Quitting the English Defence League: when Tommy met Mo

Quitting the English Defence League: when Tommy met Mo is a documentary about Tommy Robinson’s move into Quilliam, the anti-extremism group.

Since it was a BBC documentary I had low hopes for imparitality, so was dumbfounded to see Tommy his views freely throughout.

The journey – the term speaks volumes about I’m a Celebrity’s impact on broadcasting – started in the company of Mo Ansar, who once agitated for the EDL to be banned. Ansar’s diversionary tactics on explosive Koran texts, such as cutting off the hands of thieves, being shot down by two eminent Koran scholars was amazing TV.

One of these scholars is Maajid Nawaz (right) of Quilliam who, like Tommy, receives multiple death threats. He and his companion supported Tommy against Ansar in that the phrase "all your right hands possess" from the Koran refers to concubinage, including sex slaves.

Through Nawaz, Robinson spoke to a group of Muslim women who proved as heterodox as any group from any religion. While Ansar was the first in the documentary to speak of “reformed Muslims”, but it was the Koran scholars who gave the notion legs by identifying the disconnect between scriptures over a thousand years old and a pluralist, liberal society where everybody has rights, including people like homosexuals who are executed in Iran.

As Tommy identified, we need to ensure that moderate Muslims, who are indicted as apostates by jihadis who can justify their judgement from the Koran and Sharia, are heard. So, I wonder, after future jihadi outrages, will the BBC and other channels continue to give extremists like Anjem Choudary a voice in the name of impartiality? Or will it eschew extremists and air the views of ordinary Muslims as oppressed by jihad as us? It seems Tommy’s not the only one at a crossroads.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Quitting the English Defence League: when Tommy met Mo - bbc I-player until 4 November 2013

Quilliam

"The Government should ban the EDL - HM Government e-petition, created by Mohammed Ansar (closed with 6,448 signatures)

BBC, ITV and Channel 4 face Ofcom probe over decision to interview hate preacher Anjem Choudary after Lee Rigby's murder - Daily Mail

Surat An-Nisā' Sura 4 of the Koran (Surat An-Nisā or The Wonen), mentions "all your right hands possess" severalk times.

God bless the EDL

The news of Tommy Robinson’s leaving the English Defence League has provoked a deluge of reactions, occupying all points between praise and outrage. And maybe the sheer amount of coverage is something we should look at as well as the direction of Tommy’s journey.

However the EDL emerges from this episode, I’m sure it will carry on, because patriots have arisen, made themselves known to each other up and down the country and beyond, and emerged energised. It has built up a head of steam that cannot simply dissipate.

Things previously unbelievable before 2009 have happened, such as:

• Victims of child-grooming gangs are no longer being labelled as promiscuous or borderline racists on the grounds of their rapists’ and traffickers’ identities.
• Politicians are not being seen as racists (except by the usual culprits) for concentrating on immigration.
• Blue-collar concerns over national identity are being aired much more by the media, even by the BBC.

This has all happened because EDL members have taken all of these and more literally into the public square and have not let politicians forget the inconvenient truth that each one of us has a vote.

But the complex nature of public opinion and debate has also come to the fore, and the full veil is a case in point. Whereas opposition to this identity-smothering garment was initially sidelined as a fringe issue, because of patriots preventing it from dropping from debate the loudest voices now protesting against the full veil are Muslim women. And now the subject is out, bodies such as UKIP – which opposed the full veil under all circumstances – are engaging with its adherents and saying they’ll tolerate it in limited circumstances.

And all because the EDL have not surrendered to bullies, bottles and bricks any more than to far right infiltration – and undoubtedly will continue thus. God bless them.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Popper's theses on gov't (1): state a necessary evil

(1)The state is a necessary evil; its powers are not to be multiplied beyond what is necessary.

It sounds libertarian, but is actually the first of Karl Popper’s "liberal principles" concerning the state in his 1956 essay Public Opinion and Liberal Principles, which is in his 1963 collection Conjectures and Refutations. Since modern democracy owes its existence to the (small-l) liberal melting-pot of Enlightenment thought, I’ve called them his Principles of Government.

Popper’s first principle is a sociological reworking of Occam’s Razor, often rendered as "do not multiply entities unnecessarily". The state has steadily accrued functions since the eve of the First World War when, AJP Taylor noted, "a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman…The state intervened to prevent the citizens from eating adulterated foods or contracting certain infectious diseases."

Arguments perennially rage over state roles such as landlord, healthcare provider and surrogate parent. What I think Popper was thinking of with this principle, however, is the criminalisation of dissent by the state, the prime examples of which in our time were provided by fascist governments such as those of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

Until, that is, 2005, when an incident in Britain highlighted the state’s sinister take on dissent when Walter Wolfgang – tellingly, an escapee from the Nazis – was manhandled from the Labour Party Conference and charged under terrorism legislation by police for shouting "rubbish!" when then Home Secretary Jack Straw was speaking.

