Andrew Gilligan speaks of the climate of fear in Tower Hamlets and beyond. This is the dreadful campaign which seeks to undermine as “Islamophobic” or “racist” any criticism of the hardline Islamists who now operate out of the East London Mosque. Gilligan writes about Labour party members in Tower Hamlets who declined to speak openly of the problem of Islamic radicalism in the borough:
But I think I know why others are reluctant to address the issues we raised. That reason is fear. In six months of research, we spoke to dozens of people in the Tower Hamlets Labour Party. Almost everyone who talked to us said exactly the same thing – but no one, save Mr Fitzpatrick, was brave enough to say it on the record.
It is not surprising to see why. Most Bangladeshi residents are also fearful of speaking out in public bar a few brave members of the community.
In response to the programme, IFE stalwart Azad Ali has produced not one but two angry personal tirades against Gilligan on the IFE blog. This breaks his long silence after being exposed last year as a “lover” of Anwar al-Awlaki and a supporter of killing British soldiers in Iraq. This comes after he lost an attempt to sue the Mail on Sunday for publishing an article with the headline “Civil servant ‘backed fanatic’s call to kill our troops in Iraq’”. Justice Eady said in his summary judgment that Ali’s case was bound to fail and had about it “an absence of reality”.
A similar absence of reality permeates Ali’s last two blog entries. They also contained sneers at the members of the Bangladeshi community who spoke out against the IFE in Gilligan’s documentary.
The first was this:
Can I also congratulate you for getting 6 people to speak against IFE from one political party from Bangladesh and ‘linked’ to both the Brick Lane Mosque and Bangladesh Welfare Association – stroke of genius.
The second, this:
As for Gilligan’s key witnesses, Hormuz Ali, Nurul Islam, Golam Mustofa, Bodrul Islam, Sajjad Miah and Ansar Ali he still plays cloak and dagger with them, as if the community does not know who they are. He tried to present them as independent members of the community, whereas in reality they are from Brick Lane Mosque and the Bangladesh Welfare Association with Badrul Islam (CEO) and Nurul Islam (Chair) from EMEP.
Gilligan has not played “cloak and dagger” with these participants. The Dispatches documentary made it very clear who these stakeholders were and their role in the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets. Their presence on the film put paid to the notion that it isn’t possible to be a Bangladeshi muslim resident of Tower Hamlets and be a critic of the IFE:
Dispatches’s answer to that charge is that 70 per cent of our interviewees were Muslim. The most important people in the film are the locals of the area – Harmuz Ali, the vice-chairman of the Brick Lane mosque, Badrul Islam, the chief executive of the Ethnic Minority Enterprise Project, and many others. They reject the IFE, knowing better than anyone that it does not represent their community. They dismiss as nonsense the claim that any attack on it is an attack on Islam itself.
Going back to the climate of fear helped along by political expediency and political correctness, there is also the real fear that these individuals, who have so bravely gone on national television to express their dissenting views, might be in some danger themselves. Why exactly is Azad Ali naming these individuals or the groups they belong to repeatedly on his blog? Is there a sinister motive behind his attempts to “name and shame”?
Could I be overstating the threat of danger the IFE represent?
The official spokesman for the IFE is Abul Kalam who, in spite of his support for jihad, has been very busy depicting his organisation as thoroughly peaceful and democratic. Kalam is also Azad Ali’s fellow-blogger and presenter on the IFE radio show ‘Easy Talk’. Here he is writing on the IFE blog and making it very clear what he thinks of muslims who support the Government’s counter-extremism strategy, Contest 2:
One thing will become clear if Contest 2 becomes governmental policy: There will be no hiding space for Muslim sell-outs.
[His emphases]
I wonder whether the IFE, Azad Ali and Abul Kalam regard the Brick Lane Mosque (BLM), the Bangladesh Welfare Association (BWA) and the Ethnic Minority Enterprise Project (EMEP) as “Muslim sell-outs”.
37 Comments
No, you are not. Attempts to mine critical bloggers for personal information, together with veiled and not so veiled threats against critics appears to be par for the course with many IFE supporters.
The calculated nature of the same is indicated by the care these people take to avoid direct, overt evidence that they support violent jihad, hate preachers, or anything that would tie the IFE to clerical fascists.
