This is a guest post by al-Qanaas al-Masri
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Azad Ali, the head of the Civil Service Islamic Society, has called on Muslims to ‘resist’ the government’s counter-terrorism ‘Prevent’ programme.
Ali, who also works at HM Treasury, said that the Prevent programme aimed to ‘hurry people away’ from the Muslim religion and to ‘help non-Muslims increase in their hatred of Muslims’.
Writing on 18 October on the web forum of Easy Talk, a radio programme which he hosts every week, Ali wrote:
Ali posted this statement only a day after ranting on his 17 October Easy Talk programme against the government’s policy of banning foreign extremists from coming to the UK, telling listeners:
‘I think the Home Office made a fantastically stupid, stupendous mistake when they created their list of individuals that they would ban. It was crazy and it was never going to work and they’ve got egg on their face now.’ [55:45]
Both these remarks arguably bring Azad Ali into a breach of the Civil Service Code which aims to stop Civil Servants from undermining government policy. The Code says that civil servants ‘must not’, among other things, ‘frustrate the implementation of policies once decisions are taken by declining to take, or abstaining from, action which flows from those decisions.’
The Code also says that civil servants must ‘serve the Government, whatever its political persuasion, to the best of your ability in a way which maintains political impartiality and is in line with the requirements of this Code, no matter what your own political beliefs are’ and that they must not ‘allow your personal political views to determine any advice you give or your actions’.
Azad Ali has been in hot water before for his online statements.
Earlier this year, he was suspended on full pay after he was found to have made a series of statements supportive of Hamas and other jihadist organisations on the Islamic Forum Europe blog.
On the Easy Talk website, however, there is plenty of fresh evidence of Azad Ali’s extremist leanings.
For example, on 18 September 2009, Ali (who many Jamaat-e-Islami leaders in East London privately tip as being a future leader of the MCB) suggested that non-Muslims ‘will never be pleased’ with’ Muslims:
Ali’s phrase ‘those who do not have faith will never be pleased with us, even if we follow their ways’ is strongly reminiscent of Islamist extremists who believe that a civilisational conflict is underway between Muslims and non-Muslims.
The extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, for example, regularly tells its followers that “Never will the Jews or Christians be satisfied with you unless you follow their Creed.”
Not co-incidentally, perhaps, Ali has himself commended Hizb ut-Tahrir, commenting on 8 October that a press-release issued by the group in response to a forensic expose of their totalitarian ideology by the Centre for Social Cohesion was a ‘good statement’.
When Ali’s pro-jihadist statements came to light in January 2009, the government conducted a typically ponderous investigation into whether he had broken civil service rules, before allowing him to return to work – after enjoying six-months off work on full-pay.
Barely four months later, it is abundantly clear that Azad Ali has neither reformed nor learnt his lesson.
His recent comments on the Easy Talk website and radio show him to be an extremist who thinks that the Prevent programme is a plot to “hurry people away” from their religion and who thinks that non-Muslims will ‘never be pleased’ with Muslims.
It is time for the Head of the Civil Service, Gus O’Donnell, to fire Azad Ali. Ali is a disgrace to the Civil Service – and to the Civil Service Islamic Society, whose patron is also none other than Gus O’Donnell himself.
18 Comments
In the morally relativist times that we live in, Azad Ali will be protected, promoted and feted by the Civil Service. He will be appointed to yet more advisory panels and Shami Chakrabarty will champion him as a voice of “the oppressed, downtrodden Muslim” of our society by giving him a seat on the board of Liberty. Oh wait, he already has that.
wow, great find Qanaas! Let’s see how he tries to ride this wave
“The extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, for example, regularly tells its followers that “Never will the Jews or Christians be satisfied with you unless you follow their Creed.””
This is actually the translation of a verse from the Quran.
This is a non issue and again making a story out of nothing.
Come off it, This is such a non issue. Azad Ali is sooo last year!
Azad Ali is a disgrace to the civil service – and to all Muslims who are working and with the government towards the common good. I sincerely hope that the government deals with this matter before it reflects badly on innocent and sincere Muslims.