Now you are apparently a "fascist" if you voice misgivings on certain matters that are dear to the massive unelected establishment surrounding government, to the extent that you can have children taken from you if you support UKIP or the English Defence League, with "anti-fascist" rhetoric spreading to the badger cull and climate issues.

Time, it seems, to robustly prune the state before our prisons hold not criminals but dissidents and our town squares echo to jackboots stamping.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

This series:

Popper's theses on gov't (1): state a necessary evil

Popper's theses on gov't (2): democratic government can be got rid of without bloodshed

Popper's theses on gov't (3): democracy confers no benefit on citizens

Popper's theses on gov't (4): we're not democrats because the majority is always right

Popper's theses on gov't (5): institutions are insufficient without traditions

Popper's theses on gov't (6): Utopia is an impossibility

Popper's theses on gov't (7) - liberalism is evolutionary, not revolutionary

Resources

Conjectures and Refutations - 300 words

Occam’s Razor - math.ucr.edu

Ken Minogue: resisted the relentless march of state control - Peter Oborne, telegraph.co.uk - contains AJP Taylor quote

[Walter] Wolfgang highlights deeper disquiet - bbc.co.uk

Taking Liberties - channel4.com

UKIP couple have foster children removed from care - bbc.co.uk

Why try to take baby from EDL mother but not from ‘terrorists’? - express.co.uk

towards a "Patriots' Pound" campaign?

For every EDL member I know, I know countless more who support its aims but do not feel they wish to go on marches. Could numbers (and therefore business) have been on Selfridge’s managers’ minds when they gave English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson a free steak dinner to apologise after a member of staff told him to "f**k off"?

Many of us have had similar experiences – I was verbally abused by a bus-driver on the way to a demo in Luton and learnt this was commonplace.

Well-heeled socialists might despise us for our working-class backgrounds, but we – and all those who support our multicultural agenda – represent a lot of spending power. Perhaps it’s time to realise the power of our our patriots’ pounds?

Many of us do already – for example, non-stunning slaughter leaves me cold, so I don’t buy Cadbury or other brands that use ingredients from meat that might be non-stunned if I can help it.

Sometimes we just have to buy where we have to buy. But occasionally, say, might it be possible to buy produce from traditional shops more likely to have been compassionately produced? Or to raise our voices at meetings when service providers with abusive staff are applying to renew their tenders?

Just as the Pink Pound campaign had broad-based popular support, focussed spending power could have wide appeal, perhaps even to integrated Muslims who are trying to put clear water between themselves and Jihadis who want to obscure their daughters’ identities with veils. It could even be an opportunity for vendors of Halal meat from pre-stunned animals (eg Waitrose) to set out their stall in a compassionate, multicultural marketplace.

It mustn’t be a campaign against people – as Tommy tweeted, he didn’t want the eejit to lose his job, just an apology. It has the potential, however, to be a campaign for dignity, for animal welfare and for meaningful community cohesion.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

No action after EDL leader's friend refused Selfridges service - bbc.co.uk

Selfridges Criticised For Giving EDL's Tommy Robinson Free Steak Dinner (POLL, PICTURES) - Huffington Post

Conjectures and Refutations

That Karl Popper was a man who lived by convictions is shown by his views on God, that agnosticism was the most justifiable position because belief in God was irrational. As he explains in Conjectures and Refutations, an irrational – or "metaphysical" – statement may well be true, it just can’t be treated as scientific because there is no prospect of testing it.

Popper considers selected philosophers to show that unless you try to understand the central problems motivating people’s search for truth you end up with doxography, or a list of the opinions they held. (This was brought into focus recently when Norman Tebbit demanded proof the English Defence League was "far-right", complaining all he’d been given was lists of people who’d expressed that opinion.)

Having fled Vienna to escape Naziism guarantees he’s anti-fascist, but one can see in his political philosophy throughout these essays that fascism is not a matter of which side of a political seesaw one inhabits, but rather is synonymous with tyranny, that being a system of government unremovable by non-violent means.

He opposes dialectic, which he sees as a misreading by both Fichte and Hegel, and therefore by Marx, of Kant’s triadic organisation of his categories. Kant’s problem was his rude awakening from dogmatic slumber by the philosophy of David Hume, his response trying to identify how moral action is possible in a world in which reality, as things-in-themselves, is denied to our sense perception and therefore to our understanding.

