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Friday 9 January 2009

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Support Harry's Place

There are always good reasons for looking at Harry's Place, a site which does a sterling job at tracking and exposing the activities of the Islamist fellow travellers in the UK. 

But there's a particularly important reason for supporting the site now. It's being sued by Hamas:

Last Friday, in the wake of a closely argued debate about whether Mohammed Sawalha, the President of the British Muslim Initiative, had used the phrase “Evil Jew” or “Jewish Lobby” in a speech, Harry’s Place received a letter. The letter is from Dean and Dean, a firm of solicitors who are acting for Mr Sawalha. Mr Sawalha has demanded that we take down certain articles from Harry’s Place, and publish an apology “in the attached wording”.

The solicitors have failed to attach the apology that Mr Sawalha insists we publish. That omission matters little, as we have no intention of apologising to him at all, nor of taking down any article.

We have responded to Mr Sawalha’s solicitors, through Mishcon de Reya, who are acting for us.

Mr Sawalha claims that we have “chosen a malevolent interpretation of a meaningless word”. In fact, we did no more than translate a phrase which appeared in an Al Jazeera report of Mr Sawalha’s speech. When Al Jazeera changed that phrase from “Evil Jew” to “Jewish Lobby”, we reported that fact, along with the statement that it had been a typographical error.

Mr Sawalha says that the attribution of the phrase “Evil Jew” to him implies that he is “anti-semitic and hateful”. Notably, he does not take issue with our reporting of the revelation, made in a Panorama documentary in 2006, that he is a senior activist in the clerical fascist terrorist organisation, Hamas. The BBC report disclosed that Mr Sawalha “master minded much of Hamas’ political and military strategy” and in London “is alleged to have directed funds, both for Hamas’ armed wing, and for spreading its missionary dawah”.

...Mr Sawalha has been the prime mover in a number of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood associated projects. He is President of the British Muslim Initiative. He is the past President of the Muslim Association of Britain. He was the founder of IslamExpo, and is registered as the holder of the IslamExpo domain name. He is also a trustee of the Finsbury Park Mosque.

The British Muslim Initiative has co-organised with Liberty, Britain’s most prominent civil liberties campaigning group, a  National Rally to Defend Freedom of Religion, Conscience and Thought. Speakers included Ken Livingstone, the Tory Party Vice Chair, Sayeeda Warsi, and the shadow Tory Attorney General, Dominic Grieve MP, and Andrew Stunell MP, the Liberal Democrat Spokesman on Community and Local Government.

All these people spoke on the platform of a group founded by a man who has been identified as a senior Hamas activist.

IslamExpo is also organised by the British Muslim Initiative, and was founded by Mr Sawalha. In past years, various government ministers, including Tessa Jowell, have spoken at IslamExpo. This year, a government minister, Stephen Timms, will be taking part in this event.

Stephen Timms will be speaking on the platform of a group founded by a man who has been identified as a senior Hamas activist.

Mr Sawalha is a trustee of Finsbury Park Mosque. The Muslim Association of Britain was assisted in their takeover of the Mosque from the jihadist cleric, Abu Hamza, by the Metropolitan Police. In other words, a mosque that was once controlled by an Al Qaeda supporter, is now controlled by a man who has been identified as a senior Hamas activist. Can you forsee how this is going to turn out?

Mr Sawalha is a man who prefers to conduct political debate by means of litigation. He hopes to bully those who oppose his vicious theocratic politics with threats of writs. I suppose that I should be relieved. Hamas’ usual technique is to murder those with whom it disagrees.

Mr Sawalha’s British Muslim Initiative put out a press release on 2 July 2008, describing us as “racist”, “underhand”, “plainly lying” and “pure evil”. We are none of these things. Yet, instead of seeking to sue Mr Sawalha and his organisations for the serious defamation of our characters which he has circulated, or demanding an apology, we took his arguments on.

Mr Sawalha operates by invective and legal threat, because he has no other answer to the case which we have advanced. This is the context within which he expects people to attend IslamExpo and other British Muslim Initiative organised events. How can there be genuine debate in these circumstances?

One final point. It used to be the case that groups like the Muslim Association of Britain and its sister organisations, the British Muslim Initative and the Cordoba Foundation, would angrily deny that the were the British franchise of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, so it seems, they’re happy that the close links between these groups, and their members, be known. What Mr Sawalha is objecting to is not the reporting of his activism in Hamas. It is the suggestion that he is a racist. That is very telling.

Yesterday I argued that Hamas/the Muslim Brotherhood are likely to start representing themselves as the moderate wing of Islamism, and a bulwark against jihadism. That promise is backed by a threat: unless we co-operate with the Muslim Brotherhood, we’ll have to deal with Al Qaeda. The presence of government ministers and senior opposition figures on various British Muslim Initiative linked platforms suggests, either that they have successfully rebranded as the Islamists that the West can do business with, or that these senior politicians have been incredibly badly briefed.

The official thinking behind outsourcing terror prevention to terrorist-linked groups must be that many Muslims have an affinity for political violence that can only be kept in check by certain authentically vicious Islamists, who have agreed to behave well within the United Kingdom. That is precisely the thinking which underpinned the so-called “covenant of security” offered by certain jihadist groups in the 1990s. That covenant was quickly torn up, and the radicalised followers of the preachers of hate became terrorists: murderers of Britons of all faiths.

To make the same mistake again, by treating with Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood linked groups, would be a disaster for this country, and also for the vast majority of British Muslims who are not terrorists, and who are likely to be the primary victims of the Islamists in this country, as they are abroad. We all deserve better.

If Mr Sawalha persists in attempting to silence us with this desperate legal suit, we will need your help.

We won’t be able to stand up to them alone.

Not should they have to. This is not just Harry's Place's fight. It's imperative that anyone who believes in western liberal values, and who values our civilisation, stands up to these people. As David T writes at Harry's Place:
 

The presence of government ministers and senior opposition figures on various British Muslim Initiative linked platforms suggests, either that they have successfully rebranded as the Islamists that the West can do business with, or that these senior politicians have been incredibly badly briefed.

The truth is that they simply employ different tactics but that they are different branches of the same tree. Hamas is a  racist, genocidal, terrorist organisation, and the British Muslim Initiative is a front for it. It and its tactics must be exposed whenever possible.

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