Thus (as we have witnessed on this blog very recently), criticisms of IFE supported bigots is met with a wall of abuse aimed at the contributors to this blog – but when questioned as to their support for any of the named and shamed bigots mentioned in above the line articles, the IFE goons fall strangely silent, or resort to further paroxysms of “whataboutery” or abuse .
Abu FOGA make me laugh, he thinks anyone who speaks against him and his gay friends who he drinks whisky with and shares a bed with are all IFE supporters.
I dont think the though has crossed his mind muslims support muslims, muslims support islam so you do not have to agree with IFE or its principles but when a muslims honour is attacked you must defend it.
Don’t be a muppet Wiki. All I have seen here is MCB Islamists supporting IFE Islamists and vice versa. All under the flag of Jamaat-e-Islam and Mawdudi, Hamas etc. And as Effendi has identified, IFE Islamists are singling out Muslims who criticised them.
Is there much point on you commenting on threads on this site, Wiki?
You don’t understand most of what is written; and you are doing untold damage to your cause in the eyes of readers with your abusive, illiterate trolling.
What exactly is your point?
effendi and abul faris are so dumb by suggesting that azad was namin and shamin ‘secret sources’ belonging to gilligan when gilligan pasted their faces and names on his dispatches programme.
somehow though, for these terrified britishor gulams here, they think that this amounts to azad suggesting exposing these bengali sources to untold danger where they will be soon kidnapped, dragged to the underground torture chambers of the lmc and beheaded! look out for the videos peeps… u might catch a whiff of azad’s beard under the executioner’s mask.
this assertion by both effendi and abu fart this is a prime example of ‘gilliganian’ 2 + 2 = 10
Since you’re here ‘gorilla’, can you explain what you think Abu Kalam meant by “There will be no hiding space for Muslim sell-outs”?
Abul Kalam and Azad Ali are the hardest rudeboys in babylon, innit?
Abu FOGA feels threatened. It may be a new thing for you but Muslims support Muslims, and those supposed ‘Muslims’ who speake against muslims are sell out, and just because they have a muslim name does not make them a muslim. Just like hasina in bangladesh her name does not make her a muslim. You need to pratice the fundamentals of the religion to be considered a muslim.
innit? still the pretentious fool since secondary school dawud, u never changed in the slightest. stop being such a coconut…
abul kalam was saying that muslim sell outs can’t hide anywhere in public except on this blog called spittoon where we come to spit on their faces. when in public however, they revert to being religious, ‘traditional’ moslems so as to appease whomever they meet.
just like the hypocrites…
LOL, Dawood.
T2/Gorilla Killer/David Giant Killer
Is there some point you are trying to make?
More takfir and not very carefully veiled threats from Wiki.
Y.A.W.N
So, Wiki, perhaps you could avail us of your views on bananabrain’s article?
i’m going away to the toilet room decorated with bangladeshi memorobilia. i call it going ‘back home’ even though i consider yourselves and myself ‘british’.
anyway, before i go, banabrain was saying that ‘judaism is the truth! so accept jesus into your life’. but that’s okay with you pan religionists so long as he aint a moslem.
delivery to bangladesh imminent! ciao, gulams and kufs!
Bangladesh zindabad and God Save the Queen, you know what I mean!
Sorry though we were in ‘Great Britain’? Dont want to hear about Banga-desh
“…the notion that it isn’t possible to be a Bangladeshi muslim resident of Tower Hamlets and be a critic of the IFE” – who on earth was claiming that? Just a fake ‘notion’ constructed simply to give the impression of a good rebuttal.
‘Personal Tirades’ of Azad Ali? You’re kidding me right? This coming from guys who promote HP and live merely to fire ‘personal tirades’ day and night?
And perhaps no one’s throwing a biscuit to a panting and desperate Gilligan because people realise his ‘work’ is an epic fail; a bunch of arrows and names, with x met y and z said this strung into an apocalyptic conclusion that falls on it’s face.
not to mention of course the lonely chap has had his journalistic integrity kicked in the backside before. Lord Hutton said about his dodgy facade over the Dr Kelly inquiry: “”Having heard and considered Mr Gilligan’s evidence about how there came to be two versions of his discussion with Dr Kelly on his personal organiser, and how he lost his manuscript note which he made the next day, and how his memory of his discussion with Dr Kelly is not now entirely clear, I HAVE CONSIDERABLE DOUBT AS TO HOW RELIABLE GILLIGAN’S EVIDENCE REALLY IS.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/dec/14/sackandrewgilligan
It’s a fascist regime!