But the main target of his politely-expressed ire is Wittgenstein, whose assertion that problems in philosophy boiled down to misunderstandings of language threatened to destroy the links that have always existed between advances in philosophical thought and scientific (and political) progress. And, as this collection of essays shows again and again, progress towards a free society is what powered Popper.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

open letter to Feministe moderators

Dear Feministe moderators,

you have decided that "Gerry is definitely not welcome to throw around such bigoted stereotypes" on the Feministe blog.

A post was followed by a discussion that was fractious from all sides; I stated my belief that there’s no such thing as race, misogynist societies abet rape, and also wondered why we spent decades tackling our home-grown institutionalised misogyny before throwing it away by importing and proceeding to institutionalise other cultures’ misogyny.

Then I realised: you believe I am being "passive-aggressive" by linking to my blog (a standard practice) when commenting.

So what posts on my blog might you have objected to? The ones questioning "what’s the entertainment value in rape" and "since when was rape a freedom of speech issue"? Or maybe my investigation into porn and lads’ mags freely visible in newsagents in a Cambridge (England) major street?

It appears you object to the minority of posts on my blog that deal with Islamism and Jihad.

That’s your prerogative.

But I’d like to point out that opposing Islamism isn’t the same as opposing Muslims; for example, anti-Islamism appears throughout Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography, Daughter of the East. Muslims in the UK are increasingly finding their anti-Islamist voice, most noticeably when Ipswich Muslims took the initiative to join the English Defence League in processing to the town’s war memorial in remembrance of murdered soldier Drummer Lee Rigby.

I’m sad to see that you seem to subscribe to an anti-humanist view prevalent in some sectors of society, whereby you agitate for the freedoms of expression that allow you to make your point to be denied to those with whom you disagree. In the UK this is leaking outside the Islamism debate: now people who support fracking or badger culling are also being labelled "fascist".

I won’t darken your virtual door again. Have a good life.

Yours faithfully
Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Martin Luther King's dream

Fifty years ago, one of the greatest figures in world history gave an impassioned speech that rings out through the decades as a hymn to justice and multiculturalism.

Martin Luther King’s "I have a Dream" speech marked the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which became law on 1 January 1963. The president wrote:

I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves [within the US] are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

King’s assessment of progress thereafter was stark: "One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination…It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of colour are concerned".

His answer was not to take one’s rights by force, which some (eg Malcolm X - right) would have justified with the not unfair argument that freedom is taken, not gifted. King emphasized that freedom exists only when everyone is free: not just little black children and little white children but Catholics and Protestants and Jews and Gentiles.

I think King was saying is that there must be an end to exceptionalism, the concept that one part of society stands elevated over others and is justified in using all means necessary to preserve that elevation. The context of "I have a Dream" was white exceptionalism (or supremacy). Now the West faces waves of Jihad based on fundamentalist Islamic exceptionalism and, as the exclusion of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from the UK shows, the Establishment will not even tolerate reference to the issue.

What will such denial of freedom produce for our generation: a Martin Luther King, or a Malcolm X?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

"I have a Dream" speech on Youtube:

Full text of "I have a Dream" speech - BBC

Obama on Martin Luther King anniversary: the full speech

Text of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 - US Government Archives

Letter banning Pamela Geller from UK - Atlas Shrugs

Banning Geller and Spencer from UK will only increase grievance - Index on Censorship

since when was rape a freedom of speech issue?

Freedom of speech is used to justify all sorts of things which are antipathetic to reason. Ricky Gervaise used it to justify jokes about paedophilia, Jimmy Carr made a disgusting insinuation about women liking rape, and Frankie Boyle demanded he be free to apply the n-word to non-white people if used "ironically".

The latest use, as the Cambridge News’ Lizzy Buchan writes, is by comedian (why are they do high in the abuse stakes?) Mitch Fatel (right) making cracks about "spiking drinks to facilitate sex and scenarios of sexual assault".

Is it a coincidence that the butts of these abusive "jokes" are, in order, abused children, violated women, ethnic minorities and, again, abused women?

When exactly did abuse, especially of a sexual sort, become laughable?

In an enlightening case earlier this year, comic Reginald D Hunter was admonished by the Professional Footballers’ Association for telling jokes featuring the n-word at its annual awards ceremony. This might seem reasonable, but it’s less open-and-shut if you know that Hunter uses the epithet in context, to describe the experience of being a black American. But Daily Mail columnist Martin Samuel blew the whole thing apart when he revealed that in the previous year’s ceremony nobody protested when white player Ched Evans was honoured, despite having been imprisoned for rape two days previously.

Now come back to Cambridge, this February. Forty members of the English Defence League demonstrated against the Islamisation of society (and note not against Muslims); in doing so they railed against abuses of womens’ rights such as female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and corporal or even capital punishment for being raped.

Five hundred self-proclaimed and predominantly white "antifascists" turned out to try and drown out our message.

