The reason I support banning this march is that any time the EDL attempt to march through a Muslim area (and the whole point of this organisation is to “reclaim” or “protect” Britain from a mythical Muslim take-over, so there would be no point in them marching anywhere else), there is always disorder. They commonly attempt to break through police lines (meaning it takes a greater effort, and a greater cost, to police) and if they were to succeed, they would certainly damage property and use violence against local Muslims, or locals perceived to be Muslims. While it is true that there is often a violent extreme element on many demonstrations, it is usually a tiny minority and has nothing to do with the organisers. With the EDL, it is the whole point of the demonstration.

There is a big difference between demonstrations aimed at influencing those in power, be it the local council or the government, or even a major company, and those aimed at intimidating a section of the population (see this article by the local mayor, Lutfur Rahman, in yesterday’s Guardian). The latter category includes the Orange marches, and the marchers’ insistence on marching through predominantly Catholic areas was always a major source of tension which sometimes led to rioting. In some cases, the marchers gloated about Catholic fatalities in “Loyalist” terrorist attacks. They often led to people being forced to leave their homes, leading to neighbourhoods becoming more segregated than they had before the Troubles began. On occasions the government attempted to prevent them from passing through these areas, but caved in to mob rule as in the Garvaghy Road incident in 1996.

East London can well do without the EDL coming and stirring up this kind of trouble. It should be remembered that it saw less violence than many other parts of London during the August riots, and the areas with a particularly heavy Muslim concentration (around Whitechapel) saw none. Since the populations there distinguished themselves by obeying the law at a time when many others did not, why should they be subjected to an invasion by this rabble led by football hooligans, many of them with convictions for violent offences, accompanied by either the inconvenience caused by the necessary police presence, or the violence that would ensue when it broke down, or (more likely) both?

The reason I support banning this march is not to do with what the group stands for politically, or what they might say or shout. It is because of what they might do, as demonstrated on countless previous marches. If the EDL wish to march, they should be invited to do as the rest of us do, and march in the centre of London where the well-guarded seat of power is, not where an unarmed minority lives.

On Saturday I was reading a lot of tweets complaining about the “disablist” language being used, specifically the trend of calling Anders Breivik a madman or a nutter. One tweet I recall compared the use of anti-Muslim slurs with slurs related to mental illness (there is an article expanding on this issue at Liberal Conspiracy here). To me, the comparison does not hold, because the anti-Muslim slurs are (and were, in the hours immediately after the attacks before it became obvious who was responsible) accompanied by harassment of, and assaults against, Muslims in the streets. People know the mentally ill come in different types, that not all would commit mass murder, and (most importantly) are not all aligned with one another. If a Muslim did it, people would say “the Muslims did it”; if it was someone with mental illness, nobody would say “the nutters did it”.

More to the point, this insistence on calling someone who commits a heinous and perverted act a nutter seems to be an easy way of avoiding accepting the reality that evil exists, and people will do evil things while perfectly sane, whether for fun, or for personal gain, or out of some bizarre ideology as was the case here. I am not talking about calling someone’s politics mad, or calling them a “right-wing nut”, “Marxist lunatic” or something similar; I am talking about the assumption that the criminal must be “mental”, rather than evil. I have not read Breivik’s manifesto, but nobody who has done has suggested that it bears the hallmarks of mental illness, or even of extreme embitterment (for example, that of Marc Lepine, who carried out the massacre of women in Montreal), but of hard-set nationalism and bigotry, particularly against Muslims.

There were two brilliant articles about this incident published today, one by Charlie Brooker in the Guardian and another by Craig Murray on his own site. Brooker takes apart the ridiculous guesswork that made up the news coverage of the incidents on Friday night, while Murray notes that right-wing activists whose rantings may have inspired Breivik get an easy ride compared to Muslims who are suspected of links to terrorism:

Isn’t it extraordinary that right wing terrorists are seldom called terrorists, and are always said to have acted alone. Muslim terrorists, however, are always part of the international al-Qaida network, even when they and their motives were obviously homegrown. Any connection by any Muslim terrorist to any mosque or preacher is sufficient to condemn that mosque or preacher loudly in the media as an instigator of terrorism – even though they may never have heard of the terrorist. There are people in Guantanamo for approaching a decade just because they were at the same meeting as someone else. Yet exactly the same kind of links by Breivik to his right wing hate preaching US inspirers like Geller are simply glossed over by the mainstream media.

