Muslims clashed with police yesterday after burning a large poppy in protest at Britain's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which was timed to coincide with Armistice Day's two-minute silence.
Muslim protestors demonstrate near Hyde Park in London on Armistice Day
By Andy Bloxham 3:58PM GMT 11 Nov 2010
About 35 Islamic protesters, dressed in dark clothes and with many masking their faces, carried banners and chanted slogans such as "British soldiers: terrorists".
The group confronted police officers and briefly fought with them, leaving one officer with a head injury requiring hospital treatment, and three arrests were made.
Around 50 counter demonstrators from the far-right English Defence League gathered nearby but officers kept the two sides apart.
The protesters said they were from a group called Muslims Against Crusades.
They gathered near Hyde Park in London before burning a model of a poppy on the stroke of 11am then marching along Exhibition Road and along an underpass, past the Victoria and Albert and Natural History Museums.
Asad Ullah, 23, a spokesman for the group who would only say he was from London, said: "The British soldiers you remember on this day are soldiers who have taken innocent lives in illegal occupations and unjust wars.
"Our aim is not violence but if people come to us with violence, Muslims will defend themselves."
He added: "We will do this again. Until the British people condemn the British Government for these illegal wars, we will not stop protesting."
Posters bore slogans including "Hands off Muslim lands" and "Islam will dominate", and flags bore Arabic writing with the words "There is no God but Allah".
The group went to South Kensington Tube station, roughly circled by about 20 police officers as they were from the start of the march, and rode it to Whitechapel, in east London, where the organisers collected the flags and high-visibility vests some were wearing and the group dispersed.
One of the passengers on the Tube was Sylvia Black, 61, a retired sub-postmistress from Yeovil, Somerset.
She was wearing a poppy in memory of her uncle, a corporal who was killed in the First World War.
Mrs Black said: "I disagree with what they're doing. They shouldn't be doing it and they shouldn't be allowed to do it."
Of the three arrests made, two were for public order offences and one was for assaulting a police officer.
The Muslims Against Crusades website includes graphic images of children wounded in warfare and the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib.
Earlier this year members were involved in violent clashes with far-right groups during a troop march in Barking, east London.
There are suspicions Muslims Against Crusades is a splinter group of Islam4UK, founded by Anjem Choudary, a British Muslim extremist formerly a senior figure in the now banned Al-Muhajiroun and Islam4UK groups.
That this went ahead on our soil is the biggest insult to our war dead. And what do the brave Britons do? Nothing as usual. I am deeply ashamed of my country.
ReplyDeleteMuslims against crusades = Muslims against people who want to stop them slaughtering non-believers. That's what the crusades were all about and were ultimately unsuccessful. Turkey, the land where the first crusades occurred, was once Christian. And we are not learning the lessons about Islam that history teaches us.
Chris.