Radical Islamists and Western Governments
American Thinker, AZ
June 26 2006
A shocking program aired on British TV’s Channel 4 recently that
should give pause to every Western government concerned about their
domestic terror threat and raise questions from citizens about who
their elected representatives are seeking advice and guidance from
regarding Islam and terrorism.
The half-hour program, Who Speaks for Muslims, presented by New
Statesman political editor, Martin Bright, reveals that high ranking
officials in the Foreign Office of the Blair Administration are
openly advocating dialogue with some of the most radical
international jihadist elements, allowing them to enter the UK after
re-labeling them as "moderate" and "mainstream"; in addition to the
administration’s close alliance with the Muslim Council of Britain,
an organization dominated by radical Islamists and which is far from
actually representative of British Muslims.
On July 12th, two days before the program was aired, a publication
was released by the UK-based think tank, Policy Exchange, authored by
Martin Bright, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: the
British State’s Flirtation with Radical Islamism. This pamphlet
includes a number of top-secret Foreign Office documents provided to
Bright by anonymous sources and cited in the Channel 4 documentary.
These documents clearly demonstrate an effort by officials in
Whitehall to mainstream two extremist clerics with direct terrorist
ties: Youssef Qaradawi, the international spiritual leader of the
Muslim Brotherhood and advocate of Palestinian suicide bombings; and
Bangladeshi MP Delwar Hossein Sayeedi, who the Channel 4 program
shows preaching a sermon saying that all British and US soldiers in
Iraq need to either be converted to Islam, or sent back home in
coffins. Those comments notwithstanding, a top Foreign Office
official, Mockbul Ali, defends Sayeedi in the documents released by
Bright saying that he is among the "mainstream" in Bangladesh,
despite the fact that his political party only received 6 percent of
the vote in the last election.
That the British Foreign Office has given the imprimatur to these two
jihadi preachers – both of whom have been banned from entering the US
because of their terrorist ties – is evidenced by the visas issued by
the British government to both men. In 2004, Qaradawi, who issued the
fatwa permitting Hamas suicide bombings yet is described in Foreign
Office documents as "a respected scholar of Islam", was allowed to
enter the country and preach in London despite fierce protests from
British Jewish groups. And earlier this week, Sayeedi was permitted
by the Foreign Office to enter the country and speak at mosques in
London and Luton.
Furthermore, it was revealed earlier this month that the British
Government paid for Qaradawi and his wife to attend a recent two-day
conference in Istanbul at a five-star resort sponsored by British
taxpayers to the tune of £300,000. This despite a promise given by
Prime Minister Tony Blair to fellow MPs two years ago, when he said,
"Let me make it absolutely clear. We want nothing to do with people
who support suicide bombers in Palestine, or elsewhere or support
terrorism."
But the most explosive charge made in the Channel 4 program concerned
the alliance between Blair and the Muslim Council of Britain. Despite
having over 175 British Muslim organizations among its membership,
according to Bright, the group is dominated by officials from radical
Islamic organizations. In particular, the Muslim Association of
Britain advocates an engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood, the
oldest radical Islamic organization in the world; and the Islamic
Foundation, which was founded by senior officials of the extremist
Jamaat-i-Islami, a political party committed to implementing shari’a
law in Pakistan. Perhaps not coincidently, the Islamic Foundation
recently announced that two staff members had been appointed to
prominent British government positions.
The Channel 4 program is not the first to note the close association
between Blair’s administration and the MCB, and the acceptance by the
British government of the MCB as the sole voice of representation of
British Muslims. Last August, Bright wrote a piece for The Observer
noting the Blair/MCB alliance:
The MCB was officially founded in November 1997, shortly after Tony
Blair came to power, and has had a close relationship with the Labour
government ever since. Its detractors claim it was the creature of
Jack Straw, but his predecessor as Home Secretary, Michael Howard,
also played a role in its establishment as a semi-official channel of
communication with British Muslims. It remains particularly
influential within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which has a
little-known outreach department which works with Britain’s Muslims.
The FCO pamphlet Muslims in Britain is essentially an MCB publication
and the official ministerial celebration of the Muslim festival of
Eid is organised jointly with the MCB.
A week after Bright’s report last year, the BBC aired an expose on
its’ Panorama program, A Question of Leadership, which charged that
government leaders and the officials of the MCB were still dismissive
of the rise of radical Islam within Britain even after the 7/7 London
suicide bombings.
One MCB official that became the focus of the BBC Panorama broadcast
was then-MCB Secretary General, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who in the
program likened Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin to Nelson
Mandela and Gandhi, despite his authorization and justification of
suicide bombings targeting innocent Israeli citizens.
Those who fight oppression, those who fight occupation, cannot be
termed as terrorist, they are freedom fighters, in the same way as
Nelson Mandela fought against apartheid, in the say way as Gandhi and
many others fought the British rule in India. There are people in
different parts of the world who today, in terms of historical side
of it, those who fought oppression are now the real leaders of the
world.
