Groups like the UK EDL, PEGIDA, and others are created and run directly by special interests - ironically the same special interests organizing, funding, and directing the very extremists Islamophobes are scapegoating all of Islam for. Many EDL/PEGIDA members are concurrently violent football hooligans and/or Neo-Nazis, thus, a lack of informed discernment should be no surprise.
It's real simple. Create a threat, predicate expanding autocracy at home and endless wars of hegemony abroad upon confronting that threat, and all the while intentionally perpetuate fear, hysteria, hatred, and division to keep that threat relevant in the hearts and minds of as many people as possible.
Described above is an elementary tactic used by special interests throughout human history, and today's special interests being no exception. Today, the contrived threat of choice is "terrorism." It is a well-documented fact that organizations like Al Qaeda and the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS), are creations and geopolitical tools of the United States, its European allies, and its Middle Eastern subordinates, including Turkey and the Persian Gulf states.
The means of keeping this contrived threat fresh in the minds of the public is Islamophobia - the scapegoating of some 1.6 billion Muslims around the world for the deeds of US-Saudi indoctrinated, armed, funded, and backed extremists.
The role the United States and Saudi Arabia played in the inception of Al Qaeda during the 1980's to wage proxy war on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan is documented history. What is less widely known, is the role these same two nations played in the creation of ISIS -which admittedly branched off from Al Qaeda.
However, America's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) admitted in a leaked 2012 memo that indeed, just as Al Qaeda was created to wage proxy war in Afghanistan, a "Salafist" (Islamic) "principality" (State) was intentionally created in eastern Syria to wage proxy war against Damascus.
The
leaked 2012 report (.pdf) stated explicitly that:
If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).
Comment: See also: