Where are British moderate Muslims?

Where are British moderate Muslims?
by Enza Ferreri

If there are moderate Muslims in the UK, this is the moment for them to make their voices heard.

Pakistan’s Railways Minister has offered $100,000 for the murder of the filmmaker of The Innocence of Muslims.

In any civilized country, he would be not only fired from his cabinet position but also arrested for the crime of incitement to murder. Instead, Pakistan’s Prime Minister has excused him, and people in his country have demonstrated in his support.

Pakistan is a member of the British Commonwealth. Its High Commissioner to the UK, the equivalent of ambassador for Commonwealth countries, has defended the Railways Minister in an interview with Sky News.

Various British Muslims have also been interviewed, and they invariably expressed the opinion that, if freedom of speech should be protected, then the Pakistani minister is within his rights to say what he wants, and after all, he only hurt one person, not many like the controversial filmmaker. This is Muslim logic for you.

All this is reminiscent of what happened at the time of the Salman Rushdie affair, when opinion polls among British Muslims were showing the majority in favour of the fatwa against the writer.

Let’s not forget that many UK Muslims have come here from Pakistan, so much so that the derogatory term for Asians in Britain is “Paki”.

When we consider Pakistan, the country’s blasphemy law and its use to persecute Christian minorities in the most shameful way and the support that this law enjoys among the Pakistani population, and then we look at this latest episode of a government minister publicly inciting to murder with impunity and people taking to the streets defending him, we have to draw the conclusion that, if there are moderate Muslims in Pakistan, they must be very few or very silent or both.

Is the same true of British Muslims, many of whom are of Pakistani extraction?

Interestingly, Muslim figures prominent in the UK, always displayed for public consumption as representatives of moderate Islam, have turned out, under greater scrutiny, not to be so moderate after all.

Member of the House of Lords Lord Ahmed “savagely attacked Tony Blair for giving Salman Rushdie a knighthood, ...threatened to mobilise 10000 Muslims to prevent democratically elected Dutch MP Geert Wilders from speaking in Parliament, this is despite his own invite of the anti-semitic Israel Shamir who has been accused of denying the holocaust”.

The Pakistani-born peer also said: “Even if I have to beg I am willing to raise and offer £10 million so that George W Bush and Tony Blair can be brought to the International Court of Justice on war crimes charges”.

Former Deputy Leader of the Labour Group, Shadow Lord Chancellor and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice Sadiq Khan “is the lifelong friend of Babar Ahmad, a man indicted in the US on charges of ‘conspiracy to provide material to support terrorists, namely the Taliban and the Chechen Mujahideen; providing material to support terrorists; and conspiracy to kill in a foreign country’. Ahmad ran a website recruiting jihadi militants to go and fight the Russian in Chechnya and Coalition troops in Afghanistan. When arrested, he had in his possession plans for an American carrier battle group with written notations on it like ‘vulnerable to RPG’”.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan, former senior political editor of The New Statesman, on separate occasions called non-Muslims people of no intelligence and compared them to animals and cattle (in so doing revealing, on top of everything else, his speciesism).

And former co-chairman of the Conservative Party Baroness Warsi, unelected, appointed to the House of Lords, amidst public expenses frauds scandals, breachings of both the Ministerial Code and rules on financial declarations, found time to run a business her partner in which, Abid Hussain, has been a leading member of Hizb ut Tahrir, a radical Islamic group the Conservatives promised to ban when they were in opposition.

Disliked by Tories, called by one of them “the worst party chairman” we've ever had, Warsi, who is of Pakistani origin and maintains strong ties with that country, has now more power than ever, with two crucial cabinet posts and a seat at the National Security Council.

Enza Ferreri is an Italian-born, London-based author and journalist. She has been a London correspondent for several Italian magazines and newspapers, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La Repubblica.

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8 Comments

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Speedysam | September 29, 2012 4:51 AM | Reply

Moderate Muslims exsist only as a figment of the west's immagination!

David, Thailand | September 29, 2012 5:11 AM | Reply

The Pakistani-born peer (Lord Ahmed) also said: “Even if I have to beg I am willing to raise and offer £10 million so that George W Bush and Tony Blair can be brought to the International Court of Justice on war crimes charges”.

