The English Defence League (EDL), the anti-Muslim ‘street army’ composed largely of football hooligans that burst onto the front pages of British newspapers in the last year as a result of its often violent protests, is to hold a rally in Amsterdam in October, EUobserver has learnt.
The EDL is to demonstrate in support of Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-immigrant firebrand, with a recently launched French Defence League and Dutch Defence League, modelled on the English group, to join them along with other anti-Islamic militants from across Europe.
Formed in 2009, the EDL has held over a dozen often rowdy marches and demonstrations in cities across Britain over the last year. Protests that attracted only a couple hundred militants at the end of last year are now bringing thousands out. On Saturday (28 August) a rally in Bradford, West Yorkshire, home to the second-largest community of south Asians in the UK, turned ugly when members clashed with police and pelted anti-racist activists with bricks, bottles and smoke bombs. Thirteen were arrested, according to media reports.
Anti-racist watchdogs call the EDL one of the most worrying developments on the far-right scene in the UK since the 1970s and the days of the National Front, an openly white supremacist and neo-Nazi political party. The group now appears to be meeting with some success in exporting its novel brand of nativism to the continent, a combination of anti-Muslim vitriol, aggressive street marches and attempts to rope in football hooligan gangs by holding rallies around the same time as matches.
Graeme Atkinson, European editor of Searchlight magazine, a UK anti-fascist journal, says that the group is “tapping into a widespread and growing Islamophobia in society,” in a way that other far-right groups, weighed down with explicitly fascist iconography and discourse, have not been able to.
He warns against panic regarding the new group, but says authorities should not be blind to the growth of such movements, describing the new formation as “an utterly socially divisive, politically toxic ideology.”
