“I THINK we should make a stand.”
Bruce Fummey, the half-Ghanaian former Scottish Comedian of the Year is being deadly serious.
When the racist Scottish Defence League hold a protest in Perth tomorrow, ostensibly about car parking spaces beside a mosque, but really about how much they hate non-whites, he’ll be one of the hundreds protesting right back at the group.
“I grew up in a time when racism seemed the acceptable norm. My dad came to Perth to study engineering,” Fummey says.
“He told me how one day somebody walked up to him and spat in his face in Scott St.
“His crime had been to walk down the street hand in hand with my mother.
“It’s easy to forget the changes we’ve come through.”
More than 100 people gathered in Perth’s Queens Hotel on Thursday night for a meeting organised by the newly set-up Perth Against Racism to organise a counter protest.
It means when the sieg-heiling Islamophobes of the SDL get off the train on Sunday they will be met with resistance.
Fummey says it’s important to let them know they’re not welcome.
“On Sunday the SDL are coming to my town from outside trying to take us back to the ugly days we have left behind.
“Afro-Caribbean folk are no longer the key target, but I will stand along with white, black, brown, Muslim, Christian and Jew, in order to show we have no intention of reverting to those days.
“To those who would come to my town in order to sow racial hatred, today I use a phrase I heard so often then: ‘Go back to where you came from’.”
Local MP Pete Wishart said: “I am very disappointed that the SDL will be on the streets of Perth this Sunday with their message of hate, in an attempt to whip up anti-Islamic feeling amongst our community.”
The racists have said tomorrow’s protest will be a “war zone”.
However, they will be constantly surrounded by police, who will escort them from the train station to the city centre protest site.
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