Under Sacranie’s watch at MCB, in 2001 the organization began to
loudly boycott the annual January 27th Holocaust Day ceremonies in
England. In a 2001 press release (no longer available on their
website), the MCB cited the absence of recognition of genocide in
Palestine, Jammu and Kashmir, as well as the "alleged Armenian
genocide" among its reasons for boycotting the event (the Government
of Turkey still refusing to acknowledge the massacre of 1-2 million
Armenians in 1915, apparently along with the MCB).
In 2003, the group explained that they would not participate in any
Holocaust commemoration that did not include recognition of "the
Palestinian Genocide" by Israel. After taking heat each year for
their boycott, in 2005 Sacranie enlarged his explanation, writing in
The Guardian that the event was "too exclusive", because it did not
recognize similar genocidal campaigns in Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda,
Bosnia, Chechnya and Darfur (ironically, perpetrated by Sudanese
Muslims). Earlier this year, they refused to participate in a 60th
anniversary service remembering the liberation of Auschwitz.
Sir Iqbal first gained notoriety in 1989, when as head of the UK
Action Committee on Islamic Affairs he spoke out against Salman
Rushdie and his book, The Satanic Verses, saying, "Death, perhaps, is
a bit too easy for him … his mind must be tormented for the rest of
his life unless he asks for forgiveness to Almighty Allah." Sacranie
was in Iran at the time that Ayatollah Khomeini issued the infamous
fatwa calling for Rushdie’s murder, and many commentators then
believed that Sacranie had a hand in Khomeini’s pronouncement. In a
Washington Post editorial last August, The Right Time for An Islamic
Reformation, Rushdie shot back at his old nemesis, saying bluntly,
"If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Blair can offer in the way of a
good Muslim, we have a problem."
Notwithstanding his Holocaust Day boycotts, calls for legislation
banning speech "defaming Islam", and hailing Palestinian terrorists
as "freedom fighters", in July 2005, Sacranie received a knighthood
from Queen Elizabeth, "for services to the Muslim Community, to
Charities and the Community Relations." This appointment was seen by
many as an effort by the Blair government to rehabilitate the public
image of one of their closest Muslim allies.
Inayat Bunglawala, the Media Secretary of the MCB, is another of Tony
Blair’s favorites. Last August, in the wake of the 7/7 terror
attacks, Bunglawala was appointed by Blair as one of seven
"conveners" of an official government task force charged with
tackling extremism among Muslim youth in Britain. And yet Bunglawala
has a long history of making explicit anti-Semitic statements,
accusing British media of being "Zionist controlled", praising
convicted 1993 World Trade Center Bombing accomplice Sheikh Omar
Abdul Rahman, and hailing Osama bin Laden as a "freedom fighter" just
months before 9/11 while distributing hundreds of copies of bin
Laden’s statements and writings.
Needless to say, last year’s BBC expose and last week’s Channel 4
program has been met with considerable criticism by the MCB and the
Blair Administration. Just prior to airing Bright’s documentary last
Friday, the Daily Mail reported that Foreign Office Permanent
Secretary Sir Michael Jay demanded heavy edits to the program – a
request that Channel 4 refused. Needless to say, the Blair and his
ministers refused to allow anyone to appear on the program to respond
to the publication of the Foreign Office secret documents.
Even before the program was broadcast, the MCB issued a statement
charging that Martin Bright was "well known to British Muslims for
his Islamophobic views", and saying that in the program "Bright
wheels out a motley crew of some discredited and some unknown figures
to support his ludicrous arguments," specifically identifying an
official from the Sufi Muslim Council, a competing organization that
was formed because of the MCB’s radical policies and to give a voice
to more moderate Muslims.
Bright responded quickly to MCB’s charges last Friday in The
Guardian, before the airing of the program later that evening,
arguing that the conduct of the government, not the existence of the
MCB, was the real issue:
A series of leaked Foreign Office documents, demonstrate that the
mandarins dealing with the Middle East believe we have no choice but
to engage with the radical religious right, such as Egypt’s Muslim
Brotherhood. Officials seem to think that Islamists are the coming
force in the Middle East and so dialogue is necessary. But what most
people don’t know is that the same officials, based in a department
called Engaging with the Islamic World, also deal with British Muslim
issues. My argument is that the government’s engagement strategy has
become poisoned by the Foreign Office’s inaccurate picture of
moderate, mainstream British Muslim opinion.
It is clear from the evidence that Bright presents in his that
something is rotten in both Whitehall and Number 10, and the British
media are demanding answers about the government’s connections to
radical Islamic groups and the Foreign Office’s mainstreaming jihadi
clerics that openly promote violence and terror. A new book published
in England late last month, Celsius 7/7, by British journalist
Michael Gove, also accuses Blair of allowing these extremist elements
to dominate and direct the national debate after the 7/7 terror
attacks in London.
