Saudi Crown Prince commits to interfaith tolerance, says Anglican church

March 9, 2018 Article

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met the head of the Anglican church in London on Thursday and promised to promote interfaith dialogue as part of his domestic reforms, the British faith leader’s office said.

Prince Mohammed is making an official visit to London to promote Saudi Arabia as a tolerant, modernising economy and build a wider trade and investment relationship with Britain, a long-term defence ally.

On the second full day of his first foreign tour since becoming heir apparent to the Saudi throne last year, Prince Mohammed also had meetings with finance minister Philip Hammond, bankers and lawmakers, and was due to dine with Prime Minister Theresa May at her country residence later.

State oil giant Saudi Aramco, whose lucrative stock market listing Britain is vying with the United States to attract, signed a preliminary deal to pursue international gas opportunities with Royal Dutch Shell.

Prince Mohammed began the day with a symbolic visit to Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion of millions of Christians globally, at Lambeth Palace in central London.

“The Crown Prince made a strong commitment to promote the flourishing of those of different faith traditions, and to interfaith dialogue within the Kingdom and beyond,” a statement from Lambeth Palace said.

“The Archbishop shared his concern about limits placed on Christian worship in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and highlighted the importance for leaders of all faiths to support freedom of religion or belief, drawing on the experience of the UK.”

Saudi Arabia does not tolerate non-Muslims practising their faith publicly, forcing Christians to risk arrest by praying in private homes.

YEMEN CONFLICT

Prince Mohammed and Welby viewed early texts from the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths, including fragments of a Koran manuscript found in a Birmingham University library in 2015 that is thought to be among the world’s oldest.

Earlier this week, Prince Mohammed met Coptic Pope Tawadros II at Cairo’s largest Coptic cathedral, part of his drive to rid the Gulf Arab kingdom of its reputation as a global exporter of an ultra-conservative brand of Islam.

Welby also “voiced his distress” at the humanitarian situation in Yemen, the statement said. A Saudi-led coalition is fighting a war in Yemen in which 10,000 people have died and 8.3 million people have been left dependent on food aid.

May, whose government has drawn widespread criticism for approving 4.6 billion pounds ($6.35 billion) worth of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, was likely to repeat her own concerns over the humanitarian situation in Yemen during a private dinner.

That criticism over the Yemen war and noisy demonstrations have contrasted with the warm welcome from the British government given the crown prince.

On Wednesday, Prince Mohammed met Queen Elizabeth for lunch and later met May to agree to target a 65 billion pound ($90 billion) increase in trade and investment ties.

A government spokeswoman said Prince Mohammed met with Hammond on Thursday, and two sources said there was also a meeting with Standard Chartered group chief executive Bill Winters and HSBC CEO John Flint. No further details of either meeting were available.

($1 = 0.7241 pounds)

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Categories: Anglican Church, Coptic Pope Tawadros II, Interfaith tolerance, Lambeth Palace, Mohammed bin Salman, News, Peter Welby

Buddhist mobs target Sri Lanka’s Muslims despite state of emergency

March 7, 2018 Article

Sri Lanka shut down social messaging networks including Facebook on Wednesday to control violence targeted at the country’s minority Muslims, officials said, even after the imposition of emergency in the Buddhist-majority island.

Tension has been growing between the two communities in Sri Lanka over the past year, with some hardline Buddhist groups accusing Muslims of forcing people to convert to Islam and vandalising Buddhist archaeological sites.

Some Buddhist nationalists have also protested against the presence in Sri Lanka of Muslim Rohingya asylum seekers from mostly Buddhist Myanmar, where Buddhist nationalism has also been on the rise.

Police clamped an indefinite curfew in the central highlands district of Kandy where the violence has been centred since Sunday following the death of a Buddhist youth in an altercation with a group of Muslims.

Buddhist mobs attacked mosques and businesses belonging to Muslims overnight, residents told Reuters on Wednesday, even after President Maithripala Sirisena imposed emergency for seven days to control the violence.