This may, of course, be because during the past decade, the majority of successful terrorist attacks have been by Muslims; far-right terrorism was known of before (Oklahoma, Soho nail bomber) but although a number of incidents have happened such as neo-Nazis stockpiling weapons, they have carried out no successful attacks which have caused anyone’s death. This has now changed, and one hopes that there will be less tolerance for the “Eurabia” conspiracy theories and allegations that there is some sort of Muslim/leftist plot to take over Europe. This kind of theory about another religious minority has already led to one genocide in Europe, and we know that many of those responsible for this propaganda against Muslims are Jewish, and almost all of those who are not are vehemently pro-Israel, so they have no excuse to plead ignorance. Regardless of whether they knew anything about Breivik or support his action, as “Flying Rodent” at Liberal Conspiracy notes, the potential of their rhetoric for inducing violence should have been obvious:

Melanie Phillips and the gaggle of paranoids that make up the internet’s nutty ‘Counter-Jihad’ movement are loudly insisting that they don’t advocate acts of violence or terrorism.

For now, let’s assume that’s true and move on from there.

What, exactly, do they imagine it is that they are advocating?

I ask because the message they’ve been sending out loud and clear is that Europe is under threat of imminent enslavement, and quite possibly genocide, at the hands of a sinister cabal of Marxist fifth-columnists in cahoots with one of our largest ethnic minority groups, the latter of which they portray as irrevocably violent and totalitarian.

Unsurprisingly, they’re stridently in favour of “resisting” this theoretical dictatorship.

That being the case, what kind of “resistance” do they expect the urgent threat of Nazi-Commie-Jihadist European domination to inspire in their readership? A sudden upsurge in the creation of idiot blogs?

… I think that now, more than ever, fingers need to be pointed squarely at those who have been disseminating this poisonous cack, and searching questions need to be asked.

First up – What the fuck did you think you were doing?

The enthusiasm Breivik showed for the so-called English Defence League led to them being put on the defensive, and Jeremy Paxman attempted to interview Stephen Lennon, AKA “Tommy Robinson”, on Newsnight on Monday evening. Lennon gave the obligatory condolences to the people of Norway and insisted that his organisation condemned violence and all forms of extremism and that they were called “naive fools” by Breivik, but then insisted that there was an “undercurrent of anger” that could not be swept under the carpet. In other words, a veiled threat from the same political tendency: if you don’t listen to us, there is going to be violence. The EDL are already well-known for violence, and despite the rhetoric from Lennon/Robinson about “extremism”, the language we hear shouted at their rallies is aimed at all Muslims, and Islam itself (such as “Allah, Allah, who the f*** is Allah?”), the EDL itself having been formed in response to al-Muhajiroun’s demonstration at the soldiers’ parade in Luton. The practice of throwing the behaviour of individual Muslims, or small groups of Muslims, at the entire Muslim population is common on the British right, and not only the far right (note this example in Standpoint from September 2008).

For the entire period since 9/11, there has been a steady stream of propaganda against Muslims in the west, not only in the right-wing blogosphere but also in the mainstream right-leaning press in the English-speaking world and probably beyond, and much of it has consisted of outright lies — claims that Muslims are somehow taking over Europe when they are under-represented in all major political parties (and thus parliaments) in Europe, the proof offered consisting of occasional concessions to Muslim sensitivities, often by commercial organisations seeking to please customers, and many of the alleged concessions (to do with piggy banks or tinted swimming-pool windows) are false, or distortions of the truth, anyway. The American right no doubt resented the French and Germans for staying out of Iraq, but they are certainly not being “taken over” by Muslims but passing repressive legislation against their respective Muslim communities.

