This is a guest post by Jacobinism
On October 8, Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, then-leaders of the English Defence League (EDL), announced that they were leaving the organisation they had founded to work with the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think-tank founded by former members of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Anti-racist and self-styled anti-fascist organisations, bloggers and commentators committed to combatting racism and what they call ‘Islamophobia’ ought to have been delighted. They had expended vast amounts of time and keystrokes warning us all that the EDL posed as grave a threat to democracy, social cohesion and human rights as that posed by Islamic fundamentalism.
Now, suddenly, this menace was no more – decapitated at a stroke. Its headless trunk may stagger around for a while but – since the EDL was a street movement as opposed to an organised party – fragmentation, faction-fighting, dwindling commitment and collapse now look likely. And here was its former leadership sitting at a table with exactly the kind of moderate Muslims we are always being told fundamentalists and jihadis do not represent: democrats; secularists; universalists – defenders of what, for convenience, are often referred to as ‘Western’ values.
But the reaction on much of the left has not been one of delight, but one of scorn and cynicism. Robinson, hitherto derided as an ignorant, racist ex-con and brainless neo-fascist ideologue has been recast as a mendacious strategist who has duped the gullible Quilliam Foundation into providing him with a legitimate platform. In a piece entitled “Don’t be fooled by Tommy Robinson’s political sleight-of-hand”, The Guardian’s Alex Andreou explained events to his readership as follows:
There is a pattern of behaviour here. Robinson is doing what leaders of far-right movements have always done and continue to do. Like shyster businessmen, they set up one firm that serves their goals, then declare it insolvent and set up another one with a different name – each time creaming the profit of press coverage and a small shift of the political landscape.
Four days previously, in the same paper, academic Matthew Goodwin had described Robinson and Carroll’s resignation as:
…disingenuous nonsense, backed up by the counter-extremism thinktank the Quilliam Foundation, itself founded by ex-extremists who have seen the light and – to be blunt – should know better.
To Goodwin’s jaundiced eye, the whole thing amounted to nothing more than a contemptible exercise in mutual self-promotion.
Goodwin and Andreou’s opinions were hardly eccentric. In the hours, days and weeks following Quilliam and Robinson’s announcement, social media was awash with the same bitter cynicism as those used to regarding Robinson and the EDL as a byword for working class racism tried to make sense of a rapidly changing political reality.
This response can be explained in large part by the difficulty the progressive left has always had accommodating Islamism and regressive cultural traditionalism within its complacent dogma of multiculturalism.
Do read the rest of Jacobinism’s post here.