The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'edl'

2011/11/13

Police in London have arrested 179 members of anti-immigrant group the English Defence League, after members of this group were planning a violent attack on Occupy LSX protesters outside St. Paul's, in the name of defending God and Country and bringing to bear the old ultra-violence against some "Cultural Marxists". I imagine that outspoken EDL fellow traveller Anders Breivik would have approved:

The English Defence League had issued statements and made threats on Facebook to burn down protesters tents if they were still outside St Paul's on Remembrance Sunday, according to Phillips.
A statement by the EDL on Thursday was read to the Occupy LSX general assembly on Friday morning to make people aware that there was a threat being made. "They called us all sorts of names in the statement and said we should leave "their" church and stop violating their religion," said Phillips.
(Fascists claiming religion as exclusively theirs to defend and wield as a banner is nothing new: "Strength Through Purity, Purity Through Faith", as Alan Moore put it.)

Meanwhile, in eastern Germany, the story of three neo-Nazi fugitives who had been on the run since 1997 came to an end after two had shot each other in a trailer, and a third had been arrested after setting fire to the house they shared. Police searching the ruins of the house found a number of weapons, including the service pistol of a police officer killed by them during a bank robbery and a gun used in the execution-style murders of kebab shop owners across Germany. The three, calling themselves "Thüringer Heimschutz" (which Spiegel translates as "Thuringian Homeland Defence", though "Thuringian Homeland Security" is tantalisingly close) seemingly made little effort to hide, living openly among neo-Nazis in the town of Jena, which raises some questions of how they managed to avoid the attention of law-enforcement agencies:

Martina Renner, a ranking Left Party member in the state parliament, doubts these findings. "I think it's quite unlikely that those three lived for 10 years in Germany without having their cover blown." Even in 1998, she alleged -- when the manhunt began -- there were hints that the state's constitutional protection office had helped them disappear.
Renner says their alleged crimes even before 1998 were not just "petty crimes," but could have involved "explosions" of a "life-threatening magnitude." She says it's important to clarify just how deeply the state domestic intelligence office may have been involved. If a regional intelligence agency like that is prepared to "work with" such dangerous criminals, she says, the question arises whether the agency functions as an instrument to protect a democracy.

edl fascism germany neo-nazis politics religion rightwingers uk 6

2010/11/28

The heartwarming diversity of the far right (an ongoing series): Nationalist/anti-immigrant group the English Defence League, best known for their anti-Muslim marches in immigrant neighbourhoods (which, they stress, have nothing to do with hatred for brown-skinned people who pray funny and eat food that smells weird, but everything to do with saving Britain (Muslim population: 2.7%) from imminently becoming an Islamic dictatorship) are now attempting to reach out to neglected constituencies such as Jews and gays, promising not to kick their heads in if they join with them to fight the creeping Islamicisation of Britain:

It claims that these inter-faith tensions were brought into sharp focus last month when the senior US Jewish leader and Tea Party activist Rabbi Nachum Shifren denounced Islam at a EDL rally outside the Israeli Embassy in London. Israeli flags have also been spotted at several EDL demonstrations across the UK.
It's not clear how genuine the suspension of the far right's traditional anti-Semitism is. Perhaps, by showing that they can break heads with the best of them, the Jews (well, at least the ones in Israel) have won the respect of the far right; no longer the effete, treacherous, baby-blood-drinking Grabblers of the Protocols, they are now seen as God-fearing cowboy frontiersmen and/or fellow shaven-headed headkickers. Or perhaps the neo-Nazis intend to deal with them once the Muslims are out of the way.
As well as aggravating religious tensions, the EDL has established a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Division to "defend" gay people from Sharia law. There are also specialist divisions for women, soldiers and disabled people. The report warns these communities to be vigilant against "selective racism" and the EDL's attempts at manipulation.
The EDL are also making overtures to feminist groups, raising the spectre of the far left making common cause with Islamists; after all, the reasoning seems to go, being stoned to death under Sharia law would be worse than being struck regularly like a gong, as one of the EDL's fellow travellers from the BNP recommended.

edl rightwingers uk xenophobia 0

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