English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon has been sentenced to 10 months in prison for illegally entering the USA.
The irony of this is just too sweet. The leader of a group that spends half their time complaining about the problem of illegal immigrants to the UK, has been caught for doing exactly the same thing in the United States.
Having been refused entry to the US in the past, when he traveled to the US in September he decided to use Andrew McMaster’s passport instead. If that’s not illegal immigration, I don’t know what is.
Stephen Lennon, also known by his pseudonym Tommy Robinson, pleaded guilty to the offense for which he was caught when he was fingerprinted at JFK airport in New York, adding yet another criminal conviction to his collection.
His personal assistant Helen Gower has said that Lennon is likely to be released early with a tag on good behaviour, and their leader is “well chuffed at the result today.”
Who are the EDL?
For those of you who don’t hail from the UK, the EDL (English Defence League) are a right-wing, nationalist group who claim to be “peacefully protesting against militant Islam”. But its followers are all too happy to go on Twitter rants about their hatred of non-white ethnic groups, and to tell everyone in Britain who is not white to go back to their ‘own countries.’ At times they sound like frustrated children whose toys were taken away by their invisible Muslim enemy, hash-tagging #thicko at the ends of their sentences.
They often pick and choose their ‘evidence’ against Muslims, ignoring anything that shows Muslims in a good light, and giving a pedestal to anything they do wrong. A good example of this would be using the Rochdale grooming case, involving 9 Muslim men, to pin the blame on all Muslims and immigrants, while ignoring the 7 white men who did the same thing in Derby.
They have even gone as far as to cheer when tragic events happen. One follower commented that he was glad when the 2 year-old boy and 10 year-old Muslim children were killed in a hit-and-run in Leeds (though the comment has slyly been deleted by now). His justification was that Muslims kill innocent people all the time. What kind of person smiles at the death a child?
But it’s not just Muslims and immigrants they hate. Their followers, such as @CommonSense4Now, have mocked me on Twitter in the past for having a Master’s degree, which to them implied that I am rich and upper class (though I’m much the opposite). And he accused the University of Westminster as having a “Muslim extremist problem”.
Anybody who bears at left of the extreme right on the political scale may also become victim to the group’s hatred. This picture posted on Twitter summarises their views on just about everybody but themselves: