Category Archives: Yusuf al-Qaradawi

Tory twits attack Qaradawi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi and MayorYes, it’s another denunciation of the Mayor of London for engaging with leading Muslim scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi. This one is featured in an “attack ad” on the 18 Doughty Street website (watch it here). Although the site is funded by Jeffrey Archer’s former mayoral campaign manager and almost exclusively involves a group of former or present Conservative Party candidates and employees, they pretend that they’re anti-establishment rebels who will “will endeavour to always take the working man’s side and see the Nation through his eyes” (for details see here). To that end, this bunch of upper-class Tory twits have hired some actor with a mockney accent to do an embarrassing voice-over to their ad. So much for their much-hyped path-breaking contribution to political campaigning in the UK. Back to the drawing board chaps, I would suggest.

As for 18 Doughty Street’s repetition of the discredited story, which derives from the equally discredited Middle East Media Research Institute, that Qaradawi “has described suicide bombings as a duty”, see here and here.

Littlejohn says: Why not bomb Red Ken?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Richard Littlejohn comments on the recent spate of letter bombs: “I wouldn’t lose much sleep if those wicked dupes, like Red Ken The Terrorist’s Friend, who help glorify politically motivated murder and make common cause with killers, were to find themselves on the end of a bombing. Livingstone is the man who feted the IRA while it was slaughtering civilians on the streets of the capital back in the 1980s and today invites Islamist preachers of hate to tea and biscuits at City Hall, while their disciples are blowing themselves up on crowded Tube trains.”

Daily Mail, 9 February 2007

Those “Islamist preachers of hate” – they would include this man, would they?

See Jenny Jones’ post at Comment is Free, 9 February 2007

Also Osama Saeed at Rolled Up Trousers, 9 February 2007

And for another take on the letter bomb campaign see Lenin’s Tomb, 7 February 2007

‘Sleepwalking with the enemy’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ruth Dudley Edwards“Founded in Egypt in 1928 to restore the Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood is a skilful international operator which, in Britain, runs innumerable sharp-suited entryists who claim to be moderate spokesmen for British Muslims and who, for years, have been feted uncritically by the political establishment. The FCO has been under the illusion that it could do business with the appalling Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, and has spent British taxpayers’ money on flying him to a conference on European Islam.

“Ken Livingstone has welcomed him as a brother, despite Qaradawi’s approval for suicide bombers and his belief that gays should be executed and women subject to men. At a Livingstone-sponsored conference recently (A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations), the mayor assured us that Qaradawi is a moderate. But then Livingstone is the lodestar for the self-deluding, hypocritical Left whose communal self-loathing makes their country’s enemies their friends.

“I saw at first hand in the 1980s how Livingstone and his acolytes encouraged and, where possible, financed the malcontent IRA-supporting Irish who hated the country in which they lived while despising those of us who were working for integration and mutual understanding. These people march against the war in Iraq alongside people who would install the Taliban in Downing Street….

“As the American counter-terrorism analyst Daniel Pipes put it at Livingstone’s conference in a speech that showed up his host to be the time-warped, paranoid Lefty that he is, we are not dealing with a clash of civilisations: it is the civilised world against the barbarians. And the enemy is Islamism. As they infiltrate universities, prisons, politics, the media and the public service, the army of self-confident Islamists watch us crumble when accused of Islamophobia and believe we no longer have the stomach for a fight.”

Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Telegraph, 3 February 2007

Cameron attacks ‘Muslim hardliners’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David Cameron 2David Cameron yesterday endorsed a new Conservative report which condemned the “hardline” views of the Muslim Council of Britain and other Islamic groups. The Conservative leader argued that the Government must not bow to the “loudest voices” in the Muslim community when he attended the launch of the report by his national and international security policy group.

The report, Uniting the Country, singled out the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), widely seen as the mainstream voice of Muslims in the UK, for allowing “hardline members… to dominate policy and crowd out more moderate voices.”

The Tory policy group, chaired by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, also challenged the MCB’s approval of extremist clerics like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who supports the death penalty for gays, as well as its failure to participate in Holocaust Memorial Day.

Mr Cameron said: “Policy makers should stop assuming that the loudest voices and the most organised elements within the Muslim community necessarily represent the Muslim population as a whole. There’s a danger that groups with agendas aimed at separation rather than integration are deferred to when they should be challenged.”

Daily Telegraph, 31 January 2007

In an accompanying editorial, the Telegraph applauds Cameron and the Tories for “laying bare the perils of multiculturalism”.

