UK police have been forced to pay over £700,000 in out-of-court compensation to 153 ‘antifa’ activists arrested during a September 2013 counter-protest against a demonstration convened by Tommy Robinson, and detained for up to 14 hours.
Robinson’s English Defence League had intended to march to a mosque in Tower Hamlets, east London - the antifa campaigners opposed the march, arguing Robinson and his supporters deliberately sought to provoke hate crimes in an area with a sizeable Muslim population.
Police duly imposed stringent restrictions on when and where both demonstrations could take place - the antifa contingent gathered in a park to hear speeches in the morning, before setting off on their march. At lunchtime, law enforcement officials detained two antifa groups using a controversial containment tactic known as ‘kettling’ in order to prevent an imminent breach of the peace.
The activists claim the experience was humiliating and cruel as they were prevented from using the toilet for hours, and not allowed to get food or water. In all, 286 protesters were arrested for breaking the protest’s conditions, taken to police stations around London and released without charge hours later, some of them in the middle of the night. Just one arrestee was eventually prosecuted.
Under Surveillance
Internal police documents seen by The Guardian indicate two undercover officers spied on antifa activists at the protest - they were even bogusly ‘arrested’ (“extraction was achieved without incident,” the files allegedly state) so they could leave the group, having garnered intelligence on the group’s size, structures, methods and prominent members.
While the liberal outlet and left-wing activists on social media have expressed outrage at the infiltration, many may see such covert activities as justified given antifa activists’ demonstrable penchant for extreme violence - indeed, members of the sprawling international network have openly advocated physical attacks on those who condone “hatred”, believing force to be justified in pursuit of eradicating bigotry. In Germany, members of the Alternative for Germany party - including its 66-year-old Chairman Frank Magnitz - have been assaulted in the street by masked thugs associated with the movement, and PayPal is so concerned by the group’s activities it has cancelled accounts for many of its global cabals.
“The fact that the media has never reported on any of this begs the question: Are they complicit? Is the media complicit with all of this, or do they just suck at their jobs?” Crowder said.
