It seems the ever inflammatory Britain First, not happy with their national mosque targeting actions which we highlighted before, decided that they want to further stir up tensions in communities.They visited the Crayford mosque on the 1st of August and decided to hand out leaflets to individuals going into the mosque for their Friday, (Jummah), prayers.
The Britain First web-sites states that the flash protest was to highlight the “treatment of women under Islam and the segregation of women at the Crayford mosque.” These new scholars in Islam clearly do not realise that women and men pray separately in the vast and overwhelming majority of mosques and that if they are truly interested in supporting the rights of women, maybe they could support the following mosques that our partner organisation, Faith Matters, collated in the publicly available Developing Diversity directory. Here is a public directory of mosques that want to cater for the needs of women and men in their congregations and have actively taken measures in ensuring better service delivery for their congregations. We suspect that women’s rights and supporting faith institutions that promote and enhance women’s rights are not high up on the agenda of this far right group, but it is a topic that is used and abused by such inflammatory groups.
Not content with intimidating mosque worshippers, Britain First’s Facebook page has just posted up statements and pictures where they, “confronted the Vue Manager over their “Muslims only” policy.” Playing on the recent story about Vue cinema allegedly only letting in Muslims which we highlighted here, Britain First have decided to make this another campaigning theme. Furthermore, they state that, “Britain First will not allow anti-British discrimination to go unchallenged!”
What is interesting to note from the statement above is that the reader can infer that Muslims are therefore not British by virtue of the allegations made against Vue; that the people allegedly not let in, are British and one can assume that the ones entering the cinema are therefore not British in the eyes of Britain First. Forget the fact that there are British Muslims and put aside the fact the strenuous denials by Vue cinema that such actions took place and what we seem to have is a far right group which is fundamentally based on prejudice against Muslims. So their talk about tackling discrimination, is frankly, preposterous.
Facebook Posts
For a group tackling anti-British discrimination, you would therefore assume that Britain First would make an effort not to target mosques and harass elderly worshippers. We have raised their actions many times before here, here, here and here. You would also think that a group tackling discrimination might be active in taking off posts that promote toxic bigotry. Yet, a simple scan of Facebook comments in relation to their Vue cinema posting shows the following and with posts that are clearly racist and anti-Muslim in nature. We think that the statements on their Facebook page show the kind of audience that Britain First play to, so the next time they talk about countering discrimination, just remember these posts.
