The hard-left activist group calling for the curtailment of free speech in protestation to the Prophet Muhammed used a fringe blog as its primary source for the key claim in its report, Breitbart London can reveal.
Nick Lowles – the pro-EU, trade union-funded activist behind the claim that the ‘Counter Jihad’ movement wants to start a “civil war” in Britain – leans heavily on the ‘Knights Templar’ blog in his own blog about his group’s latest report.
The document is not referenced, but the only source for the front page “civil war” claim is a rant by someone going by the name Peter Mellows, which Hope Not Hate alleges is actually Jim Dowson, founder of the Britain First group.
Lowles writes:
The report reveals that just three weeks before the exhibition was publicly announced, exhibition organisers Anne Marie Waters (of Sharia Watch), Alan Ayling (original financier of the EDL) and Stephen Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’ ex-EDL leader) met former Britain First founder Jim Dowson to discuss collaborating on a new counter-jihadist project. Counter-Jihadists believe that Islam is aggressive and expansionist, and make little or no distinctions between moderate or hardline followers of the religion.
The conversation quickly changed and, led by Alan Ayling, the three talked about using the Muhammad cartoons to provoke serious civil strife in this country. One element of this plan relied on sending anti-Muslim demonstrators into heavily Muslim areas, waving placards with offensive cartoons.
He then goes on to list Mellows as his source:
So horrified by what he had heard, Dowson later denounced these plans on his Knights Templar blog.
But any other group or organisation using a single source such as this would be laughed out of the shop for lack of academic rigour.
The blog claims: “the Christian and European side in this looming conflict will NOT be served by the publication of grossly offensive cartoons of the Muslim Prophet. Accordingly, we are publishing this warning and explanation of the true insanity of this plan and the reasons we oppose it…”
It links the alleged “plan” to U.S.-based “neoconservatives” – a tired conspiracy theory – and says: “What starts with a cartoon of Mohammad having sex with a goat (for this is the sort of image waiting to go out) will end with the coffins of little children fried alive in their own homes by the petrol bombs that are the weapon of choice of communal violence. The human catastrophe that could unfold from this thoroughly evil scheme is beyond measure.”
It also claims the plans may be a “sting” operation by the intelligence services.
And yet despite these “out there” claims, Lowles and his Hope not Hate group – which has the backing of the Daily Mirror newspaper, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and several Labour and Conservative Members of Parliament – leans almost entirely on this one blog post from June 2015 as the basis of their entire report.