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From the Fox Guarding the Henhouse Department, from The Telegraph, with thanks to Sr. Soph:
A Muslim accused of anti-Semitism is to be appointed to a government role in charge of rooting out extremism in the wake of last month's suicide bombings in London.Inayat Bunglawala, 36, the media secretary for the Muslim Council of Britain, is understood to have been selected as one of seven "conveners" for a Home Office task force with responsibilities for tackling extremism among young Muslims, despite a history of anti-Semitic statements.
Mr Bunglawala's past comments include the allegation that the British media was "Zionist-controlled".
Writing for a Muslim youth magazine in 1992, he said: "The chairman of Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade [then the chief executive of Channel 4 and now BBC chairman] and Alan Yentob [BBC2 controller and friend of Salman Rushdie]."
The three are reported to be "close friends… so that's what they mean by a 'free media'."
In January 1993, Mr Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, the satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman "courageous" - just a month before he bombed the World Trade Center in New York. After Rahman's arrest in July that year, Mr Bunglawala said that it was probably only because of his "calling on Muslims to fulfil their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere".
Five months before 9/11, Mr Bunglawala also circulated writings of Osama bin Laden, who he regarded as a "freedom fighter", to hundreds of Muslims in Britain....
News of his appointment comes 10 days after he wrote to Mark Thompson, the BBC Director General, accusing a forthcoming BBC1 Panorama programme of possessing "a pro-Israeli agenda".
Although the programme had yet to be completed, Mr Bunglawala said that the BBC had allowed itself to be used by "highly placed supporters of Israel in the British media to make capital out of the July 7 atrocities in London".
The programme, A Question of Leadership, which will air tonight at 10.20pm, seeks to discover whether British Muslim leaders can tackle the extremism in their midst.
It features an interview with Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, who says members of the Palestinian terrorist organisation Hamas are "freedom fighters".
Sir Iqbal compares Hamas suicide bombers to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi.
He says: "Those who fight oppression, those who fight occupation, cannot be termed as terrorist, they are freedom fighters, in the same way as Nelson Mandela fought against their apartheid, in the same way as Gandhi and many others fought the British rule in India."
Sir Iqbal also refers to the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as "the renowned Islamic scholar"....
The programme also shows a leading Saudi cleric, an honoured guest of the East London Mosque, claiming that Islam is "the best testament to how different communities can live together", while back in his pulpit in Mecca, he has referred to Jews as "monkeys and pigs" and also as "the rats of the world". Christians are "cross worshippers" and Hindus "idol worshippers".
Mr Bunglawala said: "Those comments were made some 12 or 13 years ago. All of us may hold opinions which are objectionable, but they change over time. I certainly would not defend those comments today."
Really? But would you condemn them? Especially since they are founded on the Qur'an (2:62-65; 5:59-60; 7:166, etc.)?
Posted by Robert at August 21, 2005 7:02 AM
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Mr Bunglawala said: "Those comments were made some 12 or 13 years ago. All of us may hold opinions which are objectionable, but they change over time. I certainly would not defend those comments today."
12 or 13 years is a drop in the bucket when you consider that Muslims are still defending ideas that are 1200 or 1300 years old.
Posted by: Charles Martel![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 21, 2005 7:44 AM
Mr. Bunglawala needs to make a decisive statements to demonstrate that he is not a threat to the non-Muslim population. But (the caveat), in view of taqiyya and kitman, how can one trust anything that comes out of his mouth?
Posted by: epg at August 21, 2005 8:09 AM
... Mr Bunglawala said that it was probably only because of his "calling on Muslims to fulfil their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere".
'Sir'Iqbal also uses the word 'oppressors',
He says: "Those who fight oppression, those who fight occupation, cannot be termed as terrorist, they are freedom fighters..."
Everytime these guys speak, they give away their depravity. Just exactly what has 'fighting for freedom', got to do with Islam/jihadists/terrorism? Freedom is not part of the Islamic structure. We know that, and they know that, and they know that we know that.
And we know what they mean by oppression...Anything thats not Islamic is oppressed...Their duty is to fight that oppression 'everywhere', as bungwaal points out.
If 'oppression' is a bad word, then who is the 'oppressor' here? Islam is the biggest oppressor of humanity in existence at this moment. Everyone must submit by consent, or by conquest. "Listen my children, and you will hear"...They speak in code, but once you get on to it, it's easy to understand. Taqiyya and kitman are ok words, but I prefer the old fashion wording for it...'bull pucky'...
at August 21, 2005 9:04 AM
"All of us may hold opinions which are objectionable, but they change over time. I certainly would not defend those comments today."
-- from the article above
But the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, the teachings and attitudes that flow, not unnaturally but perfectly naturally, from them, are immutable. They do not "change over time." Would this fellow care to tell us whether his understanding of Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira have "changed over time"? And that statement "I certainly would not defend those comments today" is ambiguous. He menas not that he finds those statements "indefensible" which is what a non-practitioner of taqiyya and kitman would mean.