Police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekara said there had been “several incidents” throughout Tuesday night in the Kandy area, famous for its tea plantations.

“The police arrested seven people. Three police officers were injured from the incidents,” Gunasekara told Reuters. There was no information about how many civilians had been wounded, he said.

Some of the violence has been instigated over social media with postings appearing on Facebook threatening more attacks against Muslims, the government said.

On Wednesday, it said Facebook, Viber and Whatsapp would be blocked across the country for three days.

Sri Lanka is still healing from a 26-year civil war against Tamil separatists that ended in 2009, with reports of rights abuses on both sides. Muslims make up 9 percent of the 21 million population, the smallest minority after ethnic Tamils, most of whom are Hindus.

UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said he was alarmed by the recurring episodes of violence against ethnic and religious minorities in Sri Lanka and sought accountability.

“There should be no impunity, either for the incitement that led to the attacks, or the attacks themselves,” he said in a speech to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The U.S. State Department in a security alert warned of the possibility of further unrest in Kandy, famous for a temple said to contain the tooth of Buddha.

A government minister said the violence in Kandy had been whipped up by people from outside the area. “There is an organised conspiracy behind these incidents,” Sarath Amunugama, a senior minister, told reporters in Colombo.

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Categories: Myanmar, News, Persecution, Rohingya, Sri Lanka, State of Emergency

Ogniwo – ‘The Link’ Is A Group That Should Concern Us All

March 1, 2018 Article

Ogniwo – ‘the Link’, is an organisation that describes itself as a ‘Patriotic Association’ and is active mainly in London but also has chapters in Cambridgeshire and the South of England. Some of their members and sympathisers are known to come from football hooligan circles and can be seen on social media photographs making fascist salutes and with far-right symbolism.

One of the real concerns that we have raised previously within Faith Matters has been that language barrier has created difficulties for UK based statutory agencies in understanding the risks and threats that there are to settled communities of Polish heritage in the United Kingdom and more so, to communities who arrived in the UK after the Accession of States like Poland into the European Union.

Whilst the vast and overwhelming majority of settled communities of Polish heritage in the UK get on with their lives with a view to building themselves a better life, a small number carry with them views and ideologies that directly clash with the pluralism that we take for granted in the UK. This pluralism needs to be defended by knowing and understanding the risks that such groups pose.

Supporters of Ogniwo

An example of this clash in values can be demonstrated through social media posts associated with such groups. For example, the banner on this photo, posted on Ogniwo’s Facebook page and deleted since, states that Europe must remain white. The exact translation reads as, “Europe will either be white or uninhabited”.

‘Europe Will be White or Uninhabited’

Ogniwo is linked to a Polish-based right-wing historian, Tomasz Panfil, who is their honorary member and visited them in the UK on several occasions. His next visit to the UK has just been announced, he is due to speak in Stafford and Southampton on the 10th and 11th of March. Panfil is a historian from the Lublin Institute of National Remembrance.

He is known in Poland for his attempts to destigmatise far right symbolism. For example, as an ‘expert’ witness, he claimed in a Polish court during the trial of a Polish neo-Nazi charged with using banned Nazi symbols, that the Swastika can have many different meanings and is not necessarily a Nazi symbol, depending on its orientation. The perpetrator in question was subsequently released.

Panfil also claimed a symbol of Celtic cross with the words ‘White Power’ had “patriotic intentions” behind it. He also claims the German Nazi party was in fact a left-wing party and that the situation of Polish Jews under Nazi occupation “did not look very bad”.

Association with Violent Football Hooliganism

Ogniwo is also associated with Polish neo-Nazis who were convicted of violent disorder at an anti-fascist rally in Liverpool. The leader of Ogniwo is one Mariusz Zawadski and individuals associated with Ogniwo include Lukasz Pietraszek who was recently jailed for violent disorder in Liverpool. The Judge stated the following around the violence in Liverpool, where a woman was scarred for life, a man suffered a broken nose and a police officer was knocked unconscious.

