Richard Bartholomew reviews my post on Charlie Flowers EDL connection and concludes that I’ve made an “unsustainable imaginative leap.”
However, I believe Bartholomew has gone too far in the other direction of being too restrained in appraising the photo I posted from Flowers’ Facebook page showing him and several activists from different groups gathered around a St. George’s Cross flag. Bartholomew writes:
The obvious problem here is that just because the EDL uses the St George’s Flag, it hardly follows that anyone who makes use of a St George’s Flag must be an EDL sympathizer.
Who else in the UK is marching in public with the flag except members of the EDL and their supporters?
But Bartholomew’s objection raises a new possibility: It may be that there is now developing a loosely connected alliance of small political groups for whom the flag is a signifier, all of whom declare themselves to be in opposition to Muslim extremism and Shariah law.
For Muslims and Asians though, this is the flag of the mobs that have been engaged in a number of acts of violence and intimidation against their communities, and it would be hard for anyone in the UK who pays attention to this issue not to know that. The people who fly this flag must know that they are tapping into that history of intimidation when they display it in public.
I doubt you will find a UK organization that is sincerely trying to confront extremism among Muslims without impugning the larger Muslim community that is flying the St. George’s Cross at their demonstrations.
So are Flowers and the ‘Cheerleaders’ supporters or members of the EDL, or just in solidarity with its history of intimidation against Muslims? I don’t know, but it may be a distinction without a difference.
