The Muslim Council of Britain has adopted a new position in the wake of the London and Glasgow attacks. As Alasdair Palmer reported in the Sunday Telegraph:
The statement from Muhammed Abdul Bari, the general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was as surprising as it was unequivocal: ‘The police and the security services deserve the fullest support and co-operation from each and every sector of our society, including all Muslims.’ It was a surprise because, in the past, the MCB has seemed to be somewhat lukewarm about encouraging British Muslims to go to the police or security services with any suspicions they might have about friends or acquaintances who they think might be involved in terrorism. It is, after all, only nine months since Mr Bari issued a scarcely veiled threat to the authorities: he said that if the Government and ‘some police officers and sections of the media’ continued to ‘demonise Muslims… Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists, 700,000 of them in London’. Last week, the MCB was considerably more conciliatory. Inayat Bunglawala, Mr Bari’s deputy, accepted that the MCB was taking a new stance in insisting that it was an ‘Islamic duty’ to help the police prevent terrorism, but he said he was confident that the organisation’s 400 affiliates would back it. ‘The overwhelming majority of Muslims,’ he said, ‘will understand the predicament our nation is in.’
Would that be the same Inayat Bunglawala who told me on last week’s Moral Maze that he was committed to the Islamisation of Britain (non-violently, of course)? Would that be the same Muhammed Abdul Bari who thinks that the whole of Britain should subscribe to Islamic values such as arranged marriages? Would that be the same MCB that refuses to attend Holocaust Memorial Day and whose pin-up hero is Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who believes it’s a religious duty to murder coalition forces in Iraq and Jews everywhere?
Dr Bari has indeed had a bit of a PR makeover. The Guardian reported last week:
Britain’s most influential Muslim umbrella group yesterday signalled a significant shift in policy as it urged its communities to play a key and potentially decisive role in the fight against terrorism. Declaring that ‘condemnation is not enough’, leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain, which has 400 affiliate organisations, voiced its most robust message yet and appealed to all Muslims to work hand in hand with the police. The message carries dangers for the MCB which has been criticised by radical activists for being too close to government and the establishment.
But Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, the MCB’s secretary general, said the current crisis meant that issues of conflict between the government, police and Muslim communities who have clashed in the past over antiterrorist incidents and foreign policy needed to be put to one side. ‘When the house is on fire, the concern must be not to blame each other but to put the fire out. Our country is under threat level critical.’ He added: ‘Those who seek to deliberately kill or maim innocent people are the enemies of us all. There is no cause whatsoever that could possibly justify such barbarity.’
Such a shift might just have something to do with the fact that the MCB has been in deep doo-doo with the government over its refusal to attend Holocaust Memorial Day, which has caused even Home Office ministers with their saintly forbearance towards Islamist radicals to lose patience with it altogether. So the MCB probably reckons that if it adjusts its rhetoric in a more civic-minded direction, it can worm its way back into the corridors of Whitehall. But as Ed Husain has observed, no-one should be taken in for a moment:
‘The MCB’s insistence that there is a duty to help the police is very welcome,’ he says. ‘The trouble is, they are still wedded to a version of Islam that is, at the very least, hospitable to the extremists. None of the leading members of the MCB have condemned the hard-line anti-Western ideology of figures such as Syed Qutb, the Egyptian radical fundamentalist who developed, in the early Sixties, the theological justification for violence in the name of establishing an Islamic state (Qutb was executed by the Egyptian government in 1965). It would be a very powerful signal if the MCB said that Qutb’s hatred of the West and of democracy, and his endorsement of violence as the means to replace secular government with theocracy, had no Koranic justification. But no one from the MCB seems willing to make that move.’ The MCB has also failed to condemn suicide bombing by Hamas against Israel. ‘It is a very short step from accepting that there is a theological justification for “martyrdom” operations in Israel,’ states Mr Husain, ‘to accepting that there is a justification for perpetrating the murder of civilians here. I know. I have been down that road.’
Nor are the MCB the only radical wolves in moderate clothing. The Sunday Telegraph reports that an Islamic charity dedicated to ‘dedicated to peace and interfaith friendship’ — so moderate that it was recently invited to share a platform with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury (fancy!) — turns out to have had one of the Glasgow car bomb suspects, Bilal Abdullah, in one room and a Hizb ut Tahrir jihadi in another. And now here’s another ‘moderate’ voice:
Sejad Mekic, the imam at the Cambridge mosque which Abdullah also attended, gave a sermon on Friday condemning all acts of terror. However, he later said he had doubts that the incident at Glasgow airport was a terrorist attack, saying it could have been a car accident. ’I still haven’t made my conclusion,’ he said. When it was pointed out that containers of petrol were reportedly found in the car, he said: ‘Maybe they used to sell petrol.’
Oh dear.
Moreover the Tablighi Jamaat, the ‘moderate’ and wholly ‘spiritual’ sect that is funding the mega-mosque on the Olympics site (despite being called ‘an antechamber to al Qaeda’ by French intelligence and the FBI) turns out — guess what! —to have been instrumental in radicalising some of the car bomb suspects, just like that other pillar of moderation, Hizb ut Tahrir. As the Observer reports:
Indian investigators have uncovered links between the fundamentalist Islamic movement Tablighi Jamaat and the radicalisation of the Ahmed brothers. Tablighi Jamaat, which has a small following in Karnataka, the state where Bangalore is, promotes an austere lifestyle in which followers must adhere strictly to a literal interpretation of the Koran. But some Western intelligence agencies believe the organisation, which proselytises in mosques across Britain, is used to recruit young men. Investigators believe the 7 July suicide bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, attended the main Tablighi mosque in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, where it has its UK base.
According to Samiullah, the secretary of an Islamic trust opposite the Ahmed family home in Bangalore, the brothers had both mentioned Tablighi Jamaat to him. He said: ‘Kafeel told me he had been to Tablighi Jamaat meetings in Europe and asked me what I knew. I told him I knew very little.’ He tried to hold a meeting in a local restaurant to rally support for India’s Muslims in crisis. He also said he was raising funds for Chechnya.’
The British have been well and truly played for suckers.