It should surely be expected now that any future incidents of racists stockpiling weapons or conspiring to launch acts of terrorism or “war” will be treated as harshly as if they were Muslims training for jihad or raising money for such, and that violent provocations by the EDL or any spin-off will not be tolerated. The EDL, however, are not the Islamophobic right’s brain trust, by a long shot. It remains to be seen whether the mainstream journals of the British and American right will be somewhat more responsible about commissioning articles by conspiracy-minded bigots like Patrick Sookhdeo and Mark Steyn. They must not be treated as a pressure valve for a groundswell of anger against an over-powerful Muslim community, because such a thing does not exist. They are dangerous propagandists, trading on demonstrable falsehoods, whose rhetoric could, given the right circumstances, cause terrible violence. Free speech or not, no purportedly responsible journal or politician should touch them.

Geert Wilders was a supporter of the Dutch cartoonists who depicted the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) as a terrorist with a bomb in his turban, yet when someone posts an offensive cartoon about him and his party (based on their proposal for what they call “hooligan villages” although their general bigotry is well-documented), he demands that it be removed. Worse, one of his supporters threatens the staff of the broadcaster which posted it on his website. So much for law and order and freedom of speech. (The cartoon shows a man understood to be Wilders, holding a baton, showing a group of Muslims into a building marked “shower”; Nazi gas chambers were disguised as showers.)

This weekend the so-called English Defence League held a “homecoming” march in Luton, the town where a small group of al-Muhajiroun held a noisy rally against a homecoming parade by a regiment of soldiers recently back from Afghanistan and got much more publicity than they deserved, prompting the formation of one of the EDL’s precursors. Suzanne Moore’s piece in yesterday’s Guardian offers a convenient litany of middle-class liberals sneering at members of the EDL as racists, hooligans and “stupid men in casual sportswear” and suggested that the “chattering classes” watched Stephen Lennon AKA Tommy Robinson’s performance on Newsnight last Tuesday (watch here, UK only) and smugly “amused themselves by commenting on his chavdom”.

All the while, Lennon/Robinson made some supposedly “sharp points” which commonly appear in the mainstream media, regarding “Muslim padeophile gangs” and Muslims’ treatment of women. It is noticeable that they latch onto whatever dirt is being reported about Muslims in the media and exaggerate it beyond recognition, so the present speeches are full of Muslim gangs raping young white girls and making it sound as if this is happening all the time, up and down the country. In fact, it’s the work of specific gangs who are also involved in the drug trade and has nothing to do with the Shari’ah law that Lennon so detests, or with “militant Islam”. It is simply another way he can stir up hatred against Muslims in general.

She is partly right in saying that Lennon/Robinson should not be dismissed as thick. As shown in the Newsnight report above, the guy runs a business (a sunbed shop) and you can’t be totally stupid and run a business in today’s world. Many of his followers are, but the man himself should be called what he is: evil. He knows how to stir up his followers using exaggerations of the already distorted stories about Muslims that appear in the popular press. His tactics involve mobilising large numbers of hoodlums to cause disruption, fear and violence. As I wrote in my earlier article for Muslim Matters on this subject, he is unlikely to be able to lead a mass movement simply because his men’s thuggery is abhorrent to most middle-class people, and a very large proportion of the British population is middle-class.

Any purported “concern of the white working class” cannot be entertained without considering the role of the mass media in fostering it. Irrational and baseless prejudices fostered by the popular press in this country are not new — Linda Colley noted (in Britons: Forging the Nation) that anti-Catholic sentiment (frequently leading to riots) was fostered in the 17th century and after not only by church sermons (that were, needless to say, well-attended then) but by cheap publications such as almanacs, which besides containing information that was useful to farmers, included “a jumble of useful and sensatiomal information, combined with ‘an endlessly popular diet of jingoism, abuse of Catholics, and predictions of the downfall of the Pope and the French’” (quoting Bernard Capp, 1979). Our popular press today is regularly full of stories which distort innocent events so as to blame Muslims or to make it look as if Muslims are threatening the “British way of life” or receiving special treatment.

