Caught in the Middle

The EDL and other groups have been busy, as we know. And I must agree with what John Denham said on Saturday:

If you look at the types of demonstrations they have organised, the language used and the targets chosen, it looks pretty clear that it's a tactic designed to provoke, to get a response and create violence.

One of these tactics has been the use of Israeli flags. Not that the Israeli flag is inherently provocative but these groups know very well that waving the flag will annoy Islamists and Muslims alike (albeit for different reasons). The inevitable side-effect is that Islamists pathetically try to link these groups with Israel supporters.

MPACUK has posted two articles pushing this line. One entitled "Exposed! The EDL and Its Zionist Connection" had this to offer as proof of the headline's claim:

Their ruse is that they were marching against 'extremism' but their motives were soon revealed by their racist chanting and by the unfurling of an Israeli flag by the EDL skinheads.

The other ran under the line "Far-Right and Zionist Thugs Unite Against Palestinians" and again contained no evidence beyond the use of the Israeli flag.

Other Islamist groups are more subtle. The IHRC has two articles about the EDL events (here and here). Is it a coincidence that the pictures chosen for them just happen to be ones with an Israeli flag prominently placed?

All this leaves supporters of Israel in the middle. We know very well the games being played but are powerless to stop it. I suppose all we can do is declare clearly and loudly that supporters of Israel do not support the far-right and hope that people are intelligent enough not to be taken in by these tricks.

All Forgiven in the EDL?

Richard Bartholomew was posting about the EDL many months ago. In August he reported on a blog post from one Paul Ray bemoaning the involvement in the EDL of Chris Renton (apparently a BNP activist). In that post Ray announced his disassociation from the EDL. Interesingly, Ray has recently been posting somewhat about the EDL on his blog but the post from August has been deleted. Still accessible from google's cache though.

Is all forgiven now just as the EDL makes the headlines?

Thoughts on the EDL

The English Defence League has been busy recently and gained quite a bit of public focus. Much of the discussion has been concerned with whether the group (if they can be called a cohesive group) is racist or not and indeed a lot of time has been spent trying to uncover links to racist groups. This is, in my opinion, both wrong and dangerous.

It's wrong because the EDL are wrong even if they are not racist and it is dangerous because we may convince ourselves that the problem with the EDL is racism and thereby be unable to oppose them if we find that actually they're not racist (the question of whether they are racist or not is one I will come back to in another post soon hopefully).

So what really is the problem with the EDL? Well, I think there are many things and here are a couple.

The first is that we do not need any group to protest against Islamists, we have the police for that. If a group of people are planning to break the law to maim and kill Britons then the British police are the people charged with the responsibility of preventing that. Seen in this light we find that the EDL is little more than a vigilante group. One could argue that it is necessary to oppose the opinions of Islamists and that this is what the EDL is for. But we all know that it is useless for non-Muslims to try and convince those extreme Muslims that they've got Islam wrong. The very notion is absurd.

The second reason springs from the first. If the EDL is a vigilante group determined to fight/oppose Islamists whose definition are they using? A major danger with a group that has been set up to deal with one specific and narrow issue is that they find their remit too small. The number of actual dangerous Islamists in the UK is very small but the EDL will start to find Islamists everywhere because they've set themselves up to find them and oppose them.

The danger of the EDL is not that they're racist; it is that they are a vigilante group. If we treat them simply as racists we will get bogged down in debates about whether or not that is true and how best to oppose them. Treat them as the vigilantes they want to be and we can all take a clear and unequivocal stand against them without concerning ourselves with their ideas and beliefs.