOS racism called his remarks “a pitiful attempt to keep himself in the media eye”, while the French Jewish Student Union (UEJF) said it was taking legal action against him.

The International League Against racism and anti-Semitism (LICRA) said it planned to file fresh legal action against Le Pen after consulting its lawyers.
And France’s Young Socialist Movement (MJS) said it hoped “the courts will not let such remarks go unpunished”.

Convicted several times for inflammatory comments on race and World War II history, Le Pen was handed a three-month suspended jail sentence in February for describing the Nazi occupation of France as “not especially inhumane”.

He was found guilty of denying a crime against humanity and complicity in condoning war crimes, over the remarks made in an interview with a far-right magazine in 2005. In 2002 he shocked Europe by making it through to the second round of France’s presidential election. But his party has racked up millions of euros of debts after losing state subsidies thanks to its unexpectedly poor showing in last year’s parliamentary elections.–AFP

Gulf Times

‘Acceptable face’ of fascism may cost Berlusconi victory

Posted on April 13, 2008
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Italy’s only woman candidate for PM emerges as the revelation of the election campaign, as she attacks the media magnate’s chauvinism head on

Daniela Santanche

The sensation of Italy’s election campaign has been a glamorous 46-year-old divorcee with long, shapely legs, a piercing gaze, a fine Italian temper and the guts to say to Silvio Berlusconi: “You’re not having me.”

There is no chance she will become Italy’s next prime minister; if her small, extreme, new-minted party manages to win seats in both houses of parliament it will be remarkable. But commentators on both sides agree that Daniela Santanche, the only woman candidate for prime minister, has been the revelation of an election which finishes in polling today and tomorrow.

Ms Santanche is the figurehead of La Destra, meaning the right, campaigning on the old fascist trinity of God, Fatherland and Family. The party’s symbol is the old neo-fascist tricolour flame. It was founded by a nucleus of post-fascist believers after the mainstream heirs of fascism, the National Alliance, amalgamated with Mr Berlusconi’s Forza Italia to form the People of Liberty party.

The hard-right content of La Destra’s programme is familiar enough: the attacks on immigrants; the evocation of family values; the assault on privilege and banks’ profits. But what was new and startling was Ms Santanche’s decision to challenge Mr Berlusconi’s male chauvinist appeal head on.

Mr Berlusconi, whose lead in opinion polls appears to have shrunk in the last phase of the campaign (polls are banned in the last two weeks before voting), has long revelled in his macho image, the sultan in his harem surrounded by curvaceous young lovelies, some of whom might end up among the ranks of his MPs, but not in government. Despite what has happened to the status of women elsewhere in Europe – the Spanish Prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s new government has a majority of women ministers – for Berlusconi, women belong in the bedroom or the kitchen.

His demeaning remarks about them are the stuff of legend. “The left has no taste in women,” he mocked. “Ours are much more beautiful.” “Ladies,” he said at a recent campaign meeting, “I have a mission for you on election day: cook! Sweet and exquisite things, please. Bring them to the polling station to be examined. The boldest can try making a tart, the most skilful, profiteroles.”

Far from being a trivial eccentricity, Mr Berlusconi’s compulsion to dominate and belittle is at the heart of his political success. The reason his centre-right coalition has had much less trouble with splitters and dissenters than the centre-left is simple: with his billions he has for years bankrolled his main ally, the secessionist Northern League. This time around he has done the same for the National Alliance, putting several of its leaders on his payroll as the price for absorbing their party and erasing its identity. The National Alliance’s leader, Gianfranco Fini, has bet his party’s existence on his hopes of stepping into Mr Berlusconi’s shoes.

Ms Santanche charges her ex-colleagues with prostituting themselves for Mr Berlusconi’s favours. In a television encounter with the equally tempestuous Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Il Duce and one of the right-wingers who has gone along with Mr Berlusconi, Ms Santanche told women viewers: “Don’t give your vote to Berlusconi, he sees us only horizontally, never vertically.” She accused la Mussolini of being “Berlusconi’s showgirl”. “Your grandfather must be spinning in his grave,” she spat.

For a man like Mr Berlusconi, as priapic as a character in an Aristophanes farce, Ms Santanche was too gorgeous to be ignored. “People will vote for la Santanche because she is a beautiful babe,” he said, “without realising that by doing so they will give votes to someone who is certainly not a beautiful babe [his centre-left opponent], Walter Veltroni.”

