Category Archives: Anti Fascism

Peter Tatchell stands down as Green candidate

By Effendi | Published: December 16, 2009

The human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has announced he will stand down as a parliamentary candidate for the Green party in Oxford East. He explains:

I was selected as the Green Party candidate for Oxford East in April 2007. A month later, I was badly beaten around the head by neo-Nazis during an attempted Gay Pride parade in Moscow.

This exacerbated the brain damage caused when I was bashed unconscious by President Mugabe’s bodyguards in Brussels in 2001, after attempting to make a citizen’s arrest of the Zimbabwean leader on charges of torture.

Following the Moscow assault, I never rested and recuperated. I carried on campaigning, with a very heavy schedule of commitments in Oxford East. After several months, I was severely exhausted. This stress and exhaustion probably intensified the damage and thwarted my recovery.

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Also posted in Activism, Homophobia, Human Rights, Politics, UK Politics | 2 Comments

Hope not Hate in Harrow

By Faisal | Published: December 14, 2009

SIOE Leader Stephen Gash had said that the SIOE demo at Harrow Central Mosque yesterday would attract 2,000 supporters out of the 3,200 he claimed as total membership for his organisation. However, the BBC reports that fifteen SIOE protesters turned up in Harrow. Although from my estimates, fifteen is possibly overly generous of Aunty.

Asim Siddiqui sees at least one encouraging sign in the rise of white-race supremacist movements of the far-right resurgent all over Europe and now getting its freak on in Britain:

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Also posted in Activism, Anti Muslim bigotry, Antisemitism, Feature | Tagged | 2 Comments

Required Reading for Ed Balls

By Abdul Hamid al Manchesteri | Published: December 13, 2009

The Centre for Social Cohesion has this disturbing news:

Haringey Council has announced today that it has resumed funding to the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation (ISF), a registered educational charity with links to HT. Funding was suspended in October this year following revelations by the CSC and Sunday Telegraph that it received over £113,000 in government grants for its schools in Haringey and Slough in 2007/08. The Haringey Council investigation claimed to have found no evidence of ‘inappropriate influence’ at the ISF school in North London.

Here are two documents that should be made required reading for the Secretary for Schools, Ed “Minister of Hizb ut Tahrir” Balls.

The first is the curriculum of the ISF Schools – signed off by OFSTED in 2005. The second is the article on education policy written in Khilafah, a Hizb ut Tahrir publication, by one of the three trustees who run the school, Farah Ahmed who is the headteacher of the Slough ISF School.

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Also posted in Anti Muslim bigotry, Antisemitism, Islamism | 4 Comments

Kentish Town British-Jobbik Association Meeting

By Guest | Published: December 9, 2009

This is a cross-post of an article from Nothing British

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Gloucester Arms pub Kentish Town

Sunday 6th December 2009 – Forty-five Hungarian fascist sympathisers met at a Kentish Town pub to raise funds for Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, and to participate in a Q&A on nationalist issues like the threat of Israelis buying Hungarian property and the problem of gypsies.

The Hungarian courts have already made it clear that they find the values of Jobbik’s militia to be inimical to those of ordinary Hungarians (for the Nothing British Information Note on Jobbik, click here).

We see no reason why this sort of meeting should go unchallenged in the UK.

Sunday’s event was organised by The British-Jobbik Society and was hosted by Zoltan Fuzessy, Jobbik’s UK-based former webmaster and current Vice-President of Foreign Affairs. Fuzessy is, according to the invitation to Sunday’s meeting, Chief of Staff to Csanad Szegedi MEP, a militia commander in the Hungarian Guard, a Hungarian supremacist, a gypsy-baiter and a Israel-hater. Outside there was a 10-person anti-fascist demonstration.

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Also posted in Anti Muslim bigotry, Antisemitism | 2 Comments

Combat 18 claims responsibility for terrorist attack

By Guest | Published: November 30, 2009

Combat 18 Russia is claiming responsibility for the recent terrorist attack on a passenger train.

Many analysts are unconvinced. If it turns out the C18 claim is false, this is nonetheless a worrying development insofar as C18 Russia is clearly seeking to position itself as an active terrorist organisation.

According to this report, the C18 statement reads:

We, the militant autonomous group Combat 18, claim the responsibility for the attack against Nevsky Express. We will continue! The time has come. We say that the war will affect everyone. There are no indifferent people and no innocent victims in this war. There are only our supporters and enemies.

The group has also claimed responsibility for an explosive device found in the subway in Saint Petersburg on November 14.

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Read the full article by Edmund Standing

Also posted in Anti Muslim bigotry, Antisemitism, Feature | Leave a comment

BMSD: Taking a stand against ‘Stop the Islamisation of Europe’

By Faisal | Published: November 22, 2009

It is very encouraging to see secular, pro-democracy Muslims take on the anti-Muslim nutters on their own terms. Read the BMSD’s (British Muslims for Secular Democracy) open letter (pdf) to Stephen Gash of the anti-Muslim hate group, ‘Stop the Islamisation of Europe’ in anticipation of SIOE’s planned demo outside Harrow Central Mosque on December 13.

