FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN THE UK

Perhaps Jane Duncan and Na'eem Jeenah of The Freedom of Expression Institute can kindly inform FIX THE FXI what they think about the following article written by Melanie Phillips:


The Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, Mohammed Abdul Bari, has repeated in an interview with the Daily Telegraph the thrust of remarks he made last year, also to the Telegraph, that Britain should be Islamised. The first time he said this, there wasn’t a peep of reaction. This time, there’s been a bit of a furore. Which is progress.

Much of the latest interview was the usual whingeing and fanatical stuff. Apparently there is an argument for stoning in Britain. And of course, it is not insignificant that Bari chairs the East London mosque, in whose bookshop the recent Policy Exchange report found dangerous incitement on sale but which Bari does not condemn and whose sale says he will do nothing to stop. The most wicked part of his remarks was his comparison of Britain with Nazi Germany (a comparison he has also made before):
Every society has to be really careful so the situation doesn't lead us to a time when people's minds can be poisoned as they were in the 1930s. If your community is perceived in a very negative manner, and poll after poll says that we are alienated, then Muslims begin to feel very vulnerable. We are seen as creating problems, not as bringing anything and that is not good for any society.
Of course, it is the Islamists who have the fascist agenda in wanting to destroy British values and make this country submit to Islam. Bari is thus exhibiting the classic Islamist trick of taking aberrant behaviour by certain Muslims and ascribing it to their victims — the trick that is pulled from Israel to Islamabad and from Dewsbury to Damascus. But Bari is here pulling another common Islamist trick that has not been commented upon. He is taking a ball that has been rolled to him by liberal opinion and running with it. For the air is currently thick, is it not, with denunciations of the government’s proposed extension to the 28 day detention limit for terrorist suspects on the grounds that it would spell the end of the liberty for which this country fought Hitler etc. What is not realised is that, far from such measures turning us into a fascist state, such liberals themselves are providing Islamists like Bari with the weapons with which to undermine our defences against being turned into a fascist state.

On Saturday morning, BBC Radio Four’s Today programme (0832) featured a discussion about these matters between the MCB’s Assistant Secretary-General, Inayat Bunglawala, and the former chairman of the Joint Intelligence committee, Sir Paul Lever. Asked about Bari’s comparison between Britain and Nazi Germany, Bunglawala immediately responded:
He didn’t say that.
When it was pointed out that he had in fact said precisely that, Bunglawala observed:
He made a fair point. Just as in the 1930s the Jewish community in Germany was collectively vilified, and we saw what happened, I think we need to be careful not to allow the terror threat to lead us to make generalisations about entire communities.
The Jewish community in Germany in the 1930s was not simply ‘collectively vilified’. It was singled out for genocide. The collective vilification was part of that process of mass murder and ethnic obliteration. The comparison made by Bunglawala between Nazi Germany and Britain’s attitude towards its Muslim community is obscene.

When it was further put to him that many listeners had rung in to say, a propos Bari’s remarks, that in the 1930s there had been no Jews — no ‘minority of Jewish groups’ — committing acts of terrorism and so the comparison was odious, Bunglawala replied:
No that’s true; and today we don’t see the entire Muslim community engaged in acts of terrorism.
But no-one has ever said this; what is always said is that a minority of British Muslims are thus engaged. No-one has ever ‘demonised’ all British Muslims, nor even the majority. Bunglawala went on:
What you had in the 1930s was that all sorts of popular fictions were being spread about the Jewish community: they were in control of money in Nazi Germany, they were responsible for all the ills that were occurring in Germany, they were made into folk devils. And I think the danger is that the word Muslim in the UK is becoming synonymous with bad news.
Can hypocrisy be any more brazen? This is the same Bunglawala who, as I reported here, wrote some years ago:
The Jews consider themselves to be God’s chosen people - although the blessed prophet Jesus called them the children of the Devil (John 8:44) - and so can do just whatever the hell they like.
He cited claims that the Zionist movement was
at the core of international banking and commerce
and observed:
Nonsense? You be the judge…The chairman of Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade [then the chief executive of Channel 4 and later BBC chairman] and Alan Yentob[then BBC2 controller and friend of Salman Rushdie].The three are reported to be ‘close friends’ so that’s what they mean by a ‘free media.’
According to a report by the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, Islam in Britain, he also wrote that Hamas was an
authentically Islamic movement
and
a source of comfort for Muslims all over the world.
The report went on:
In the same article, Bunglawala supported the radical Wahabbi Muslim clerics in Saudi Arabia, Salman al-’Awadh and Safar al-Hawali (later linked to Osama bin Laden) and the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria. In other issues of Trends he attacked the Bin-’Ali regime in Tunisia while supporting the Islamist Egyptian cleric ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman, spiritual leader of the Egyptian Islamic jihad terrorist group, who was arrested by the US authorities for alleged links to the first bombing of the Twin Towers. Bunglawala claimed ‘Umar was simply ‘calling on Muslims to fulfil their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere’. This looks like clear agreement with the violent Islamist call for jihad by terror anywhere and at any time.
And as the Telegraph also reported:
In January 1993, Mr Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, the satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman ‘courageous’ - just a month before he bombed the World Trade Center in New York. After Rahman’s arrest in July that year, Mr Bunglawala said that it was probably only because of his ‘calling on Muslims to fulfil their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere’. Five months before 9/11, Mr Bunglawala also circulated writings of Osama bin Laden, who he regarded as a ‘freedom fighter’, to hundreds of Muslims in Britain.
Meanwhile, as I reported here, Bunglawala told me on the Moral Maze last July that he was certainly committed to turning Britain into an Islamic state. By peaceful means, of course.
 
I’m sure we are all relieved to know that.