Over the past four years I have been following the progress of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK. They have gone from strength to strength and are opening new offices across Britain. If you visit their site in April they are fuming about Zionists and “Zionazis” as if Great Britain were 90% Jewish. There are actually 260,000 Jews in Britain alongside some two million Muslims, one million Hindus, and roughly fifty-eight million Christians. MPACUK likes to claim responsibility for the defeat of two major female rising stars in Parliament, Lorna Fitzsimons and Oona King, and on their website in April they are urging their supporters to work to eliminate another forty “Zionist” MPs.
In December 2005 I decided to attend the Global Peace and Unity Event at the Excel Centre in Canary Wharf because it had been touted as a celebration of Islamic culture and food. What greeted me was a giant hall filled with some very angry young Muslims being whipped up by Micahel Mansfield QC, George Galloway MP, former Taliban hostage-turned-Islamist-activist Yvonne Ridley, and the retired cricketer Imran Khan. Keep in mind that this rally, sponsored by Western Union, the Metropolitan Police, and Emirates Airlines, occurred just five months after London’s Islamic terrorist attacks.
The British journalist Melanie Phillips published my account of the event on her website and the result was incendiary. MPACUK set up a “discussion” page about me and I received “How does it feel to be the world’s number one Islamophobe?” emails. I decided to join the discussion on MPACUK’s blog but was barred from entering a comment. To this day, I cannot communicate with them because they prohibit me from using their comments facility. This is the Muslim “public affairs” sector’s idea of promoting community cohesion. As a British citizen I find denial of my right to freely communicate inside my country of residence utterly appalling.
One of the complaints registered by MPACUK is how “underrepresented” Muslims are in the media, though there is frequent, nationally disseminated comment from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Inayat Bunglawala, Ahdaf Soueif, Ghada Karmi, Tariq Ali, Tariq Ramadan, Lord Ahmed (recently released from prison), Faisal “Israel Simply Has No Right to Exist” Bodi, the Muslim Council’s Muhammad Abdul Bari, and Sir Iqbal “Homosexuals Spread Diseases” Sacranie. MPACUK blocks non-Muslims like me from their discussion boards whilst bizarrely complaining they have no voice.
In January 2009 Douglas Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion issued a report about Asghar Bukhari, head of MPACUK; the Centre felt his comments on Facebook were sufficient to incite violence. This was referred to the police. Bukhari was quoted: “Any Muslim who fights against Israel and dies is a martyr and will be granted paradise”; “There is no greater oppressor on this earth then [sic] the Zionists, who murder little children for sport.” He also commented that he had dealt with Zionists who had a “crooked mind.” Since his report Douglas Murray has been banned from chairing a debate on Islam by the London School of Economics “in the interest of public safety.” Hello? Who is the incendiary one here?
Murray will not be silenced. In mid-March he was trying to stop Hezbollah spokesperson Dr. Ibrahim Moussawi from entering Britain, in the wake of the expulsion from Heathrow of Dutch MP Geert Wilders for trying to import his film about Islam. Douglas Murray was successful but is now regarded as the number one Islamophobe on Anglo-Islam’s growing list of hate figures. His efforts were a pyrrhic victory because April has seen Lebanese-born Dyab Abou Jahjah, who fought for Hezbollah against Israel, addressing meetings in London with the Stop the War Coalition; he also spoke in the Grand Committee Room of the House of Commons, at the launch of a British branch of the International Union of Parliamentarians for Palestine. It also featured a speech by Lebanese Hezbollah MP Hussein al-Hajj Hassan — “the first Hezbollah MP to speak in the House of Commons.” MPACUK complains that Muslims are perpetually “silenced by the Zionists” but the Grand Committee Room of Parliament isn’t exactly silence.
What is significant about MPACUK is its blog. The venomous rhetoric spewing forth from dawn until dusk is a mirror on a British universe that has arisen in the past thirty years of radicalization of young Muslims, many of whose parents and grandparents came to this country to work hard and keep a low profile. The excuse for radicalism in Britain is the “brutalization of Palestine” by Israel and in turn the imams who rail about this every day. I do not buy this. The endless atrocities against Jews and Israelis — for example, the PLO’s cruel murder of Leon Klinghoffer, the murder of Dora Bloch, and the sadistic massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes — could have inspired hundreds of British rabbis to rally young Anglo-Jews to rise up against Muslims. Did one rabbi in Britain do this? No. Did rabbis in the United States rail about Muslims after 9/11? If so, I would like to hear about it.
MPACUK and its bloggers routinely assert that “Zionist devils” control the political elite in America; their greed pulled the major world powers into a recession; the “Gestapo Israelis murder in cold blood” and “these animals must be stopped.” They complain about the inordinate number of films about the Holocaust, which their bloggers routinely denounce as a fabrication.
The mainstream media have completely ignored a stunning entry on the MPACUK website in March: they celebrate the election of a “Hizb ut-Tahrir man” as the new president of the University of Westminster student union. This Sunni organization, which promotes the concept of a world caliphate and urges its youth to train for jihad, is not illegal in the UK but its aims include the dismantling of the “Zionist entity.” It is proscribed in many Muslim nations but has a big following in (natch) the United Kingdom. What is even more intriguing is that bloggers write in to complain to MPACUK that it has “outed” a man whose membership in “HT” ought to have been kept secret.
During the height of the violent clashes with London’s long-suffering police at demonstrations against Israel’s Gaza intervention, the MPACUK blog encouraged members to bring tomatoes and eggs, which is no great crime, but the rhetoric was filled with Jew-hatred. The popular British comedy actress Maureen Lipman remarked in the Jewish Chronicle in March that she had dared stick her neck out for Israel but had quickly become aware of the venomous nature of Jew-hatred because of her comments.
Interesting, too, that on a page that has now disappeared a MPACUK blogger remarked, “Gordon Brown … privately told his people at the United Nations Security Council to tacitly block a ceasefire. … What a hypocrite, I hope his family suffers the same fate as the innocent children in Gaza.” Interesting! MPACUK’s blog is allowed to threaten the family of the prime minister. One has to visit the site to get the true flavor of what appears to be an unmoderated blog to promote pure hate. Conversely, I challenge someone to find an Anglo-Jewish website that obsesses on “vermin” Muslims.
Words can be father to actions, and I fear the hate rhetoric that fills the many pages of MPACUK’s website could one day fuel something much worse than July 7, 2005.
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