Alan Lake and a Couple of Friends

Searchlight has posted online a report from September about the English Defence League, focusing on Alan Lake:

EDL representatives have addressed anti-Islamic gatherings in Sweden and Germany, they are co-organising a demonstration in the Netherlands and will, this month [September, blogged by me here], attend a protest against a planned Islamic centre near Ground Zero in New York.

….The driving force behind these links are two men who have been guiding the EDL from the shadows, Alan Lake and his close friend whom we know only as “Kinana”.

The two men are believed to have met at Kensington Temple, in Notting Hill Gate, west London, which belongs to the Elim Pentecostal Church, a protestant evangelical church, elements of which have attracted controversy for their hardline views on Christianity, homosexuality and Islam.

It is believed that Lake has moved away from the church but Kinana has maintained his links.

Kensington Temple is a successful and large Charismatic church, pastored by Colin Dye, and it has featured on this blog a couple of times; I would prefer the term “conservative” to hardline, although Dye is has had links with Christian Right lobby groups such as CCTV, and the church has hosted the anti-Islam speaker Sam Solomon. I actually visited his church once, in early 2003; I recall he prophesied an easy victory in Iraq, followed by mass conversions to Christianity. However, the church is not particularly “Right Wing” in the way that some American churches obviously are – and of course, just because Lake and “Kinana” have attended that does not mean they have any personal assocation with the people running the church. Lake does, though, have sympathies with Christian fundamentalism – on 4Freedoms he posted a very strange chart linking the theory of evolution with totalitarianism.

“Kinana” was also mentioned in an Observer report in October, and in a Daily Mail report in January:

Alarmingly, the EDL is becoming more sophisticated and those orchestrating its activities at the top are far more astute than its foot soldiers. I meet two of the EDL’s key figures in a Covent Garden pub – a respectable looking man called Alan Lake, and a man who goes by the moniker ‘Kinana’.

Lake is a 45-year-old computer expert from Highgate, north London who runs a far-right website called Four Freedoms. This summer he contacted the EDL and offered to both fund and advise the movement.

His 4Freedoms page is here. On Facebook he calls himself “Kinana Nadir”, and he associates with an “English Defence League Pakistani Christian Division” – “Kinana” is a reference to the story of Kinana ibn al-Rabi’, a Jewish leader who according to a source for the life of Muhammad was tortured and killed on Muhammad’s orders for refusing to divulge the location of a treasury.

According to the cyber-thug Charlie Flowers, Lake is a personal friend of his, and Lake’s Facebook page includes Flowers’ music band among his “Likes”. Flowers has links of his own with the EDL, and held the megaphone for Guramit Singh when Singh made his notorious jibe about Muslims “burning in Hell” at a rally in support of Geert Wilders. However, Flowers claims that he is not himself EDL, that he disagrees with some of what the EDL stands for, and that this is also the case with some ex-EDL associates of his: in particular, Matthew Kaplan and Joel Titus. However, there are claims that Flowers’ cousin was at an EDL rally in Leicester (see comment here). Flowers justifies having all these links because he’s “libertarian situationist”, although when it comes to people he doesn’t like he plays a game of “Six Degrees of Asghar Bukhari” to uncover an conspiracy of Islamic extremism – this includes me, and the fact I once got information from MPACUK about fake postings being made to the MPAC discussion forum inspired him to create a Glenn Beckesque flow chart on the subject.

Flowers also recently posted on Facebook about a meeting with Lake :

just got back from a two-hour meeting in the John Lewis cafe between me, Abdullah al-Andalusi, Paul Williams, and Alan Lake. They talked about stuff like Descartes, secularism,atheism, Marx, and the human condition… and I went “duuuuh”.

Al-Andalusi directs the Muslim Debate Initiative, which has debated the EDL (and the BNP) in the past (Williams is also associated with it). Flowers sees himself as some sort of broker encouraging debate “between all sides”, and thus showing up elements of the left that don’t wish to debate; a poster to Indymedia using the name “CamdenAntifash” (in fact an anti-vivisection activist named Mandy Ford) claims that (square brackets in original):

Thanks to Charlie Flowers [who isn’t EDL] there is peace in London including in Camden between anti racists, ex EDL, Muslims, Jews, anarchists [and even possibly current EDL]… Thanks to Charlie Flowers what could have been a potentially volatile situation has been calmed down in Camden

Nice idea: except that Flowers is a phony. For him, political activism is about manipulation rather than debate, and that includes making bogus postings to Muslim websites, spreading lies, making threats of violence, and publishing home addresses to intimidate when it suits him – the full background is laid out here. The only question is whether his motivation is ultimately rooted in a political project or whether he’s simply having some sort of mid-life crisis.

20 Responses

  1. And I thought they were just bunch of “knuckle dragging Nazi bigots”! Looks like they are a lot more organised and intelligent…

    • The footsoldiers are knuckle dragging nazi bigots. Unfortunately, they are too stupid to realize who is pulling the strings. It’s the same with the hypocrites of the Tea Party being sponsored by corporations.

