Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, delivered the opening address at the Islamic Cultural Centre conference on Saturday.
See also BBC News, 7 July 2007
Over at the Sunday Telegraph Alasdair Palmer informs his readers that the conference’s call for co-operation with the police and security services came as “a surprise because, in the past, the MCB has seemed to be somewhat lukewarm about encouraging British Muslims to go to the police or security services with any suspicions they might have about friends or acquaintances who they think might be involved in terrorism. It is, after all, only nine months since Mr Bari issued a scarcely veiled threat to the authorities: he said that if the Government and ‘some police officers and sections of the media’ continued to ‘demonise Muslims… Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists, 700,000 of them in London’.”
Of course, the MCB has repeatedly urged the community to co-operate with the police in countering terrorism. As for the “two million Muslim terrorists” nonsense, which is based on the Sunday Telegraph‘s own distorted presentation of a September 2006 interview with Dr Bari, the MCB replied to this at the time. But never let facts get in the way of an anti-Muslim story, eh Alasdair?