Category Archives: Analysis & comment

EDL uses Douglas Murray to deny accusations of racism and boost recruitment

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Douglas Murray (3)

The English Defence League have posted an article on their website urging support for their fight against “Islamic extremism”. It begins with the usual whinge about how they are falsely accused of being far-right racists: “The eagerness of some in the media to paint a group of patriotic people as some kind of extremists (when they’d never make such an offensive and blatantly untrue generalisations about more ‘sensitive’ groups of people) illustrates the application of a double standard reflective of what we’ve regularly referred to as a growing two tier system.”

However, not all the news is bad: “Luckily there are a few members of the middle and establishment classes who believe that the EDL at least deserve a fair hearing. One of these is the British writer and former director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, Douglas Murray.” This is followed by a video of Murray speaking at the One Law For All seminar last year where he welcomed the EDL as “a grassroots response from non-Muslims to Islamism”. The EDL applauds the fact that Murray “identifies ‘decent ordinary people’ with the EDL. Whilst he’s cautious of the need to ensure that the EDL is not hijacked by undesirable elements (so are we!), he recognises that most EDL supporters simply care about their communities and their countries”.

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Another Islamophobic rant from Abhijit Pandya

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at the Mail’s Right Minds blog there is yet another raving anti-Muslim post from former UKIP candidate Abhijit Pandya. David Cameron is denounced for “failing to act” on his notorious Munich conference speech last year denouncing multiculturalism. This has supposedly resulted in a failure to resist forced marriages, honour killings and, in particular, sharia courts.

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BFP agrees with Spiked on defence of ‘freedom’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Spiked BFP

As its contribution to the end-of-the-year lists genre, Spiked has published a piece by Patrick Hayes entitled “The worst 10 assaults on freedom”, which has now been reproduced in its entirety by the EDL-linked British Freedom Party.

The BFP’s support is hardly surprising, given that Number 7 on Hayes’ list of “assaults on freedom” is the use of Crasbos against far-right thugs:

“In March, English Defence League (EDL) member Shane Overton received a Criminal ASBO banning him from attending or helping to organise any demonstration, meeting or gathering held by the EDL, and even from visiting its website for 10 years. Later in 2011, police tried to slap an ASBO on EDL leader Stephen Lennon that would have prevented him from having any involvement with his own organisation.”

It’s worth recalling that Overton, while passing through Doncaster railway station on his way back from an EDL demonstration, racially abused a Muslim family as they were waiting for a train, terrifying their children.

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Jerusalem Post gives another boost to Wilders’ party

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Wilders in Tel AvivThe Dutch Freedom Party, the Netherlands’s third largest political party, urged the Foreign Affairs and Defense Ministries last week to reconsider Turkey’s continued membership in NATO.

Geert Wilders, head of the party, and its Mideast expert, deputy Wim Kortenoeven, accused Turkey of abandoning its allies – Israel earlier this year, and now France.

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Henry Jackson Society opposes ‘hate speakers’ – except when they’re leading members of the Henry Jackson Society, of course

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Henry Jackson Society logo

Students’ unions should introduce tougher rules to keep “hate speakers” off campuses and stop the spread of Islamist extremism, MPs have heard.

Hannah Stuart, co-author of Islam on Campus: A Survey of UK Student Opinions and Islamist Terrorism: The British Connections, made the suggestion in evidence to the Home Affairs Committee’s inquiry into the roots of violent radicalisation.

The committee held a day-long session at De Montfort University last week, including a workshop titled “How can we best counter radicalisation in universities?”

Nabil Ahmed, president of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, rejected many of Ms Stuart’s arguments, countering from the audience that it was “upsetting and hurtful for Muslim students to be caricatured as potential extremists, potential radicals, when none of this is applicable to 99.9 per cent of not just Muslim students, but all students”.

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Resist a burglary and you’re a hero to the Mail – unless you’re a Muslim, that is

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Daily Mail reports: “A courageous housewife stabbed a machete-wielding burglar when he threatened to cut off her son’s finger, a court was told yesterday. Gillian Wilson, 55, was praised by a judge after she rushed at violent burglar Nigel Greenwood, 29, and plunged a knife into his arm, causing him and his accomplices to flee.”

What a sharp contrast this report presents to the Mail‘s coverage of Inayat Bunglawala’s resistance to a violent intruder at his own home in 2009 (see here and here), for which the paper was subsequently obliged to issue an apology and pay damages.

Martin Bright continues his campaign to poison relations between Jewish and Muslim communities

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jihad and Jews

The current edition of the Jewish Chronicle has yet another piece by the paper’s political editor Martin Bright attacking the East London Mosque. Entitled “Jihad and Jews don’t go together”, this is just the latest installment in the JC‘s obsessive (and so far entirely futile) campaign to destroy the relationship between community organisers London Citizens and ELM (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here).​ An outraged Bright relates the shocking news that Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg of North London Synagogue “agreed to take part in a ‘multi-faith peace procession’ alongside the chairman of East London Mosque, Mohammed Abdul Bari”.

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Another Torygraph smear against the East London Mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Al-Furqan bookshop

The Daily Telegraph reports on the conviction of Ahmed Faraz for producing and distributing extremist literature (“Terrorists’ favourite bookseller guilty”). According to the report:

“Faraz made profits of at least £62,000 and employed a number of salesmen, sending unsolicited copies of his books to Islamic shops around the country. Financial records showed that he had distributed his wares to bookshops including the al-Furqan bookshop at East London Mosque….”

But the al-Furqan bookshop has no connection to the East London Mosque and isn’t even geographically adjacent to it, being situated some distance away down Whitechapel Road, as the Telegraph‘s intrepid Security Correspondent could have found out if he had bothered to check Google Street View (see photo above).

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British Freedom Party chairman interviewed

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Paul Weston with Wilders and Wolff
Paul Weston with Geert Wilders and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

There’s an interview with the British Freedom Party’s chairman Paul Weston at the European Son blog. It doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know but it’s of interest all the same.

A former member of UKIP, Weston states that he joined that party “because of Lord Pearson, who was the only person to speak about Islam”. He resigned after Nigel Farage replaced Pearson as leader of UKIP: “Mr. Farage has actually come out and said that he will not say anything about Islam because he will no longer be invited on to BBC television programs such Have I Got News for You. I think it’s terrible, so that’s really why I left UKIP.”

This is hardly an accurate summary of Farage’s position – he’s been quite happy to play the anti-Islam card on behalf of his party – but it’s probably true that the current UKIP leader doesn’t entirely share the raving anti-Muslim bigotry of his predecessor, at least as far as his public utterances are concerned. So you can see why Weston became disillusioned and saw the need for a more hardline party that placed Islamophobia at the centre of its programme.

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Resisting the Islamification of Witham

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mark DunbarA local paper reports that the British Freedom Party has appointed a long-time EDL activist named Mark Dunbar as its organiser in the Essex town of Witham, which is of course currently under serious threat from the Muslim hordes.

It’s easy to laugh, but people living in places like this can be susceptible to the EDL/BFP’s Islamophobic propaganda precisely because they very rarely come into contact with an actual Muslim.

Postscript:  I’ve failed to find figures for the number of Muslims living in Witham, but according to the last available census there were only 409 Muslims in the whole of Braintree, compared with 98,116 Christians. Clearly, if Muslims are intent on imposing Islam on Witham they have a long way to go.