Samuel’s conclusion about football holds true for society: we are "no longer in a moral maze but a moral cul-de-sac".

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Apology over crude comedy show at Lakenheath - Cambridge News

Stumbling through a moral minefield... football condemns the comedian but applauds the rapist - Daily Mail

letter: the EDL and multiculturalism

What follows is a letter published by the Cambridge News on Saturday 29 June; the parts in italics never made it into the paper. I've changed the name of the lady I was responding to, who asked what the EDL does that is multicultural.

Dear Sir,

Like Jane Smith (letters 25 June), I am glad to write about something other than cycling. And I am also pleased that the English Defence League wreath-laying ceremony in honour of Gunner Lee Rigby at Cambridge War Memorial passed off peacefully.

Ms Smith wishes to know what we do that is multicultural, so I am writing because the Cambridge News was quoting myself saying that the EDL is a multicultural organisation. But the question as it is posed is difficult to answer, as you don't "do" multicultural, you "are" multicultural. A case in point comes at the end of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech, in which he indicates that freedom has no bounds and looks forward to the day "when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics" are free. He understood that when one sector of society is in chains, those chains threaten us all.

When David Cameron said in his Munich speech of February 2011 that multiculturalism was a failure, our founder Tommy Robinson distanced the EDL from that view the same day. Multiculturalism refers to a state when all of us, regardless of background, stand as equals in the context of the law of the land. In the United Kingdom, the constituent parts of this law tell the story of more than a millenium's evolution, still ongoing, seeking - often unhappily - to resolve the contradictions between the might of the rulers and the anger of the ruled. Despite high points such as the Magna Carta, Habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights, this process, almost unbelievably, only produced universal suffrage in 1928. Thus any British citizen, regardless of gender or ethnic origin, is enfranchised.

We are therefore alarmed at the growth of Sharia Courts, inhabiting a legal area negligently left grey, dispensing misogynist judgements that are often disenfranchising. Despite what our detractors say we do not oppose Muslims, many of whom are a credit to Great Britain. We oppose Sharia, which is what many Muslims came here to escape and make a new life for themselves. Among the abuses that have been uncovered are primary-school girls in forced marriages and countless cases of honour-based violence. In the case of the latter I would say the EDL is definitely more multicultural than the BBC, whose Panorama wasn't interested in HBV until a white girl was killed.

The starting point of multiculturalism is that we are all equal, and that empowers us all. The problem is Diversity, which with its (often hidden) calculations and quotas delivers an Orwellian rider that some are more equal than others.

Personally, I find it difficult to envisage any circumstance in which the EDL would drop its commitment to multiculturalism. I apologise to Ms Smith for the length of this answer, but as I hope I've demonstrated it's a complex issue.

Yours etc

Gerry Dorrian

anathema and the New Fascist Inquisition

There was a time in the Catholic Church when to be anathematised for holding unsanctioned beliefs was to be declared apart from the church. Since the church then composed the major part of society, this meant that the excommunicant couldn’t buy or sell or take an active part of the community. When the Inquisition came on the scene, anybody anathematised/excommunicated lost the right to freedom and even life.

Use of exclusion as a control strategy, when practiced by later regimes, would be known as fascism. The Inquisition is back, is situated in secular life, and is no less fascist for its main driver being known as “Unite Against Fascism”.

In this week’s Sunday Telegraph Andrew Gilligan exposes how the UAF practice fascism, under the leadership of Muslim supremacist Azid Ali, to deny a voice to those they disagree with on the basis of the circular argument that people they disagree with must be "fascists".

In the name of anti-fascism, says Gilligan, they desecrated a war memorial in Oxford; and the Cambridge News unquestioningly quoted Cambridge UAF leader Richard Rose as saying that we’d be "goose-stepping" through the town to remember Gunner lee Rigby at our war memorial. So where was the picture of EDL members goose-stepping? Perhaps there are none?

The new fascist inquisition doesn’t stop at persecuting patriots; if you dare dissent from, say, the authorised opinion on Europe, foreign affairs or the causes of climate change, the cry of anathema sit! arises. Remember when David Bellamy was branded a paedophile on the grounds that his changed views on climate change were harmful to children?

We cannot allow the new fascist inquisitors to push us out of community and political life. To their attempted cleansing of dissenting voices from each and every aspect of public life we must respond with ¡No pasarán!

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

fetish and phobia: time to be shocked a bit more

There appears to have been a cult of Islam, a fetishisation of the religion by non-members, for some time. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first occurrence of the word "Islamophobia" in 1926 in the Journal of Thelological Studies, indicating the author regards it as preventing fair comment on Islam. The second quote, from the International Journal of Middle East Studies, is similar: "a non-Muslim…is compelled, under penalty of being accused of Islamophobia, to admire the Koran in its totality."

