News
Evan Bartlett
Jun 17, 2016
In a case of not-seeing-the-irony-whatsoever, Islamophobic hate group Britain First is angry that all followers of its party are being tarnished by one man's actions.
Following the death of Labour MP Jo Cox, eyewitness reports suggested the alleged perpetrator had shouted "Britain First", "put Britain first" or words to that effect, while stabbing and shooting her outside a library in her West Yorkshire constituency.
As those reports surfaced, Britain First leader Paul Golding took to the party's Facebook page and sent emails to members to strongly condemning the attack which he described as a "despicable crime carried out on the streets of Yorkshire".
There's no evidence whatsoever that 'Britain First' was shouted or 'putting British people first'.
We're in the middle of a referendum campaign. What this person said... Was he referring to an organisation? Was he referring to a slogan? Was he just shouting out in the middle of an EU debate: 'Putting Britain first'? You know, I've heard this almost every day.
We're nothing to do with it. We would not condone actions like that.
As the group posted the news about Cox's attack on its Facebook page of more than 1.4m followers, comments flooded in to support it:
Some suggested the attacker represented no one else but himself:
Golding himself added:
After this terrible attack happened, the Britain First press line is ringing off the hook with journalists all asking what we think about this...
They are trying to incriminate a perfectly legal political party in this act of criminality. We're nothing to do with it... we certainly don't condone it.
This was a terrible criminal act on an MP, a representative of the people. No one else, no organisation, was behind this, no organisation was incriminated. That's the fact.
Others, however, have pointed out the irony of this line of thinking from a political party that does its best to portray the world's 1.6bn Muslims as evil (NB: it's posted at least seven anti-Islam videos since the shooting):
Perhaps these two comments sum it all up best:
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