The administration of the Harrow Central Mosque has some very dodgy affiliations.

YMOUK is the youth wing of Jamaat-e-Islami. The Islamic Forum Europe (IFE) is also Jamaat-e-Islami linked, and also runs a blog on which senior IFE people praise the likes of the jihadists, al-Awlaki and Abdullah Azzam. Islam Channel is run by a convicted Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood/an-Nadha terrorist, and broadcasts material by Hizb ut Tahrir, and Yasir Qadhi, and a host of other vicious and extreme bigots. Islam Expo is run by Mohammed Sawalha, who is a fugitive Hamas commander, who has been named in US court documents as a key Hamas fundraiser. And finally, Islam Online is al-Qaradawi’s website.

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Also posted in Activism, Anti Muslim bigotry | 21 Comments

British Jews and Muslims Against Extremism

By Faisal | Published: November 21, 2009

There is a superb article by Martin Bright in the Jewish Chronicle, in which he calls to British Jews and British Bangladeshi Muslims to form an alliance and take on the scourge of extremism of the neo-Nazis and the Islamists in East London.

I recently had the pleasure of addressing an audience of well-informed, liberal and politically committed Jews on the rise of radical Islam in Britain. I suggested it was a tragedy that east London, for so long associated with Jewish immigration and the fight against fascism, had now become the home of the Islamist extreme right.

How had East London Mosque and the London Muslim Centre, both dominated by Jamaat-i-Islami (South Asia’s version of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood) come to be the first port of call for British politicians? What did the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, think he was doing earlier this year when he praised ELC and LMC for tackling prejudice? The reality is that the institutions have played a central role in promoting a sectarian Islam that represents only one strand of thinking within the magnificent diversity of this world religion.

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Also posted in Activism, Anti Muslim bigotry, Antisemitism | 14 Comments

Symbols at EDL protests undermine their ‘non-racist’ claims

By Guest | Published: November 5, 2009

This is a guest post by Lucy James, a research fellow at Quilliam. She writes in a personal capacity.

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In the past months the English Defence League (EDL) have held a series of protests in UK cities: Luton (from where they have been banned from protesting for 3 months), Birmingham, Manchester and Newport (hosted by the allied Welsh Defence League). Last Saturday they arrived in Leeds.

I have been following each of these protests closely. Aside from their chants, placards and police scuffles, it seems to me that they are adopting a couple of symbols in a way which is somewhat concerning and needs highlighting:

  1. The Nazi salute: Photographic evidence of this can be found in Birmingham, Newport, and Leeds among others.
  2. The Israeli flag: I witnessed this first-hand in Manchester, and it was given considerable prominence in Leeds. But it has been present from early on, for example in Birmingham.
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Also posted in Anti Muslim bigotry, Your View | Tagged | 8 Comments

A Leeds report: stand-off between EDL and UAF

By Guest | Published: November 4, 2009

This a cross-post of an article from Pickled Politics by The Common Humanist

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The 31st of October was an un-seasonally warm day in Leeds and things, as they say, were afoot. The English Defence League, or EDL, was to hold a rally in City Square, near the train station in Leeds, at 1pm. On the nearby Headrow, outside the City Library, Unite Against Fascism (UAF) a counter demo would be held. So I thought it was time to investigate both these demos and this is what I found.

What are my concerns here? Well, I believe in freedom to protest and freedom of speech but I am worried about violence: elements in the EDL have form on this but I hope West Yorkshires Finest can act as a deterrent.

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Also posted in Activism, Anti Muslim bigotry | Tagged , | 4 Comments

A Good Day For Democracy

By Effendi | Published: November 3, 2009

Shaaz Mahboob has a good article on Saturday’s demonstration by the BMSD against Al-Muhajiroun.

Anjem Choudary’s chums abandoned their own demo, of course, and the field was left open to the supporters of liberal democracy. But to be precise, when I say “open”, I am ignoring the identity politics played by the organisers of the Mulsims4UK counter-demonstration, who made it a point to distance themselves from the Secular Democracy message of the BMSD counter-demo.

As Shaaz mentions:

Sadly, we were not joined by the Islamic Society of Britain and Inayat Bunglawala’s group, Muslims4UK, who called off their own counter-demonstration. Also, disappointingly, we discovered that Inayat Bunglawala had formally requested that the police set up a separate pen, so that they would not have to stand with pro-democracy and anti-sharia Muslim groups such as us. This sort of sectarianism is incredibly damaging, not only to Muslims, but Britain as a whole.

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Also posted in Activism, Secularism | Tagged | 11 Comments

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