The past few months have seen the emergence of another challenge for the British Muslims in the form of the English Defence League (EDL), who are supposedly marching around the country against Islamic extremists.

In reality EDL is a racist organisation which seeks to vilify, intimidate and provoke our communities.

Their first protest was in Birmingham, followed by Luton, Harrow and on the 10th October in Manchester. On every occasion there has also been a much bigger counter demonstration against EDL lead by United Against Fascism (UAF), a broad left wing socialist group.

The response from the Muslim community has fundamentally been two type. Initial where young Muslims in large numbers joined the ranks of UAF, and the second in Manchester where the Muslim leadership concluded not to support the counter protest of UAF. There is a debate within the Muslim community which route best serves the long term interests of the Muslim s and the wider community in the UK.

Whilst I have not been involved with the first three protests but have researched what took place. As far as the Manchester protest is concerned, I have had the opportunity to work closely with the local authority and the police during the planning stages and to observe the protests closely as the day unfolded in Manchester.

In my opinion the Muslim community and Manchester city have come out with flying colours and therefore we need to use this as the model to be applied in other cities where EDL are planning to demonstrate.

I say this because in the case of the first three protests, we witnessed violent clashes between EDL and UAF with large numbers of Muslim young men being arrested and charged by the police, and in due course they will end up in court and may have criminal convictions for life.

The media also had a field day showing large numbers of Muslim youths attacking a small number of white youths, reinforcing EDL’s message that Muslim’s are violent and intolerant of the freedom to protest, showing them to be the victims.

In contrast in Manchester what you got was a clear unified position of not participating in a counter demonstration, which resulted in a much smaller number of young Muslims turning up in UAF’s counter demonstration, and only four out of the 47 people arrested identified as Muslims, and there was hardly any fighting between the two groups.

A lot of hard work done before the demonstration meant that all the political parties came together by unanimously passing a resolution condemning EDL’s demonstration.

Sending a clear message to EDL, they were not welcome in Multicultural Manchester. Faith leaders also played their part by issuing a statement stating that they all are united against EDL and ‘an attack on one community is an attack on all.’ There was also a vigil held at Manchester cathedral comprising of faith leaders, political leaders, trade unions and others all standing together against EDL’s message of hate and provocation. By bringing all these key players together on one side, media too got a clear message against EDL.

The fact that very few young Muslim youths turned out against EDL, there will be no YouTube and other web based campaigns using images from the Manchester demonstration against the Muslim community.

Perhaps the most important point is that with every protest the number of EDL has increased culminating in their biggest demonstration in Manchester.

I believe that the unity and foresight shown by the Muslim community by working closely with key players, city hardly saw any violence or damage, this fundamentally reduce the oxygen of publicity and will reduce the large section of football hooligans from the ranks of EDL’s, who are only interested in violence. The campaign of British National Party and EDL has exposed the current weakness in the legislation, whilst we have seen the strengthening of race hate legislation, these organisation have moved to using faith based hate message in order to create division and disharmony in society. The government now urgently needs to look at this area.