The Hizb ut Tahrir organisation and Al-Muhajiroun – or its successor group – are to be banned, Tony Blair has announced. “We will also examine the grounds for proscription to widen them and put forward proposals in the new legislation,” he said.
Imran Waheed of Hizb ut Tahrir said his group would fight any ban and insisted they were “non-violent”. The Muslim Council of Britain said the ban would be “counter productive”.
“If young Muslim women have embraced the hijab as a badge of identity in a way their mothers never did, as a public political symbol, this is more a result of the demands of British multiculturalism than a spontaneous assertion of allegiance. Furthermore, the distinctive character of the identity promoted by multiculturalism is the identity of victim. In the world of multiculturalism, claims of victimhood provide the basis for recognition and status. Thus British Muslims proclaim a litany of persecutions and humiliations of Muslims around the world – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Israel, in Bosnia – as the justification for their sense of grievance and their claim to a privileged position in the hierarchy of victimhood…. But the cult of victimhood in Britain has merely a vicarious relationship with the sufferings of people in Iraq or Palestine – its real origins are to be found in Britain. In the competitive struggle for prestige (and state resources) unleashed by multiculturalism, every minority must justify its claim by elevating its sufferings…. Muslims inflate every personal slight into a manifestation of Islamophobia.”
Another rant by Mark Steyn in the Telegraph, perhaps? No, it’s ex-RCPer Michael Fitzpatrick.
The Muslim Council of Britain regards the Prime Minister’s statement today in which he announced a number of measures, including seeking to proscribe the Hizb ut-Tahrir organization, with concern and alarm.
“The MCB holds no brief for Hizb ut-Tahrir – they are a group with whom the mainstream Muslim community has strong and well known disagreements concerning participation in our political process. However, banning Hizb ut-Tahrir is certainly not the solution and may well prove to be counterproductive. We understand that Hizb ut-Tahrir in the United Kingdom are an avowedly non-violent group. If there are groups that are thought to be contravening our laws, then they ought to be prosecuted in courts of law, not driven underground. Our democratic values need to be upheld, not undermined,” said Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain.
“In addition, we are seeking clarification from the government to ensure that expressions of support for people who are living under brutal military occupation is not to be outlawed. That would be completely unacceptable. Our faith of Islam commands us to speak out against injustice wherever it occurs. To prohibit support for oppressed peoples would make us complicit in the injustice and would have dire consequences for the upholding of international legality,” said Sir Iqbal.
The MCB recalls the admonition given by the Chief Justice Lord Woolf who stated that: “In defending democracy, we must not forget the need to observe the values which make democracy worth defending.”
“Terrorist organisations can kill and maim but they cannot alter our laws or deny us our civil liberties, only our own government can do that. Tony Blair says that he is concerned to ‘defend our way of life’ but his new raft of police powers takes away more practical freedom than any terrorist organisation has yet managed.”
“This is so annoying – last week I was condemning Hizb ut-Tahrir, now I’m forced to defend them with the government ban. Today’s announcement has exposed serious flaws in the way Labour deals with Muslim and non-Muslim groups. I am no fan of HT as it has always been clear on these pages, but there needs to be a sense of perspective and equal rights for everyone.”
Sunny Hundal at Asians in Media, 5 August 2005
Reacting to an Al Jazeera report that the Islamist cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi has called for the execution of the Crown Prince of Qatar because he is gay, the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) has called on Home Secretary Charles Clarke to permanently ban Al-Qaradawi from Britain.
A spokesperson for GALHA said: “If there was any doubt about Qaradawi’s fundamentalist credentials, this latest outburst will put it to rest. To call for the execution of Prince Tameem Bin Hamad Al-Thani simply because he is gay flies in the face of all international human rights conventions. It is not acceptable in a developed nation such as Britain to allow people who encourage the murder of innocents to be permitted free reign to do it. Gay people must be protected from this kind of lethal hate-speech. We have written to the Home Secretary asking him to impose a permanent banning order on Qaradawi. Britain could surely do without such people at a time when religious tensions are so high.”
GALHA news release, 2 August 2005
Unfortunately for GALHA, as Islamophobia Watch has already pointed out the quote isn’t from Qaradawi at all, but from another person entirely. See here.
Diana West recommends Robert Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) as “a book that explains, as the president and all his men (and Condi) cannot, why it is that the sharia-spreaders and the murder-bombers and, as Oriana Fallaci vividly labels them, ‘the head-choppers’ do it all for ‘the religion of peace’.” And she notes approvingly that book already features among Amazon’s best-sellers. West complains bitterly that “WMAL’s Michael Graham got his microphone yanked for daring to notice, mention and ponder the links between Islam and terrorism on the air”, and applauds the thousands of emails that poured into the radio station in support of Graham. Her conclusion: “people want facts – hard, non-PC, and vital to their understanding of what we’re really up against”.
“Those who follow the Qur’an word-for-word have declared war on the West, period. Cloak it in a religion, cloak it in a peaceful request for asylum and refuge, the fact remains that we’re at war. Muslims declared this war long before 9/11/01. War against non-Muslims was declared centuries ago. Islam has been at war with non-Muslims since its inception…. If Americans speak honestly about Islam and happen to say something negative, too bad.”
D.C. Watson rallies to the defence of Tom (“nuke Mecca”) Tancredo and Michael (“Islam is a terrorist organisation”) Graham.
“Hizb ut-Tahrir has a record of over 50 years of following a method of non-violent political activity against imperialism and dictators and despots who rule the Muslim world with the West’s approval. In its work to establish the Islamic Caliphate, Hizb ut-Tahrir has never resorted to any sort of armed struggle and nor has it ever incited people to kill innocent civilians. It has throughout its history worked through intellectual and political means while its members have been tortured and killed in the thousands. Hizb ut-Tahrir has in explicit terms stated that Islam forbids the killing of innocent civilians and expressed its denunciation of the killing of 58 innocent individuals on 7th July 2005 in London.”
Politicians, police, campaigners and community leaders give their responses to Tony Blair’s plans to deport foreign nationals who encourage terrorism and ban the Islamic organisations Hizb ut Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun.