Not Just Barking

Out there on the right, there are many siren voices. From the National Front (NF) of the 1960s and 70s, which split when Messrs Tyndall and Webster fell out, to the British National Party, which also looks as if it may split, to UKIP, to the English Defence League (EDL), there is a tradition in this country of frightening white people by raising the spectre of brown and black people.

More recently, the frightening has moved on to the presently more fertile territory of Islamophobia. Here, the paranoid right try to sell the idea that white (and by default Christian) folk are being “colonised”, about to become a minority in their own country, and that Sharia law is being imposed. It’s complete drivel. It’s flagrantly irresponsible. And it’s peddled by quite rational and apparently sincere individuals.

So what should be dismissed as ranting wingnuttery starts to gain traction. And one individual typical of the breed is former UKIP parliamentary candidate Paul Weston. He contested Cities of London and Westminster last May, garnering all of 664 votes. He believes that the English are being ethnically cleansed, that there will be a civil war in the UK within the next 20 years, and that “we are being colonised here in the UK”.

Weston has just produced another tirade against what he calls “Socialist enabled Muslim fraud” on the Gates Of Vienna blog, which majors on the supposed war between Islam and Christianity. Links from Gates Of Vienna are provided to one Andrew Breitbart (he of heavily edited ACORN “sting” and Shirley Sherrod videos fame), and the International Civil Liberties Alliance, which features such luminaries as Geert Wilders and the EDL.

Weston kicks off with a neatly executed smear: he asserts that Barack Obama called the Muslim call to prayer “the sweetest sound in the world”. However, what the Prez said to the NYT was rather different: “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset”. And that’s the least of it: Weston describes Muslims in Pakistan as representing a “seventh century mono-culture”.

There is much more of this tedious flannel, but to save readers the trouble, and get to Weston’s real purpose, one can go directly to this part of his closing paragraph: “We are already witnessing the early stages of civil war in England, as the native EDL square [sic] up to foreign Islam and their Communist allies”.

And how did I discover this truly off the wall specimen? The heads up came from a Zelo Street regular – who had clicked on the first of yesterday’s Daley Dozen blog links. Yes, Iain Dale. And Dale called Weston’s post “disturbing evidence [my emphasis] of electoral fraud”. There’s mainstream and Tory for you.