Incidents of ‘Islamophobia’ are really getting out of hand in Britain. In fact there has been such a wave of attacks that it’s amazing that politicians and commentators across the political spectrum, (not to mention all those supposed ‘anti-fascist’ groups) aren’t grand-standing like crazy. Perhaps their problem is that this wave of attacks does not consist of people writing nasty and mean things on Twitter, but of Muslims killing other Muslims and still other Muslims extolling such killings.
It’s only a couple of weeks since a Sunni Muslim from Birmingham called Tanveer Ahmed was sentenced to prison for murdering an Ahmadiyya Muslim shopkeeper from Glasgow called Asad Shah. Mr Ahmed thought Mr Shah had ‘disrespected’ Islam, and so he repeatedly stabbed Mr Shah in the head until he was dead. Some people will remember that aside from the brutality of that case one of the most remarkable things about it was that while the family of Asad Shah were too terrified to turn up to court, the circle of the loved-one’s murderer certainly did show up to court and there showed great support for the killer. Indeed associates of the murderer interviewed outside the court seemed more annoyed that their friend had been sentenced to prison than that an innocent Muslim shopkeeper had been brutally murdered.
This month’s poster-boy for the ‘Ummah’ is a Muslim from Rochdale called Mohammed Hussain Syeedy. This young man, aged 21, has been found guilty of the murder of an Imam from Rochdale called Jalal Uddin (71) who the young Rochdale man thought had the wrong theological ideas regarding the peaceful religion of Islam. And so Syeedy took part in an attack on the Imam in which his head was smashed in with ‘repeated forceful blows’. Mr Uddin died a short time later in hospital.
Some relief must surely come from the fact that two Imams from Pakistan recently toured the UK, speaking to capacity audiences in Mosques and Islamic centres, spreading the true message of Islam (peace, love etc). It’s just unfortunate that Muhammad Naqib ur Rehman and Hassan Haseeb ur Rehman are mainly noteworthy because of their considerable support for Mumtaz Qadri, the Pakistani extremist who was executed in Pakistan in January for murdering the Pakistani governor Salman Taseer. Readers will recall that Mr Taseer was campaigning to reform Pakistan’s grotesque blasphemy laws and so Mr Qadri killed him because he thought that made Taseer a blasphemer. And who is surprised that the Imams who toured the UK are supporters of the murderer rather than the victim? On the positive side, non-Muslims in the UK can take comfort from the facts that (in the words of the Imam of one of the mosques this pair spoke at) they have ‘hundreds of thousands of followers in the UK.’
In the meantime I cannot be alone in finding the general silence over this recent wave of ‘Islamophobia’ truly perplexing.
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