Racist mobs continued their rampage through the U.K. this weekend, throwing bricks, setting fires, smashing windows, threatening mosques and attacking hotels housing asylum seekers.

The street-fighting fascist mobs, disproportionately made up of young, white men, have targeted Black people and Muslims, chanting anti-immigrant slogans and embracing much of the same language as was used in the U.S. by neo-Nazi protesters at the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The explosion of far right violence against asylum seekers and Muslims came as fascists spread a frenzy of misinformation on social media in the wake of a mass stabbing committed by a teenager born in Cardiff, Wales, who was in fact neither Muslim nor an asylum seeker.

The stabbing, took place last Monday, and was committed by a knife-wielding 17-year-old in the English town of Southport. By the time he was stopped by police, three young girls at a yoga-dance and yoga class had been fatally wounded, several more children were in critical condition, and two adults who tried to intervene were also seriously injured. It was a truly horrific event, redolent of the mass-shooting sprees that have so bedeviled the U.S. in recent years.

But then, the already awful situation suddenly got even worse. Within minutes of the killings, rumors began circulating online that the attacker was either a Muslim or an undocumented immigrant or both. And, in quick succession far right mobs descended first on the mourning town of Southport, and then, within days, on central London and several other cities, including Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Hull, Nottingham and Belfast in Northern Ireland. They have, in the week since, targeted mosques, hotels housing asylum seekers and then the police. The violent attacks have now spread to more than a dozen cities, with hundreds arrested and with the government so concerned that Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary, is reportedly considering introducing emergency legislation to try to reimpose public order on a rapidly metastasizing situation, and prime minister Keir Starmer, himself a former crown prosecutor, has warned the racist mobs that the full force of the law will be brought against them. Earlier today, Starmer and Cooper........

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