Judge Andrew Menary QC, in sentencing the perpetrators said that the “self-styled Polish hooligans” wore “deliberately intimidating face masks” and tops that showed violent imagery. He went onto add:

“There was nothing benign about the hooded tops that those men were wearing. It was planned mob violence.”

The leader of Ogniwo’s views are pretty easy to ascertain when this photo of him came to light on social media. The top he is wearing states:

“Death to the enemies of the fatherland”

Mariusz Zawadski – wearing a top emblazoned with ‘Death to the enemies of the fatherland’

Zawadski’s views about Muslims are also evident through these Facebook postings. Interestingly, the use of a pig in the picture moves the post into one which is anti-Muslim, even though the person on the floor seems to be symbolised as an ISIS supporter. Instead of targeting IS supporters and sympathisers, Zawadski makes clear his disdain for Muslims.

Anti-Muslim Postings

 

 

Association with Marian Kowalski

Ogniwo have also hosted Marian Kowalski, who has been extensively written about by Faith Matters in the report entitled, ‘The Changing Face of Hate in Poland: From Anti-Semitism to Anti-Muslim Hate in Poland’. Kowalski’s anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim comments, allied to his provocative stunts which include support for white supremacist, Janusz Walus, highlight the nature of the associations that Ogniwo keep.

Kowalski was recently meant to speak at a Polish restaurant in Ealing and failed to attend after his views were publicly highlighted. 

Marian Kowalski and Mariusz Zawadski, Ogniwo

In line with sympathies that Marian Kowalski has around Janusz Walus, Ogniwo have praised Walus and run online campaigns for him. For example, they highlight campaigns outside the South African Embassy in London where they call for the release of the white supremacist.

Ogniwo and Postings About Janusz Walus

 

Ogniwo and Firearms Training Sessions

Worryingly, the group recently was the co-organiser of a training session in the use of firearms and military tactics in September 2017. The instructor, an ex-soldier from Polish special forces, is not known to have any far right sympathies and we would like to stress that his involvement in training members of Ogniwo, should not imply that he believes in far right ideology or groups. The firearms training session was marketed mainly in far-right circles.

Ogniwo and Military Training

These are some of the photographs that were passed to us around the military training. 

 

A follow up training session with the same instructor is due to take place in Evesham, West Midlands on the 9th-11th of March. ‘Ogniwo’ is not listed as an organiser this time but the organiser, a group of military enthusiasts calling themselves ‘Grom Legion JR 2305’ lists ‘Ogniwo’ as their “partners” on their website.

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Categories: Far Right groups, Grom Legion JR 2305, Janusz Walus, Judge Andrew Menary, Liverpool, Lukasz Pietraszek, Mariusz Zawadski, Nazi, Neo-Nazi, News, Tomasz Panfil

Britain is facing serious far-right terrorism threat, top UK officer

February 27, 2018 Article

Britain faces a new and significant threat from organised far-right terrorism, the UK’s most senior counter-terrorism officer said on Monday as he revealed police had foiled four plots by right-wing extremists in the last year.

“The right-wing terrorist threat is more significant and more challenging than perhaps public debate gives it credit for,” Mark Rowley, London’s Assistant Commissioner, told reporters.

Britain has been a prime target for homegrown and foreign Islamist militants since the 2001 attacks on the United States. But Rowley said until the last two years, far-right activity was limited to unpleasant protests and hate crimes, with serious incidents limited to the actions of isolated individuals.

The full transcript of the speech made by AC Mark Rowley can be read HERE

The MI5 domestic spy agency are now involved in investigating the far-right and he warned that British groups were seeking links with international extremists.

“It’s a significant part of the terrorist threat. Right-wing terrorism wasn’t previously organised here,” Rowley said.

“There are many Western countries that have extreme right-wing challenges and in quite a number of those the groups we are worried about here are making connections with them and networking,” he said, declining to give further details because it was a new, live intelligence phenomenon.

