“The legal efforts by a Muslim father to force a Buckinghamshire school to permit his 12-year old daughter to wear the niqab should be resisted by sensible integrated British Muslims. This misguided judicial action, if successful, will not only set a deplorable precedent for Muslim exceptionalism, but will also exacerbate frayed tensions between a (largely) self-segregating Muslim community and an antagonistic general public. This legal test case is so critical as to serve as a defining moment in the battle for the hearts and mind of Muslims in this country.

“The disputed decision by a father to protect the ‘human rights’ of his daughter by insisting that she wears the full-face mask in school should not be seen in isolation. It is at the root of a frightening theological convulsion that is underway in the Islamic world. Driven by a toxic combination of Wahhabi-Salafi-Ikhwani-Deobandi religious extremists, this militant movement seeks to resurrect the caliphate not only in the heartlands of Islam itself, but elsewhere as well.”

Taj Hargey (for background details see here) writes in the Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2007

And who exactly are these people who want to “resurrect the caliphate not only in the heartlands of Islam itself, but elsewhere as well”? Not even Hizb ut-Tahrir holds that position. Whatever your view on the niqab issue, to portray this as part of a campaign to impose an Islamic state in the UK plays to all the worst paranoid stereotypes about the “Muslim threat”. It’s no wonder Taj Hargey is enthusiastically promoted by the Torygraph and the likes of John Ware.

Unfortunately, Cristina Odone seems to have fallen for Hargey’s spurious claims to represent “moderate Muslims”:

Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2007

Meanwhile in an article entitled “School at centre of veil row gets overseas backing“, the Guardian reports that Hargey is boasting that he has the support and financial backing of a group calling itself the Muslim Canadian Congress. This is an organisation that participated in the hysterical “No sharia law in Canada” campaign against the proposal to extend state-sponsored faith-based family arbitration to Muslims in Ontario. In August last year a section of the MCC split away to form a rival organisation, the Canadian Muslim Union, accusing the MCC of aligning itself with the enemies of the Muslim community. The breakaway faction were denounced by the MCC leadership as “Canadian supporters of Hezbollah” – because they had joined a demonstration against Israel’s attack on Lebanon!

So this is where Hargey is getting his international support from – an organisation whose politics are evidently barely distinguishable from those of Harry’s Place.