Same Politics, Different Words?
The BBC, reporting on the English Defence League demo in Luton today, writes: ‘The EDL group chanted “Muslim bombers off our streets” and held banners aloft, some of which read “No more mosques”.
The lead article in the Guardian today, reporting on David Cameron’s big ‘security’ speech in Munich, is entitled: ‘Cameron tells Muslim Britain: stop tolerating extremists’. Cameron arguably went even further than that tag-line suggests. He spent most of the speech pontificating on what he sees as a problem of Muslim extremism in Britain and is quoted as saying such things as, “instead of ignoring this extremist ideology, we have got to confront it in all its forms”, and “Europe needs to wake up to what is happening in our countries[;] We need to be absolutely clear on where the origins of these terrorist attacks lie - and that is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism”.
The EDL are racist, fascist thugs. David Cameron is the British prime minister. There is a distinct similarity of sentiment in their respective (disrespectful) public statements. How can it be that on the same day in history a criminally ignorant group of racists and the British prime minister have actually given public expression to similar types of Islamophobia? Cameron is scapegoating and scaremongering. In so doing he’s sanctioned and given governmental license to the militant racism and Islamophobia of the EDL. I’m incredulous - but what should one really expect when there’s an extremely ideologically conservative government in power.