It’s the fate of the lion in winter: all his billions, all his television channels, cannot rescue him from the mockery that rains down on the aged lecher, his powers visibly waning.

While his rival, Mr Veltroni, leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, has soberly criss-crossed the country, denouncing the Mafia and calling for Italy to turn over a new leaf, Mr Berlusconi has addressed small, ageing crowds, many bussed in to fill the seats, saying “anything that comes into his head”, as one commentator put it, and bemoaning his fate. The magic has deserted him. But it took the flashing eyes of a beautiful woman to spell out the extent of his humiliation.

The Independent

Word of KKK event stirs up Pineville

Posted on April 13, 2008
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PINEVILLE — Groups that espouse racism stir up strong reactions, so news that the Ku Klux Klan was planning an event in Pineville this weekend caused some concern.Residents and officials denounced the group. State police beefed up patrols and put more officers on standby, and Mayor Bob Madon said he could get the National Guard to town with one phone call. One woman asked Bell County Sheriff Bruce Bennett if she should leave with her young child for the weekend.

As it turned out, concerns about provocative public displays by the Klan were unfounded.

Klan members said on a Web site and in e-mails that the event — including speeches, a cross-burning and, according to one, games such as tug-of-war — was not planned as a public demonstration, but rather a members-only gathering on private property outside the city limits.

That news had spread by Friday — the day the Klan meeting was to start — easing concerns about hooded men marching through the streets of the small town or preaching hate from the courthouse steps.

“I’m glad of it. I’d rather not see ‘em around here because this is a peaceful little town,” Delbert North, 41, said as he worked to repair the battery box on a Chevy van at Elliott’s Auto Parts. “I don’t know what makes ‘em believe the way they do. People’s people, regardless of their skin color.”

By midday Friday, Pineville Police Chief Bill Matthews’ more immediate concern was arranging security for a beauty pageant in town that evening.

Local officials said they didn’t expect any problems.

Judge-Executive Albey Brock said he felt the only potential for a confrontation was if local people and Klan members bumped into each other and had words.

By the end of the work week, some people were questioning whether the purported Klan event was a hoax.

By late Saturday afternoon, Benett, Brock and State Police Sgt. Damon Gayheart said there had been no incidents related to the Klan reported and that there’d been no confirmation the group was actually meeting in the county.

Concern over the Klan event came up in late March. The Middlesboro Daily News reported that the Klan would hold an event billed as the first annual “Aryan Bash” in Pineville April 11-13.

The announcement of the event was on a blog of the Appalachian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The posting said other Klan and neo-Nazi groups planned to attend or had been invited, but included no information about what the bash would include.

The blog includes a brief profile of a man named Steven Decker. The blog said he is the Imperial Wizard of the Appalachian Knights.

The blog lists the headquarters of the Appalachian Knights KKK as Pikeville, but there is no public telephone listing for a Steven Decker there, and attempts to reach him were not successful. On the blog, he said he would not speak with reporters.

The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which monitors racist and extremist groups in the United States, lists four chapters for the Appalachian Knights: in Pikeville and Caneyville, Ky., and in Logan, W.Va., and Dayton, Ohio.

Klan members had demonstrated a few years ago in Pikeville and Middlesboro, and with little information available about the “Aryan Bash,” some residents feared another public demonstration — spanning three days this time.

Residents flooded Web forums with negative comments about the Klan. Many worried the event would be a black eye for the town of about 2,200 and said they wished Klan members would stay away; others questioned why the group picked Bell County as the site for an event.

Race relations have been good in the area, said Carolyn Sundy, director of special programs and cultural diversity at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, which has a campus in Middlesboro.

“We’ve advanced so far for diversity here. We just hate to see them come,” she said of the Klan.

The overwhelming majority of county residents do not support the Klan’s ideology, said Brock, the judge-executive. People were “upset, fearful, disgusted” that the Klan was coming, he said.

Some people questioned whether the “Aryan Bash” was even real, given the difficulty of confirming information. The Appalachian Knights KKK blog said there would be a cookout in Pikeville March 29 and 30, but police couldn’t confirm it actually happened.

Decker, the Appalachian Knights KKK blogger, said the Pikeville cookout did take place, but was private.

And Jay Walker, who identified himself as a 44-year-old resident of Logan, W.Va., and Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of Justice, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, said in an e-mail to the Herald-Leader that the Aryan Bash in Bell County would in fact take place this weekend.