For a response by the MCB, see the Guardian, 31 January 2007

See also MCB news release, 30 January 2007

As for the fascists of the British National Party, they criticise Cameron’s attack on multiculturalism and Muslim organisations on the grounds that it falls short of “dismantling the structures of the multicultural State and restoring our lost ancestral rights and freedoms”. BNP news article, 30 January 2007

Tories set sights on ‘separatist’ British Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Conservatives will today accuse Islamic groups including the high-profile, mainstream Muslim Council of Britain of promoting separation and ignoring the wishes of the people they represent.

A report by the party’s policy group on national and international security will tear into the MCB as part of a generalised attack on the concept of multiculturalism, which it says has divided people rather than simply respecting their differences. The report will underline comments made by the party’s leader, David Cameron, who warned yesterday that separatist Muslims who promote sharia law and demand special treatment for their faith are the “mirror image” of the British National party.

In an attack on the MCB – which was until recently feted by government ministers – the report says: “Its hardline members tend to dominate policy and crowd out more moderate and varied voices. As a result the MCB’s claim to ‘foster good community relations and work for the good of society as a whole’ is hard to reconcile with some of the positions it has taken.”

Last night Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former diplomat who chairs the policy commission, said multiculturalism “has tended on the whole to emphasise differences between us rather than actually creating a framework in which difference flourishes”.

While stressing that the group was not singling out Muslims, she did criticise the MCB’s approach. “We would like it to say that they actually stand specifically and explicitly for integration,” she told BBC2’s Newsnight. But it “does not in our view take a sufficiently strong stand against that kind of view”. She attacked the MCB’s supportive references to the conservative Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

But on the same programme, Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary of the MCB, said Mr Qaradawi had spoken out against extremism. “In the report, in all its mentions of the Muslim Council of Britain, there’s no mention of any of the positive work we’ve done,” he said. “The MCB is proud to stand for integration. We want British Muslims to play their full role in all aspects of British society, we want obstacles to be removed.”

Guardian, 30 January 2007

For the MCB’s defence of multiculturalism see (pdf) here.

Pickled Politics on Clash conference

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi and MayorSunny Hundal offer his take on last Saturday’s Clash of Civilisations conference in London. It’s a reasonable and quite balanced account (certainly in comparison with right-wing pieces like this). But Sunny spoils it with an ignorant attack on Yusuf al-Qaradawi, writing: “Qaradawi certainly isn’t likely to lead a call for Muslim women to be given more rights in the Middle East.”

Pickled Politics, 23 January 2007

Which shows how much Sunny knows. As one writer has pointed out: “Barbara Stowasser, author of the book Women in the Qur’an and a leading academic expert on Islam, argues that Qaradawi’s [Al Jazeera] broadcasts have been crucial in overturning the conservative Islamic view that women should be restricted to domestic duties and play no part in politics and public life generally. She applauds his ‘vision of a new, more gender-equal Islamic society’ and stresses ‘his role as both exponent and catalyst of a new groundswell of Muslim public opinion in favour of women’s Islamic political rights’.”

Labour Left Briefing, November 2004

I looked up the source for this and it would appear to be Barbara Stowasser’s article “Old Shaykhs, Young Women, and the Internet: The Rewriting of Women’s Political Rights in Islam”, published in the journal The Muslim World in 2001. Perhaps Sunny could check it out.

Inayat Bunglawala on Enlightenment values

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Inayat“Last Saturday I took part in a panel discussion on ‘Enlightenment values and modern society’ as part of a large conference on the theme of the clash of civilisations, organised by the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.

“It has been disconcerting recently to see that many of the most vocal advocates clamouring for the spread of Enlightenment values have also been those most keen on waging war on Iraq and now, Iran. Still, I argued that the peaceful spread of the values of the Enlightenment offers protection for people of different faiths and none. The Qur’an itself calls upon people to be prepared to question inherited beliefs and urges them to examine the universe around them and use their reason….

“A couple of the speakers at Saturday’s conference, including the American neocon columnist Daniel Pipes (founder of the McCarthyite outfit Campus Watch), pointedly criticised Livingstone for hosting the highly influential Egyptian Islamic scholar Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi when he visited the UK in 2004. Yet Livingstone was surely right: how can you hope to challenge someone’s views if you do not engage with them? Engagement in that case certainly seemed the more ‘enlightened’ policy to me.

“Unless, of course, the kind of engagement you are really calling for is one from 50,000 feet in the air.”