Don’t try and pretend you clowns support Brick Lane Mosque or are at good terms with it. Very soon we’ll be seeing you boys with ‘personal tirades’ against the mosque and it’s Imams, on why there’s no female prayer space there, or why even the Brick Lane Imams don’t support homosexuality, or don’t support ‘freemixing’, or sit with women in ‘segregated’ arrangements, or don’t allow women to have a say in how their mosque is run (all of which are of course Sh Gilligan’s ‘proofs’ of extremism in his Dispatches fatwa).
So don’t play two-faced peek-a-boo.
Azad Ali was caught on camera espousing this IFE pearl of wisdom:
That was “manufactured evidence” too?
I think we can safely conclude from the last deranged episode that Respectabilia is on some sort of strong medication. Or should be.
I note all this talk of “British masters” and “colonised mentality”, etc.
If they do not want to be ruled by the British, then can we ask that they educate their children at their own expense, use private care, and generally stop being such a burden on our welfare system.
More simply: Might I suggest that if these IFE scum do not like being ruled by British people in Britain that they get on the next flight out and don’t come back? After all, it is becoming crystal clear that no-one else in Britain – least of all the vast majority of the Muslim community – is remotely interested in their rapid fascist ideology and are completely disgusted with their bully-boy antics.
In short: fuck off and don’t come back. You are not needed or wanted here.
Termite, that’s some badass response there dude . need to give you one em biscuits I gave Faris earlier.
The sad reality, Abu Faris, is that these Jamaatis would never dream of going back to Bangladesh, when they’ve been so horribly unsuccessful over there and are so feted by the mainstream political parties over here.
Mace
Another one of the sockpuppets being operated by the same illiterate 15 year old… how tiresome.
What’s wrong Faris? Too much to drink?
What’s that again you boys always sing…’heresy is another word for freedom of thought’ . So man up and put up with it.
Tell us about it.
Termite
‘A Whitish soft-bodied ant-like social insect that feeds on wood’
Nah, Mace
Just love your sock puppets, though. How about you tell us what you think we should be writing about. That would be so much more constructive than your usual trolling bilge.
“In short: fuck off and don’t come back. You are not needed or wanted here.”
who needs the national front, when you have pakis like abu faris. atleast get paid for doing their job for them faris. don’t do it on a voluntary basis you cheapskate. khal forain.
had it been a skinhead, this statement would have been deemed racist. not anymore. this blog espouses racism, intolerance, islamaphobia under the guise of ‘heresy is freedom of thought’.
“If they do not want to be ruled by the British, then can we ask that they educate their children at their own expense, use private care…”
precisely what the colonised britishor gulams in banga desh used to say to earn a poodle pat from their masters. SPITTIN IN A SPITTOON FULL OF SELL OUT GULAMS.
“In short: fuck off and don’t come back. You are not needed or wanted here.”
Time for the mods to intervene, I think…
I’m not a Pakistani, troll.
Now fuck off. Heathrow’s that way (*points*).
Hardly a racist comment, either.
If one does not approve of, nor like, the culture, politics or any aspect of the country where one lives one is free to go elsewhere.
What ticks people off is a small minority that despises our culture; but is happy to use its benefits and freedoms, to live off the land whilst despising its inhabitants.
We do not want people in our country who hate us, but are happy to take advantage of the freedoms that ordinary people have won. We do not want people who preach hate and violence living amongst us.
If you hate my people so much – then leave. Fare better elsewhere… if you can. You are not welcome here.
Sod this for a game of soldiers – I’m off down the local “The Prophet’s Head” to readmy copy of the Jewish Chronicle, whilst supping a fine lager made by a microbrewery run by an order of gay, Benedictine Christian monks.
Once I get thoroughly rat-arsed by last orders, I shall retire to the local park to dance naked in the moonlight with the other members of my Satanic coven in praise of MANY dark gods. After sacrifice, we will engage in rampant sex with goats, each other and possibly passing park wardens.
I know, I know – I shall regret it in the morning. But hey, it floats my boat.
