Campaigners from the Centre for Social Cohesion have pledged to seek an arrest warrant for Dr Ibrahim Moussawi, an Islamic extremist, who is due to visit Britain this March.

The think-tank said the Home Office would be “beyond hypocrisy” if it allowed Dr Ibrahim Moussawi into Britain just weeks after barring Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician, because of his alleged anti-Muslim views. Dr Moussawi is a spokesman for the Lebanese-based militant group Hizbollah, the military arm of which is banned in Britain as a terrorist organisation.

Douglas Murray, director of the CSC, has written to Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, warning her that he will instruct lawyers to seek an arrest warrant for Dr Moussawi if he is allowed into the country. The think-tank has already sought advice from barrister Paul Diamond, an expert in religious affairs law, on using war crimes legislation and a legal precedent from 2004 to seek, independently, an arrest warrant from a magistrate.

Mr Murray said: “This is the deepest hypocrisy, in fact, it is worse than hypocrisy on behalf of the British government. The government clearly do not have a grip on this. Britain is still a place where terrorists and terrorist supporters can come to incite and recruit.”

Dr Moussawi is due to address a conference at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, on March 25, on the subject of political Islam.

In its letter to Ms Smith, the Centre for Social Cohesion said: “It is the position of the Home Office that individuals are banned from entry in the United Kingdom if ‘they stir up tension and provoke violence to others’. Dr Moussawi would threaten community harmony and clearly breach this condition. If Dr Moussawi arrives in the UK we will instruct counsel to seek a warrant for his arrest.”

Sunday Telegraph, 8 March 2009

Well, Douglas Murray would know all about threatening community harmony, wouldn’t he? This is the man who in 2006 told the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference in the Netherlands:

“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.”

If Ibrahim Moussawi was intending to visit the UK to make a similar speech directed against the Jewish community (“conditions for Jews in Europe must be made harder across the board”) it would be quite right to ban him. But of course he’s not.

A government-funded group has called on police and council bosses to ban a public meeting which is being held in Queens Park on Tuesday night.

The Hizb ut-Tahrir political party has scheduled a public meeting at 7.30pm at Queens Park Community Centre, in Westbourne Road, about a perceived bias by Western governments against Muslims. The meeting is entitled “The Campaign To Destroy Islam”. Hizb ut-Tahrir’s website says the group wants to unite all Muslim nations in a unitary Islamic state, or “caliphate”, headed by an elected caliph. This would be established using political methods.

But the Quilliam Foundation, a Government-funded think tank, has described the group as “extremists”. James Brandon, spokesman for the Quilliam Foundation, said: “Hizb ut-Tahrir is one of the more extreme British Islamic groups. The Government has considered banning it in the past. It has got a confrontational, aggressive agenda. The agenda is to radicalise Muslims to take over the world.”

Mr Brandon said his group had contacted Bedfordshire Police, Bedford Borough Council and Queens Park Community Centre to try to have the meeting cancelled.

Bedford Today, 3 March 2009

Yes, that’s the same Quilliam Foundation who defended Geert Wilders’ right to speak at a meeting in the UK, on the grounds that banning him offended the principle of free speech. Maajid Nawaz stated piously:

“Banning Geert Wilders from the UK is not the solution. Just as the ideas of non-violent Islamist groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir should be tackled through debate and argument, so should those of Wilders and others. Freedom of speech should be protected – so long as people do not use this freedom to call for violence against others.”

So, at least we know what a load of nonsense that was. The reality is that the Quilliam Foundation opposes freedom of expression for Islamist sectarians but defends it for far-right racists.

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