05 September, 2011

 

Meme news - Tower Hamlets edition

It's interesting how memes develop. And how they persist, seemingly indestructible, in the face of any and every counterargument. (Remember the EDL supposedly beating up innocent "Asian" youths at Chadwell Heath, or indeed BNP "thug" Bob Bailey going round randomly abusing "Asian" youths in Barking?)

When I came across this link

Extremist group EDL members breaks coach window from inside
& media blames Muslims

I thought, aha, the paranoid are on the march; this'll be fun. Then I read the more considered than its previous effort but still very slanted piece at the Mail about the attack on the EDL coach in Stepney. A number of the commenters there are also suggesting that the EDL passengers broke the windows of the coach from the inside. Hmm, something more to this. So I finally got round to watching the YouTube footage,



And at roughly 20 seconds in, a window on the coach does appear to shatter outwards. Indeed, one Daily Mail commenter suggests that the window has not only been broken from the inside but that an EDLer throws a "slab" through it at one of the poor "Asian" rioters. Looks quite plausible when you view the video.

Hold on a minute. Let's think this through. You are a group of EDL sitting in a coach in hostile territory. The coach has broken down and is going nowhere fast. A number of "Asian" youth are running about in the street. At least one of them has thrown a projectile at a window of the coach, fortunately without doing any damage. So what do you do? Apparently you break one of the windows and climb through the hole in order to attack the innocent "Asian" lads. Well no, according to the video footage, you break the window and then just sit there. OK, you toss a "slab" which you happen to have handy through the hole where the window was, and then you just sit there. Doesn't work does it?

Well, it doesn't work unless you sign up to the standard trope that the EDL are mindless thick illiterate violent knuckledraggers. Then it's perfectly obvious that a coachload of EDL would respond to a situation like this by punching a window out with bare hands and then just sit there like a group of very puzzled and very dim gorillas, not knowing what to do next and making plaintive ooh-ooh-ooh noises.

Yes, OK then. Let's download the video in as high a definition as possible and take a closer look. I find the Firefox Video Downloadhelper extension handy for this. I'm sure there are plenty of other tools just as good. Then I viewed the relevant section of the video. Repeatedly. And in slow-mo. And in slower mo. And then frame by frame.

At about 17s the young man in the black top throws a projectile at one of the windows towards the rear of the side of the coach. The window survives. He runs forward and at about 20s throws another projectile at a window half way along. Either that or he strikes the window with something. The resolution is not good enough to be sure. Immediately the window seems to flex outwards and a portion of the pane crumbles away and slides downwards. This is the so-called "slab" — a large piece of broken glass detaching itself and dropping. If the window has been broken by someone inside the bus then I can only say that the co-incidence in timing with the youth's action is quite remarkable. Most impressive in fact.

In my earlier post about Searchlight's fascinating gallery of photographs supposedly depicting Tommy's private army brandishing their weapons, I admitted my ignorance of guns and readers were kind enough to fill in the detail for me. Perhaps someone can help me out again, for as a non-driver I have had little incentive to gen up on the detail of the glazing of vehicle windows. But I would guess that what I describe above is how you would expect the sort of safety glass installed in the windows of a coach or bus to behave, namely to break gracefully and preferably away from the passengers.

Dunno. That's my take on it anyway. It makes a damned sight more sense than the other explanation.

One thing I can say with certainty is that reason will make sod all difference. The meme is launched. Years from now Lefties and Muslims will tell the tale of how EDL thugs deliberately punched out the windows of their own coach in order to ... well what? To provoke the innocent Muslims into attacking them, I suppose.

Comments:
"Then I viewed the relevant section of the video. Repeatedly. And in slow-mo. And in slower mo. And then frame by frame. "

"Back, and to the left...back, and to the left...back, and to the left.."

;)

 
What I'd really like to know is why the police arrested everyone on that coach, rather than the ones attacking them.

 
Dunno. According to Casuals United, the blokes on the bus got out to defend the woman who was being attacked, so they were presumably milling about when the OB deigned to turn up.

The most charitable assumption is that the police acted quickly to get them into "protective custody" and out of the area before the rest of the wog youth in the area turned up, which could have happened very quickly.

Plus it demonizes the EDL and bumps up the arrest stats nicely. There'a another solid meme for you: "60 EDL thugs arrested at Tower Hamlets; something must be done." Not that we know which team the other 16 arrestees were playing for, of course, but don't bother us with details, eh?

 
I don't know anything about bus windows but it looks pretty obvious what happened.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story though

 
Questions are also "being asked" about where the EDL gets its money from. A valid point as the merchandise, web pages etc are all of a very professional standard, not what you would expect from a bunch of football fans.

