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On 21 March at a demonstration in Bolton, Greater Manchester Police arrested 74 protestors from the rival English Defence League (EDL) and Unite Against Fascism (UAF). Most of the arrested were UAF supporters. According to the police:
"We have seen groups of people, predominantly associated with the UAF, engaging in violent confrontation...It is clear to me that a large number have attended with the sole intention of committing disorder and their actions have been wholly unacceptable...they acted with, at times, extreme violence."
A UAF spokesman responded with that organization's by now characteristic combination of aggressive assurance and petulant whimpering: "As soon as we arrived at the square we received hostility from police officers. We were certainly not the violent ones, we had come with the intention to protest peacefully against racism and fascism. However, the police stormed into our side of the square and started picking out UAF leaders and arresting them before anything had even happened."
I have never been to Bolton, don't like the look of the EDL and am not defending fascism. I also acknowledge freely that there are many on the left who are agreeable and fair-minded. But anyone who has ever seen self-described 'antifa' activists being, well, active will guess that UAF is being economical with the actualité.
We are so well-informed about the horrors of World War Two that to be an anti-antifascist may seem like perversity. But the problem with antifascists is that usually they are not attacking real fascists - simply people who do not share their peculiar anarchist/Trotskyite views. As well as the EDL, recent targets of antifa ire include the Dutch MP Geert Wilders and the journal American Renaissance - both patently non-fascist. At other times, antifa yahoos have also singled out senior Conservative politicians and respected academics for obloquy and aggression. Antifascists were behind the 2002 killing of Pim Fortuyn and are behind the ongoing bombing campaign in Athens. And there are innumerable earlier examples of antifa intifada - the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Black September and the IRA, to name just some.
More...
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/left-right/the-always-angry-antifa-natics/
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