Sadly, however, England is not alone among America’s closest allies
in the War on Terror in promoting and associating with Islamic
extremists. Earlier this week it was revealed by The Australian that
the mufti of Australia, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, one of Prime
Minister John Howard’s closest Muslim allies and a member of the
government’s Muslim Community Reference Group, was secretly recorded
last November saying that the Holocaust was "a Zionist lie" in a
series of fiery sermons that also lashed out at the West, and the US
in particular, for the occupation of Iraq.
The Bush Administration is not immune from the charge that it has
associated itself with organizations advancing a radical Islamic
agenda or openly supporting Islamic terrorism. In recent months,
Daniel Pipes and Joe Kaufman have both issued reports documenting
numerous instances of contact and cooperation between the FBI and the
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which even Democratic
Senators Chuck Shumer and Dick Durban admit has known ties to Islamic
terrorist organizations and foreign governments in the Middle East.
According to a 2003 report by Paul Sperry, FBI Director Robert
Mueller mandated "Enrichment Training Sessions" led by
representatives of Islamic advocacy groups and mosques with
questionable associations and extremist agendas, despite the 9/11
Commission’s findings that the FBI did not pursue leads prior to the
Sept. 11th attacks because they were reluctant to investigate a
Washington DC-area imam. Sperry also notes that in 2002, Mueller was
the keynote speaker for the American Muslim Council’s annual
conference – an organization that has openly promoted the terrorist
activities of Hamas and Hezbollah.
A Washington Post article by John Mintz and Douglas Farah published
in 2004 on the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, In Search of
Friends Among the Foes, quotes CIA and State Department officials as
saying that the US should begin to engage radical Islamic
organizations with terror ties, such as the Muslim Brotherhood,
despite the organization’s advocacy and material support of terrorism
throughout the Middle East. One former CIA official cited in the
article, Graham E. Fuller, was quoted as saying about the Muslim
Brotherhood, "It is the preeminent movement in the Muslim world. It’s
something we can work with," and concluding that demonizing the
group, "would be foolhardy in the extreme."
This thinking of engaging and embracing organizations like the Muslim
Brotherhood – thinking which is apparently pandemic among diplomats
and analysts of Western governments – can only be suicidal in the
long run. As Israel has seen in its engagement with the PLO over the
past decade, a policy forced on it by the American and European
governments, when extremist elements are recognized and given
legitimacy, the result has not been less extremism, but the
institutionalization and entrenchment of extremism. We can see in the
events of the past week the results of this tragic policy.
Furthermore, as is the case with the PLO, and now the MCB in Britain,
giving legitimacy to these organizations is tacit authorization for
them to speak on behalf of all Muslims, which inevitably results in
the silencing of moderate voices, sometimes through violence. These
radical organizations are given permission to dictate policy
regardless of whether they represent the majority of Muslims, which
they rarely do. Because the West gave the PLO legitimacy (and
billions of dollars in aid), the situation is such that the PLO –
once the extremists – is now the voice of "moderation" in opposition
to the Hamas-led Palestinian government. What a sad day we live in.
This issue of engaging extremists is hardly a moot point for the US
as many in the State Department and a number of talking heads are
recommending that we back the "moderates" within the new Islamist
government in Somalia. On Tuesday last week, the Washington Times
reported that several former senior US diplomats were telling the
State Department to ease off the Islamic Courts Union, which received
praise earlier this month in the most recent public statement from
Osama bin Laden. Herman Cohen, former Assistant Secretary of State
for African Affairs, warned that applying pressure on the radical
Islamic regime would create only more radicalization. This from the
same people that brought us the previous Somalia debacle in 1993,
when they said that taking out the warlords would buy us good will
with the Somalis and end the humanitarian crisis. We would do well to
remember how that all worked out.
There is also the issue of honesty to be considered. What exactly are
all the ripple effects of the conflicting messages given by Western
leaders who loudly denounce terrorism, but ally themselves with
terrorist supporters and extremist organizations at home for the sake
of political correctness and electoral politics? If anything, it is
the loss of moral authority in conducting the War on Terror.
The fact that our two closest allies in fighting the global terrorist
threat – Britain and Australia – are openly and unapologetically
allowing their foreign and domestic policies to be influenced and
shaped by radical Islamists themselves should give us occasion to
hold up the mirror and look at our reflection to soberly consider own
government’s policies and our failings in this regard.
That the country who was victim of the murderous 9/11 attacks would
not only still be reluctant to publicly heap open scorn on
organizations like CAIR and others like it, but allow them access to
train our top law enforcement officials and be sought after to speak
to our state legislatures and Congress to help determine our policies
is an open indictment of ourselves. There is certainly no room for us
to mock and jeer at our Limey and Aussie cousins for their respective
sideshows. That we see the radical Islamic elements they have climbed
into bed with should provide us with a moment of clarity to consider
how we have been sleeping with the enemy ourselves.
Patrick Poole is an author and public policy researcher.
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