The BBC’s Face the Facts programme recently featured two of them; in one case, a (white, non-Muslim) family took a neighbouring café to court as they had installed an extractor fan which blew fumes from their frying straight at their front door. Among their complaints were that Muslim friends might not want to come round, but they also found that their house and clothes were smelling of the fumes. The press, however, focussed on the Muslim reference even though the complainants were non-Muslims and the decision was made on the basis of planning law and did not make any reference to Muslims. This led to the local riff-raff taunting the couple who complained in the street, calling them “Paki-lovers” and similar. Another story covered in that feature was about a swimming pool whose windows had supposedly been “blacked out” in response to complaints from Muslim women; they were, in fact, ground floor windows which had been covered by tinted, translucent film in response to complaints from Muslims and others, particularly women.

The EDL are entirely a product of exaggerated media reporting of a small demonstration by a group of Muslim men who are widely despised by the Muslims themselves and have been for years, at least since they began their “Magnificent 19” campaign celebrating the 9/11 attackers. To talk of “having a debate” about race or Englishness or the supposed decline of English culture is to talk of giving in to baseless grievances fostered by the distortions published in the mass media, and allowing them to dictate policy on these matters. It must not be allowed to happen.

Image source: Hope Not Hate.

Bindel complains that anti-child abuse campaigns shy away from emphasising the Asian ethnicity of the men responsible, for fear of being accused of racism, and that Channel 4 put off showing a documentary about the situation in 2004:

Unfortunately, the reluctance of the various anti-child abuse campaigns and charities to engage openly with the fact that, in the north of England, the majority of men involved in child-grooming criminal gangs are Pakistani Muslim means that racist organisations such as the BNP hijack the issue.

“The fact that these particular gangs are made up of Pakistani men is significant but not in the way racists would have us believe,” says one child protection expert who asked not to be named. “While the BNP would have us believe that abusing white girls is an endemic part of these men’s culture — which it absolutely is not — the truth is that these men are aware that the police do not want to be accused of racism in today’s climate.”

In 2004, Channel 4 withdrew Edge of the City, its controversial documentary made by Annie Hall that depicted parents trying to stop groups of young Asian men grooming white girls as young as 11 for sex. It had been seized on by the BNP as a party political broadcast.

Colin Cramphorn, the then Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, joined groups such as Unite against Fascism in calling for the documentary to be withdrawn. Channel 4 complied, saying that the issue was not censorship but timing because of the proximity with the local and European elections. But many argued at the time that the delay in transmission had strengthened the case of the BNP.

After the film was withdrawn, one of the mothers sent Annie Hall a text message: “It’s a real shame when votes come before young girls’ lives.”

Why on earth would a channel withdraw a documentary on a racially sensitive issue, in an area with a history of racial tension (much more recent in 2004 than now), just before an election? Well, because racists do not care about subtleties such as that this is a small minority of Asian criminals who are not typical of Asians in general and who, despite their Muslim names, are certainly not representative of the behaviour of Muslims; they would boil it down to a simple matter of “Muslims abusing white girls” and circulate a whole lot of lies about what Muslims believe it is acceptable to do to non-Muslim women and so on, in much the same way as Nazis of a previous era would have turned any story about an unscrupulous Jewish shopkeeper into an opportunity to portray Jews in general as bloodsuckers. Edge of the City was eventually screened in August 2004, after the election, so it is not as if they entirely backed down from the issue; they just did it when it was too late for the BNP to exploit it.

Three years ago this month Jack Straw argued his case for urging Muslim women who attend his MP’s surgery to remove their niqab. He said that he wanted to start a debate. In this, at least, he was successful.

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy said “the veil is an invitation to rape”; the Daily Mail columnist Allison Pearson said women who wear “nose bags on their faces … have no place on British streets”; the then shadow home secretary David Davis argued that Muslims were encouraging voluntary apartheid.

And 16-year-old Daniel Coine insisted he felt threatened: “I’d go further than Jack Straw and say they should all take off their veils. You need to see people face to face. It’s weird not knowing who it is you’re passing in the street, specially late at night when someone might jump you.”

