Al-Barrak and al-Beraik – Gilligan can’t tell them apart

Andrew Gilligan has uncovered another dangerous extremist at the East London Mosque – Sheikh Saad al-Beraik, who who spoke at the ELM last week (and at the London Central Mosque too, as it happens).

After intensive googling, Gilligan has come up with a 2002 article from which he extracts the quote that provides his article’s headline. A single quote that appeared on a dubious website a decade ago isn’t much of a basis for denouncing Saad al-Beraik as an extremist threat, you might think.

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Church leaders have hit out at a branch of McDonald’s which is to open on Christmas Day. A Muslim branch manager has been drafted in by the fast food outlet to cover for the usual boss who is taking the day off and staff have volunteered to work that day for seven hours.

Parish Rvd Wayne Stillwell said the decision to open the branch showed “the continuing decline of Christendom in this country” and his reaction was “one of great sadness”. He added: “I’m sad that we’ve got to this point in our society where something that means as much as Christmas seems to mean so little. It shows the continuing decline of Christendom in our country.”

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Media coverage of the police figures for so-called “honour” crimes in the UK, revealed by the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation in association with the Guardian, was generally fairly balanced, avoiding the Islamophobic stereotyping of the Muslim community that you might have anticipated. Even the Daily Star managed to report the issue without blaming Muslims.

The exception was the Daily Mail, which headlined its report “Alarming rise of Muslim ‘honour attacks’ in the UK”. This irresponsible accusation against British Muslims was predictably endorsed by Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch (“The Daily Mail headline goes straight for the elephant in the room: this is largely a phenomenon within Muslim communities in Britain”), while his friend Pamela Geller of course agreed (“As Muslim immigration increases, so does sharia, misogyny and gendercide”).

The ignorance and bigotry underpinning such views hardly need underlining. As a Metropolitan Police spokesperson told the Mail: “Honour-based violence cuts across all cultures, nationalities and faith groups – it is a worldwide problem.” Honour attacks are a problem in Hindu-majority India, for example, but are not evident in the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia. Even contributors to the comments on the Mail‘s article were able to make the obvious point that honour-based violence is a cultural rather than a religious phenomenon.

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