While I am not a member of the EDL, nor a particular fan of their brand of awareness-raising, I was curious enough to go along to watch their rally in Weymouth on Saturday.

This was mainly because I don’t like being told by the liberal left what I am allowed to hear or believe.

While their approach to protest was loud and the majority of their membership clearly from the football terraces, my impression is that the reports and the statements made by the opposing groups are simplistic, dismissive and wrong.

Perhaps because most of this opposing group was based around the pavilion (and I have to say I doubt there were anywhere near 350 people there when I walked there) they did not see the flags that the EDL were carrying.

One of them bore a Jewish emblem. This is important because the EDL membership, despite what the liberal left would have us believe, comprises gay men, Jews and Asians. Hardly the jack booted stormtroopers I had expected.

Undoubtedly, as far as Weymouth is concerned, such grandstanding is unnecessary, because, as the so called ‘anti fascists’ (in my experience, there is no fascist like a liberal) correctly state, Islamic extremism has yet to put down its roots here.

But that is not to say there is not a valid concern to be discussed.

The EDL also claimed to be protesting against the grooming of white girls by Islamic gangs.

Once again, this is dismissed as racism. But there is a very real problem.

I’m sure that there will be responses to my letter, and the same people who have stated, in print, that they want to show hate to the EDL (isn’t ignorant hatred a mark of the facist?) will accuse me of racism.

I have no argument if they tell me that an EDL demo in Weymouth was not necessary. I do, however, believe that a debate about the dangers of Islamic extremism is needed, and now.

Democracy is not best served by marginalising opposing views (an approach being vociferously advocated by one of the opposing spokesmen, who was telling a TV crew and random passers by that he had asked the police to ‘ban’ the demo because ‘their view doesn’t need to be heard’).

Simon Bowkett, Jim Knight and others quoted in your reports are able politicians but they need to work to stimulate debate, not suppress it.

Dismissing a multicultural protest group as “racist” is simplistic and ignorant and our leaders should know better.

The liberal left dreamers are fond of referring to Nazi Germany as an example of what would certainly happen if their vision of utopia were to be questioned.

But if we should learn a lesson from the Nazi era, it must surely be that refusing to acknowledge a problem is the first step in the path to genocide.

The EDL may not all be university graduates, but they have as much right to express a view as all of us.

I, for one, have been very disturbed by the hate-filled rhetoric this weekend.

But it is not the EDL that has offended me and, despite what our leaders might want Echo readers to believe, there was a genuine interest in what the EDL had to say.

James Young, Challacombe Street, Dorchester