Last year, there were five deadly militants attacks in Britain including one carried out by a man who drove a van into worshippers leaving a London mosque after developing a hatred of Muslims by reading extreme right-wing material online.

The previous year, a Nazi-obsessed loner murdered lawmaker Jo Cox in a frenzied street attack a week before the referendum on the European Union. Since then, Britain has banned National Action and two other spin-off groups, the first extremist right-wing organisations to be outlawed since the 1940s.

“COMMITTED TO VIOLENCE”

“For the best part of 18 months in the UK we have a homegrown, white supremacist, neo-Nazi terrorist organisation that is pursuing all the ambitions of any other terrorist organisation committed to violence,” Rowley said.

“That should be a matter of great concern for all of us.”

Since the first of the 2017 deadly attacks last March, Rowley said police had foiled 10 Islamist conspiracies and four far-right plots, although he said he could not provide details of these as they were subject to ongoing court cases.

To show the overall scale of the threat Britain faced, he said there were 600 terrorism investigations currently ongoing involving more than 3,000 suspects.

Over the last three years, terrorism arrests had doubled while in the same period some 2,000 people have been referred to the government’s counter-radicalisation Prevent programme, with a third of these over far-right concerns, he said.

Rowley, who next month steps down from the role he took on in 2014, said Islamist and far-right extremists were a toxic combination, feeding off each other and pursuing the same agenda of division, fear and hatred.

He reiterated British concern about extremists’ use of the internet and said he expected technology and internet firms would react to a mixture of persuasion and regulation as the banking sector had done.

He also said it was important that an agreement struck with the European Union for when Britain leaves the bloc in 2019 did not damage relations with their European colleagues.

“Whatever the arrangements, we need something that provides at least a good a platform for cooperation as we have today,” he said.

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Categories: Assistant Commissioner, CAGE, counter-extremism, Far Right groups, Met, Neo-Nazi, News, Prevent, threats

“France first”, far right’s Marechal-Le Pen says in comeback speech

February 24, 2018 Article

France should follow U.S. President Donald Trump’s lead and fight for “France first”, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, seen as a potential leader of France’s far right, told U.S conservatives on Thursday in her first public appearance in months.

The 28-year-old former lawmaker, granddaughter of National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of party leader Marine Le Pen, temporarily withdrew from politics after her aunt’s presidential election defeat last May.

But she has long been viewed in France as a possible future leader of the National Front, and the fact that she was a keynote speaker at a conference that both Trump and U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence were addressing was widely commented on in French media as posing a challenge for Marine Le Pen.

“I’m not offended when I hear President Donald Trump say ‘America first’. In fact, I want America first for the American people, I want Britain first for the British people and I want France first for the French people,” she said.

“I came here today to tell you there is a youth ready for this fight in Europe today,” she told thousands of activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland.

Marechal-Le Pen, who is more socially conservative and economically liberal than her aunt, did not say if or when she was planning to return to an active role in French politics, instead mentioning her plans to open a management and political science school, which she said should train tomorrow’s leaders.

But the reception for Marechal-Le Pen, who has been praised by right-wing U.S. media such as Breitbart, was in contrast to her aunt’s visit to Trump Tower in New York in January last year, during the French presidential campaign.

Marine Le Pen, who has long aimed to burnish her credentials with foreign appearances, did not meet either Trump or anyone from his team during that visit and was photographed having coffee in a public area of the building.

While Le Pen has over the past months softened her anti-EU, anti-euro comments, Marechal-Le Pen lambasted the bloc, which she said was “slowly killing” ancient nations.

Blaming immigration and political correctness, she said in a speech delivered in English: “France is in the process of passing the eldest daughter of the Catholic church to the little niece of Islam.”

Marine Le Pen is hoping that a National Front congress mid-March will help her reassert her authority.

But in the complicated Le Pen family, whose rows have made French headlines for years, another possible problem for her is her father, who she expelled from the party but who said he would gate-crash the congress.