  2. Has the EDL every blown anyone up?

    If you don’t acknowledge the huge social migraine the large presence of Muslims in Europe has become, then you actually part of the “Far Right” problem.

    Last weekend in France both the Socialist party and the UMP were holding huge and much publicised gabfests in the hope of moving centre-stage.

    However both were eclipsed when Le Pen’s daughter gave a press conference and DARED talk about a subject ( you know which one! ) that all the other politicans just won’t raise.

    The result? It took her barely 15 minutes at an hastily improvised press conference to steal the entire limelight.

    After she spoke no one would even listen to what the Socialists and UMP had to say.

    • Neither have the Muslims who see the EDL as a return to Nazi gangs roaming the streets decrying Jewish world domination. But the man behind MEMRITV has. Didn’t you try top post that video already once before? No one witha rational mind will take MEMRI seriously seeing it sconnections witn the IDF.

      Anyway, in other news, a Christian honourkilling resulted in a husband killing his former wife and her new lover in the UK. Meanwhile, in Palestine, Jewish settlers kicked another Muslim family out of their home and placed guarddogs outside. Complaining is no use since the IDF will just tell them to go die somewhere. That is what June supports.

  3. After she spoke no one would even listen to what the Socialists and UMP had to say.

    Correction: Before she spoke and after, June and her ilk would not listen to what the Socialists and UMP had to say.

  4. Correction: Before she spoke and after, June and her ilk would not listen to what the Socialists and UMP had to say.

    The Socailsts who once ruled France are at 3% in the polls, so apparently no one listens to them anymore.

    And I doubt that an old commie like you, Dogsbody, could ever sit still long enough to hear what ANY conservative has to say.

    You’re clearly not aware of what’s happening in France.

    How could you be? You’re far to angst-ridden and hide-bound to look at the degenerate social portrait France now presents.

    You prefer the fabricated bromides and balms that deceitful, dishonest twerps like Tariq Ramadan dispense for the illusionary comfort they bring.

    Your moral anomie makes you easy prey for Ramadan’s nonsense.

    • Somehow, you bedraggled, old fascist (See. I can do it too), you think that if you waffle on enough I might take you paranoid, bigoted arguments seriously. June, the only thing I take seriously about you is the danger that you and lunatics like you, whether they be Muslim, Christian, Hindu, fascist, Totalitarian communist, whatever, pose to healthy, functional society.

      P.S. Throwing around Durkheim to try to make youself seem knowledgeable was a waste of time. Go back to the books, if any non-biased information is capable of entering your cesspool of a mind, you may possibly unearth the correct meaning and usage of the word “anomie”.

  5. […] Lake’s mysterious sidekick Kinana has stopped by with a comment urging us to visit Lake’s “4 Freedoms” site, […]

  6. Mandy Ford is definitely a bit suspect.
    Clearly visible in the EDL crowd at their Bolton demo is Mandy Ford Mdl Camden…, smiling at a youth as he chants offensively: “Allah is a paedo”

  7. Mandy Ford is that smiling woman on the left, featured in the initial still.

  8. […] television news show TV 2 Nyhetene has a report on Alan Lake, the British businessman connected with the English Defence League. For the first time, Lake admits […]

  9. […] (the “Cheerleaders” and “NiceOnesUK”) of being EDL front groups – I don’t think they are, although Flowers’ objection is somewhat hypocritical given his insistence […]

  10. […] regular readers will also know, one of Lake’s associates is an on-line thug who regularly posts threats about me and spams this blog with abusive messages. […]

  11. […] Searchlight also speculates that Lake may have come across Solomon previously – Lake formerly attended Kensington Temple, a large neo-Pentecostal church in London where Solomon has given at least one […]

  12. […] noted Flowers’ friendship with Lake back in December 2010. The article also discusses Flowers’ “Cheerleaders” group and the […]

  13. […] and he has published an email from one of Lake’s associates (“Kinana”, discussed here) which mentions that another person present at this meeting also uses the name “Richard the […]

  14. […] appears to have become involved with the EDL through a prior association with Alan Ayling (aka “Alan Lake”); however, he claims that this was during a period […]

  15. […] have influenced HnH reporting into Alan Lake, who was formerly associated with the the EDL and who is a friend of Flowers. The latest issue of Notes from the Borderland magazine (number 10, 2012) has an […]

  16. UKIP MEP Gerard Batten and CCFON’s Sam Solomon’s Charter for Muslim Understanding (Dec 2006) is published by Pilcrow Press, whose director is Rev Colin Dye of Kensington Pentecostal Temple (The Elim Church Incorporated), where Lake & ‘Kinana’ are alleged to have met. ‘Kinana’ wrote the first EDL speech which ‘Tommy Robinson’ gave in Leeds 31 Oct 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/20121113092426/http://www.libertiesalliance.org/2009/11/02/english-defence-league-edl-speeches-in-leeds-on-31-october-2009/

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