Current favourite seems to be a UK banker (name of Slater, i think) who has ties to the Hungarian 'Jobbik' party which is apparently a Fascist organisation, whatever that means these days. Also there are apparently links between the EDL's putative benefactor and........ta-DAAA!!!.....Fruitloop Brevik from Norway.

 
Alan Lake is your man. Some kind of IT entrepreneur, I believe. He has certainly been to Scandinavia and has consorted with assorted Right Wing types there, but his alleged links with our man Anders are probably as substantial as any of the other bollocks that Little Nicky Lowles and his mates dream up.

 
The first thing that struck me about the EDL, on reasonably close investigation, was the slickness of their presentation on the web and the level of organisation they had right from the get-go. There's a fair amount of money and brains behind it, and a carefully gauged brand being built up with a great deal of media-savvy awareness. Qualities not common amongst the general run of football fans.

My own guess is its a government/intelligence service set-up (although I have heard a rumour it's all courtesy of a 'foreign power'). The rank-and-file EDL's hearts are in the right place, no doubt of that; but I can't help wondering who's pulling the strings.......

 
Who knows? I don't think their presentation, web or media, was particularly slick in the early days. Wasn't there a stunt involving balaclavaed blokes in a car park burning a Nazi flag for watching journalists? That was pretty naff. Nor were their early website efforts particularly out of the ordinary. Given cheap modern technology and volunteer labour, "professional" results are relatively easy these days: thirty years ago you would have been knocking out barely legible grey flyers on a Gestetner. And if they have a football casuals background, the clothing, merchandizing and branding flair comes as part of the package.

What is remarkable about the rise of the EDL has been the rapidity of their spread and their organizational capabilities, both of which can arguably be attributed to the pre-existence of the casuals/football hooligan infrastructure. Nor would it be wise to write the membership off as all being drooling criminal thugs who can barely speak, let alone run a protest organization. This is the mistake commonly made by the Righteous Left. There will be a lot of bright cookies who have passed through the hooligan stage in their football-nutter youth who have moved on to better things but have retained the social connections. As to finance, most of the cost is in people's time, which is being given free; though input from rich sympathizers like the aforesaid Mr Lake are entirely probable.

No, I don't find the rise of the EDL as a genuine grass-roots movement implausible, just fortuitous.

Of course that doesn't eliminate the possibility of a hidden government or other third-party actor. The Stormfronters and the BNP are convinced that the EDL is a government false-flag operation. The UAF believes that "Tommy" is a Special Branch-controlled double-agent. The trouble with the conspiracy theory approach is that it is untestable. Therein lies the fate of the oozlum bird.

Perhaps the most productive response to that unreachable question for us civilians is to consider the benefits of a false-flag operation. In my opening post above, I asked what possible reason the EDLers in the trapped coach could have for breaking the windows. And I found no rational explanation. Similarly, what benefit accrues to HMG or some other "power" in organizing or at least encouraging a successful anti-Islam street movement which the supposedly "controlled" media then largely ignores. I can't think of one that makes any sense.

Unless it is that HMG is employing a proxy to encourage the Muslims to fuck off somewhere else; in which case they have my wholehearted support.

 
"Unless it is that HMG is employing a proxy to encourage the Muslims to fuck off somewhere else; in which case they have my wholehearted support."

Hehehe, indeed!

I admit I may be a touch paranoid. My thesis is based on an assumption that, in this country at least, the ruling class has been moving towards an effective disenfranchisement of the working classes since, at a guess, the 70's. A genuine reawakening of political (if not idealogical)consciousness amongst the proles is something that our semi-permanised governing elite would want to stamp out asap. Or control. It's too early to have any parallels to draw on, although the possible 'infiltration' of the Hippy Traveller/Peace Convoy movement in the late 70's and early '80's is an interesting study.As is the ever-present Class War group. 'Dark Actors' is an apt phrase.
Of course, I accept the possibility that I am in fact a swivel-eyed nutjob, and I do try to avoid the conspiracy theory route as much as poss. The rank-and-file EDL-er's are the salt of the earth and, who knows, may be the start of a sea-change towards something better. I hope and pray so. But only time will tell............

 
It is interesting how that particular assault by muzzies on the coach was being filmed right there and then, and how there was apparently something on the coach of sufficient weight and size to be classed as a slab, all ready to be chucked.

If it was a fellow muzzie filming the hi jinks, it must have been intended for the usual pro-islamist audience; you wouldn't want to youtube a gang of nutters rampaging through merry England for the benefit of the Daily Mail readership.

 
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