Last week’s Jewish Chronicle – the same issue that included Geoffrey Alderman’s column applauding the murder of Vittorio Arrigoni at the hands of al-Qaeda – also featured a front-page splash by its political editor Martin Bright, who reported that:

“An organisation which hosted an associate of 7/7 ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan in the House of Commons has been bankrolled by one of the UK’s most prominent Jewish philanthropists, the JC can reveal.”

The charity referred to was Forward Thinking, which aims to encourage greater understanding between Muslim communities and wider society, promote peace in the Middle East and facilitate dialogue between the religious and secular worlds. And the Jewish philanthopical organisation was the Pears Foundation. The “jihadist” who spoke at the reception in parliament was Tafazal Mohammad, the head of an organisation called Muslim Youth Skills which advises clients such as the Metropolitan Police on how to engage with young Muslims.

The purpose of Bright’s report was clearly to warn off sections of the Jewish community who might be inclined to associate with organisations that take a more balanced view of the Palestinian resistance than the JC does. As Bright explained: “Forward Thinking was founded by William Sieghart, who has called for a reassessment of the West’s ‘distorted image of Hamas’.” (The reference is to an article published in the Times in December 2008.) Yet despite this the Pears Foundation had – shock, horror – given £23,000 to Forward Thinking between 2008 and 2010.

Continue reading →

“Few events – not even the execution of Osama bin Laden – have caused me greater pleasure in recent weeks than news of the death of the Italian so-called ‘peace activist’ Vittorio Arrigoni.”

Thus Geoffrey Alderman in the Jewish Chronicle. As Alderman notes, Arrigoni was killed by the Gaza-based al-Qaeda-aligned terrorist group Tawhid wal-Jihad.

Continue reading →

Well, that’s the figure given by the tabloid press for the number of participants at the demonstration by Anjem Choudary’s Muslims Against Crusades group yesterday.

The Mail reported: “A protest by hundreds of Osama Bin Laden supporters sparked fury outside the US Embassy in London today as they staged a mock ‘funeral service’ for the terror leader…. Radicals carrying placards proclaiming ‘Islam will dominate the world’ branded US leaders ‘murderers’ and warned vengeance attacks were ‘guaranteed’.”

The Sun and the Express agreed that “hundreds” of Choudary’s supporters joined the embassy protest.

Even allowing for the fact that an event like Bin Laden’s death would bring a larger than normal turnout, this seems highly unlikely, given that the supporters Choudary is able to attract to his provocative stunts are usually numbered in the tens rather than the hundreds. Indeed, Associated Press reported that “dozens of people” attended yesterday’s demonstration, while Reuters puts the figure at no more than “about a hundred”. Photos of the protest would appear to confirm that the “hundreds” of MAC demonstrators were a figment of the press’s imagination.

But this is what we have come to expect from the tabloid press. They repeatedly boost the importance and significance of Anjem Choudary and his tiny group, suggesting to their readers that he represents substantial forces within Britain’s Muslim communities, when in reality he represents next to nothing. This in turn feeds the paranoid far-right fantasies of the English Defence League, who organised a counter-protest against MAC yesterday. EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon recently predicted, with an entirely straight face, that “there’s going to be a hundred thousand Anjem Choudarys”.