Anne Marie Waters - Troll of the Month
The Troll of the Month is an incident we choose every month to expose racist and anti-religious haters and to show positive outcomes in the fight against intolerance in Europe.
The far-right anti-Muslim activist and politician Anne Marie Waters wrote a vile Islamophobic article for the free, English, anti-vax ‘newspaper’ The Light.
Titled, ”Blind eyes are still turned to gang rapes,” the article accuses Muslim men of being violent rapists and blames government and police for not protecting women and allowing them to continue to be victims of Muslim predators.
Waters uses examples from different European countries, such as Norway, claiming that “attitudes to women are so awful in many countries that men grow up feeling entitled to rape women who dress a certain way or who frequent the public sphere unaccompanied”, to back up her accusations which falsely suggest that Islam is the motive of the horrific number of gang rapes and domestic violence worldwide.
The Irish activist has a long history of expressing racist, anti-Muslim and anti-migrant views. She has described Islam as “evil” and as “an expansionist, political, totalitarian and supremacist faith, commanded to world domination”.
Waters is the director of the anti-Muslim organisation Sharia Watch UK and the founder of the anti-Islam party For Britain Movement. She founded the party after she was defeated in the UKIP (an anti-EU and anti-migrant party) leadership election.
In 2021, she stood as a For Britain candidate in Hartlepool Borough Council election and Batley and Spen by-election, but failed to be elected.
The For Britain party’s Islamophobic manifesto includes objectives such as “Ban[ning] the burqa as a security threat” and “holding a public inquiry into Islamic doctrine – including the Koran and hadiths – and the fundamentals of sharia law, and fully inform the British public as to its values.”
As the British anti-racist organization Hope not Hate states, Anne Marie Waters “spent years as a Labour Party member, but in 2013 she shifted dramatically to the right and became heavily involved in the so-called ‘counter-jihad‘ scene.”
She has had close connections to extremists, including the British National Party (BNP), and For Britain fielded a former member of the now-banned Nazi terrorist group National Action (NA) in the 2018 Leeds local elections.
Water was also deputy leader of the UK arm of far-right and anti-Islam Pegida party together with the former English Defence League leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson).
The politician also adopted the far-right supremacist ideology of ‘White lives matter’, calling for justice for white people in response to the Black Lives Matter movement during the global protests after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