Little wonder, then, that even constructive criticism of practices undertaken by Muslims is handled with kid gloves. Witness BBC Radio 4’s long-term Born in Bradford project, in which health-workers investigate why Bradford’s Pakistani community, who comprise 20% of its population and have 50% of its babies, bear children with genetic disorders. It’s not rocket science – as any student of the Habsburgs' decline knows – but one doctor told of resistance at the highest levels to offending Pakistanis by campaigning on the dangers of marrying relatives as close as first cousins.

Therefore I admire Charles Moore, Telegraph commentator and former editor, for his candour in berating the British establishment and populace for being shocked "not quite enough" at Lee Rigby’s murder. His honesty is courageous and astounding:

If we attack the EDL for being racist, fascist and pro-violence, we can do so with impunity, although we are not being strictly accurate. If we make similar remarks about Islamist organisations, we will be accused of being racist ourselves.

He writes of us having an "air of menace", but that’s mild compared to the Mail and the Sun, whose comment sometimes might be cut-and-pasted from ours, but whose reportage labels us thugs.

So I’d like to throw him a friendly challenge: do his honesty and courage extend to publishing interviews with EDL members?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Woolwich outrage: we are too weak to face up to the extremism in our midst - Charles Moore, Telegraph

Born in Bradford page on bbc.co.uk

Born in Bradford NHS page

Born in Bradford page at Bradford University

The Habsburg Lip - msu.edu

the BBC's choice

English Defence League Tommy Robinson’s excellent performance on Radio 4’s Today has already been skilfully parsed on Kafir Crusaders.

The only thing I’d add is that interviewer Sarah Montague seemed to be somewhat unprepared. When she asked Tommy about representing the views of white working class people, I genuinely don’t think she was trying to trap him. She seems in thrall to Greg Dyke’s doctrine that the BBC is "hideously white", with the BBC predicating the epithet of society at large. Tommy, of course, replied that the EDL represents "non-Muslim communities in Britain". Anybody on a housing estate can tell you that doesn’t necessarily mean white.

Tommy is of course right to complain "no-one wants to sit around tables with working class people in this country". Our sharp-elbowed political classes, ascending through Society’s ethereal heights, position us on the receiving end of an apartheid with mainstream politics as the meadow we look on but whereupon we may not graze.

But I suspect the BBC is paying far more attention to the EDL now than it ever has because it’s not just blue-collar people who nod earnestly when we talk about two-tier Britain, or how ordinary Muslims are Sharia’s first victims. People from all social strata and ethnicities want to make up their own minds about what we say.

The day before Tommy’s interview, Oxford West MP Nicola Blackwood – a tireless campaigner for justice for child-grooming victims – indicated on Today there is another grooming scandal waiting to break. She spoke of Asian victims who weren’t coming forward "because of fear of retribution from their families and communities".

I can understand their alienation: the BBC wasn’t interested in victims of honour-killings until a white girl was murdered. If it comes to a choice between Jihadis and their co-religionist victims, who will the BBC stand beside?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Today, Radio 4, Monday 10 June 2013 - go to 0:53:40 to hear Nicola Blackwood's interview

Today, Radio 4, Tuesday 11 June - go to 1:35:30 to hear Tommy Robinson's interview

Click for Kafir Crusader's analysis of the above interview, contains the interview on YouTube

Nicola Blackwood MP homepage

MP Blackwood granted child exploitation debate in Parliament - Oxford Post

the blasphemy law is dead: it must rest in peace

In the late 1800s, the National Secular Society published a pamphlet featuring a cartoon Moses meeting God on Mount Sinai. God, whose lower half we see, is pictured wearing a nightshirt billowing out behind him: he’s farting in Moses’ face.

To observant Jews and Christians this is shocking. But it’s part of the long, often unhappy conversation between church, state and citizens about what is acceptable comment and what strays into criminality.

Thus, in latter times, we’ve had The Love that Dares to Speak its Name, a poem about a centurion sexually abusing Christ’s dead body that was published by Gay News in 1977 in defiance of Britain’s blasphemy law. In a reading of the poem in 2002, Peter Tatchell said "The blasphemy law is now a dead letter. If the authorities are not prepared to enforce the law, they should abolish it". (It was, by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.)

What worries me is that we are accruing a blasphemy law by stealth, an undead version if you will, that is used to justify persecution and even murder of those who insult Islam. In the recent trial of the six would-be Dewsbury bombers, the defence attempted to justify the terrorists’ intention to bomb an English Defence League demonstration by playing a CD of EDL members chanting “who the **** is Allah?”

It might not be the most elegant sentiment, but it’s nothing compared to the content of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which the BBC refused to apologise for in the face of over 60,000 complaints, saying "nobody has the right not to be offended".