Brother Yunus – This is truly a verse from the Quran. But Azad Ali has taken this verse out of context in a way that will damage the reputation of Islam and Muslims. For this he should be sternly criticised with the aim of forbidding the munkar with the heart and with the tongue.
We got something planned for Mr Azad.
Coming soon, get it while it’s hot!
Charlotte
Hur al-Ayn Cheerleaders
Following the link you provided, it looks like Azad Ali or his fan-boys have removed the mp3 files of the recordings of his shows from the easy-talk.org website.
Why were they removed? Well, it’s a lot harder for Azad Ali and his braindead defenders at the IFE blog to claim to be “deliberately misquoted” when he’s recorded himself saying it.
I have already saved the MP3s off-line. Bad luck Azad!
Do they really think the Spittoon doesn’t know to back up this kind of material to Effendi’s secure server in South Waziristan.
Nice try lads
In the words of Charton Heston, ‘I’ll only give you these MP3 when you take them from my cold, dead hands’.
Come and get ‘em, IFE fuckwits.
I don’t understand why Azad Ali wasn’t fired the first time around.
How crazy does a person have to be before the Civil Service decides to take action???
FF – because he hadn’t done anything wrong!!
Al-Qanaas Al-Masri – ok be honest here – do you really think this Azad person is an extremist/ Islamist? Or do you just have something personal against him and/ or IFE?
Fiyaz E12 – i don’t think it’s the likes of Azad that the goverment need to work on! I don’t think Azad reflects badly on the ‘innocent’ or ‘muslims’. It’s unfortunate that the people who do do this are very rarely spoken about! They are the one’s we should be naming and shaming!!
What is it with people picking up names from the media and suddenly forming harsh perceptions of these people?! Certain media will always want to create scandals, and it’s a shame ‘we’ lap up all their stories!! Surely we’re intelligent enough to do our own research and form our own conclusions – surely we don’t have to take the media’s stories on face value (which is the case here! Some people have read this blog and have straught away come to the conclusion that Azad is an extremist with radical views!!)
Seeing is believing.
GM – You asked for an honest answer, so I’ll be as honest as I can.
Do I think that Azad Ali is an extremist/ Islamist? Well, obviously I dont think that Azad Ali is the next bin Laden, or even the next Anjem Choudary. Having read a fair web of his web-posts and listened to his Easy Talk show, I’d say that in some respects he’s a pretty normal guy. That said, however, he is demonstrably more extreme that most British Muslims – witness his older posts praising Anwar Al-Awlaki and Abdullah Azzam, saying that Ismail Haniyeh would make an ideal caliph etc etc – these are things which most Muslims wouldn’t agree with. And do I think that he’s an Islamist? Well, yes I do; Azad Ali does repeatedly adopt Islamist view points and he is after all a prominent member of Islamic Forum Europe, a pretty out-and-out Islamist organisation.
That said, however, I think that these questions are somewhat beside the point of my post. My post aimed to argue (and I hope that this was sufficiently clear to readers) not that Ali was problematic because he was an Islamist per se but rather that as a civil servant paid by the British taxpayer, and as the head of the Civil Service Islamic Society, he should not be publicly advising people to ‘resist’ the government’s Prevent programme.
To turn this question around – would you be happy if the head of the Civil Service’s Christian Society (assuming that there is one) called on white British people to ‘resist’ government policies to tackle BNP/National Front-style white supremacist extremism – or saying that Muslims will ‘never be pleased’ with Christians? Or would you think that this would be incompatible with their job as a civil servant?
I dont think Azad is a threat in any way shape or form. People are trying to dig into old news trying to make them into something worth while. I really think we should move on, i know were the last country to be very slow at recovering from this recession but this story can very easily be faked.
The screenshots hold no water in my opinion as any photoshop geek can do wonders!
Well thats just a few of my cents!
So log into the forum and check them for yourself, rather than making entirely unsubstantiated (and serious) allegations.