ASIATODAY.ID, JAKARTA – The UK is at risk of sliding into a civil war, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said, commenting on the ongoing anti-immigration protests in the country that have turned violent.
Several cities in the UK, including Liverpool, Nottingham, Leeds, Belfast, Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool, and Hull, were plunged into chaos after a knife attack in Southport, England left three children dead and several others injured. The attack was carried out by Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old born in Britain to Rwandan parents. Meanwhile, there are rumors circulating online that the culprit was a Syrian migrant who went to Britain by boat.
The tragedy has sparked numerous protests, with videos showing demonstrators chanting anti-immigrant and anti-Islam slogans, setting fires, and setting off fireworks as cars were burned and buildings damaged, though the protests have not all been violent. Some activists have clashed with police, resulting in dozens of arrests and injuries to officers.
Commenting on a video on X (formerly Twitter) showing the unrest which was shared by a social media user who suggested the chaos was caused by mass migration to the UK and open-border policies, Musk responded: “Civil war is inevitable.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper warned that those involved “in criminal disorder and violent thuggery on our streets will have to pay the price” and face “the strongest possible penalties.” The office of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who took up the post less than a month ago, said the UK government “backs police to take all necessary action to keep our streets safe.”
Richard Dearlove, the former head of the MI6 intelligence service, claimed without providing evidence that Russia was attempting to fuel the protests by spreading falsehoods that the perpetrator of the Southport attack was a migrant. He added that the fake news was being spread by the website Channel3 Now, which is allegedly linked to Russia. The Channel3 Now page on X has around 3,000 followers.
The Russian Embassy in London has dismissed the allegations, calling the claims “predictable gaslighting,” adding that Dearlove was among those who helped destabilize “entire countries and regions, setting in motion unprecedented refugee flows.”
Channel3 Now had named the suspect as Ali-Al-Shakati, an asylum-seeker who allegedly arrived in the UK by boat last year. He was reportedly “on the MI6 watch list and known to Liverpool mental health services.” Channel3 Now — which appears to specialize in covering shootings, mostly in America — later deleted the claim. The site appears to be an “aggregator,” which often publishes fake claims designed to go viral.
Channel3 Now registered under a Lithuanian domain in 2023, and British media has reported that it “has a single named author, called James Lawley, whose LinkedIn account states that he owns a gardening company in Nova Scotia, Canada… and the site is routed through a Massachusetts-based service that anonymizes website ownership details.”
Like the EU, Britain has been struggling with an influx of migrants for several years. As of June 2023, net migration to the country over the preceding 12 months was 685,000 people, with the top five non-EU nationalities being Indian (253,000), Nigerian (141,000), Chinese (89,000), Pakistani (55,000), and Ukrainian (35,000), according to official figures.
British ioters torch migrant hotel
Right-wing protesters in the English town of Rotherham have set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers, as demonstrations against immigration and Islam continue across the country. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed that the rioters will “face the full force of the law.”
Hundreds of people gathered outside the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham on Sunday afternoon, pelting police officers with wood and bottles and chanting “get them out,” referring to the 130 asylum seekers housed in the hotel since 2022.
South Yorkshire police said at least ten officers were injured in clashes with the rioters, who broke windows and set dumpsters ablaze outside the building, before setting a fire inside the hotel’s ground floor.
Multiple arrests were made, and the fire was extinguished shortly afterwards.
They set a hotel on fire that houses asylum seekers in Rotherham, and people can’t get out.The police are outnumbered and getting pushed back.You can see someone on the top floor window. pic.twitter.com/9PiMwwrBRx
— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) August 4, 2024
Dozens of British towns and cities have been rocked by right-wing protests and riots since Monday, when a British teenager of Rwandan descent stabbed three children to death and injured ten others in the town of Southport, near Liverpool. Although initially sparked by a false rumor that the knifeman responsible for the stabbings was Muslim, the demonstrations have since grown into a wider backlash against Islam, mass immigration, and the perception that political leaders are more concerned with suppressing right-wing dissent than tackling immigrant crime.
More than 150 people were arrested after riots in Liverpool, Manchester, Stoke, Leeds and other cities on Saturday. Similar riots took place in locations including Middlesbrough, Blackburn, and Tamworth on Sunday. Mobs of Muslim protesters, some armed with knives and machetes, have been seen in some cities, including Bolton and Stoke.
In a speech on Sunday, Starmer warned that more arrests would follow. “Those who have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law,” he declared, warning that those responsible “will regret taking part in this disorder.” In Sunday’s address and in a similar speech earlier this week, Starmer did not discuss any of the root causes of the unrest. Instead he pinned all blame for the violence on “far right hatred” and online “misinformation.”
Rotherham is infamous for its Muslim ‘grooming gang’, a group of predominantly British-Pakistani men who sexually abused around 1,400 young girls between the late 1980s and 2013. Three separate reports published in 2013, 2014, and 2015 found that local politicians and police covered up the gang’s crimes, partly out of fear that identifying and punishing the perpetrators would be seen as “racist.” (RT/AT Network)
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