Walker said Decker had put him in charge of interviews. The Herald-Leader could not independently confirm whether Walker was the e-mail writer’s real name, or if he is a Klan member. The Southern Poverty Law Center does not list a White Knights of Justice Klan group in any state surrounding Kentucky.

Walker said Bell County was chosen as the site for the bash because “we” own a 15-acre spot there. In a later e-mail, he said Decker lives in Pineville and owns land.

Walker said 118 tickets had been sold for the Bell County event as of Wednesday. A schedule Walker provided included dinner, speeches and bluegrass music Friday evening; more speeches on Saturday and “games such as tug of war” between Klan factions; and on Sunday, a Bible study, more speeches and music, and burning of a 30-foot cross Sunday evening to close the bash.

“We have no desire of being in the public,” he said in an e-mail. “We are not here to scare or bully anyone.”

Lexington Herald-Leader

Antihate report lists Framingham group

Posted on April 13, 2008
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Four years after they began highlighting their opposition to illegal immigration, Framingham brothers Joe and Jim Rizoli (left) are continuing to generate controversy with local Brazilian immigrants and the town’s top officials - and now, with a national antihate group.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based nonprofit organization that tracks extremist groups, published a report last month linking the brothers’ group, Concerned Friends of Illegal Immigration Law Enforcement, to organizations that the law center identifies as hate groups.

To back up its assertion, the center pointed to postings on the Concerned Friends group site on Yahoo.com by such individuals as Mark Martin, the head of the Ohio division of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.

Prominent local Brazilian activists said the law center’s report was not a surprise.

“CCFIILE does a disservice not only to the Brazilian community, but to the community at large because they spread hate,” said Manoel Oliveira, pastor of the New Life Presbyterian Community Church. “And that’s been happening for a long time.”

However, Jim Rizoli blasted the law center’s report and denied that his organization has any ties to hate groups.

“What makes a hate group?” Rizoli said. “We hate illegal immigration and people who break the law. The Brazilians are upset because we’ve exposed their crooked ways.”

Rizoli said he doesn’t have anything against Brazilians. “They’re good people, but they’re misled,” he said.

In one message, according to the report, Martin talked about putting a “bounty” on the head of “every minority” and “shoot them for sport.”

“We don’t ascribe to that viewpoint,” Rizoli said. He added that he only found who Martin is when the law center published its report, and that when he read the postings, he immediately deleted at least 10 of them.

The law center report defined CCFIILE as a “nativist, extremist group,” said Mark Potok, editor and director of the law center’s Intelligence Project, which published the report.

He said the report’s authors did not mean to suggest Rizoli knew Mark Martin or the other controversial posters. “What we’re pointing out is the kind of talk that goes on in his own forums,” Potok said.

Martin said he had been posting on CCFIILE for about six months. He said he posted the comment highlighted in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report, but denied that the National Socialist Movement is a hate group.

“I don’t care what the SPLC says,” he said. “It’s not about hate, it’s about love for our own race and country.”

The law center’s report included interviews with several Brazilian leaders and town officials in Framingham.

Police Chief Steven Carl, who was quoted in the report, said in an interview with the Globe that he doesn’t think the Rizolis’ group is a white supremacist organization, “but what they say can easily be perceived as hateful.

“I’m worried that people they attract to their cause could be members of hate groups,” Carl said.

Ilton Lisboa, a well-known figure in the Brazilian community, said of the comments by Jim Rizoli, “American laws allow him to say that and it’s important to educate our community about that.” However, he noted, “It’s difficult for our community to understand that.”

Some leaders in the local Brazilian community see the law center report as confirmation of their concerns about the Rizolis. Vera Dias-Freitas, a local business owner who has been targeted on the brothers’ local-access cable television show, Illegal Immigration Chat, calls the report “a milestone.” Dias-Freitas, a high-profile advocate for the Brazilian community, also said town officials have known about the Rizoli brothers for years and have done nothing to stem their attacks on the Brazilian community.

But Carl said the town has been proactive in working with the immigrant community - especially Brazilians - by hosting a townwide dialogue and having his department conduct workshops that covered everything from immigration laws to driver’s licenses.

Carl said he understands the frustration felt by some Brazilians, but that there’s only so much the police can do.

“We’re doing everything within our lawful authority, given the protections of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” Carl said. “The Rizolis, even if we don’t like what they say or how they say it, are entitled to their opinion.”

Boston Globe

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