The battle for the hearts and minds of young Muslims in London is being lost because the vast majority of imams that practise here cannot speak English, leaving a vacuum that jihadist groups ruthlessly exploit.

So says Ed Husain, 34, co-director of the counter-extremist think-tank Quilliam and himself a “reformed jihadi” who knows what it’s like to be young, impressionable and subject to unchallenged Islamist rhetoric.

In London, he singles out the huge East London and Regent’s Park mosques as being of particular concern. “Hizb-ut Tahrir, an organisation which refuses to condemn suicide bombers, still holds meetings inside Regent’s Park Mosque every Saturday, despite widespread public protest but the imam there, a foreigner, does nothing to stop it,” says Husain.

“And at the East London Mosque, which has thousands of congregants, the main imam is a guy who trained in Wahabist Saudi Arabia. One of their trustees, Azad Ali, employed as a civil servant, was recently suspended from his job at the Treasury because he suggested killing British troops fighting in Iraq is justified.

“And in their bookshop there are volumes such as Milestones which is known to be Bin Laden’s bible. It has chapters entitled ‘the virtues of killing a non-believer’ and argues that ‘attacking non-believers in their territories is a collective and individual duty’.”

Husain, living in Essex with his London-born Muslim wife, Faye, 30, and their 18-month daughter, Camilla, knows the East London Mosque all too well, he says. As a former radical activist for Hizb in charge of recruitment at Newham College campus in the 1990s, it was his stamping ground, but since he wrote his 2007 memoir The Islamist – about how he became a fundamentalist at 16 only to reject it five years later – it’s too dangerous for him to return.

“I’ve received personal death threats from those quarters. I’ve had emails warning me that if I go back, I’ll be whipped and hanged.”

“When the death threats impact your family, it’s extremely hard to take,” he says. “Recently my wife was watching The Islam Channel on digital satellite television when a piece came on that was so full of hostility and hatred towards me that she fainted – clean passed out – from the shock.”

Evening Standard, 27 February 2009

“Sectarian, conservative leadership is driving confused young Muslims into the arms of radicals.” Thus the standfirst to Ed Husain’s scaremongering piece in the Times.

The Quilliam report Mosques Made in Britain, on which the article is based, predictably dismisses the work of the Mosques and Imams Advisory Committee, and in a footnote accuses two of MINAB’s constituent organisations, the MCB and MAB, of failing to condemn suicide bombing. But generally speaking, and admittedly on a first quick reading, the report is otherwise quite measured.

But that wasn’t good enough for Ed Husain. He had to spin the report to fit the Islamophobic agenda of the Murdoch press, feeding into the right-wing myth that the entire Muslim community in the UK represents an extremist threat to wider society. And this is a man who is in receipt of large sums of public money, supposedly to fund his efforts at building social cohesion. He really is an utter disgrace.

Cf. “British mosques promote community cohesion”, MCB press release, 23 February 2009

Download the Charity Commission report here.

Update:  See also “Young Muslims at the mercy of extremists because of out-of-touch Imams” in the Daily Telegraph, 25 February 2009

The Archbishop of Canterbury has defended his controversial comments about the introduction of Islamic law to Britain and claimed that public opinion is now behind him.

On the anniversary of the interview in which Dr Rowan Williams said it “seems inevitable” that some parts of sharia would be enshrined in this country’s legal code, he claimed “a number of fairly senior people” now take the same view. He added that there is a “drift of understanding” towards what he was saying, and that the public sees the difference between letting Muslim courts decide divorces and wills, and allowing them to rule on criminal cases and impose harsh punishments.

But Douglas Murray, the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, said: “He has started a process which is deeply dangerous, damaging to Britain and to Muslim women in Britain. It was a wicked move because it undermines the progressives and gives succour to the extremists.”

Daily Telegraph, 16 February 2009

Yes, that’s the same Douglas Murray who said: “It is late in the day, but Europe still has time to turn around the demographic time-bomb which will soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities. It has to. All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop…. Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board: Europe must look like a less attractive proposition.”

The Douglas Murray whose slanders against Salma Yaqoob in a television discussion led to the programme being pulled by Central TV for fear of legal action. According to Salma: “He made all sorts of wild claims about me. He said that I was a supporter of terrorism, that I didn’t care about Muslims in Iraq and that I’d taken part in an anti-war riot. It was all such libellous nonsense I thought they would just halt the recording there and then…”

In the soaraway Sun Jon Gaunt adds his ten cents to the Wilders debate, claiming that he “can clearly hear the shrill whistle of appeasement to a vocal minority community” and denouncing “double standards”. He tells us:

“After having 52 people slaughtered on 7/7, we spent millions on roadshows and diversion projects to keep young lads away from extremism. However, at the same time Labour allowed Muslim hotheads to preach death to the infidels on the streets of London, stirred up by radicals such as Abu Hamza.”

Er… actually, Abu Hamza is now serving a seven-year prison sentence and the idiots who took to the streets with provocative slogans during the 2006 demonstrations against the Danish cartoons have also been jailed.

Gaunt goes on to outline his position on the issue of freedom of expression: “As far as I’m concerned, in a mature democracy such as ours you should be free to worship who you like and criticise any belief structure you fancy as long as you don’t incite hatred.”

Sentiments with which we entirely concur. But the whole point about Wilders is precisely that he does incite hatred – in fact this is the charge on which he’s currently being prosecuted in the Netherlands. Hasn’t Gaunt watched Fitna? Well, since you ask, no: “I haven’t seen the film, just like I haven’t read the Koran. And I haven’t got any intention of doing either in the near future. Why? Because I am simply not interested.”

Still, never let your own ignorance stand in the way of a good rant about appeasing Muslims, eh Jon?