Bartholomew's Notes

A few days ago the “Casuals United” website changed its name to the “British Defence Leagues”, with links to the following groups: The English Defence League, the Welsh Defence League, the Scottish Defence League, and…erm, the Jewish Defence League. This final page links, as expected, to the American “Jewish Defense League”. The JDL, of course, is a notorious extremist organisation with a history of violence in the USA, and which has been repudiated by most other Jewish groups. The Anti-Defamation League has a chronicle of its activities here.

I doubt very much there is any real link with the JDL – more likely, this is just the usual vicarious identification with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But if there is a link, perhaps someone from the JDL will ask why “Casuals United” created a video – since removed from YouTube – which promoted a quote by Kevin Alfred Strom, an American known for railing against Jewish “supremicism”.

UPDATE: Several hours later, the link to the JDL has been removed. Instead, we now have the Sikh Defence League; we’re told that “some Sikhs and Hindus even have started to support and liaise with the BNP”, and we’re directed to watch “a tape made by the BNP a few years back with a Sikh and a Hindu”.

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From the Manchester Guardian (1947):

The anti-Jewish demonstrations which have marred the week-end in Manchester, Liverpool, and other towns are clearly the work of the most irresponsible and hooligan elements in our population. But that does not make these outbreaks less menacing or less disgraceful…

The man who condemns the Zionists in Palestine on account of the crimes of the Irgun gangsters is only a degree better the youth who expresses his hatred by mobbing the innocent men and women of Cheetham Hill or Wavertree. There is no political fault so common or so dangerous as this primitive confusion between many and few. The murder of the British sergeants in Palestine was a brutal crime, the act of crazed fanatics. But…to answer terrorism in Palestine with terrorism in England is sheer Hitlerism. We must be desperately careful to see that we do not let ourselves be infected with the poison of the disease we had thought to eradicate.

According to a thesis posted at this site:

For over five days [Liverpool] bore witness to such extreme violence and looting that the Lord Mayor was compelled to issue an appeal to the city ‘to assist the police in the prevention of attacks on property and shops supposedly owned by Jews’.317 In total over 300 Jewish properties were affected by the rioting in Liverpool, and the police made 88 arrests.

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