Meanwhile her niece told the activists: “Let us build on what you have achieved here so that on both sides of the Atlantic, conservatism may prevail.”

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Categories: Breitbart, Donald Trump, France, France First, News

Second Austrian far-right group has anti-Semitic songbook – newspaper

February 21, 2018 Article

A second Austrian student fraternity has a songbook containing anti-Semitic lyrics making fun of the Holocaust and insulting Jews, a newspaper said on Tuesday, three weeks after it exposed a similar case that forced a far-right politician to quit.

The earlier case reported by Falter prompted the resignation of a prominent member of the anti-Islam Freedom Party (FPO), which became the junior partner in conservative Chancellor Christian Kurz’s government in December following elections.

Austria is the only western European country to have a far-right party in government.

Last month, left-wing weekly Falter reported on anti-Semitic lyrics in a songbook published by a student fraternity in Lower Austria, the province surrounding Vienna. That fraternity’s deputy leader was the FPO’s top candidate in an election for the regional parliament there, Udo Landbauer.

Landbauer eventually stepped down over the affair. After initially refusing to sack him, the party later said it was setting up a committee of historians that would examine its past and that of right-wing fraternities like Landbauer’s, which are often close to the FPO but not formally part of it.

On Tuesday, Falter reported that another fraternity, Bruna Sudetia based in Vienna, had a similar songbook, and that the head of that group is on the staff of FPO Infrastructure Minister Norbert Hofer.

The staffer, Herwig Goetschober, who works on social media, was not immediately available for comment. A spokesman for Hofer said Goetschober was sick but denied knowing of the lyrics published by Falter, adding that his songbook had a different content and layout.

“He has no knowledge of this other songbook. He also does not know who produced it,” the spokesman said.

The FPO says it has abandoned its neo-Nazi past and rejects anti-Semitism. It now focuses its criticism on Islam and even openly courts Jewish voters.

But the main group representing Austria’s tiny Jewish community, the IKG, says the FPO has done too little to address the long-standing anti-Semitism within its ranks. It sees fraternities as a breeding ground for the problem.

The IKG has also questioned whether the FPO’s historical commission will get to the bottom of anti-Semitism within fraternities. Many senior political party figures belong to a fraternity but the FPO has said it cannot force those organisations to cooperate with the commission.

“If it is true that the FPO cannot control the fraternities, then that probably confirms that fraternity members control the FPO,” IKG chief Oskar Deutsch told ORF radio at the weekend.

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Categories: anti-Semitism, Austria, Falter, Far Right groups, Holocaust, Jews, Neo-Nazi, News

Imam Muhammad Yasir Ayub Also Goes Into Anti-Shia Rants

February 12, 2018 Article

Yesterday we highlighted how this imam was involved in posting comments on his Facebook page that inflamed community divisions. A further observation shows how sometimes, hatred towards minorities spreads to anti-Shia hatred. Imam Ayub, who preaches in various mosques has also been highlighting his dislike of Shia Muslims through a series of postings on his Facebook page. These include the following:

Comments from Imam Muhammad Yasir Ayub

The comments include:

“So many hidden evil filthy dirty disgusting Shias within the Ahl us Sunnah Wal Jama’ah, in our masjids…….”

Not to be outdone by these statements he continues to post the following:

“Why do so many Sunnis on Facebook, have so many dirty deviants in their friends list? Go through your friends list once in a while and remove all dirty non-Sunnis”.

Not happy with these comments, he then starts on ‘Western ideology of love’. 

 

The assumptions that he makes are crude, wide sweeping and play into a ‘them and us’ narrative. That they – ‘westerners’, are somehow crude and that their ‘love’ leads to “vulgarity, crudity and indecency.”

Given these postings, we would hope that mosques review this Imam’s preaching within them. Until he can show that he rejects these messages, there is no way that any mosque should allow such a preacher promoting these views to have access to a congregation.

