After yesterday’s English Defence League protest in Bradford, the first since the resignation of its leaders Stephen Lennon and Kevin Carroll, some anti-fascists have been keen to write the organisation off. EDL News, for example, reported the demonstration under the title “EDL drags its twitching corpse to Bradford”, while Hope Not Hate reported that a mere 300 EDL supporters joined a march that was only 11 metres long.
Yasin Bangee examines media reporting of the North Yorkshire child abuse story, comparing it with that of the earlier Oxford grooming case.
Tommy Robinson: For you, Tommy, the war isn’t over
By Rosie Kinchen
Tommy Robinson likes getting something for nothing. He walks into the lobby of the hotel and asks if he can have a full English on The Sunday Times. And one, too, for the cameraman who is filming him for a documentary. Having informed me it will cost £20 a head, he unselfconsciously ploughs through his baked beans and bacon until the hotel staff become so agitated by his presence they ask us to leave. Robinson wipes his thin mouth with a napkin, turns to me and brimming with pride says, “Welcome to my world.”
Robinson is a short, frantic man who smells of Lynx, hair gel and bravado. A former tanning salon owner, he seems to have spent the past four years transforming himself into the poster boy for British racism. He founded the English Defence League in 2009 in response to protests by extremist Muslim groups in his home town of Luton, Bedfordshire, and has helped build a base of 25,000-35,000 followers, although the only people who openly associate with the group are skinheads, yobs and opportunistic football hooligans looking for a fight. They march through city centres with large Muslim populations, wearing pig masks, chanting racist anthems and being offensive to Muslims and non-Muslims.
Muslims at a mosque feared an attack after a teenager daubed graffiti outside the building following the killing of soldier Lee Rigby, a court heard.
Worshippers at Oadby Central Mosque believed they could be assaulted after “EDL” – a reference to the English Defence League – was scrawled on a charity clothing bin outside the building.
Prosecutor Safina Desai told Leicester Youth Court yesterday how the 17-year-old graffiti vandal wrote “EDL” on the bin in Sandhurst Street days after the attack on Mr Rigby in London on May 22.
In a victim statement read out in court, Muhammed Katib, chairman of Oadby Central Mosque, which is also a community centre, told how Muslims were in fear of being attacked. He said: “This really rang alarm bells.” After the killing of Mr Rigby, mosques had been set on fire.
In October 2012 the French far-right group Génération Identitaire staged a rooftop protest at a mosque that was under construction at Poitiers.
Des Dômes Et Des Minarets reports (via the UOIF) that on 11 October, presumably to mark the anniversary of the earlier protest, a banner was hung from the same building with the slogan “Islam out”.
A complaint has been lodged with the police and an investigation into “incitement to religious hatred” has been launched.
Muswell Hill’s al-Rahma Islamic Centre ablaze – with the letters “EDL” visible on the wall of the burning building
“Who needs Tommy Robinson and the EDL, when Islamophobia has gone mainstream?” The question is posed by Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman and Huffington Post.
He provides some good illustrations of how the bigoted rhetoric of former English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) is barely distinguishable from the anti-Muslim propaganda of the mainstream media. Mehdi of course has a point here. Indeed, it has long been obvious that, in addition to the inspiration provided by the international “counterjihad” movement, a large part of the EDL’s ideology derives from right-wing newspapers like the Mail, the Express and the Daily Star. However, Mehdi concludes from this that Lennon “is an irrelevance. So, for that matter, is the EDL. The hate-filled antics of these balaclava-clad thugs have distracted us from a much bigger issue: Islamophobia went mainstream long ago, with the shameless complicity of sections of the press.”
This seems to me to be a false argument. That the existence of mainstream Islamophobia is often either underestimated or denied outright is undoubtedly true. And Mehdi is correct to stress that “the denialism about rampant Islamophobia, on the left and the right, has to stop”. But this shouldn’t lead us to ignore the fact that the EDL, and Lennon personally, have played a distinct role in inflaming the Islamophobic sentiments of a thuggish minority among the population and encouraging them to translate their anti-Muslim hatred into violent action.
The Quilliam press conference at which Lennon announced his break with the EDL
An excellent article by Yvonne Ridley exposing the McCarthyite methods of Quilliam, the organisation that got itself into the news last week over its role in promoting former English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon’s fraudulent claim that he has broken with far-right extremism.
Two Muslim boys barred from classes because they would not shave off their beards will be allowed to return to school unshaven.
Both 14-year-olds had been placed in “isolation” from the start of the new term at Mount Carmel Roman Catholic high school in Accrington, Lancashire, and this week were sent home as the school maintained they had to be clean shaven.
But the school has now performed a U-turn to comply with the European Convention of Human Rights, it explained.
Governors have taken the decision to only allow Muslim boys permission to grow a beard as a sign of their faith as long as they have started the Hafiz programme at their local mosques, which entails daily prayers and learning the Koran in Arabic.
Two men have admitted an arson attack on a Gloucester mosque. Clive Michael Ceronne, 37, and Ashley Henry Juggins, 20, both pleaded guilty to arson being reckless as to whether life was endangered.
The pair attempted to set fire to the Masjid-E-Noor in the city’s Ryecroft Street on June 18 this year. Ceronne, a former security guard of Redwood Close, in Gloucester and Juggins, of Brooklyn Road in Cheltenham will be sentenced at Gloucester Crown Court on November 18.
The court previously heard the pair had bought lager, vodka and a petrol can of fuel from a London Road garage before using the fuel to set fire to the place of worship by owned by the Muslim Welfare Association. A passer-by saw the fire and helped put it out, before severe damage was caused. The attack came in the wake of the death of Drummer Lee Rigby.
A spate of racist vandalism has hit Brentford in recent weeks sparking local condemnation. The crimes started when a shocked father found his number plate defaced and a racist note on his car claiming to come from the English Defence League.
Muhammed Abu Sayed Ansarey went to his Honda Civic in the public car park in Coates Walk, Brentford, on September 28 to find a note under his windscreen wiper telling him to “park in your own car park at the top or else”, accompanied by racist swearing and signed off supposedly from the English Defence League (EDL) and British National Party (BNP). His car number plate also had permanent marker pen on it joining up letters and numbers to form different ones.