A censored choice

Tuesday, 29th April 2008

There is clearly no limit to British pusillanimity and sheer unadulterated funk when it comes to calling Islamic radicalism by even the most polite and restrained of proper names. The Tablighi Jamaat is an Islamist sect which is funding the proposed mega-mosque on the site of the 2012 Olympics in east London. In my book Londonistan, I described the project and its backers thus:

The cultural significance and symbolism of a project on this scale are unmistakeable. It would make the most powerful statement possible, on the back of the high-visibility Games, about the primacy of Islam in Britain. That is why it is being proposed. ‘It will be something never seen before in this country. It is a mosque for the future as part of the British landscape,’ said Abdul Khalique, a senior member of Tablighi Jamaat which is behind the proposal.

Tablighi Jamaat is often described as a ‘worldwide Islamic missionary group’ and is said to be pacific and apolitical. Two years ago, according to The New York Times, a senior FBI anti-terrorism official claimed it was a recruiting ground for al-Qaeda. According to the counter-intelligence expert Alex Alexiev, Tablighi Jamaat is a driving force of Islamic extremism and a major recruiting agency for terrorist causes worldwide.

For a majority of young Muslim extremists, he says, joining Tablighi Jamaat is the first step on the road to extremism. Perhaps 80 percent of the Islamist extremists in France come from Tablighi ranks, prompting French intelligence officers to call Tablighi Jamaat the ‘antechamber of fundamentalism.’ U.S. counter-terrorism officials are increasingly adopting the same attitude. ‘We have a significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat in the United States,’ the deputy chief of the FBI’s international terrorism section said in 2003, ‘and we have found that al-Qaeda used them for recruiting now and in the past.’ Is this really what Britain wants to symbolise its culture at the 2012 Olympics?

Since I wrote that, local Muslims have come out strongly against this mosque. They believe the Tablighi Jamaat is a menace which will target their children for extremism and radicalise countless numbers of British Muslims. Accordingly, more than 2,500 of them have signed a petition against the project. They include Irfan al Allawi, the international director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, co-founder of the Muslim Parliament of Britain, and Taj Hargey, chairman of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, who has said that the proposed mosque would become ‘the headquarters for radical . . . sectarianism in the UK’ and accused Tablighi Jamaat of preaching ‘a virulent, intolerant version of Islam’.

The campaign against this mosque has been led by a local Newham councillor, Alan Craig (pictured), who is the candidate for the party Christian Choice in this week’s London mayoral election. As the Times reports today, when Christian Choice submitted the text of a party election broadcast to the BBC and ITV, their wording was censored. So what had they wanted to say that the BBC and ITV deemed too extreme to be broadcast?

The Christian Choice election broadcast would have described Tablighi Jamaat as ‘a separatist Islamic group’ before welcoming that some ‘moderate Muslims’ were opposed to the mosque complex…The BBC refused to accept ‘separatist’ — the corporation asked for ‘controversial’ instead — and barred the use of ‘moderate Muslims’ because the phrase implied that Tablighi Jamaat was less than moderate. ITV went a step farther, demanding that the adjective ‘controversial’ be used merely to describe the planned mosque and not the group itself.

This censorship has simply prevented Christian Choice from telling the truth in a moderate, restrained and responsible manner. Of course Tablighi Jamaat is separatist. As the Times also reports:

One of its British advocates has said that it aims to rescue Muslims from the culture and civilisation of Jews and Christians by creating ‘such hatred for their ways as human beings have for urine and excreta’.

How can the BBC think that such a view is moderate? And if the TJ is not controversial, what does that make the 2500 Muslims who condemn it as extreme and dangerous? ‘Islamophobes’??

Christian Choice, which says it was pressured into amending its broadcast as required under the threat that otherwise it wouldn’t be shown at all, is now seeking judicial review of the BBC’s decision. Is it too much to hope that, somewhere in the bowels of the Law Courts, there exists an English judge who will stand up for sanity and backbone in the face of all this?

UPDATE, APRIL 30: Well, they lost their application for judicial review today on procedural grounds. The judge, Mr Justice Collins, said they should have taken legal action before the broadcast was transmitted. However, he also made the following observations: the Tablighi Jamaat could properly be described as 'extremist'; that it was 'responsible for imbuing ideas leading to terrorist activities'; and that it was 'understandable that Cllr Craig should have concerns'.