Friday 27 November, 2009

Special Report

Opposition Leader, David Cameron

By Charles Gardner

The claim by Opposition Leader David Cameron that a Government saying it wants to prevent Islamic extremism is actually funding it is one which Lifebite raised some six weeks ago.

As we said at the time, the matter of radical Islam is a very serious issue that will also need to be addressed by the Conservatives if and when they take office.

During Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons this week, Mr Cameron claimed that two schools linked to a radical Islamic group had received cash from public funds designed to tackle extremism.

The Government has denied the accusation which relates to independent schools run by the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation described by Mr Cameron as a “front organisation” for Hizb ut Tahrir which ex-Premier Tony Blair promised to ban in the wake of the July 7 2005 bombings in London.

Schools Secretary Ed Balls has responded by saying the Tories appeared to have mixed up two separate funds and that, while the schools concerned had received money for the provision of free nursery school places as part of routine allocations by local authorities, there was no evidence it had received cash from the fund to tackle extremism.

And in a latter to Mr Cameron, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: “I can confirm that no funding related to Preventing Violent Extremism has been given to the schools.

“Haringey local authority suspended funding to the nursery school pending an investigation following the media reports on which your comments were based. The investigation found no evidence to suggest inappropriate content or influence in the school.”

However, in a Lifebite article entitled The need to tackle hardline Islam published on October 9, we raised very similar concerns to those of Mr Cameron.

We said that fundamentalist Islam was another deeply serious and potentially divisive issue with which the Conservatives would need to deal if and when they took power in the spring.

We said that 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 that 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.

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: Public Domain