Over the past year, the extremist groups has held a series protest marches around Britain in towns and cities with high Muslim populations, often targeted against mosques, that have erupted in violence and clashes with counter-demonstrations.
Director and founder of Faith Matters, Fiyaz Mughal, said that its actions are of “extremists in their own right, masquerading as a grass roots social force, supposedly bringing their brand of community resilience against Muslim extremists’.”
“Letting these groups going unchecked destroys what we stand for and damages our image globally,” he warned about the government’s refusal to outlaw the EDL.
The report, authored by Professor of Modern History at Teesside University, Nigel Copsey, said that the EDL is best understood as an “Islamophobic, new social movement, born of a particular unattractive and intolerant strand of English nationalism.”
“It is symptomatic of an English identity crisis, drawing on native English ‘identity’ as its principle weapon against an ‘alien’ Islam identity,” it said.
Copsey said the EDL had far-right links but was not even the “street-fighting” wing of the British Nationalist Party formed in the 1980s.
'It did not emerge from the established far right but from several ultra-patriotic ‘anti-Jihadist’ groups with origins in the football casual subculture,” he said.
According to a copy of the report obtained by IRNA, the EDL’s foot-soldiers are described as a “loose coalition of hardcore football hooligans, far-right extremists and politically unsophisticated white working-class youth.”
It also identified it as part of a much broader “counter-Jihad movement” with established links with like-minded groups in Europe and with right-wing conservatives in North America, most recently, the anti-Islamic wing of the American Tea Party movement, Copsey said although the EDL may run out of steam, he warned that it could well prosper if it is buoyed up by support from the US and elsewhere in Europe.
“It certainly has the potential to be a potent ‘lightning-rod’, attracting hostility towards Muslims,” he said, adding that the extremists should “not be taken lightly.”
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