Lutfur Rahman is ‘a vile Islamic supremacist’ with ‘links to jihadist groups’, claims Geller

Pamela Geller UndeadIn an interview at Frontpage Magazine, Pamela Geller tells Jamie Glazov that “a vile Islamic supremacist, Lutfur Rahman, has been elected executive mayor of the London borough of Tower Hamlets. And he has accomplished this through massive voterfraud – isn’t this always how they get their way?” Indeed, according to Geller, Lutfur is not only an Islamic supremacist, he has “links to jihadist groups”.

“What will this mean for Tower Hamlets and Britain in general?” Glazov enquires anxiously. Geller: “It means Sharia for Britain, and the election of Lutfur Rahman is a significant step in that direction.The IFE says that its agenda is to change the ‘very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed… from ignorance to Islam’.”

And what is Geller’s source for this crazed Islamophobic rant? Yes, you guessed, it is of course Andrew Gilligan.

Gilligan must be really proud of himself. First a ringing endorsement from Melanie Phillips and now he is being hailed as a “superb investigative journalist” by an American EDL admirer whose politics make mad Mel look relatively sane.

Cameron caves in to anti-GPU witch-hunt, instructs Warsi not to attend

The Conservative party chair, Baroness Warsi, has been banned by David Cameron from attending a major Islamic conference today, igniting a bitter internal row over how the government tackles Islamist extremism.

Warsi, Britain’s first female Muslim cabinet minister, was told by the prime minister to cancel her appearance at the Global Peace and Unity Event, which is being billed as the largest multicultural gathering in Europe.

A Whitehall source said: “She had hoped to attend, but there is a conflict of opinion on how extremists should be dealt with and the prime minister, supported by Theresa May [the home secretary], were adamant no Tories should attend.”

Paul Goodman, the former Tory communities minister, said: “The aim of the organisers is to exploit politicians by using their presence to gain muscle, influence and credibility among British Muslims. Politicians shouldn’t play their game.”

Argument over the most effective strategy to challenge extremism has also led to a schism between the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in the coalition government. While Cameron has prohibited Tories from attending the event at the Excel Centre in Docklands, the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, has firmly opposed a boycott by politicians.

Observer, 24 October 2010


If this report presents an accurate picture of divisions within the Tory party over the GPU, as seems likely, then the leadership enforced a boycott while their critics called for participation at the event in order to use it as a platform to denounce “extremism”.

The latter tactic was employed in 2008 by the then shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve, who made an idiot of himself during his speech by condemning the GPU organisers for inviting a “Holocaust-denying anti-Semite” to speak at the event. This was a reference to Yasir Qadhi, who had been the subject of a witch-hunt by the likes of Harry’s Place and Frontpage Magazine.

Instead of checking out the accuracy of the allegations against Qadhi, Grieve swallowed them whole, just as Theresa May did more recently with Zakir Naik. If one section of the Tories has has a better position on the GPU than the other, the differences are clearly marginal.

You’ll note that the Observer still thinks that Yasir Qadhi qualifies as an extremist on the grounds that he believes homosexuality is a sin. If that’s the definition of extremism, then in all consistency Paul Goodman et al should have been calling for a Tory boycott of the Pope’s visit.

According to the Observer, the GPU “is likely to witness clashes between moderate Muslims and extremists. One influential Muslim scholar, Tahir ul-Qadri from Pakistan, will denounce those in the audience who subscribe to terrorism as ‘disbelievers’.”

So, while Qadhi is an extremist, Qadri is a moderate. The Observer omits to mention that if there is hostility shown towards Qadri at the GPU, it will largely be because of the sectarian attacks he has made on rival tendencies within Islam. During a visit to London earlier this year he was treated to a double-page spread by the Evening Standard in which he stated that “every Salafi and Deobandi is not a terrorist but I have no hesitation in saying that every one is a well-wisher of terrorists”.

As for Qadri’s proposal that terrorists and their supporters should be treated as apostates, most Islamic scholars would regard this as entirely counterproductive, as it is the mirror image of the takfiri ideology adopted by the terrorists themselves. Qadri’s aim, however, is not to combat terrorism but rather to promote his own tiny organisation, Minhaj ul-Quran, by portraying himself as the unique voice of moderation and mainstream Muslims as supporters of violent extremism.

