Johann Hari offers his assessment of last Saturday’s protest. “Communists mingled awkwardly with fascists”, he tells us approvingly, though unlike Tatchell he does at least have the honesty to admit that fascists participated in the demonstration.
Hari complains that a member of the Worker Communist Party of Iran was arrested for provocatively brandishing “silly cartoons of the Mohammed that some fundamentalist Muslims have declared to be blasphemous”.
The cartoons in question were in fact the most explicitly racist of the series published by Jyllands-Posten: one of the Prophet with a bomb as a turban and another of a wild-eyed Prophet wielding a knife, with two terrified veiled women cowering behind him – the implication of course being that Muslims are terrorists and misogynists.
We look forward to Hari defending the right of anti-semites to parade round Trafalgar Square with a caricature of a hook-nosed Jew counting money. After all, we have to defend freedom of expression at all costs, don’t we?
Posters with the phrase “America’s latest hero is a Muslim straight out of jail” has been banned from the Tube by London Underground (LU).
Those who question whether the far right was present at Saturday’s ‘March for Free Expression’ in Trafalgar Square are referred to the BNP’s report, which states that the rally was attended by “a delegation from Civil Liberty, the organisation established earlier this year to defend the rights of patriotic Britons…. Whereas there are scores of organisations, some of which are publicly funded, that defend ethnic minority groups in their usual divisive way by excluding the indigenous majority from taking advantage of their services, until recently there has not been one single organisation that was prepared to defend the hard won freedoms of the British majority…. About 40 CL supporters attended the protest rally and handed out literature which was well received by other defenders of our fundamental liberties.”
A representative from Islamophobia Watch will appear on the