In response to comments by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik that he both admired and had given advice to the English Defence League, Socialist Unity has pointed out that “the Islamophobia preached by this far right organisation is in tune with much of the Islamophobic propaganda that appears on Harry’s Place” and has reposted a screenshot of the EDL’s LGBT division recommending HP:
United East End, a coalition of activists, trade unionists and community groups in Tower Hamlets, is organising an event on Saturday 3 September to celebrate the East End’s diversity and express its opposition to the racist English Defence League, which has announced plans to march on the borough that day.
UAF is supporting the United East End coalition and is calling on anti-fascists from across the country to come to Tower Hamlets that day and show solidarity with local people opposing the EDL.
United East End and UAF are also organising a public rally onFriday 29 July, 7pm, at the London Muslim Centre on Whitechapel Road, London E1 1JQ.
Speakers will include the Right Reverend Adrian Newman, the new Bishop of Stepney, in his first public engagement in the borough.
Last week Tower Hamlets council unanimously agreed to support a United East End petition signed by representatives from a host of local organisations including East London NUT, the London Muslim Centre, Neighbours in Poplar, Rainbow Hamlets LGBT community forum, Tower Hamlets Inter-Faith Forum, Tower Hamlets Tenants Federation and Tower Hamlets Unison.
We will be publishing more information on the Tower Hamlets demonstration shortly, including leaflets, petitions and details of organisations backing the anti-EDL event. In the meanwhile, click here to download a PDF of the press release issued by United East End and backed by UAF, Tower Hamlets Inter-Faith Forum and the borough’s No Place For Hate campaign.
As theories abounded early Saturday as to the group or person behind the deadly twin attacks in Norway a day earlier, investigators began to face the fact that they were likely dealing with a home-grown terrorist.
Key suspect Anders Behring Breivik – a blond, 6ft, 32-year-old Norwegian – was arrested after a gunman opened fire on a summer camp of students who had met to spend a long weekend discussing politics, playing football and enjoying music. The camp was organized by the Workers’ Youth League and was a meeting for young socialists.
Breivik was also believed to be linked to the explosions that ripped through Oslo earlier in the afternoon.
As police began searching the flat that he shares with his mother in a wealthy area of western Oslo a picture began to emerge of a loner with links to right-wing extremists and who had been well-educated and enjoyed hunting.
Breivik appeared to come from an affluent background, attending a middle-class secondary school in the city. Apart from a traffic conviction ten years ago he has no criminal record, according to a Norwegian newspaper. He completed a year of national service in the army.
Breivik had set up his own business, Breivik Geofarm, and a month ago had started to run an organic farm in Hedmark in eastern Norway. There he reportedly produced and stored fertilizers that he was able to use in explosives.
He was known to be active on the internet, expressing extremist Islamophobic views on forums and criticizing immigration policies.
He recently claimed that politics today was not about socialism vs. capitalism but nationalism vs. internationalism. He argued on a Swedish news website that the media were not critical enough about Islam and claimed that Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands was the only “true” party of conservatives.
A commenter at little green footballs has pointed out that Breivik is also a fan of Pamela Geller, whose blog Atlas Shrugs he has cited.
Update: Breivik recommended other sites associated with the so-called counter-jihad movement, notably Jihad Watch, Gates of Vienna and the Brussels Journal. In December 2009 he wrote that he was working full time to promote the ideas of Islamophobes like Robert Spencer and Bat Ye’or.
He also wrote of his contacts with the English Defence League and Stop Islamisation of Europe and claimed to have given them advice on strategy. He attached importance to building “a Norwegian version” of the EDL to fight against anti-fascists and anti-racists.
Attempts to set up a Norwegian Defence League have been beset by problems, including accusations that the organisation had been “taken over by neo-Nazis“. It would be interesting to know what role if any Breivik had in this.
“NORWAY’s 9/11” – that was the headline in the first edition of today’s Sun, with the strap “‘AL-QAEDA’ MASSACRE”.
As we now know, far from being a member of Al-Qaeda, the individual charged with carrying out the terrorist attacks is an extreme right-wing Islamophobe, and his hatred of the governments and political parties whose immigration policies he holds responsible for allowing the “Islamisation” of Europe was evidently inspired by the “counter-jihad” movement promoted by Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and their European counterparts.
However, even a physical description of Anders Behring Breivik could not shake the Sun‘s initial conviction that Muslims were behind the atrocities. The paper reported: “Cops fear Islamist fanatics were out to kill PM Jens Stoltenberg, who was due to visit his political party’s youth camp on Utoeya Island – where a man was arrested. Witnesses claimed the gun maniac was blond with blue eyes and spoke Norwegian – raising fears that he was a homegrown Al-Qaeda convert.”
Racist thugs vandalised a Luton mosque during the early hours of Friday morning. They spray painted “EDL” and a swastika – the symbol of Nazi Germany – on the walls, and smashed windows.
Imaam Shahid Ahmed from the Madina Mosque in Luton spoke toSocialist Worker about the attack.
“We locked up the mosque at 11.30pm on Thursday night, everything was fine. When I returned at 4am for morning prayers I found the windows smashed. The words ‘EDL’ were painted on both sides of the mosque and a symbol [swastika] was also painted on one wall.”
Bedfordshire police attended the scene and the council immediately removed the racist graffiti.
Shahid said that the racists who attacked the mosque are ignorant. “They have no understanding or respect for any religion,” he told Socialist Worker. “This is a place of worship. We live in a multicultural society. We have to respect each other.”
Dave Barnes from Unite Against Fascism in Luton went to the mosque to offer solidarity.
“The attack on the Madina mosque was exactly the same form ofattack we saw on homes in Bury Park the night after the EDL protest in February – windows smashed and EDL painted on the walls. It is clear who is behind the attack.
