Friday 9 October, 2009

Special Report

By Charles Gardner

Another deeply serious and potentially divisive issue with which the Conservatives will need to deal when and if they take power in the spring is that of fundamentalist Islam.

It’s no secret that we are under constant threat of terrorist attacks from extremists targeting the ‘Christian’ West for reasons including the fact that they hate Jews and Christians, literally taking instructions from the Qur’an to regard them as enemies, that they believe we are immoral and because they wish to extend the Islamic empire.

It’s true that we have soldiers in Afghanistan – probably not enough, if former Army chief Sir Richard Dannatt is to be believed – who are there precisely to deal with this threat. And those tempted to be swayed by ill-informed and growing opinion that the war there is a pointless no-win exercise need reminding of this.

But there is still far too much woolly thinking keen to promote Islam as a friendly and peaceful religion from which we can only benefit.
Although it would be true to say that most Muslims are indeed peace-loving people with whom we have no quarrel and who do not wish us any harm, there is a hard core of fundamentalists whose influence is out of all proportion to their numbers.

The problem is that even British taxpayers are inadvertently helping to promote their radical agenda. And it is my understanding that government money is being given to Islamic bodies who are undermining the unity and cohesion of the British nation in favour of an all-embracing Muslim culture.

For example, among organisations who have received funding via local authorities – ironically through a scheme known as Preventing Violent Extremism – are the Muslim Welfare House, a member of the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe, which represents the Muslim Brotherhood.

And Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leading scholar of the Brotherhood, has publicly spoken in support of the Nazi holocaust and stated that the next bid to exterminate the Jews may be committed by Muslims! He is also said to have co-signed a letter earlier this year which claims that “the events of September 11 2001 were nothing but fabricated drama by some influential forces in America in co-ordination with the Israeli Mossad (undercover security force).”

And although the Brotherhood itself does not present a direct terrorist threat, it is said to promote an ideology which helped create modern jihadist (holy war) terrorism and is fundamentally incompatible with western notions of statehood.

Brigitte Marechal, a French expert on the subject, has written how the Brotherhood in Europe continues to promote Islam not simply as a religion, but an all-encompassing framework which “suggests that Islam should be understood as a complete system that concerns state and nation, beliefs and legislation, cult and behaviour, and the social, political and historical.”

And this ideology is said to be one of the driving forces of the jihadist terrorists who are currently trying to enforce strict Sharia (religious) law in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and numerous other fronts. (A leading light of the Brotherhood in Egypt only last year refused to label Osama bin Laden a terrorist, opting instead for the more cordial ‘jihad fighter’ battling against ‘oppression and corruption’.)

And this is aggravated by its subversive promotion of Islam as an alternative system of governance. All of which results in young Muslims feeling a greater affinity with fellow Muslims around the globe than with their non-Muslim next door neighbour.

Upon the arrest of the recently convicted transatlantic terrorists, former Muslim Association of Britain spokesman and Hamas cheerleader Azzam Tamimi (who was given a Muslim Welfare House platform last January) could only offer the pathetic suggestion that the entire episode was invented by the government to “smear the image of Islam and the Muslims”.

Rather than paying for its promotion, the government should be providing more robust arguments against the politicised Islam of the Brotherhood.

But there is such naïvety in Britain, especially parts of the church. Bradford Cathedral, for example, has appointed Nuzhar Ali, a Muslim, to develop projects that will help bring people of different faiths together. But for what purpose? Muslim and Christian individuals seek the conversion of each other, the only difference being that in Muslim countries throughout the rest of the world, Christians are being forced on pain of death to convert to Islam.

Only this week we heard how Islamists have attacked the home of a Christian family in a town near the Pakistan capital of Islamabad for refusing to convert to Islam. They have received threatening letters quoting verses from the Qur’an including Sura 5:51 which reads: “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends…” They were also told: “You Christians are agents of US-led forces. Therefore it is our religious duty to wipe out all Christians from the Islamic holy land of Pakistan.”

Closer to home, a London church has effectively been ‘silenced’ by a court after a decision by magistrates to uphold a noise complaint by a Muslim neighbour who happens to live in what used to be the Manse (vicarage).

Immanuel House of Worship in Walthamstow meets in a former United Reformed Church. And an environmental health officer had earlier advised the church to “tread carefully” as it was a “Muslim borough”.

But the church is appealing against the ruling with the help of the Christian Legal Centre whose director Andrea Williams said: “This is a vibrant Afro Caribbean community of Christian believers whose worship of God is fundamental to the expression of their faith.”

Just who is dancing to whose worship tune?

The Islamic empire is being extended throughout the UK where they have been granted extraordinary freedom to build mosques and schools to preserve and promote their faith and culture. Muslims do not respect the Christian virtue of ‘turning the other cheek’, regarding it as weakness on our part because it suggests we don’t have a faith worth fighting for. In the nations from which they have come, you can neither build a church nor be a Christian!

The erosion of our Christian culture is a threat to future generations who will live under the jackboot of fundamentalist Islam if we don’t step in now and say ‘enough is enough’.

Photo: stock.xchng