Lord Ahmed should be praising Blair for holing Britain beneath the waterline with his treasonous open gates immigration policy for economic migrants from Pakistan, among other poverty stricken, dysfunctional Arab/Muslim failed states.

Just shows, no matter what the dhimmi West does, it should expect zero gratitude from the eternally ungrateful crybabies.

IMMELMAN | September 30, 2012 2:33 AM | Reply

Moderate muslim is an oxymoron. Liberal and moderate are both words unique to Western countries - you can not be muslim and moderate, or liberal, at the same time - their cult and mantra in their rule book forbids it. It is a crime punishable by death to water down, in any way, the word as it was written in the 7th century. So let's put a stop to all this talk about 'moderate muslims' - they cannot exist - if there is one, he is an apostate, and will be killed, and that is why you never hear them speak out against any other muslim and what they have done, no matter how evil, bestial or medieval

Geordie12 | September 30, 2012 3:52 AM | Reply

In the UK we have a small but well organised number of ex-muslims who work hard to counter extremist tendencies in their communities. They call themselves CEMB council of ex-muslims of Britain. Also worth noting is that much of the intelligence gathered by MI5 and the police regarding potential terrorist threats in the UK, comes from within the muslim community. There are even soldiers of Asian descent in British Army uniform, currently bearing arms against the Taliban. These people above all, deserve our recognition and support.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending the deathly silent vast majority of commonwealth muslims. (Silent only when it comes to attacking extremists.) I just want everyone to know that some progress has been made here in the UK. Sadly by accident and not design.

Jan replied to comment from Geordie12 | September 30, 2012 2:51 PM | Reply

''In the UK we have a small but well organised number of ex-muslims who work hard to counter extremist tendencies in their communities. They call themselves CEMB council of ex-muslims of Britain.''

The fact they are **ex** muslims, says it all.

''Also worth noting is that much of the intelligence gathered by MI5 and the police regarding potential terrorist threats in the UK, comes from within the muslim community.''

Really ? Do you have any proof of this ?

Stuart Parsons | September 30, 2012 5:15 PM | Reply

There are undoubtedly 'a number' of genuinely moderate Muslims in the U.K. However, the vast majority, in fear of their afterlife existence, follow the mythical Allahs command to be 'hard against infidels and compassionate to each other'. Furthermore, the 'moderates' are constantly reminded by the less moderate that 'Allah is the end of their journey' and anyway they must fall into line or at least remain silent... or else life might become a little unpleasant for them.

Free speech in the U.K is dying when it come to exposing the unpleasant nature of Islam. I who have done nothing more than voice my views concening Islam, have been charged under Section 5 The Public Order Act because I am perceived by a number of well-intention fellow citizens, who have never met or spoken to me and who know nothing about Islam, to be racist and intolerant. They claim they are distressed by the things I say about Islam. Both Houses of Parliament, Commons and Lords have given citizens the right to freely express antipathy, ridicule, and even if we choose insult a religious belief. However, our politically correct Islamophobia conscious Police and Crown Prosecution service choose to 'maintain public order' by prosecuting those who speak out against a religion because it causes a few others to feel harassed and distressed.

dumbledoresarmy | October 1, 2012 3:45 AM | Reply

Frankly, in light of Pakistan's flagrant and worsening human rights abuses inflicted upon non-Muslim minorities, I think it would be entirely appropriate for Pakistan to be expelled from the Commonwealth.

And a Cricket boycott would be a good idea, too.

dumbledoresarmy replied to comment from dumbledoresarmy | October 1, 2012 3:48 AM | Reply

My slightly OT comment above was occasioned by the passage in the article which drew attention to the fact that a very large proportion of Muslims in the UK are of Pakistani extraction.

"Let’s not forget that many UK Muslims have come here from Pakistan, so much so that the derogatory term for Asians in Britain is “Paki”.

"When we consider Pakistan, the country’s blasphemy law and its use to persecute Christian minorities in the most shameful way and the support that this law enjoys among the Pakistani population, and then we look at this latest episode of a government minister publicly inciting to murder with impunity and people taking to the streets defending him, we have to draw the conclusion that, if there are moderate Muslims in Pakistan, they must be very few or very silent or both.

Is the same true of British Muslims, many of whom are of Pakistani extraction?"

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