“Muslims who preach hate are to be deported and subject to new restrictions, Charles Clarke announced in the Commons on Wednesday. So what would the home secretary have to say about stuff like this: ‘Blessed is he who takes your little children and smashes their heads against the rocks’? Or this: ‘O God, break the teeth in their mouths … Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime; like the untimely birth that never sees the sun … The righteous will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.’ No, this is not Islam, it is the Bible. And there is a lot more where that came from.
“Why, then, are so many commentators persuaded that the Qur’an is a manual of hate – compared to the Judeo-Christian scriptures, it is very tame stuff indeed. More disturbing still for Christians and Jews, the nearest scriptural justification for suicide bombings I can think of comes from the book of Judges, where Samson pushes apart the structural supports of a temple packed with people. ‘Let me die with the Philistines,’ he prays, just before the building collapses.”
Giles Fraser in the Guardian, 23 July 2005
The Muslim Council of Britain demanded an explanation yesterday, after the police shooting of an Asian man at Stockwell Tube station in south London. The Council expressed concerns that there is a “shoot to kill” policy in operation, after the man was shot five times as he fled from the police. MCB spokesman Inayat Bunglawala warned that Muslims he had spoken to are now “jumpy and nervous.”
Senior Muslims warned the government that it needs to revise British foreign policy if it wants to put an end to terrorist violence.
“Ramadan, whose grandfather Hassan al-Banna was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, is considered the most important Muslim religious intellectual in Europe. He has written and spoken extensively on the need for Muslims to avoid building a ‘ghetto Islam’ and to work with people of all faiths to build a culture of peace and justice….