Tuesday 15 March 2011

East End Gay Pride: Hate Against Hope/Cancelled Due To EDL Interest

Comment: Why Are Gay People Trying To Ban East End Pride?
"In a sad reminder of the prejudice that Prides face throughout the world, the event has been denounced as confrontational, with the organisers facing a flurry of baseless and deeply personal abuse..."
Paul Birrell, Pink News, yesterday.

'East End Pride Organiser Resigns After ‘English Defence League Past’ Is Revealed'
"One of the organisers of East London Gay Pride resigned today after it was revealed that he had been involved with the English Defence League.
"Raymond Berry helped found the far-right group and remains involved in groups including Stop the Islamification of Europe, it was claimed..."
Pink News, today...

• For the record Out East did not call for East End Pride to be "banned". In their open letter they wrote they have; "great concerns about this demonstration and we have decided neither to participate in the event nor to call our supporters to be part of it, and we think it important to express the reasons why...
"We call on you and the organisations supporting this event to cancel it with a view to working with the local communities of the East End to ensure active, inclusive responses are made to homophobia, which do not inadvertently contribute to community tensions."
The statement from LGBT Muslim Group Imaan that outed Raymond Berry's EDL connections.

UPDATE: Wednesday March 16th. Organisers have cancelled East End Gay Pride.
In a rather silly statement they blamed "personal vendettas" against them.

UPDATE2: The shamefully thick and lazy Peter Lloyd, Pink Paper news editor (!), does his usual trick of just cut and pasting a press release without getting a second opinion - thus missing the point of the story (the furore started over unproven assumptions the stickers/posters were put up by Islamists).
He even manages to spell "Defence" "Defense"; Mr Lloyd, (American) spellchecks are only useful if you yourself can spell. Jesus fucking wept.

3 comments:

  1. The motivations behind East End Pride always sounded a bit dodgy so sadly this revelation about Berry doesn't come as a huge surprise. Meanwhile the whiff of EDL hanging around those anti-gay posters is getting stronger by the week.

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  2. They should have had a counter march: "Non-Islamophobic But still determined to have a Pride march gays against the really quite racist seeming East End Gay Pride March".
    Or NIBSDTHAPMGATRQRSEEGPM.

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  3. They should have had a counter march - I hate the way the gay press is run by idiots.

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