Harry's Place

Inayat Bunglawala writes:

Today’s Guardian story about the Quilliam memo helps demonstrate how the current Prevent programme has degenerated into a worrying spectacle of tiny groups competing for government access and funding while smearing other credible and far larger Muslim organisations as being ‘Islamists’ and extremist sympathisers.

Now, I’ve got little time for the way the previous government decided the best way to combat Islamic extremism is to throw taxpayers’ money at various groups and ‘initiatives’, and the way it also managed to give the impression it viewed every Muslim as a potential terrorist (see The British Labour Government’s Ruinous Approach to Combating Islamic Extremism), but Bunglawala’s whining about ‘credible’ Muslim organisations being ’smeared’ smacks of sour grapes over the fact that his favourite organisation, the Muslim Council of Britain, has fallen out of favour in Westminster. Frankly, it should never have been in favour. Previously, I’ve looked at the members of the MCB’s Central Working Committee, and found a group of people who should have no influence or credibility whatsoever, given their views and associations.

For a particularly egregious example, take the case of MCB CWC member Abduljalil Sajid. In 2006, Sajid praised the Egyptian-born Australian Muslim leader Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali as ‘a great scholar’ and defended him when he caused outrage by blaming rape victims for sex attacks. Al-Hilali ‘argued‘:

If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it … whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?

The uncovered meat is the problem.

If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.

Sajid’s response to this was to say:

I respect his [al-Hilali's] views. His intentions are noble in order to make morality and modesty part of our overall society.

Previous sermons by al-Hilali, viewed by MCB CWC member Sajid as ‘a great scholar’ with ‘a great knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence’, have called for jihad, supported suicide bombing, denied the Holocaust, and glorified the 9/11 attacks. In 2004, al-Hilali stated in a sermon:

Don’t be surprised if one day you hear the Muezzin calling for prayer and saying “Allah Akbar” from the top of the White House. September 11 is God’s work against oppressors. Some of the things that happen in the world cannot be explained; a civilian airplane whose secrets cannot be explained if we ask its pilot who reached his objective without error, who led your steps? Or if we ask the giant that fell, who humiliated you? Or if we ask the President, who made you cry? God is the answer.

Then there’s Bunglawala himself, a man who in November 2009 wrote:

It is very unfortunate that Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi has been barred from visiting the UK since early 2007 by the British government, following pressure from pro-Israeli lobbies. Sheikh Al-Qaradawi is an Islamic scholar who commands huge respect among millions of Muslims worldwide.

Al-Qaradawi has stated: ‘We must plant the love of death and the love of martyrdom in the Islamic nation’.

And there’s more.

And more.

And then there’s this:

Bunglawala concludes:

[I]t is vital and necessary for the authorities to work in cooperation with all the main Muslim organisations in the country to ensure that the anti-terrorism message gets the widest possible dissemination and the strongest possible endorsement.

It is vital and necessary that the MCB play no role in that process. Bunglawala and co or Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri? No contest.

Edit:

Just to clarify, I’m not advocating funding for ul-Qadri, either. Not a penny of taxpayers’ money should go to any religious group on the basis that it will help ‘prevent extremism’ in a religious community. Religious people must get their own houses in order, with their own money, on their own time. Why should you or I fund them?

What we need is for the government to treat us as citizens, not as members of this or that group or ‘community’ or whatever. The surest way to bring about a fractured society is for a government to treat its citizens as though their private beliefs, their skin colour, their ethnic background, and so on, somehow makes them ‘different’ to other citizens.

The only role government should have regarding religious and cultural groups is upholding the rule of law. Muslims should be treated as citizens, not ‘Muslims’, and Islamist terrorists should be dealt with as criminals, as citizens who have broken the law, not as ‘Muslims’.