The cha cha shehada will go on as originally planned. A breathtaking bit of dhimmitude: the jihadists tried to deceive the Quakers, they were exposed, and were then accepted by the Quakers despite their true character. From "Quakers lift ban on Islamist conference" in the TimesOnline, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
THE Quaker Movement has reversed a decision to ban a hardline Islamist party from holding a conference at the Friends Meeting House in Central London tomorrow.Hizb ut-Tahrir’s booking, made under the name of the Salsa Bill Publishing House, had been cancelled by the Quakers this week. Tony Blair has labelled the group extremist and said after the London bombings that the Government wants to proscribe it. It is banned in Germany and Russia, excluded from many British university campuses and has been accused of anti-Semitism.
Quaker bodies in the United States and Israel have assisted and cooperated with pro-PLO groups often in the past. Such a body is the American Friends Service Committee. Edward Said's father-in-law, according to Said in one of his books, was the leading Quaker in Lebanon. Western Christian missionaries went off to the Middle East in the 19th century and made converts among the native Christians belonging to the Eastern churches, since they were forbidden to convert or missionize Muslims. The Quakers too sent missions to Lebanon and Israel, establishing a mission in Ramallah [then a Christian village] as early as 1869. The Quakers [officially the "Society of Friends"] have long run a school in Ramallah which attracted much of the Arab elite, including Muslims, such as the children of Faisal Husseini, the Jerusalem PLO leader and great-nephew of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the leading Arab Nazi collaborator and Holocaust advocate who spent most of World War 2 in the Nazi-fascist domain in Europe. To get back to the subject of using Quaker venues for jihadist or terrorist meetings, Arab journalist Lamia Lahoud reported in the Jerusalem Post in December 1992 that the Popular Front for the Lib of Pal [or perhaps the Popular Democratic Front for Lib of Pal] had held a meeting at the Ramallah Friends School. The Quakers are avowedly pacifists but some of their leaders have had some decidedly less than peaceful friends. This decision of Quakers in London does not surprise me.
How sad. The Society of Friends has done great work in the past. The elite leaders need to go back and read about the beginnings of the movement and its founders.
In listing the tireless anti-Israel workers, one should not forget the many non-Quakers who have managed to take over such things as the American Friends Service Committee. During World War II this was an honorable organization. But it has not been for a long time. And of particular note are people such as Joe Gerson, whose entire adult life seems to have been consumed with anti-Israel activities. What prompted the American Friends Service Committee to support and protect Joe Gerson and a good many other jeffgersons is a matter that deserves to be pondered. Nixon gave the Quakers a bad name. Joe Gerson is the coup de grace.
And for whom is Joe Gerson working now? What NGO has seen fit to employ him, after his decades of monomaniacal service on behalf of the Lesser Jihad against Israel? Let's find out.