EDL and MDL on the Streets of Leicester

The following videos taken in Leicester yesterday illustrate the scale of the police operation in ensuring that rival demonstrators from the EDL and UAF did not clash. One element present in Leicester that the mainstream media chose not to highlight was the so-called Muslim Defence League (MDL), which sprang into being earlier this year in anti-homage to the English Defence League. Like the EDL, this is more an idea and an amorphous movement reliant upon social networking technologies than an organisation with a strictly defined hierarchy. It will of course have its key activists and agitators, but the MDL is no monolith.

However, unlike the EDL the MDL draws the bulk of its street presence at protests from amongst the locally resident population, from Muslim ‘communities’ as the mainstream media likes to refer to such neighbourhoods.  Thus those labelled as members of the MDL in the videos below may in some cases see themselves as such, but in many instances I am sure that the people you see will be resident Muslims either looking for a fight or coming out to ‘protect’ one of their mosques which they were misled into believing would be subject to EDL attack. As I outlined last month, this piece of police ‘intelligence’ appears to have been fabricated with the express intent of banning the EDL from protesting in Leicester. This naturally caused unnecessary and unwarranted alarm amongst Muslim residents and generated a climate of fear that stoked the violence that occurred yesterday.