Now watch the contortions of so-called "antifascists" who will argue that some people do have the right to be offended and to act on this, and also attempt to deny that we inhabit a two-tier Britain.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Blasphemy Law Is Dead - petertatchell.net - scroll down for The Love that Dares to Speak its Name

Six would-be terrorists were responding to EDL provocation, court hears - The Guardian

Governors' Programme Complaints Committee finding on complaints against Jerry Springer - The Opera - bbc.co.uk

EDL silent walk to war memorial, Cambridge 1 June 2013

"We don’t want you here!" spat one of the so-called "Unite against Fascism" protestors as the English Defence League silent procession approached the war memorial to lay flowers in memory of Gunner Lee Rigby.

The woman wasn’t shouting at us, though, but at a pensioner who had come independently to meditate on the short life and brutal death of the off-duty soldier.

On Thursday 30 and Friday 31 May the Cambridge News published stories attempting to raise concerns about the EDL to the level of hysteria. We’re used to its being biased, but on those two days it surpassed itself, presenting UAF opinions as fact in an exercise in disinformation that I’m sure will provide future cub reporters with plenty of material when learning how not to write articles.

Because of the News’ venom, our facilitators decided it would be prudent to process from a different place from the one advertised. There were about 30 of us, all of us uninterested in the 4 seated UAF protestors engaging in a silent protest (silent, that is, unless a pensioner happens to express an opinion they dislike).

After we’d laid our floral tributes we left, as the main body of the UAF counter-protest had seen us and was coming up the road: there were rather a lot of them. The News had quoted Richard Rose of Cambridge UAF as predicting that we were going to be "goose-stepping" – no wonder his flock were fired up.

I agree with what the woman who shouted at the pensioner wrote on her placard – "no place for racism here". That is why the English Defence League continues to oppose those who seek to trade genuine multiculturalism for a system that listens to the grievances of one religion’s abusive wing at the expense of all other groups within our shores.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Rsources

Police prepared for EDL war memorial rally - 31 May - contains remark about EDL "goose-stepping"

Confronting the rise of the far right - 31 May: "If there were just three old men putting a wreath on a war memorial we would probably not oppose it but the organised hard right has to be opposed"

Police describe EDL walk in Cambridge as "peaceful" - 1 June

don't dismiss Anonymous, their hands are dripping with blood

Reading about the Peasant’s Revolt, in which society flew apart under punitive taxation to pay for cronyism and wars, what struck me was how much historians’ access to events of June 1381 is hampered not by distance, but the deliberate muddling of contemporaneous records.

In the age of mass media you don’t need to torch the Savoy to make a point. Considering that in 1955 Rosa Parkes (right) needed only not to rise from her seat to start a cultural revolution that’s still rolling, the fecundity of Gunner Lee Rigby’s martyred blood becomes comprehensible.

You wouldn’t think it to look at the mainstream media, though; press gagging orders seem to be doing the same job Revolt chronicler Thomas Walsingham achieved with misinformation. How else to explain the silence on how the Metropolitan Police forced an unrelated Sikh protest (about Professor Bhullar) between an EDL protest and the UAF counter-protest?

So I don’t believe "hacktivists" Anonymous’ entry is a coincidence. Styling themselves as hidden masters, they say that they’ll target the EDL for trying to segregate Muslims. I wonder if reactionary Establishment forces have brought them in to erase online mentions of our policy of peaceful protest in pursuit of multiculturalism and integration?

Just look at the logo at the end of their message to the EDL:

Anonymous and its partners, Lulszec and Wikileaks, are dripping in blood through their manipulation of Arab Spring conflicts. The death-tolls in just two countries affected are 70,000 in Syria, 30,000 in Libya.

Anonymous live by Stalin’s dictum that "one death is a tragedy, one million a statistic". But I hope anybody opposing us who finds a hit-list (because that’s what Anonymous are talking about) in their hand ponders the words of another era's revolutionary, Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken", then researches us while materials are still available.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Sitting Down: the story of Rosa Parks

Sikhs protest for Prof Bhullar, crossfire cleared up by the EDL:

Who Is Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar? - India Real Time

Anonymous' Message to EDL:

Syria death toll probably at 70,000, U.N. human rights official says - CNN

Libya death toll hits 30,000" - Mirror

"our minds and consciousness consumed by current scenes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya" - AnonNews - Everything Anonymous

Click for a review of The Peasants' Revolt: England's Failed Revolution on amazon.co.uk

EDL Newcastle demo: RIP Drummer Lee Rigby

The Mail, never slow to heap abuse on the EDL, merely carried a muted statement that the Newcastle demo on Saturday 25 May had "passed off without major incident".

The police were great. Many are ex-military, and looked as angry as us. It was also great to see veterans proudly displaying their medals among the 1,500-2000 protesters, and there were several serving Forces members present – for obvious reasons.

