Nick Griffin, the white supremacist leader of the far right British National Party and newly elected Member of European Parliament, is in the news again (which was surely his intent) after he told a Channel 4 reporter that “Islam is a cancer, requiring global chemotherapy.”

Griffin was echoing the words of a candidate for the Belgian Vlaams Belang party:

The BNP leader Nick Griffin has described Islam as a “cancer” that should be removed from Europe by “chemotherapy”.

In an interview with Channel 4 News, Mr Griffin, who has just been elected to the European Parliament, said there was “no place in Europe for Islam”.

He added: “Western values, freedom of speech, democracy and rights for women are incompatible with Islam, which is a cancer eating away at our freedoms and our democracy and rights for our women and something needs to be done about it”.

The BNP leader said he agreed with a candidate for the Flemish far right party, Vlaams Belang, who had declared: “We urgently need global chemotherapy against Islam to save civilisation.”

The good news in this story is that Griffin is having no success forming a coalition with other European right wing parties — which means that the BNP will probably not receive funding from the EU.

Meanwhile, the leaders of Vlaams Belang are more politically savvy than Nick “Troglodyte” Griffin; in this video VB official Philip Claeys does a pretty good impression of someone who disapproves of the Nazi-like rhetoric of their own candidate and Griffin.

And by the way, if you browse around some of the so-called “anti-jihad” blogs today, you’ll find lots of support for Griffin and his statement.