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Categories: Imam Muhammad Yasir Ayub, Khutba, Opinions, Preaching, Shias, Western

Parisian eyes on Brussels court as Bataclan suspect goes on trial

February 4, 2018 Article

More than two years after Islamist militants killed 130 people in their city, Parisians will be hoping for some new insight into the carnage when the sole surviving suspect appears in public for the first time on Monday.

But Salah Abdeslam, who goes on trial under high security in his native Brussels in relation to a shooting that preceded his capture and Islamic State suicide bombings there in March 2016, has so far shown little inclination to talk.

Kept under 24-hour suicide watch near Paris, 28, the 28-year-old has been transferred to a high-security prison close to France’s northern border so that he can be ferried to the Belgian capital’s Palace of Justice daily. Hearings are scheduled to last all week in a case related to events four months after the Paris attacks of November 2015.

With a French trial not expected until next year, his Belgian appearance, along with alleged accomplice Sofien Ayari, a 24-year-old Tunisian, will be his first moment in public since his arrest on March 18, 2016, close to his family home in the poor, western Brussels borough of Molenbeek.

Both men face up to 40 years in prison for attempted murder linked to terrorism for shooting at Belgian and French police who raided a suspected hideout in the southern Brussels borough of Forest on March 15, 2016.

Prosecutors say Abdeslam and Ayari slipped away, leaving a third gunman holding out until he was killed by police marksmen.

Lawyers for Abdeslam, a French citizen born to and raised by Moroccan immigrant parents in Brussels, accept he was in Paris on Friday, Nov. 13, when gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 at a rock concert, near the national stadium and outside cafes.

His elder brother, with whom he ran a bar in Brussels, was among those who blew himself up. Prosecutors believe the younger Abdeslam, whom they accuse of running logistics for the attack including ferrying fighters from Syria across Europe, would have met the same fate had his explosive vest not malfunctioned.

How the pair, from a broadly secular background with a history of petty crime, were transformed into alleged cogs within extensive Islamic State cells operating in Belgium and France is unclear. A third brother, who has visited Abdeslam in prison, told a Belgian newspaper in December that he might be preparing to talk, inspired by a devout religious faith.

The trial had been due to start in late December but was delayed after Abdeslam belatedly reappointed a defence counsel, who then requested more time to prepare the case. Lawyers do not rule out that there could be further adjournments this week.

The trial has triggered a high alert in a city where 32 people were killed in suicide bombings at its airport and on its metro system by members of the same Islamic State-inspired group on March 22, 2016. That came four days after Abdeslam’s arrest and was prompted, officials believe, by fears among the Brussels cell that he might betray their plan under interrogation.

More than 100 police are expected to be deployed in and around Brussels’ mammoth 19th-century Palace of Justice, which dominates the skyline over the Renaissance city centre.

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Categories: Brussels, France, Islamic State, News, Parisians, Salam Abdeslam, terrorism

No Twitter – After the Darren Osborne Terrorist Attack, It is not business as usual

February 2, 2018 Article

Terrorist Darren Osborne has been found guilty of the murder and attempted murder of people outside the Muslim Welfare House in Finsbury Park in June 2017. Sentencing Osborne to a minimum term of 43 years, Mrs Justice Cheema Grubb said:

“This was a terrorist attack. You intended to kill.

“Mr Ali’s family said they could not imagine the trauma he felt as he died.”

The Judge also said that Osborne had “planned a suicide mission” and that he believed that he would have been shot and killed in his attempts to kill as many Muslims as possible in a terrorist attack. The Judge went onto add that:

“(Osborne) had been rapidly radicalised over the internet by those determined to spread hatred of Muslims”. 

This though is telling. Justice Grubb said:

“Your use of Twitter exposed you to racists and anti-Islamic ideology,” she added.

“In short, you allowed your mind to be poisoned by those who claimed to be leaders.”

In short, if Twitter thinks it is business as usual after this case, it better think again. Tommy Robinson’s account need shutting and if not, Twitter will have crossed a line from no return and opened itself up to potential legal claims.

