The government is poised to allow Ibrahim Moussawi, media relations officer of Hizbollah, into the UK – despite the opposition of the cabinet minister responsible for social cohesion.

The JC has learned that the Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, is fighting a lone battle within Whitehall to prevent Mr Moussawi’s admission to speak at a conference at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies on March 23.

No other Cabinet minister has, the JC understands, sided with Ms Blears, and the Hizbollah propagandist is to be granted a visa.

Jewish Chronicle, 12 March 2009

Can’t Gordon Brown find someone better suited to running DCLG? Both Hazel Blears and her predecessor as communities secretary, Ruth Kelly, suffer the triple disadvantage of being right-wing, ignorant and thick. If anything, Kelly was even worse than Blears. This was the idiot who in 2006 decided to sideline the Muslim Council of Britain, a broad-based organisation with some 500 affiliates, in favour of the Sufi Muslim Council, which had two known members.

Kelly recently contributed a foreword to Choosing Our Friends Wisely, the latest scaremongering anti-Muslim report by the right-wing think-tank Policy exchange, where she blithely defends this brain-dead decision as an attempt “to ‘rebalance’ our relationships with Muslim communities significantly towards those organisations that were taking a proactive leadership role in tackling extremism and defending our shared values”. Or, to put it another way, towards tiny groups that represent little or nothing in the Muslim community but do defend the government’s foreign policy and attacks on civil liberties.

Update:  Alas, it would appear that Hazel Blears has secured a victory over common sense, according to the Daily Mail, which reports:

“Islamic fanatic Ibrahim Moussawi was today denied a visa to enter Britain. Jacqui Smith has ruled the spokesman for the terrorist organisation Hezbollah should not be allowed to travel here – despite him making at least two previous visits to the UK on her watch. The Mail understands the Home Secretary ruled his presence here – where he was due to lecture Government officials – would not be ‘conducive to the public good’.”

For a response see ENGAGE, 13 March 2009