Pete North: The Far Left and Islamic Extremism Have United

He highlighted that Islamic extremism has collaborated with the far left and poses a greater danger to the UK than the perceived far right. Pete North, known for his Northern Variant account on X, shared these views with NTD’s Lee Hall on the “British Thought Leaders” programme.

North pointed out that the real far-right extremism in the country is manifested through Islamism, stating, “What we’ve seen is that the real far right in the UK is Islamic extremism.” He drew parallels between the beliefs of Muslim extremists and the far right, indicating a significant overlap between the two groups.

He also observed that Islamic extremism has aligned itself with the far left, noting that a substantial portion of participants in Islamic extremist protests have leftist inclinations. According to North, this coalition between Islamism and the far left has resulted in various disruptive activities such as climate protests and vandalism of art galleries, exemplifying the impact of far-left extremism.

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“The eco-extremism that permeates into energy policy has caused no end of damage,” he said, “and so to talk about this phantom far right threat, it’s pure misdirection.”

Qutb, who in 1966 was convicted and executed for his involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, had studied socialism and literature in the 1920s and 1930s before joining the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He was a liaison for the Brotherhood to Communist International and to Egypt’s communist party. His philosophies were steeped in communist ideology.

In latter decades, the Soviet KGB had supported several international terrorist groups that staged anti-U.S. attacks, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Outrage of the Leftist Elite

Mr. North called the threat of leftist extremism an “absolutely unhinged” elephant in the room, which is “a manifestation of what I believe to be middle class entitlement.”

“That’s what the far left is now,” he said, adding that the day after the election, they were “protesting the result of the general election, protesting the result of the [Brexit] referendum, trying to overturn the result of the referendum.”

“These are tyrants who are absolutely used to getting absolutely everything their own way, all the time,” he said.

The commentator said that this liberal elite’s outrage was driven by anger that ordinary people could use their vote to inform major decisions.

“This is a class war,” Mr. North said, adding that it was a particular set of the middle class who “were absolutely outraged that we had a referendum in the first place.”

“They didn’t believe that the ordinary person is qualified to comment on a major constitutional issue such as the European Union. And so they were outraged that we got a say, outraged that we got a vote, even more outraged that we won, and especially outraged that that referendum was actually carried out.

“This far right, as such, doesn’t exist and is not nearly as much of a threat as the far left,” he said.

“People talk about the far right in Britain. Generally, it consists of a few dozen bloggers and a few activists. There’s only—in terms of actual hardcore neo Nazis—there are vanishingly few of them … It’s not a huge movement.”

While Mr. North disagrees with Melia’s beliefs, he thought that being jailed for making stickers was “a dark and dangerous road to go down.”

“That’s the weirdness about this, because you’ve seen the full weight of the establishment fall on this one guy, putting him in prison for the production of stickers with the intent to distribute … But if they’ve made him the example, I think that’s quite a dark and dangerous road to go down, even if you fundamentally disagree with what [Melia] says, which I do,” he said.

Islamic Extremism UK’s Primary Terror Threat

According to the government, the UK’s primary domestic terrorist threat comes from Islamism which accounts for more than two-thirds of attacks since 2018, 64 percent of those in prison for terrorism-related offences, and about three-quarters of MI5’s caseload.

In it, Sir William said that the strategy was “not doing enough to counter non-violent Islamist extremism” and that Prevent “has a double standard when dealing with the extreme right-wing and Islamism.”

“It’s actually us who are dubbed far right. We’re the majority: the people who believe that immigration should be controlled, that people who have no right to be here should be deported, that we should be able to freely discuss these issues online, that men cannot change sex.

“These are ordinary, everyday normal opinions that have been castigated as beyond the pale by a media class.”

“My opinions often get called far right,” he said. “I’m to the right of the centre right, but my views are pretty pedestrian. No different to what you would hear in the average pub in Bradford, Leeds, York, across the north, or anywhere in this country, because it’s the norm.”