A Caledonian caliphate?

This blog post was originally duplicated on the site. The duplicate has now been deleted and the comments from it moved over to this thread.

Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, has been spectacularly canny and effective as Scotland’s first minister, moving his nationalist pieces across the British constitutional chessboard with stealth and skill. But there’s a dimension to this that has so far passed below the radar – the scimitar slung around the kilt. Tomorrow, the Scottish Islamic Foundation will be launched in Edinburgh in Salmond’s presence. But as the invaluable Centre for Social Cohesion tells us, the leading members of this group and many of those who lead its events are closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose aim is the Islamisation of Britain and Europe.

Its chief executive Osama Saeed, who has worked as Salmond’s researcher and is the SNP’s parliamentary candidate for Glasgow Central, is an Islamist and leading light in the Brotherhood front the Muslim Association of Britain. Saeed follows the usual Brotherhood line of promoting certain limited moderate positions, such as calling for an end to forced marriages or opposing terrorism in Britain, thus enabling him to pass himself off as a moderate while he slips and slides over issues such as sharia. But he is of course an unequivocal supporter of the Brotherhood leader Yusuf Qaradawi who endorses terrorist mass murder in Israel and Iraq -- support which inescapably identifies the holder of such a view as an extremist and terrorist sympathiser.

One of the most recent events advertised on the SIF's website is a residential weekend held on 4-6 April 2008 on the subject of 'Dear Beloved Son', a book by the medieval Islamic scholar Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali which has been translated by Kemal Helbawy. The weekend was hosted by Helbawy himself and Ahmed Saad.

 

Helbawy was formerly the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's main spokesman in Europe and co-founded the MAB. During his career, he has frequently denounced the Jews and non-Muslims. For example, in 1992 he told a conference in the US: ‘Do not take Jews and Christians as allies. For they are allies to each other. Oh Brothers, the Palestinian cause is not of conflict of borders and land only. It is not even a conflict of human ideology and not over peace. Rather, it is an absolute clash of civilizations, between truth and falsehood. Between two conducts - one satanic, headed by Jews and their co-conspirators - and the other is religious, carried by Hamas, and the Islamic movement in particular, and the Islamic people in general who are behind it.’

Ahmed Saad, who hosted the SIF's weekend course along with Helbawy, is the imam of the North London mosque (better known as the Finsbury Park mosque). He was appointed imam of the mosque after it was taken away from Abu Hamza's followers and put in charge of a group led by MAB in 2005. The mosque's new management had undertaken to end extremism in the mosque. In fact, the mosque's trustees have reportedly turned a blind eye to recruitment and fund-raising in and around the mosque by members of Hizb ut-Tahrir and Somalia's Islamic Courts Union, an extremist group linked to al-Qaeda.

The Salmond/Saeed axis is not merely a disturbing sign of Salmond’s own prejudices. It has a potential strategic significance that goes beyond Scotland. The Brotherhood’s strategy for Britain is to promote separate Islamic development, declare sharia-only enclaves and infiltrate mainstream institutions as a springboard for Islamising the entire society. Since Salmond’s aim is to make Scotland independent from the rest of the United Kingdom, with one leap the Brothers could achieve an Islamised country on England’s border.

Scottish voters might be getting more than they bargained for: a Caledonian caliphate.

Update: The CSC’s director Douglas Murray has posted this extraordinary update on ConservativeHome’s Centre Right:

What is perhaps most worrying is that in February of this year, the Scottish government appointed Saeed -- as the representative of the about-to-launch Scottish Islamic Foundation -- onto its 13-member working group looking into whether or not to renew the Trident nuclear weapons system.

Who would ever have thought that decisions over the future of Britain's nuclear capability would fall into hands the hands of men like these?

Who indeed.