A Little More on that ‘Britain First’ Rally in Telford, and Who It Was Who Got Arrested

In a previous posting I reproduced, and discussed, a “report” presented by the Europe correspondent for Australia’s ABC (our national broadcaster), James Glenday, which included what purported to be a description of something that happened at a rally held by “Britain First” in Telford.  In that account Mr Glenday wrote as follows – “Within five minutes there was trouble as Britain First came face to face with a counter-demonstration by anti-fascist protesters, who chanted “Nazi scum off our streets”.  More than 600 police just managed to keep the two groups separate, but a brick was thrown, sticks and insults flew, a woman was injured, and there were a few arrests.”

Upon reading these two sentences, I made the following observation, rhetorically addressing the reporter: “Given that you retreat into the passive voice, and do not tell us who did what to whom, I will assume that the Antifa threw the brick and the sticks, that the majority of insults and the worst insults were offered by the Antifa, and that the injured woman was either a Britain First member… attacked by a young thug from the Antifa, or else an Antifa harridan who got a bruise or two in the course of resisting arrest.  And I will also take the liberty of assuming that every person arrested was an Antifa ‘protester”. 

And guess what? I got most of it right. The only thing I got wrong was when I allowed for the possibility that the  injured woman might have been an Antifa female resisting arrest.  

Here, so that one can see exactly what sleights of hand James Glenday pulled in his “report” on events at the demo – a report not worthy to qualify as journalism – is the account that appeared in a local paper, the Shropshire Star (to which Mr Glenday could easily have resorted, if he had missed out on a good vantage point and did not in fact properly see what transpired).

http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2017/02/25/britain-first-in-telford-three-opposition-arrests-during-far-right-protest/

“Britain First in Telford: Three Opposition Protesters Arrested During Far-Right Demo.

‘Debris was thrown, insults were chanted, and three counter-protesters were arrested as Britain First demonstrated in Telford.

“More than 150 members of the far-right group gathered at Telford Central station on Saturday afternoon to march against the “horrors of Muslim grooming gangs” in the town they have dubbed the “new Rotherham”.

‘Some of the group spoke of an upcoming civil war against British Muslims, adding that they see “taking to the streets:” as the only way to make up for an establishment that refuses to act on their concerns.

They are not the only group who feel that way.  The British Pakistani Christian Association recently held four public rallies and marches – in London, in Birmingham, in Manchester, and in Glasgow and Edinburgh – to try to draw attention to the suffering of Pakistani Catholic Christian woman Asia Bibi, languishing on Death Row in Pakistan because she was accused of blaspheming against Mohammed, and to try to press the governments of Pakistan – and of the UK – to  act on her behalf and bring about her exoneration and release. – CM

“If everybody stood up for their own and we did it together, these Muslim monsters would be gone like that”, deputy leader Jayda Fransen said in the shadow of Darby House near Telford Shopping Centre, to cheers and applause from the crowd of men, women and children.

True enough… – CM

“They’re waging Jihad in this country.

Also true.  Jihad, of course, is not only waged through acts of open violence, such as the London bus and train bombings, or the beheading of Lee Rigby, or a stabbing spree aimed at unsuspecting tourists in central London.  It is waged by the infiltration and subversion of schools (“Trojan Horse”), by the ‘jihad of the pen’ (dawa, and pro-islamic propaganda), by the ‘jihad of the purse’ (the deployment of petrodollars, corrupting government, business and academe); by postal vote fraud on the grand scale and the corrupting of the political process by the use of the bribe of the Muslim vote bank.  Oh, there are, as ‘Hugh Fitzgerald’ has pointed out here at the Iconoclast and elsewhere on many occasions, many different instruments of Jihad, that ‘struggle’ to bring about Muslim dominance and to impose the Muslim system, the sharia.  John Quincy Adams noticed the same variety of method, more than two centuries ago: as he put it, in 1829, “…the commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.”  – CM

“We are currently under attack. It’s an overall takeover.  We are just giving our country away, and our authorities are bending over backwards to appease them.”

Also true. – CM

“Everyone in this entire town, in this country, and Europe, should be standing with us. If you’re not, you’re condoning paedophilia”.

And now for something that James Glenday completely refrained from mentioning.

“As Ms Fransen and party leader Paul Golding spoke to the crowd, they got shouts of support from passing traffic and pedestrians.

‘It was a very different atmosphere from their march past Addenbrooke House minutes earlier, where anti-fascists and unionists had gathered in a counter movement.

I observe that the Shropshire Star, though their reporting is better than that of Mr Glenday of Australia’s ABC, still fall down on their job somewhat; they do not tell us exactly how many antifa there were.  There were 150 Britain First marchers/ demonstrators.  How many ‘antifa’ were there??  Shouldn’t the police have been able to offer the reporter an estimate of numbers? – CM

‘Police on horseback made sure the two sides were kept separate, as insults and debris were hulred across the road, the two groups just metres apart.

‘A woman in her 50s on the Britain First side of the street was injured when she was hit by a missile in an incident that saw a 27 year old man from Gloucester arrested on suspicion of affray.

Bingo!  I wondered whether the injured woman would turn out to be a victim of antifa violence, and she was.  The Shropshire Star doesn’t say whether she was with the rally, or a bystander. Either way; one may safely assume that the missile was not thrown by a member of Britain First; for there is no mention of any Britain First member having been arrested. – CM

‘Two other counter-protesters were arrested (hm: the Shropshire Star didn’t say outright that the missile-hurling 27 year old man from Gloucester’ was a “counter-protester” but it’s pretty plain from this, that he was. – CM) including a 29 year old man from Selly Oak, in Birmingham, who was detained on suspicion of breaching Section 14 of the Public Order Act, which had been put in place to ensure protesters stayed in the car park and did not attempt to approach members of Britain First.

‘A 64 year old from Telford was arrested on suspicion of a breach of the peace.

‘Superintendent Tom Harding of West Mercia Police said the vast majority of people involved on both sides of the march had been peaceful.

“However, disorder broke out before and during the march which saw three arrests take place…

‘During his speech, Britain First leader Paul Golding likened the “patriots” who had marched in Telford to the Knights Templar, a Catholic military order closely tied to the Crusades. “We are the modern Knights Templar battling against Islam like our ancestors did for 1400 years”, he said.

Somewhat inaccurate; the military orders were founded in the course of the Crusades, which began some hundreds of years after the rise and initial onslaughts of Islam.  There were no “Crusaders” as such during the 7th-11th century; Charles Martel and his army holding the line for the Camp of the Infidels at Tours/ Poitiers in 732 did not do so as part of or under the aegis of any “order” of the Church.  They did so as representatives of the remnants of western latin civilisation.  He would have done better to have simply said that for 1400 years Infidels everywhere within the reach of the Ummah have had to defend themselves against Jihad, if they wished to remain alive and unsubjugated. – CM

‘He asked Britain First supporters to applaud the police, who he said had been fair and impartial.

“For the first time ever we’ve held a march in a town and the police have been cooperative, fair and reasonable”, he said.

That is indeed worthy of note. 

But, just to repeat, a comparison of the Shropshire Star account with that of James Glenday, on the spot, reporting for the ABC, shows clearly that Mr Glenday refrained from telling ABC readers that all three arrests were of members of the antifa ‘counter-protest’, which of course indicates that the violent actions such as the throwing of missiles – causing injury, in one instance, and not to an antifa member – were done by the antifa (another little detail that Mr Glenday preferred to omit).  If Mr Glenday somehow missed out on noticing this as it was happenng, he could have found it out afterwards by reading the Shropshire Star.  – CM