Home > Melanie Phillips

Sunday 8 November 2009

Britain's massive problem

Sunday, 11th November 2007

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.

Previous Back to Melanie Phillips Next

Blogs: Martin Bright | Susan Hill | Alex Massie | Coffee House | Faith Based

Actions: Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (2)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Dr. Irene Lancaster FRSA

November 13th, 2007 8:27pm

This is a very important piece. I've just been teaching Arab children in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv. I asked them to make up some lyrics. One girl wrote a very poignant piece about the present situation in Gaza and the fear of Hamas that pervades the area.

Robert Houghton

November 13th, 2007 8:27pm

Melanie, Thank you for your valuable expose of Bari and Bunglawala. Theirs is the politics of fantasy and paranoia, as so often with orthodox Muslims. The audience they address in their outrageous remarks is not the British community at large, intent upon an objective appraisal of affairs, but Muslims, whom they intend to alienate from our national community by persuading them that they are persecuted; they are thus more easily religiously manipulated into a constituency on behalf of whom (in the name of Human Rights) they may demand the implementation of Shariah Law, and eventually an Islamic State within the UK. (The Muslim Council of Britain has betrayed that this is their aim.) Perhaps you intended your readers to infer this from your article. You report Bunglawaya as stating: “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. “ This is odious and perhaps you intend your readers simply to register this and from the polemical point of view see no advantage in detailed refutation. You don’t need me to point out the falsification in the designation of the Jews as “God’s chosen people” – they weren’t chosen because of any superiority – but you might have checked John 8:44. You would have discovered that Bunglawaya libels not just the Jews, but Jesus and Christianity: Jesus is addressing a group of Pharisees, who are plotting to kill him (the Gospels refer to several such plots, which were in the end successful), and it is because of this that he calls them children of the devil – who was a murderer from the beginning. When the NT refers to the Jews the word generally refers to the Jewish authorities – Joseph Caiaphas &co, who are in bad odour, I believe, among Jews to this day.

Most read
Most commented on

1 There is only one question that frightens Brussels - Fraser Nelson (124)

2 Cameron hasn’t broken a pledge on Europe - James Forsyth (100)

3 What Cameron should now say about Europe - James Forsyth (79)

4 Motives for murder - David Blackburn (63)

5 A bit of French stock in play - David Blackburn (59)

Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'Londonistan', published by Encounter and Gibson Square.

For a complete set of Melanie's articles click here