Topic: Accuracy in Media
Cliff Kincaid uses his Dec. 10 Accuracy in Media column to argue against Republicans embracing gay marriage, claiming that the British offer up an alternative:
This British Conservative Party has watered down traditional conservatism to such an extent that some conservatives have formed an alternative, the English Defense League (EDL), which has spawned the British Freedom Party.
This group has been strongly attacked in the media, here and abroad, as “far-right” or worse. But I had the opportunity to meet their leaders, Kevin Carroll and Tommy Robinson, at the 9/11 conference in New York City sponsored by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer which was designed in part to organize resistance to global Islam and safeguard our right of free speech against the advance of Sharia, or Islamic law. You can watch the speeches by Carroll and Robinson and draw your own conclusions. Carroll and Robinson want a patriotic alternative to the British Conservative Party that will promote traditional values.
As Right Wing Watch points out, the EDL is "strongly linked with violent actions and whose members terrorize Muslims and often espouse Nazism." So, yeah, "Far-right" seems pretty accurate. Of course, Kincaid thinks the white nationalist American Renaissance is a perfectly fine source on issues of race, so his perspective is a tad skewed.
Kincaid goes on to lament how EDL officials have been arrested:
American conservatives and their media should take a hard look at what is really happening in Britain. We had to turn to a relatively new conservative channel in Canada, Sun TV, for important news and information about how Carroll and Robinson and their supporters are being targeted by the “conservative” government there. Carroll was actually imprisoned for exercising his political rights. Robinson is still in prison on charges that he entered the United States illegally and has sent Pamela Geller a letter about his plight, which is published on her website.
Richard Bartholomew details that Robinson -- who has a long criminal record that would normally prevent international travel -- used a passport with a namethat was neither his real name nor his nom de plume of Tommy Robinson. Carroll was arrested along with 53 other EDL members as part of a police sting relating to a "planned disturbance," which sounds a litle more serious than Kincaid's benigh description of "exercising his political rights."