‘The capture of Tower Hamlets’ – scaremongering Islamophobe endorses Gilligan’s witch-hunt

Mad Mel Jihad in Britain“People like myself who have warned for some years now about the steady Islamisation of Britain receive a torrent of scorn and abuse from the so-called custodians of our culture. Terms such as ‘scare-mongering’, ‘exaggeration’ or ‘alarmism’ tumble out alongside the inevitable ‘Islamophobia’.

“Now we can see what these cultural kamikazes are helping bring about. In the east London borough of Tower Hamlets, a man with links to radical Islamism, Lutfur Rahman, has been elected Mayor of the borough, giving him control of a million-pound budget and a platform for the progressive intimidation and silencing of British Muslims who do not want to live under sharia law, let alone the non-Muslim majority in the area.

“In order to know anything about this crucial development, you have to read the Telegraph‘s Andrew Gilligan who has been closely following what’s been going on in Tower Hamlets during the past year.”

Melanie Phillips’s Spectator blog, 24 October 2010


Phillips goes on to cite an article in today’s Mail on Sunday, which reports on a proposal to merge the Anglican diocese of Bradford with Ripon and Leeds due to financial problems caused primarily by a decline in church attendance. For Phillips, this demonstrates that “the indigenous culture of this country is under siege” from Muslims. According to her:

“The crumbling of church membership is due overwhelmingly to a profound loss of spiritual purpose and moral nerve within the Church of England – and the vacuum is being filled by Islam. Instead of defending its own territory, and with it the religious and moral underpinning of British society, the CofE has decided to stamp upon its Jewish theological roots and instead appease – through its strategy of Christian-Muslim dialogue – the creed that seeks to supersede Judeo-Christian culture.

“The outcome is that Britain’s establishment is actively assisting the progressive Balkanisation of Britain, in accordance with the global strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies to take over the west.”

Phillips’s spelling and grammar may be better, but in other respects it is difficult to distinguish the views expressed here from the hate-filled comments posted by BNP supporters and other racists on the Mail‘s website. No doubt Gilligan is well pleased to receive the endorsement of such a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Muslim bigot. Phillips’s article certainly provides a useful illustration of the narrative that Gilligan’s malicious witch-hunting of the IFE and Lutfur Rahman has played to.

A further reply to George Readings

In a piece for the Guardian’s Comment is Free, George Readings of the Quilliam Foundation has finally got round to replying my Socialist Unity article (crossposted at Islamophobia Watch) in which I defended the noted Islamic scholar and Al-Jazeera TV star Yusuf al-Qaradawi against an attack from Readings.

Readings misrepresents my views – and more importantly those of Qaradawi himself – but at least he has attempted to rebut my criticisms with reasoned argument. This is certainly an improvement on Quilliam’s previous methods, which have involved trying to politically blackmail a London Assembly member for whom I worked into taking action against me, and then, after he told Ed Husain to take his threatening email and shove it, hiring libel lawyers in an attempt to shut me up.

Continue reading

Geller has nothing against halal food (it says here)

Campbell Soup Co., the Camden, N.J., food giant, has been fighting a grass-roots boycott of its products after its Canadian subsidiary rolled out a line of soups certified as halal, meaning they’re prepared according to Islamic dietary laws.

Campbell Co. of Canada introduced the soups in a few Canadian markets in January, although American bloggers didn’t catch up to the news until earlier this month. That’s when the tempest in a tomato-soup can started.

Blogger Pamela Geller began calling for a boycott earlier this month via her widely read site, Atlas Shrugs. Other bloggers soon joined in.

The halal soups, designated with a special label, are available only in Canada. The company has no plans to offer a similar line in the United States, said John Faulkner, a company spokesman.

In an interview, Geller, who was instrumental in whipping up opposition to an Islamic community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan, said she has no objection to the halal certification itself. Rather, she said, she opposes Campbell’s decision to have its Canadian products certified by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an organization that government prosecutors alleged had ties to the terrorist group Hamas in a 2007 conspiracy case.

“No one is suggesting they refrain from this line,” Geller said. “No one is suggesting they not have halal food. I’m not against halal food any more than I’m against kosher food. My issue is who’s doing the certifying.”