“We have to stand united against racism. This attack has made us even more determined to organise to get as many people as possible to Tower Hamlets on 3 September to take part in the national protest to stop the EDL marching through the heart of London’s Muslim community.”
Friday night on The O’Reilly Factor, guest host Laura Ingraham did a brief report on the terrorist attacks that killed dozens of people in Norway. She began by saying, “In the ‘Back of the Book’ segment tonight, two deadly terror attacks in Norway, in what appears to be the work, once again, of Muslim extremists.” She went on to describe the attacks, which involved a bombing in Oslo and a mass shooting.
Ingraham then immediately transitioned into a segment on Park51, the planned Islamic community center near the World Trade Center, by saying, “In the meantime, in New York City, the Muslims who want to build the mosque at Ground Zero scored a huge legal victory. A Manhattan judge dismissed a lawsuit by former New York City firefighter Timothy Brown, who was trying to stop construction of the mosque. Bill O’Reilly spoke with a lawyer for the Muslim developers yesterday.”
Friday’s edition of The O’Reilly Factor was recorded, so, despite the fact that several outlets were already reporting at the time the show aired that the suspect in the attacks was not linked to any Islamist groups, Fox News viewers were left with that impression anyway.
Logistical constraints aside, it’s totally inappropriate to juxtapose news of a terrorist attack with a discussion of Park51 because they both purportedly have something to do with Muslims. This is an attempt to reanimate Fox’s failed strategy from last year of smearing Park51 by baselessly associating it with terrorism.
Ahead of Friday’s terror attacks in Norway, Norwegian police intelligence had warned of rising activity in far-right and anti-Muslim extremist groups, but didn’t view it as a major threat to Norway.
The man charged in the attacks, which killed at least 92 people, has been identified in media reports as Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year old with right-wing extremist and anti-Muslim views.
The Norwegian Police Security Service, or PST, in an annual threat assessment published in March, said “a higher degree of activism in groups hostile to Islam may lead to an increased use of violence.” PST also noted an “increase in the activity of far-right extremist circles in 2010,” and said, “This activity is expected to continue in 2011.”
However, the security service viewed Islamist extremism as a larger threat and concluded that far-right fringe groups or individuals wouldn’t constitute a major threat against Norwegian society.
The rhetoric on immigration and Islam in Norway has become harder in some fringe groups, Kari Helene Partapuoli, director of the nongovernmental Norwegian Centre against Racism, told Dow Jones Newswires.
Although the suspect’s online postings seem to express views largely consistent with anti-immigration right-wing movements, the apparent targeting of the Labor Party sets him somewhat apart, she said. “I think he views them as a party which represents multiculturalism,” she added.
She noted that the extreme-right movement in Norway is small and lacks the kind of organization it has in several other European countries, including neighboring Sweden. The lack of leading figures was also cited by PST as a factor hampering the growth of organized right-wing extremism.
Ms. Partapuoli noted that the discussion on immigration has been less prominent in Norway than in many other European countries. “We have seen relatively less of it in Norway; it has never been like in Denmark and Netherlands with their big debates about how multiculturalism has failed,” she noted.
“In that movement, they do label social democrats weak and naive, but this kind of hatred is not commonplace,” she said, adding that in his online rhetoric, the man “calls just about everyone who doesn’t agree with him a ‘Marxist’.” “I think he views them as a party which represents multiculturalism and this ‘Marxism’ threatening Norway,” Ms. Partapuoli said.
Wall Street Journal, 23 July 2011
Breivik’s hatred of the Labour Party certainly didn’t set him apart from the English Defence League, an organisation for which he expressed his admiration. When the EDL was founded, a Labour government was still in office in Britain and EDL propaganda consistently vilified Labour for having supposedly sold out to Muslims, as the placards below illustrate. They are from the first Dudley protest which took place in April 2010, in the run-up to the general election.
CAIR Chicago has posted an article by Ben Small which provides an analysis of the EDL for an American audience, making some interesting comparisons with the role of the Tea Party in the US.
Liam Wood, the convicted drug dealer – and also, it turns out, football hooligan – who heads the English Defence League’s LGBT division, had planned to hold a demonstration in Manchester tomorow, including leafleting Canal Street to warn the LGBT community about the threat from “Muslim homophobia”.
Alas, it would appear that the fight against the “Islamafactation of this country”, as Wood describes it, has suffered a setback. The self-proclaimed “gay Tommy Robinson” has bottled it and postponed the protest.
The Belgian burqa ban is set to be challenged before the country’s constitutional court by two women who willingly wear the full-body Islamic covering, their lawyer said Friday – one day before the new law was to come into effect.
“My clients are far from being the only ones,” Ines Wouters told the German Press Agency dpa. “This is really a head-on attack on the Muslim world.”
Belgian lawmakers earlier this year approved the new law, which punishes anyone caught in public places with their face completely or partially covered – thus preventing identification – with a fine of up to 137 euros (197 dollars) and up to seven days’ imprisonment. Officials argue that the law is a matter of safety. Concerns about women being forced into wearing the burqa have also been raised.
But Wouters described the measure as disproportionate and discriminatory, arguing that it will further stigmatize the Muslim community. She said she would file her lawsuit with the constitutional court over the weekend. It calls for the burqa ban to not only be reversed, but also suspended until the court rules on the matter.
One of her clients, a Belgian woman who converted to Islam and has worn the burqa for 13 years, is no stranger to challenging such bans. She succeeded in overturning a fine in the Brussels commune of Etterbeek, which implemented a similar local ban, Wouters said. Her other client is a Moroccan woman who moved to Belgium a few years ago.
Both women are married, in their 30s and don’t consider wearing the burqa “an obligation, but a choice they make,” Wouters said.
See also Open Democracy and Deutsche Welle.