It’s an unlikely setting for an ongoing night-after-night street protest.
However, hundreds of people have been gathering in Thurncourt Road, on Leicester’s Thurnby Lodge estate, for some weeks now to protest against an Islamic charity’s plan to turn a disused Scout hut into a community centre and prayer room.
On Friday, the number of people taking part swelled towards the 400 mark – with about 50 police officers there to oversee it.
Priyamvada Gopal examines the double standards that are applied to terrorist attacks.
A group of church leaders, community groups and political partiesare preparing to unite against the English Defence League (EDL) this weekend.
EDL members are expected to descend upon Chelmsford town centre on Saturday, 18 August and United Chelmsford is preparing to march. The protest coincides with the first day of V Festival at Hylands Park.
United Chelmsford’s Celebration of Unity will be starting from Tindal Square at 11.30am and marching through the city at 1pm, the group expects their numbers to swell to 200 as they take a stand against the EDL.
Malcolm Wallace, Secretary of Chelmsford TUC, speaking on behalf of United Chelmsford, said: “This will be a magnificent demonstration of our City’s opposition to racism and islamophobia. The divisive policies of the EDL stand in sharp contrast to our multi-cultural Team GB and the spirit of the Olympics.”
Demonstration against the English Defence League, Tower Hamlets June 2010
In March this year the English Defence League’s political wing, the British Freedom party, launched a letter campaign aimed at persuading MPs who had signed Unite Against Fascism’s founding statement to withdraw their support from the organisation. The hook for this campaign was provided by a witch-hunting article by Andrew Gilligan (a journalist greatly admired by right-wing Islamophobes) who had accused UAF vice chair Azad Ali of being a fascist. The model letter provided by the BFP also included the claim that Azad Ali had been “exposed at the web site Harry’s Place” (which has been another source of inspiration for far-right racists).
It appears that the only positive response the BFP received was from Brian Donohoe, Labour MP for Central Ayrshire, who took up the issue after being contacted by George Whale, editor of the British Freedom website. To the delight of the BFP, Donohoe replied to Whale with a friendly assurance that he was pursuing the question of UAF on his behalf: “I have written to both the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary asking for an update on this website as I am sure the majority of these ‘signatories’ are unaware their names are listed there.” Donohoe also relayed to the Home and Foreign offices Whale’s accusation that UAF is an extremist group.
If there were Olympic medals being handed out for political spin then the man who had just introduced himself to me as “Tony Smith” was clearly going for gold.
I was interviewing him against a back drop of largely drunken men waving banners and chanting foul-mouthed racist abuse at a rally organised by the far-right English Defence League in the West Yorkshire town of Keighley.
“Tony”, who admitted he was giving me a false name, had a ready answer when I asked if their language and behaviour was acceptable for a Saturday afternoon political rally in a town where many British Asians live. “That is really unfair,” he told me. “It’s not about race. It’s not about colour. It’s about culture.”
The man known as Alan Lake, a key strategist and funder behind the racist English Defence League (EDL) is out of his job at a major international development bank.
The news comes the week after another shadowy EDL strategist, Chris Knowles, was sacked by Leeds council.
Lake, whose real name is Alan Ayling, masterminded the EDL’s strategy of bringing together football hooligan firms into an anti-Muslim army of racist street thugs.
A man who took revenge on a kebab shop after his girlfriend was jailed for being part of a racist mob which launched a drunken attack on it has himself now been sent to prison.
Gavin Mossop, 27, spent one night in prison for contempt of court after shouting at the judge as he jailed the 11 racists in February. And he was back at the city’s Crown Court yesterday for his own drunken racist attack on the takeaway in Carlisle.
Mossop, who lives with his mother in Highmoor Park, Wigton, was jailed for nine months after pleading guilty to charges of taking revenge and racially aggravated public disorder.
Members of the National Front are planning to protest once a month at the site of a proposed new city centre mosque, Sky Tyne and Wear has learned.
The right wing group demonstrated against the building of a mosque in St Mark’s Road in Sunderland on Saturday, August 11. Police were forced to separate the protesters and anti-fascist groups as tensions heightened in front of worried residents.
Following the protest, the North East National Front (NENF) Facebook page announced the group will protest every month. The posting, which has been forwarded to Northumbria Police and Sunderland City Council, claimed that the NF “won the day”.
Until the discovery last year that a string of unsolved killings had been perpetrated by neo-Nazis, few in Germany considered far-right extremism a major threat.
After the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, security agencies around the world poured energy into fighting Islamist terrorism, and Germany did so with special urgency because several of the hijackers had lived in Hamburg. But the shift led to the neglect of other types of homegrown violence in this nation of 82 million people, critics now say, allowing a neo-Nazi movement to flourish.
Campaigners are due to hold two events to protest against a march organised by the English Defence League (EDL).
The far right extremist group was due to hold a demonstration in Walthamstow on Saturday, August 18, but has now postponed it until Saturday, September 1.
Umbrella campaign group We Are Waltham Forest has reacted by opting to hold two demonstrations in Walthamstow town square on both dates.
A spokesman for the group said: “We have to ensure both dates are well covered, so we need people to be understanding and to turn up in large numbers to show the EDL that we don’t want them or their politics in our borough.”
Both its town square demos will begin from 11am.