'Protesting Global Peace and Unity.' that sounds a little bit wrong.

A few friends and I had volunteered for a charity called ULFA Aid over the weekend. ‘ULFA’ meaning uniting hearts and minds with the charity’s core message to spread community togetherness through various projects.

This all happened at something called the GPU (the global peace and unity event or ‘the GA-poo’ as its unofficially known as.) For anyone not familiar with this big shin-dig held in London’s ExCel Arena it’s an event for Muslims and non-Muslims to exhibit stalls, lectures and a concert in one squished weekend like a disorderly, rushed club sandwich oozing with ketchup.

The massive event crammed 50,000 mainly Muslim people into the ExCel arena (amusingly Britain’s Next top Model LIVE was going on at the same time in the same arena.) Some would describe this as Muslim ‘halal’ rave but of course not wanting to offend anyone I will not describe it as that or mention it in this blog.

Nevertheless I will swiftly move to the point. Just outside the ExCel there were people and placards, I was intrigued, as were my friends. As we approached I recognised a few of the people holding these protest signs on channels like BBC1, ITV3 and Sky News. I felt like saying: ‘Hey I’ve seen you hold that sign about be-heading non-believers, that’s you right, how are ya?’ But I wisely chose not to.

The protesters believed that the Global peace and unity event was promoting ‘free-mixing.’ I asked an extremist translator and he said this means that when a man breathes and a woman is within a million miles of that breath they are engaging in some sort of conversation, technically. Thus they concluded this event was morally inappropriate. Using their logic the world is one gigantic pot of free mixing immorality which needs to be destroyed. Now.

I raised a few concerns (in my head of course in fear of being be-headed.) The first one was: ‘your protesting ‘the Global Peace and Unity Event,’ something about that sounded slightly insane. I can imagine the text that went around: ‘protest 2moro against Global Peace, haraam init.’

The other concern was a little bit more serious. It was that people would walk past and assume that those 11 or so guys holding placards are representative of all Muslims. Rather then the 50,000 crammed inside the ExCel Arena. That’s like me saying ‘Loose Women’ on ITV3 (which I believe is a form of legitimate torture) is representative of all bored, middle aged, nothing-better-to-do-so-I-will-sip-coffee-and-gossip-all-day women. But I don’t. But the media does unfortunately.

To balance this blog out I will quickly list the negatives of the ‘Global Peace and Unity event.’ Firstly I was ejected from ‘The Platinum Suite’ which was were all the ‘Muslim A-Listers and ‘Very Very Important people’ chilled and talked about property and money. I believe the Scottish man who removed me and my friends said he needed to control ‘the flow of traffic’ (flow of traffic my buttocks) and removed us from the soirée of talented Muslims (basically rich people.) I thought about a socialist revolution against the Platinum Suite but time was against me.

The next annoying thing which I will quickly mention is the BO. Of course with that volume of people this is natural. There was a natural waft of teenage-lynx, mid-life crisis after-shave and chicken tikka which to be fair added to the atmosphere. The whole event was by no means perfect but was a positive experience for us all.

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