Washington Post, 18 October 2010


Yup, that’s the same Pamela Geller whose response to the Mail‘s recent scaremongering about halal meat in the UK was to complain about non-Muslims having to consume “meat slaughtered in a barbaric, torturous and inhuman method, Islamic slaughter. Ugh.”

‘Qaradawi won’t talk to Jews’

Well, so Harry’s Place claims. They quote that reliable source, the Elder of Ziyon blog, as follows: “The 8th Annual Doha Conference on Interfaith Dialogue is to start tomorrow, but prominent Islamic Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi is boycotting the conference, according to Palestine Today. The reason? Because there will be Jews there!”

In fact Qaradawi’s position on interfaith dialogue is quite clear. Back in 2005 he stated that he objected to dialogue with Israel’s chief rabbi because “he supports the murder of Palestinians on a daily basis, supports the destruction of homes and the eviction of people, and supports the crimes and the barbaric slaughter that are taking place every day. How can I shake his hand and sit down with him?

But Qaradawi said he had no problem engaging in dialogue with representatives of the Jewish community who oppose the repression of the Palestinians: “I welcome Jews who dissociate themselves from what Israel is doing, and I welcome being with them.”

He concluded: “I oppose dialogue with Jewish rabbis living in Israel, who support the crimes committed by Israel. With them there is no possibility [of dialogue]…. We will hold a dialogue with those who are reasonable among them, as well as with the Christians, as indeed I have been present at a number of conferences for Islamic-Christian dialogue. But with those ‘who do evil’, as Allah said, we shall neither argue nor shall we have any dialogue.”

The source of these quotes? None other than the Middle East Media Research Institute, an institution that is of course highly regarded by the contributors to Harry’s Place.

Civitas (!) defends right to wear veil

Well, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph and a Civitas press release, it does. Alveena Malik, one of the contributors to a new report from the right-wing think-tank entitled Women, Islam and Western Liberalism, is quoted as writing that “the wearing of religious symbols, including the full veil, should be a fundamental human right of an individual in both the public and private sphere”.

Which is not at all the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from Civitas, who have been the source of a series of scaremongering publications directed against the Muslim community.

Indeed it’s not so long since the Civitas blog carried a piece that quoted al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri as saying that every veil-wearing Muslim woman in the west was “a soldier in the battle of Islam against Zionist-Crusader”, went on to assert that the niqab represented a serious security threat and concluded that “there are enough genuine concerns as to who and what may really lie behind the veil to justify its proscription in public places”.

Has the government banned another ‘extremist preacher’?

Writing on his Telegraph blog Andrew Gilligan reports, under the headline “Labour-linked extremist ‘banned from UK'”, that Qazi Hussain Ahmad the former president of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan has had his visa revoked.

You don’t have to be an admirer of Jamaat-e-Islami to recognise that Ahmad is a mainstream political figure in Pakistan. He was the parliamentary leader of the MMA alliance that won 11% of the vote in the 2002 elections to the National Assembly.

Given Gilligan’s notoriously light-minded attitude to factual evidence, anything he writes has to be taken with a pinch of salt. However, after the exclusion of Zakir Naik, I wouldn’t put anything past the present government.

Daily Express defends ‘nation’s shared values’ against ‘creeping islamification’

Inayat Bunglawala has rightly criticised the head of the UK Islamic Shariah Council, Shaykh Abu Sayeed, who in an interview on The Somosa website has stated that it is “not Islamic” to classify non-consensual marital sex as rape and prosecute offenders.

Inayat wrote: “Shaykh Abu Sayeed’s comments are woefully misguided and will also be a gift to the likes of the Daily Mail and others who love to incite mischief by portraying the Islamic Shariah Council as being in the vanguard of slyly ‘Islamising’ the UK.”

And, sure enough, we find an editorial in the Daily Express which does just that:

“The views of Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed about rape in marriage show why sharia law must never be allowed to take a grip in Britain…. Perhaps this outburst will destroy once and for all the foolish notion that opposition to the creeping islamification of Britain can only be motivated by bigotry and prejudice. This nation’s shared values, including belief in gender equality and the right to self­-determination, are under threat.”

