Anti-Muslim hate in London: These are the foreigners who really need to be kept out

Here are some examples of Islamophobic extremists from outside the UK who spoke at the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally on 13 September, organised by veteran Muslim-hater Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson).

Valentina Gomez is a far-right Republican politician from the USA, notorious for posting a video in which she burnt a copy of the Quran using a flamethrower. Addressing the Unite the Kingdom rally she delivered an unhinged anti-Muslim rant, from which this is an excerpt:

“It’s either now or never, because if these rapist Muslims take over, they will not only rape your women, they will behead your sons, just like they did on October 7th in Israel. So we either fight now or we die. And we’re fighters, we are warriors of Jesus Christ. And in the words of the great Charlie Kirk, Islam is the sword that the left is using to destroy Christian nations and to destroy every Christian nation across the world. So do not make peace with evil. Destroy it. And we need a new prime minister that has guts and that’s gonna stand up for the British and send all of these rapist Muslims and dirty rugs back to their Sharia nations.”

Brian Tamaki is another extreme Christian fundamentalist, who founded the fringe, far-right Freedoms New Zealand party. In his speech to the Unite the Kingdom rally Tamaki shouted: “We’ve got to clean our countries up. We’ve got to get everything out that does not know or receive Jesus Christ. Ban any type of public expression in our Christian nations from other religions. Ban halal, ban burqas, ban mosques, ban temples, ban shrines — we don’t want those in our countries.”

Filip Dewinter is a Belgian far-right politician, a long-time self-confessed Islamophobe. He took to the stage to declare:

“It has to be clear that Islam is our real enemy. We have to get rid of Islam. Islam doesn’t belong to Europe. Islam doesn’t belong to the UK…. Mass immigration and multiculturalism are the Trojan horse of Islam. And Islam is the most dangerous thing for our society ever. It’s a threat for the freedom of speech. It’s a threat for the equality between man and woman. It’s a threat for the separation between the church and the state. It’s a threat for all of us. It’s a threat for our children. It’s a threat for what we stand for. Liberty, Europe, England, our kingdom.”

Éric Zemmour is a far-right politician from France, who in 2018 was convicted of “inciting discrimination and religious hatred” against the French Muslim community. On Saturday he took the opportunity to inform the crowd that British and French people are “are facing the same mortal danger” because they are “subjected to the same process of the great replacement of our European peoples by the peoples from the South and of Muslim culture”. We have been “colonised by our former colonies”, face the threat of becoming “a minority on our own soil” and “do not want to disappear”.

Although expressed in superficially more restrained languge, Zemmour’s message was no less poisonous. This is the same “great replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired the white-supremacist terrorist who murdered ten African-Americans in a Buffalo grocery store in 2022.

Obviously foreign extremists who engage in this sort of hate speech should not be allowed into the UK. There is a clear precedent here. In 2013 two anti-Muslim extremists from the US, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, were advertised to speak at another rally organised by ‘Tommy Robinson’, in that case to incite hatred against Muslims following the murder of Lee Rigby. The then home secretary Theresa May banned Geller and Spencer from entering the country, on the grounds that their presence would “not be conducive to the public good”.

The exclusion letters from Home Office can be found here and here. Geller and Spencer were both accused of “making statements that may foster hatred which might lead to inter-community violence in the UK”. As can be seen, the statements in question — Geller had written “Al-Qaeda is a manifestation of devout Islam… it is Islam”, while Spencer described Islam as “a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers” — were no more extreme than the statements by Gomez, Tamaki, Dewinter and Zemmour.

The home secretary’s powers of exclusion remain in force. In the event of overseas hatemongers being invited to speak at a similar event in future, Shabana Mahmood should be urged to exercise these powers. The speeches at last Saturday’s rally are on record and provide more than adequate grounds for a ban on entry to the UK. These vile individuals should never have been allowed to come here in the first place.

First published on Medium in September 2025