What grated was that during a minute's silence for Drummer Rigby, all the so-called Unite Against Fascism round the corner could do was chant "Nazi scum, off our streets". I don’t know why I expected more; people who defend the ideology that killed Drummer Rigby will sink to anything.

Tommy Robinson extemporised an impassioned speech in which he was careful to warn us that we must discern the difference between Muslims and Islam, reminding us that Muslims serve in our armed forces. In the run-up to the demo, which has been planned for months, Tommy has received many death-threats on Twitter; the ones I’ve seen threatened to decapitate his family.

Kev Carroll recited a poem about Lee’s death; by the end he was weeping and so were many of us. An activist from our LGBT division told how Jihadists in East London were now boasting, after a campaign of violence and intimidation with the blessing and assistance of the UAF, that it was a "gay-free area". So much for diversity, then.

Every single speaker exhorted us to respect Lee’s memory by ensuring that the demo didn’t turn violent. It didn’t, thank God. We are all angry, and our task now is to take our anger to the ballot-box at the next general election and, if our political classes aren’t getting domestic terrorism sorted using measures already on the statute-book, vote accordingly.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

View more Newcastle demo pics on Flickr

In Memoriam: Drummer Lee Rigby - Poems Noticed

Bud, Britain's bravest police horse, returns to duty after being punched by football thug - Daiy Mail

we're more than "sickened"; we're gripped by existential rage

I don’t advocate any violence. I don’t want anyone to go out and burn a mosque…It’s not the answer, because there will be innocent Muslims and you are then as bad as these scumbags who are doing it [terrorism].

The words are those of Tommy Robinson, English Defence League founder.

In an obscene desolation of responsibility, following the brutal execution of Drummer Lee Rigby by Jihadists the EDL has come in for unprecedented condemnation by the mainstream media, and given the cauldrons of bile usually reserved for us that’s saying something.

Worse still, an 83-year-old woman who shouted "go back to your own country" outside a mosque has been arrested by Kent Police. I don’t imagine her words would have been easy for worshippers to hear, but two-tier Britain, where people who protest against British policy in Afghanistan are allowed close enough to returning troops to spit on them, is seriously eroding the tolerance of the British people.

David Cameron spoke for the nation when he said the Woolwich execution "sickened us all". But he didn’t join the last dot. We are more than sick: we are gripped by existential rage at the utter failure, at the highest political levels, to tackle the Islamism which blights Muslim communities with the rest of us not far behind.

Some commentators say the death of one white man in London pales before the numbers of black men dying there. They may have a valid point, but they miss the equally valid point that Lee Rigby represented the Forces defending us, and by extension us, in this war by any other name.

Captain Dreyfus didn’t even have to die for his case to turn France upside down and inside out. This is a defining moment. I hope that cooler heads in the Police Force will see that the upcoming EDL demo in Newcastle will dissipate far more pressure than it causes, and that without the safety-valve we provide Lee Rigby’s death might well have ignited England as surely as mark Duggan’s did London.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words (minus quote)

Tommy Robinson video reacting to Woolwich execution: "I don't advocate any violence..." section starts at 28:30. Watch below, or click to watch on YouTube

Woman, 85, arrested after abuse hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham mosque in wake of Woolwich terror murder - Kent online

David Cameron: Woolwich attach "sickened us all" - Telegraph

Dispatches: The Hunt for Britain's Sex Gangs

The latest Dispatches documentary, The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Gangs, was always going to be hard-hitting. The fact it was broadcast when the nation was reeling from the brutal murder of soldier Lee Rigby by Islamists in Woolwich made it doubly so.

What enraged me was the cynical methods paedophiles’ defence lawyers use to terrify victims into incoherence: one police officer spoke of these vulnerable, abused girls being "retraumatised, revictimised and violated" in court. I’m sure she was speaking advisedly – one girl spoke of cross-examination as like being raped again.

Another police officer spoke of the danger of being perceived to be racist, when all he wanted to do was to put predatory paedophiles in jail. Putting aside the fact that there’s no such thing as race, it was obvious that the rapists were of shared ethnicity. Not every abuser is a Muslim and not every Muslim is an abuser; nevertheless, as senior police officials recover from fits of cultural sensitivity like that which scuppered the trial of Charlene Downes’ (right) groomers and killers, arrests for trafficking (which can result in more convictions than rape as it takes distorted issues surrounding consent out of the question) are soaring. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner has estimated that up to 10,000 children in Britain may be affected by sexual exploitation by gangs and groups.