No, he means: it would be prudent for me today, given the growing alarm in a few quarters about Islam, not to openly defend those statements. It would make sense for me to fudge, mislead, lie about the matter -- and not to openly defend what, of course, he still believes.
These two sentences offer a textbook example of taqiyya/kitman. Clip them out. Offer them to friends. Explain what an Infidel might think they mean -- and what in fact they mean.
Posted by: Hugh at August 21, 2005 10:20 AM
Hugh,
The fossilized nature of Islam is unknown to infidels because infidels see the world through their own lenses and make assumption after assumption about Islam based on our own experience with Christianity.
This has to stop.
Ever has mankind been forced to resist the uniquely human impulse for self-enslavement and time after time, bloody wars have been fought to resist the gravity pull of crystallized tradition.
Inherent in this struggle is the idea that man my commune with God on his own and take away from that communion his own understanding of God. If you take that away - you strip man of his humanity. Islam does this. It deprives each generation of its own discovery of God and without this renewed discovery, there is no progress, only degeneration.
-Rebecca
Posted by: Rebecca JW at August 21, 2005 10:41 AM
I just sent this to RS, I don't know how I missed it here.
Posted by: Carolyn2 at August 21, 2005 12:41 PM
"but they change over time" - that's exactly it, he has learnt over time that he can't be as revealing on the true nature of the five letter word, here as he can in say Pakistan or the west bank. Reminds me of Cat Stevens after his death threats to the C4 and Rushdie, the embarrassment led him to declare his hatred for the infidel only in Arabic and to a muslim audience behind closed doors. Mind you Stevens had some fooled (I think it may have been Warraq or Rushdie, but the links don't seem to work any more), after 9-11 he was likened to a 'pussy cat' that is untill some of his speeches in Arabic (and the small matter of terrorist funding, accidentally of course) were made public. A leopard never changes its spots, not this one at any rate.
This may actually signal a new and more dangerous phase for the infidel nations with substantive muslim minorities. Hugh asked in a previous posting whether or not a measure of success on intergration dependened on the rate of killings. Muslims are more likely to keep more quiet and lo and behold a fatwa perhaps declaring hate speech un-islamic (I refuse to use capitals) and harmfull to the cause (jihad and dawa). I wonder will Messers Blair be satisfied with that, will they think it's a step in the right direction and help in the forthcoming 'islamic' enlightenment, you know one step at a time that sort of thing (one leftie actually told me to wait 300 years!)?
What all our leaders need to realise is that muslim condemnation of terrorism is nothing but a form of hudna, they are just buying time. Time would make their numbers larger, hence far harder to take the the neccessary corrective measures and the path of least resistance will increasingly on a political level become the "least worst" option.
I'm not for waiting and I don't hold my breath, nor should Europe's leaders.
JV
Posted by: jv at August 21, 2005 5:32 PM
On this measure of sagacious appointment, Tony Blair should appoint
1. Sheikh Omar Bakri as the British ambassador to Lebanon.
2. Abu Hamza as ambassador to the USA
3. Sheikh Qatada as British representative to the UN.
Words fail me. Tony Blair's govt, apart from Iraq, has been the most negligent of all governments when it comes to the defence of the realm.
at August 21, 2005 5:59 PM
Mr Bunglawala said: "Those comments were made some 12 or 13 years ago. All of us may hold opinions which are objectionable, but they change over time. I certainly would not defend those comments today."
Not in public, that is.
Posted by: PRCS at August 21, 2005 11:37 PM
I was very pleased to see this programme. John Ware had done his homework and put Sir Icky on the spot, as well as the loathesome Tamimi.
Predictably there has been a barrage of complaints on the Panorama website alleging all manner of sins from Islamophobia to blasphemy. And the programme wasn't even talking about Islam as such, or about Muslims, just about the Muslim Council of Britain. It makes you wonder what the reaction would be if the BBC were to do a no-holes-barred, warts-and-all account of the life of Mohammed. (I bet he had a lot of warts and stinky breath.)
Hugh's probably right - Sacranie has got a bit more prudent since the Rushdie affair. This is also true of Hizb ut Tahrir, who have removed some of the more overtly anti-Semitic material from their website since they've come under closer scrutiny.
Posted by: Interested at August 22, 2005 9:17 AM
Maybe comparing the Hamas hoods to Gandhi is wrong, but there's more in common between them and Mandela than is usually noted. Mandela goes down as a peacemaker only because he got out of jail at a time when his Communist friends in Russia, East Germany, and elsewhere were going down the tubes. Had they been in a position to support him with what he wanted, you could have bet the farm that South Africa would've bled very badly.
Posted by: Kepha at August 22, 2005 4:23 PM
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