Andrew Gilligan has a piece in the Sunday Telegraph continuing his campaign against ENGAGE.
Alas for Gilligan, it seems that the campaign isn’t going well. Kris Hopkins and Greville Janner, who buckled in the face of a witch-hunt initiated by Gilligan (“Islamists establish a bridgehead in Parliament”) and taken up by Paul Goodman and Martin Bright, and announced that they would recommend that the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia should remove ENGAGE from its position as the group’s secretariat, finally got round to consulting other members of the APPG. They found that their proposal to remove ENGAGE has no support. Gilligan reports:
Kris Hopkins, Tory MP for Keighley, and the Labour peer Lord Janner, quit the new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia after failing to persuade their colleagues to sack a body called iEngage as the group’s secretariat.
iEngage, also known as Engage, is an organisation of Islamist sympathisers which has repeatedly defended extremists. Last year, it called on the Government to revoke a ban on a hardline foreign preacher who has said that “every Muslim should be a terrorist”.
The pass allows Mrs Bunglawala to enter Parliament without having to go through security checks and mix freely with ministers and MPs. It gives her the right to invite guests and to use Commons facilities. There is no suggestion that Mrs Bunglawala has been involved in any act of terrorism.
No, there’s just the weasel-worded accusation from Gilligan that ENGAGE supports extremists who advocate terrorism and that Shenaz Bunglawala represents some sort of security threat.
Gilligan isn’t meeting with much success in his self-appointed role as witchfinder general of Islamists, is he? Last year, you may recall, he intervened in the Tower Hamlets mayoral election to launch an attack on Lutfur Rahman, portraying him as a pawn of “Islamic fundamentalists” at the East London Mosque. The result was that Lutfur was elected as an independent candidate with a huge majority.
The moral for Muslims seems to be that if you want to win broad support, your best bet is to have Gilligan launch a campaign of baseless slander against you.