And where those gangs and groups are street-based, chances are that they will be composed predominantly, if not exclusively, of Muslims. I don’t want to vilify people on account of their ethnicity or religion, I merely want children to be free to have a childhood. And, as English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson has said, Muslims are free to take to the street to point the finger at their co-religionists who rape children and kill soldiers. And say, “not in my name”.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Dispatches: The Hunt for Britain's Sex Gangs webpage

Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups (CSEGG) - The Children's Commissioner for England

Watch The Hunt for Britain's Sex Gangs on 4oD

Watch Tommy Robinson speak on the Woolwich terrorist attacks, the EDL's response and other issues below, or click here to view on YouTube.

Click for English Defence League website

Unthinkable

Kris Hollington's uncompromising honesty about child sex trafficking in Great Britain makes Unthinkable a difficult read.

About two-thirds of the book treats grooming and rape of underage children by Muslim, mainly Pakistani-heritage, men. But the first of a series of vignettes interlaced between chapters is from my hero, William T. Stead, whose cutting-edge journalism saw the age of consent raised from 13 to 16 in 1885. Stead quotes a detective lamenting that while abusing 13-year-old girls in brothels "ought to raise hell, it does not even raise the neighbours".

Lessons are lost as generations pass; in 1943, when the countries first specialist venereal disease unit for underage girls was opened, a doctor comments "'we had thought it (the prostitution of children) couldn’t happen here'".

I can understand why: the first time I talked with a woman who’d been so desperate to get crack she’d pimped her daughter (who had went on to become a prostitute) I was reluctant to peer into the existential abyss opening up in front of me. But how did the daughter feel? Read Unthinkable.

The one false note was, I thought, Hollington’s treatment of opponents of the institutionalised denial of child grooming gangs. He refers to the English Defence League as "thugs…some [of whom] have been exposed as violent racists". Karen Downes, mother of the murdered Blackpool teenager Charlene (subject of another vignette) by kebab-shop workers credits us with keeping the Establishment from further covering up Charlene’s death. He also paints Melanie Phillips in a racist light, despite quoting a passage in which she affirms that the vast majority of jailed sex offenders are white.

Hollington exposes how the Establishment’s comprehensive failure to protect vulnerable children from abuse is such a tragedy of errors that "it seems as though a sexual predator has designed the current childcare system". Misreading of patriots apart, I recommend Unthinkable thoroughly.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click for reviews of Unthinkable on amazon.co.uk

Police disciplined for blunders in murder case of Charlene Downes - Daily Mail, October 2009

The Rochdale sex ring shows the horrific consequences of Britain's 'Islamophobia' witch-hunt - Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail, May 2012

cover-up exposed: child grooming in Rotherham - 300 words, September 2012

EDL Dewsbury bombers: not warriors but pawns

BBC Radio Two news, on one occasion only, carried a reaction from a Muslim "community leader" to the guilty pleas of the would-be Dewsbury bombers:

If this had gone ahead, then I think we could have seen a serious massacre – lots of people could have been injured, possibly killed as well, with no discrimination. There could have been younger people, older people, black, white, Asian, etc. Anybody could have been affected by that.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion the soundbite was pulled because somebody realised it was substantially similar to a denunciation of the plot made by our own Tony Curtis at the Bristol demo in July 2012. Curtis added that the bomb could have killed not only so-called "antifascists", but also police officers when the terrorists’ car, impounded for not having insurance, was being driven to the station.

Some detest the EDL. That’s their right. We were in Dewsbury peacefully exercising our democratic right to protest not against Muslims but against Sharia and Jihad. These are in the news as seldom before, with a boy beaten by Palestinian "modesty police" for an "un-Islamic" hairstyle and Saudi Arabia’s first campaign (right) against the entrenched problem – justifiable by Sharia – of domestic violence.

The Dewsbury Six might style themselves warriors with their nail-bomb-carrying rocket, but in reality they are pawns near the bottom of the Jihadist food-chain. Their puppet-masters intended the atrocity to turn public opinion against Muslims so as to make younger co-religionists feel categorised and alienated, and therefore easier to radicalise.

As Henry Kissinger points out in Diplomacy, a government needs to defeat terrorists every time, while terrorists only need to get successful once. It is reassuring to know that 7/7-sized terror plots are being foiled every year, but the BBC asks a disturbing question about the Dewsbury bomb-plot: did police miss it?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Speeches from the Bristol 2012 rally Tony Curtis' is the second clip down. He speaks on the indiscriminatory effect of the Dewsbury bomb from 2:25-3:00

Steve Wright in the Afternoon, 30/4/13 news-clip featuring community leader on indiscriminatory effect of bomb, 2:01:30-2:02:14 - listen again until 6 May 2013

Terrorism plot size of 7/7 attacks 'foiled every year' - bbc.co.uk 21/4/13

EDL bomb plot: did the police miss it? - bbc.co.uk 30/4/13