And so Muslim women passed, in the public imagination, from being actually among the group most likely to be racially attacked to ostensibly being a primary cause of social strife – roaming the land in search of white teenagers to physically harass.

However, Jack Straw is hard of hearing, so perhaps he would have some right to ask a woman to remove her niqab if that got in the way of his understanding her, a reason no other man would have. The Express — or Daily Spew as it’s known in these parts — had no time for any such subtleties, and ran numerous front pages attacking Muslim women who wear niqab. While I don’t dispute that Jack Straw shouldn’t have been telling the world what goes on in his MP’s surgery meetings, the blame for the rise of the BNP lies squarely with the press, and the Spew in particular, for promoting bigotry in order to sell copies.

Then again, what about the poisonous effect of all the tabloids on British political culture? Has anyone tried discussing any political matter with a Sun reader, for example? They will simply repeat what they read in that rag and not question it at all.

Melanie Phillips had this article published yesterday in the Daily Mail (also on her home page) and she comes out with her usual line about the BNP being a vile, racist party, but that politicians are to blame for its rise because they do not address the supposedly legitimate questions they raise. This is, of course, a fairly typical position of Phillips’s particular kind of right-wing bigot.

Phillips alleges that Griffin and his party have an appeal not because of their racism or because those who vote for them are racist, but because “he also opposes mass immigration, Islamisation and the loss of sovereignty to the EU”. He also opposes loss of sovereignty to the USA and involvement of British troops in American wars, but Phillips doesn’t, so she doesn’t mention that. She mentions her own personal hobby horses, none of them factually based, but ‘Islamisation’ had to be in there somewhere.

And there hasn’t been any, at least not unless you count increasing numbers of actual Muslim people, mosques and (in some places) Muslim schools. Yes, they look different and often dress differently, but so do certain other minorities. Of course, the nonsense about “Shari’ah courts” causes some concern, but they are only private tribunals for settling civil and family disputes as allowed by law, not criminal courts empowered to chop hands and heads off. It is all a storm in a teacup cooked up by the media to cause a sensation and thereby boost ratings and sell papers. Our supposed “loss of sovereignty to the EU” is also highly exaggerated; besides Ireland we are the only country that has not signed the Schengen accord, which would free us from having to use a passport to travel in the EU, as has already happened for citizens of other EU countries as well as Norway. This kind of isolationist nonsense won’t stop any invading army; it just avoids displeasing editors of mid-market tabloids with provincial readerships.

It may be true that the political classes are to blame for the rise of the BNP, but not for these three reasons. It is the commercial press which is to blame for whipping up resentment against Muslims and immigrants with exaggerated stories about “Muslim demands” based on dubious sources or the antics of one or two individuals or small groups. Besides the party’s own falsifications, including claiming murders in which the alleged victim turns out to be still alive, this is what the BNP feeds on, and it most likely can’t be refuted in a one-hour Question Time session.

She promotes Douglas Murray as an appropriate figure to oppose him on the grounds that he agrees with the bits of the BNP’s platform that she agrees with herself, but opposes the “nasty” bits, i.e. the racism and anti-Semitism. Douglas Murray is an anti-Muslim bigot with a dubious record on free speech, advocating in his Pim Fortuyn memorial lecture in February 2006 that “all immigration from Muslim countries must stop”, that any Muslim who condones violence against western troops anywhere in the world be forcibly deported, and that if he were born in the UK then he should be ‘returned’ to a parent’s or grandparent’s country of origin. As I noted here in July last year, Murray responded to assertions by Peter Oborne that various reports about violent Muslim behaviour were baseless with a story about a small group who plotted to murder a soldier, and an individual, a Muslim dentist, who tried to dictate a dress code to his Muslim female patients. Murray conveniently overlooked the fact that incidents involving tiny numbers of people, or outright trivial incidents, were given exaggerated importance; in fact, he was doing the same in his article.