From which you might be led to conclude that the nation’s “shared values” have always included the principle of prosecuting on a rape charge any husband who subjects his wife to non-consensual sex. In fact an interpretation of the law dating from 1736 which provided the basis for an exemption for marital rape wasn’t overturned until a House of Lords ruling in 1991.

Nick Cohen on the Caldicott inquiry

Nick_CohenWriting in the Observer, Nick Cohen takes issue with the results of the Caldicott inquiry, commissioned by University College London, which absolved the university and the students’ union Islamic Society of any responsibility for the “Christmas Day bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab turning to violent extremism.

Not that Cohen addresses the actual content of the 37-page report produced by the inquiry. Instead we get this: “I could attack it by emphasising that UCL had chosen to put on the inquiry team Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain. Dr Bari is high up in the Jamaat-e-Islami-dominated East London Mosque.” And Cohen goes on to outline JI’s part in opposing the Bangladesh independence struggle back in 1971.

Leaving aside the question of whether the actions of a political party in East Pakistan four decades ago tell you anything at all about the political role its sympathisers play in the UK in 2010, Cohen ignores the fact that many of the opponents of the ELM leadership within the British Bangladeshi community are themselves linked to a political party in Bangladesh – the Awami League.

This is the organisation that led the 1971 independence struggle but within a few years had lost popular support. Its response was to ban rival political parties and impose a one-party state, while establishing an executive presidency to which the League’s leader appointed himself without bothering to go through the formalities of an election.

Cohen is always ready to denounce “totalitarian Islamism”, but it would appear that he has no problem at all with totalitarianism when it is practised by secular nationalists.

Cohen also finds it significant that one Riyadh ul-Haq was invited to speak at an ISoc charity dinner in November 2005, and quotes an antisemitic statement attributed to him in a Times report. Such statements are of course to be condemned. But nobody has presented any evidence that Riyadh ul-Haq incited hatred against the Jewish community or anyone else when he spoke at the ISoc dinner, or that ISoc was even aware that he held antisemitic views.

The question of whether speakers may use students’ union society meetings as a platform to promote bigotry does need to be addressed. Indeed, a substantial section of the Caldicott inquiry’s report, which Cohen dismisses as a whitewash, is devoted to this very issue. Noting that the UCLU adminstration has brought in new procedures to check the background of external speakers, the report proposes that these procedures should be “further reviewed and strengthened” and recommends that “UCL Union, in consultation with the UCL authorities, review its criteria for defining the acceptability of prospective visiting speakers”.

However, this is hardly an issue restricted to ISocs. Earlier this year there was a controversy when the Israel Society at Cambridge University invited the Israeli historian Benny Morris to speak at one of their meetings. Morris believes that “the phenomenon of the mass Muslim penetration into the West and their settlement there” has had the effect of “creating a dangerous internal threat”. He is also on record as stating that “the Muslims are busy killing people, and killing people for reasons that in the West are regarded as idiotic. There is a problem here with Islam”.

But somehow Cohen didn’t get round to condemning the university Israel Society for promoting political extremism and hatred. In fact, he said nothing about the issue at all.

Cohen also pours scorn on UCL’s awareness of Islamism, accusing them of “ignorance” and saying that he doubts whether “one lecturer in 10 at UCL knows anything about the ideologies of Jamaat and the Muslim Brotherhood”. Presumably that would be as distinct from the deep knowledge of all things Islamic we have come to expect from Nick Cohen – a man who thinks that Muhammad Abdul Bari is still secretary general of the MCB when Dr Bari ceased to occupy that position four months ago.

The reality is that Cohen never showed the slightest interest in Islam or Islamism until the run-up to the invasion of Iraq – of which he was an enthusiastic supporter – when the Muslim Association of Britain became centrally involved in organising a mass movement in opposition to the war. Suddenly Cohen discovered that political Islam represented a major threat to civilisation as we know it. And even then his hostility was hardly based on any actual study of the subject.

This is the man who angrily informed Observer readers in February 2003 that the huge demonstration against the Iraq war that brought London to a standstill was jointly organised by “the reactionary British Association of Muslims”. Cohen knew so little about MAB that he couldn’t even get their name right – but of course he didn’t see his own ignorance as any obstacle to denouncing them as reactionaries.