What I saw at the EDL’s ‘Lee Rigby memorial’ in Colchester
‘Their true intentions were clear from their banners, one with the term ‘Rape-ugees”
‘Their true intentions were clear from their banners, one with the term ‘Rape-ugees”
Last week Lejla Kuric met the former leader of the English Defence League (EDL) Tommy Robinson. This is what she found out.
I first met Tommy yesterday morning and spent most of the day having brief conversations with him as I helped co-ordinate media requests for Quilliam. I believed Tommy when he told me that he is not a racist and does not hate ordinary Muslims.
There are gradations of extremism, and degrees of strategy. Let it not be forgotten that violent extremism is of a markedly different character to its non-violent counterpart.
It was announced today by the Quilliam Foundation that Tommy Robinson – aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – has decided to leave the English Defence League (EDL), a far-right anti-Muslim street group he co-founded.
Dominic Ashton reports on last weekend’s English Defence League rally in Tower Hamlets.
Mostly male, shaven-headed and white, they can be found in almost any of Britain’s urban centres – a jostling crowd beneath a thicket of placards and Crosses of St. George.
There’s no one, easy solution to this problem, and the origins of hatred and prejudice are extremely complex. However the first step should be to recognise that anti-Muslim incidents like these are a serious problem in their own right, and in a just and fair society, no one should be subject to this sort of violence and prejudice.
Sabby Dahlu is Secretary of One Society Many Cultures. She comments on the unreported Islamophobia that still hurts many British Muslims.
Islamist terrorism predates the EDL by many years. Osama bin Laden published his justification for the indiscriminate killing of Americans and Jews everywhere in February 1998 and the ‘secret apparatus’ of the Muslim Brotherhood is believed to have assassinated Mahmoud an-Nukrashi Pasha, then prime minister of Egypt, as long ago as 1948.