Comment is Free, 22 January 2007

And while we’re on the subject of the Clash of Civilisations conference, one of the questioners from Daniel Pipes’ side was Stephen Schwartz’s sidekick (sorry, “European director”) Irfan al-Alawi, who also featured in a recent broadcast by Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (watch video here). Yet, when al-Alawi appeared in the “Undercover Mosque” documentary, he was filmed with his face obscured, on the basis that he feared violence as a result of his campaign against the proposed Islamic Centre at Newham in London! Which just goes to illustrate the dishonest scaremongering tactics employed by that programme.

‘Dublin imam takes on the fanatics’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Observer finds a Muslim it likes (i.e. who denounces mainstream Muslims as extremists):

Beneath a basketball net in a freezing sports hall, a Muslim cleric is waging war on Islamic extremism.

Imam Shaheed Satardien is taking a stand against those Muslims in Ireland whom he claims are too sympathetic to Osama bin Laden and the cult of the suicide bomber. At Friday prayers in the sports hall in north-west Dublin, the South African-born former anti-apartheid activist warns his multinational congregation against blaming other religions and the West in general for all Muslims’ ills.

Cast out by the majority Islamic community in Dublin for his outspokenness, the 50-year-old preacher says he has received death threats. “I am standing firm in my beliefs,” Satardien says. “The truth is more important than being popular or living a quiet life. Extremism has infected Islam in Ireland. It’s time to get back to the spiritual aspect of my religion and stop it being used as a political weapon.”

The imam from Cape Town fled his native country following death threats, he says, from Islamic extremists in South Africa. His younger brother, Ibrahim, was shot dead in 1998 following a row with Islamic radicals in the city. When Satardien was told he would be next, he travelled to Ireland, the birthplace of his maternal grandmother, and pleaded for asylum.

“I never, ever, expected that Muslims would come under the influence of extremists in Ireland when I arrived here with my family. So I was shocked to find support for Osama bin Laden, to discover the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood and even al-Qaeda here in Dublin.”

Satardien fell out with the main Dublin mosque at Clonskeagh, singling out the influence of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian born sheikh who has spoken openly in support of suicide bombers and issued fatwas on gays.

Observer, 14 January 2007

As an example of the sort of bigotry this sort of “liberal” reporting plays to, a right-wing Canadian Christian blogger writes that the Observer story offers “more reasons to halt Muslim immigration to Canada”.

James Love on Religion and Culture, 14 January 2007

‘Clash of Civilisations – what’s that about then?’ asks Vanessa Feltz

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Today’s Vanessa Feltz show on Radio London (listen here) featured a discussion of the forthcoming Clash of Civilisations conference in London. Perhaps not the ideal subject for that particular presenter, given that she expresses total ignorance of what the “Clash of Civilisations” is about. Oliver Kamm is featured on the programme. For his take on the issue see here and here.

Kamm places an attack on Yusuf al-Qaradawi at the centre of his critique of the Clash of Civilisations event. Not only is it difficult to see the relevance of this – Qaradawi isn’t speaking at the conference – but Kamm gets his facts wrong. Qaradawi doesn’t support suicide bombings directed against Israeli civilians and he didn’t visit London “three weeks after the 7/7 bombings” but a year earlier, in July 2004.

‘Brave Trevor makes so much sense on race’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“There are quite a few useful rules of thumb in life. If something seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is too good to be true. If a book is still boring after 100 pages, it’s not going to improve. And if Ken Livingstone violently disapproves of someone, the chances are that they are an admirable person. The London mayor keeps company with Jew-hating, gay-baiting Muslim extremists such as Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi. But he can’t bear the black, liberal chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips. Which is odd, as Phillips has so many brave and sensible things to say….

“It would have been easy for the chairman of the CRE to stay in the comfort zone of ‘diversity policy’ and the unquestioning defence of minority rights. Instead, Phillips supported Jack Straw’s expression of concern about Muslim women covering their faces in his constituency surgery. He criticised ‘so-called Muslim leaders’ for attacking Straw: ‘They were overly defensive and need to accept that in a diverse society we should be free to make polite requests of this kind.’ And he called on the teaching assistant Aishah Azmi to drop her discrimination case after she was suspended for refusing to remove her veil during lessons. Most of all, Phillips wants us to be able to talk about race freely, to bust the last taboo….

“Forget Ken Livingstone: Phillips talks a lot of sense. And it is not just ‘so-called Muslim leaders’ who should be listening to him. We all should.”

Mary Ann Sieghart in the Times, 30 November 2006