UK judge tells Muslim man jailed for fighting back against rioters to 'rise above' racism
A young Muslim man in the south-west English city of Plymouth has been sentenced to 20 months in prison for throwing cans at far-right rioters who had hurled alcohol at him.
Amer Walid, 24, had no previous convictions and was attacked by members of a far-right mob as they clashed with an anti-racist rally on Monday 5 August.
The incident was part of a wave of racially fuelled and Islamophobic rioting across the country.
The trigger for the riots, which began on 30 July, was online misinformation following a stabbing attack that killed three children in the northern English town of Southport on 29 July.
False claims spread rapidly online that the attacker was a Muslim and illegal immigrant.
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Walid told the court on Thursday that rioters, chanting racist slurs, threw a bottle or can of alcohol at him - which angered him, since he doesn’t drink due to his Islamic beliefs.
Walid then retaliated by throwing cans at rioters.
Judge Robert Linford said he accepted Walid had not been “looking for trouble” and that rioters “had been throwing missiles” and making “deeply offensive racist chants”.
But he sentenced Walid to 20 months in prison, telling him: “What you should have done was rise above their simply obnoxious racism.
“You were capable of doing that but you didn’t, instead what you did was throw four missiles of one sort or another at the group opposite,” he added.
Walid was sentenced alongside three others, who were far-right rioters.
Over a thousand arrested in crackdown
In recent days, courts across the UK have seen hundreds of prosecutions of those involved in the rioting.
Over a thousand people have been arrested and around half have been charged, including children.
One 15-year-old boy was convicted for stealing from a vape shop and throwing beer kegs through windows in Sunderland. Two 12-year-old boys also pleaded guilty to violent disorder earlier this week.
Muslims who fought the rioters have also been charged.
Noman Ahmed, a 24-year-old engineering graduate, was sentenced to 14 months in prison after joining a group guarding a mosque in Middlesborough.
He helped chase two white men, who were alleged to have made “racist threats”, from the mosque and was filmed trying to punch one of them.
People have also been jailed for online posts. On 9 August, London’s Metropolitan Police commissioner, Mark Rowley, threatened to extradite and imprison people overseas, including US citizens, over online posts.
He warned that “the likes of Elon Musk”, the world’s richest man and owner of the social media platform X, are potential investigation targets.
Having declared that civil war in Britain was “inevitable” during the riots, which were partially triggered by misinformation spread on X, Musk has since issued several apparently humorous posts suggesting the US should invade the UK and labelled former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousuf “racist” and a “scumbag”.
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