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Categories: Darren Osborne, Finsbury Park, online, Opinions, terrorism

Darren Osborne guilty of Finsbury Park terror attack

February 1, 2018 Article

An anti-Muslim terrorist has been found guilty of murder and attempted murder after launching a terror attack on Muslims in Finsbury Park last June during Ramadan.

It took the jury just 59 minutes to find Darren Osborne, 48, guilty of the murder of Makram Ali, 51, and the attempted murder of nine others.

The 48-year-old had a ‘warped’ hatred of Muslims which was rooted in the ‘material he had watched on TV and online’, according to Jonathan Rees QC for the prosecution. The online materials were from far-right sources which included circulars distributed by Tommy Robinson, the founder and ex-leader of the English Defence League, via the far-right Canadian outlet Rebel Media.

Mr Osborne had used internet searches for Britain First and the English Defence League. He used Twitter to engage with the deputy leader of Britain First, Jayda Fransen, via an automated direct message.

One internet search took him to a misleading article headlined “Proof: Muslims celebrated terror attack in London” on the Infowars website.

Devices used by Mr Osborne, which included two iPhones and an iPad revealed that Osborne searched out various tweets, one such tweet, made by Tommy Robinson two days before the Finsbury Park attack read: “Where was the day of rage after the terrorist attacks. All I saw was lighting candles.”

Following the London Bridge terror attack, Mr Osborne is said to have browsed a tweet which read: “We have to go back to Churchill, Churchill never told us to hold vigils and sing songs, he told us to fight.”

Within hours of that attack, Osborne researched more Britain First materials online, and the murder of Christians in the Philippines.

For his long-term partner of twenty years, Sarah Andrews, however, Osborne was an ‘unpredictable’ man, who she had never considered a racist until he watched the BBC drama Three Girls in May. He then began research far-right materials online. In her mind, the documentary had such an impact on Mr Osborne that she likened it to a form of ‘brainwashing’, according to the judge.

His outward hostility towards Muslims meant that his daughter stopped bringing her Muslims friends home to visit.

But when it came to hiring the large Luton box van in Cardiff on 17 June, he was described as “polite and well-mannered”.

The outward hostility and racial hatred of Muslims Mr Osborne displayed at home would resurface again two days before the attack. At Hollybush Pub in Pentwyn, near Cardiff, Osborne burst into paroxysms of anti-Muslim rhetoric, stating that ‘all’ Muslims ‘were terrorists’ and that he was going to ‘kill all Muslims’, according to Callum Spence.

Mr Spence, a Royal Engineer, told the court that Osborne had mumbled ‘all our families are going to be Muslim. They are all going to be terrorists.’ He then claimed to be a serving soldier but could not disclose to Mr Spence which regiment he belonged to, insisting that he ‘will find out tomorrow’.

Andrew Parker, the landlord of the Hollybush pub, described Osborne’s ‘agitated’ state, adding that he ranted about Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party.

Osborne approached the bar and requested a pen as he ‘wanted to send a letter to Parliament’. CCTV footage presented to the jury showed Osborne writing a note which would later appear in the van following the attack.

The letter included statements about ‘feral’ and ‘inbred raping Muslim men’ who are ‘hunting in packs preying on our children’. He appended this section of the letter with a racist statement about Muslims ‘climbing’ back on ‘ya camels’.

He vented about the child sexual exploitation scandal in Rotherham, directing his rage at Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, whom, like some sections of the UK press, insisted that he was a ‘terrorist sympathiser’. The letter also blamed London Mayor Sadiq Khan for the terror attacks last year.

The ideological curve is most apparent when Osborne wrote: “islams ideology doesn’t belong here & neither does Sharia law.”

He expressed his desire to kill Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan, adding that killing the Mayor of London would be akin to a ‘lottery win’. To kill Jeremy Corbyn in Mr Osborne’s mind would mean ‘one less terrorist on our streets’. Another target was the Rochdale Labour councillor Aftab Hussain.

His original target was the ‘Al-Quds Day’ march, on June 18, expecting that Mr Corbyn would attend. Mr Osborne changed targets after road closures prevented from being close to the march. He then drove to Forest Hill, south London, asking a member of the public where the nearest mosque was at around 20:00 pm.

Learning that no such mosque existed in the area, he settled on Finsbury Park and was able to follow a motorist to the location in under thirty minutes.

When Osborne took the stand, he offered none of the racist bravado or conspiracy theories he spoke of days earlier. Here was a man who attempted to blame the attack on a man named ‘Dave’. The prosecution argued that his contradictory statements were proof of a ‘fabricated’ defence from a man who lacked the ‘courage of his convictions’.

This pattern of calculating behaviour is consistent with his statements given in the immediate aftermath of the terror attack.

Footage from the body camera of PC David Jones, the attending officer who is said to have handcuffed Mr Osborne in the aftermath of the attack, confirmed that Osborne was the sole driver and that Mr Osborne had claimed to have ‘lost control’ of the vehicle. He added that he had drunk a ‘couple of pints’ before the attack.

The loss of control and consumption of alcohol were proven false. Osborne had no trace of alcohol in his system, despite being described as a ‘functioning alcoholic’ who had been out of work for years and had previous convictions for violence. A ‘ticking time-bomb’ to some.

The injuries Makram Ali sustained after collapsing were described as ‘catastrophic’ as the Home Office pathologist Dr Simon Poole believed that Mr Ali was still alive when Osborne struck.

A group of Muslim men, dressed in traditional Islamic clothing, rushed over to assist, when Osborne struck again, injuring nine.

Commander Dean Haydon, of the Metropolitan Police, said: “From our investigation, it was clear that Osborne had planned to come to London with the intention of carrying out an attack against the Muslim community.

“Only he will know, but if Osborne’s aim was to create divisions and hate between communities, then from what I have seen, he has failed in that respect. The way that the local community in Finsbury Park – of all faiths and backgrounds – came together was astounding and this reaction was the same across London and the UK.”

Sue Hemming, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “Darren Osborne planned and carried out this attack because of his hatred of Muslims. He must now face the consequences of his actions.”

It would be short-sighted, however, to frame Osborne’s act of murderous terror as a response to terrorism or even child sexual exploitation.

His murderous intent was ideological, believing Islam to be an ideology which is incompatible with the UK, and calling for the banning of Sharia Law, arguments unrelated to either event. Osborne wanted to be a martyr for his ideological beliefs. He tried and failed to flee the scene, shouting: “I want to kill more Muslims”.

In short, Darren Osborne’s ideological conviction to ‘kill all Muslims’ went beyond words and turned into an act of terror which left one man dead and left others injured. The Prime Minister remains correct in her assessment that anti-Muslim hatred is a form of extremism.

The pathway to radicalisation is not linear but Osborne’s trajectory towards such thinking and actions in a few short weeks is alarming but not uncommon. Perhaps owing to how the violent rhetoric of some which trade complexities for binaries of racial division and hatred can overwhelm more vulnerable minds. There is a growing awareness among experts about the role mental health can play in the radicalisation process.

The ease in which Osborne accessed such hateful materials online is not a call for censorship but a call for an honest discussion about how the far-right continues to exploit sections of the internet. For example, Britain First reaped the benefits of a verification badge on Twitter, before its long overdue suspension from the platform. The extremist far-right movement still benefits from a verified Facebook profile.

In our 2016 annual report, titled A Constructed Threat: Identity, Intolerance and the Impact of Anti-Muslim Hatred, we called on social media platforms and search engine providers to do more to tackle the scourge of far-right extremism online. For example, we called on Google to “review how far-right websites are cheating its search algorithm through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to improve their rankings on stories related to crime, sexual exploitation, and terrorism”.

He will be sentenced tomorrow morning.

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Categories: Britain First, Darren Osborne, Far Right groups, Finsbury Park, News, terrorism, Tommy Robinson