I’m not sure if Bonnie Greer would be any better as an opponent, but it’s all academic, because Griffin should not be on the programme anyway. They need to be exposed as fascists who are looking to exploit any crisis and using dishonest rhetoric, such as talk of “identity” rather than race, which is what they say they are when they think nobody unsympathetic is listening. It’s true that there are other parties which have their fair share of bigots, but no other party seems to have such a high proportion of violent, racist criminals. To oppose him with the likes of Douglas Murray, who confirms Griffin’s currently most prominent prejudice while decrying the anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism he is trying to play down, is to play into his hands and both insult and risk injuring the targets of his prejudices. The policy should remain “no platform”.

Unprompted by either of the activists, she [reporter Debbie Randle] invited them to give their views on Chelsea football star Cole. Born in Stepney, East London, he has now gained his 72nd England cap in the World Cup qualifier against Ukraine, which England lost 1-0. ‘So when you see someone like Ashley Cole play for England, are you happy to watch him?’ she asked. ‘Joey’ replied: ‘If he wants to come to this country and he wants to live by our laws, pay into society, that’s fine.’ ‘But,’ Ms Randle asked, ‘if he wanted to call himself British that would be a problem?’ Joey replied: ‘He cannot say that he’s ethnically British.’ Asked whether it was ‘OK for people who are not white to call themselves British’, he said: ‘You cannot say they are ethnically British. It’s denying our heritage. It’s taking that away from us.’

On the subject of ‘races mixing’, i.e. mixed-race marriages, Collett came out with the usual nonsense of comparing such relationships to the mixing of species, such that there would end up being no giant pandas etc.

These two goons were allowed to present themselves as ‘ordinary Joes’ (literally in Barber’s case) when they are, in fact, men with important roles in the party. This is a known tactic, as the BNP encourages its members to contact phone-ins, which is why Newsbeat received a number of responses sympathetic to the party. However, the BBC, if it is to invite BNP activists to participate in its programmes, it should present them as who they are and question them as robustly as they would anyone else. If they are too dumbstruck by the views they spout or intimidated by their well-earned thuggish image, they should get a backbone or else not invite them at all.

More, from the paper’s website today, by Roy Greenslade and Peter Hain.

File on 4 investigates the football hooligan racists who have been going around causing trouble in various British cities. They claim to be against “Muslim extremism”, but their chants include phrases distinctly offensive to any Muslims, “extremist” or otherwise, and people who have tried to sit down with them have concluded that they are not interested in debate.

One qualm I have with recent coverage of these new anti-Muslim hooligan groups is the constant reference to “right-wing groups”. Right-wing doesn’t mean much; it just means that they are the conservative element at any given time. They may be pro- or anti-free market (in the 19th century, free marketeers were the liberals, while in the 1980s, they were on the right), pro- or anti-immigration, or whatever. They are not politically sophisticated enough to be called right- or left-wing, anyway, and their views on the economy or healthcare or even immigration are irrelevant; what distinguishes them is being violent men who want to stir up Muslims and cause trouble.

The BBC reports that a London Assembly member from the British National Party may be banned from the council for six months after being found to have made up details of murders in east London in a YouTube propaganda video:

Richard Barnbrook, also a councillor for Barking and Dagenham, claimed in a video three people had been murdered in the borough in three weeks.

But figures from police and fellow councillors revealed there were no serious attacks weeks before the video.

A Greater London Authority (GLA) report said Mr Barnbrook had “showed wilful disregard for the truth”.

Mr Barnbrook will hear later about the penalty he faces for the claims.

In the video he said: “In Barking and Dagenham alone three weeks ago, there was a murder of a young girl. We don’t know who’s done it, her girlfriend was attacked inside an educational institute.

“Again, two weeks ago there was another attack by knives on the streets of Barking and Dagenham where two people were murdered.” …

In his defence, Mr Barnbrook said, in the first claim, the person was killed outside the area in Newham and details had “come out wrong”.

He also said he spoke “too soon” about the other two “murders”, as the victims were on life support at the time.

Here is some background on the BNP’s fondness for “big lies”.