Cheers!
on the subject of brick lane mosque, if it is giving aid and comfort to clerical fascists, i don’t think we’d be too happy. by all means do tell us if you know otherwise. you seem, however, to be under the impression we are playing some sort of sectarian “cowboys and indians” – we’re not. it is a matter of supreme indifference to me what mosque or community gets which funding from who as long as the funding in question is not being used for something i disapprove of, like, for example, undermining the foundation of liberal democracy or supporting clerical fascism.
that *did* make me smile. judaism is *my* truth, but as we are a particularist religion, there is no obligation on me to proselytise it, or you to accept it – we’d consider anyone a good person, eligible for his/her portion in the World to Come, provided they observe seven basic commandments, known as the “noahide laws”, which, if you are a muslim, you will be doing by default anyway. the standard expected of jews is somewhat higher, comprising another 606 commandments of obligation, which is one of the reasons we don’t proselytise – why make life difficult for people? we ourselves, on the other hand, are stuck with it, like it or not, so we might as well try and cope.
the other thing to remember, of course, is that although jesus was jewish, he has no bearing whatsoever on judaism – that is one of the basic differences between us and christianity, as you’d have known had you been paying attention during that module of religious studies gcse coursework. if you have any other questions about judaism, i’d be happy to answer them, provided you can shove them into intelligible sentences.
b’shalom
bananabrain
All Wisdom Is From God and to All People
Thank you, Abu Faris for pointing out (about a half a year ago) the spelling error on the word “yoke.” All wisdom and the answer to everything is from God and I am happy that we can talk some more about the gracious and life giving words that the Lord Jesus Christ spoke. Jesus (Savior) Christ (the Anointed) is the obedient and life giving one with his Heavenly Father God’s loving life giving grace, words, deeds and authority; worthy to be called Lord.
The quote I used was the scripture passage from the book of Matthew, Chapter 11 verses 28 to 30: “Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart: and you shall find rest unto your souls. My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Remember the movie “The Passion of the Christ” in 2004. The record breaking “R” rated movie (due to the bloody torture of the Lord Jesus) that was seen by a record number of Muslims in the Muslim countries where it was allowed to be shown. The film’s dialogue is in Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew, with subtitles. It is good to see that many people would like to learn of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Muslim people are people like anybody else. We are all living souls created by the same Creator God of Life. Every human being has a human spirit which is where ones conscience communes with God’s Holy Spirit. “Drink this water and you shall never thirst,” “Eat this bread and you shall never hunger,” said the Lord Jesus Christ concerning the Holy Spirit and his words. The Lord Jesus said, “I came not to change or destroy the Law, but to fulfill the Law.” The Holy Scripture also say, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever believe in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
Once again another group of people (the Muslims) are among many different ones over world history (including the Roman Catholics) who set out to change the world but in the end, it is God’s Creation and Purpose, “the Living God Expressed,” that will change all of Mankind for the better and for His Purpose. It is the life giving and loving Divine Natural Way of God’s Nature. And changing the people are; to God’s life giving and loving Divine Nature for whosoever believe are partakers thereof. It is a gift from God to all Mankind. “Blessed are they which hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” The Lord Jesus Christ also said, “I have come that you may have life and have life abundant.” “Blessed are those that are not offended in me.” “Your faith has made you whole, now go and sin no more.” The Holy Scriptures from the New Testament goes on to say, “Now the Lord is that Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty!” This is not just for some people who are in a certain club or religion. It is for all Mankind and all that call upon the Name of the Lord in spirit and truth and for all that long for freedom from bondage of sin and death. I happily share this good news. If you have some more good news to tell, please do so. Your comments are mostly graceful and inspiring.
With the above already written, said and finished one minute ago, coincidentally, I just now heard your name, Abu Faris, on the radio (Friday February 26, 2010 at 4:35am Pacific time) and I agree with you on the renaming of Mt. Diablo to Mt. Reagan. And if there is another person with your same name of whom the radio referred to here in, I agree with him. And may all the Earth be blessed with goodness, health, prosperity and life. That was a really fast response to my request. Blessed be the Name of the Lord and blessed is what God is doing on the Earth. Amen.
Now, let’s gain Christ and love one another as the Lord Jesus told us to do with the new commandment he has given to all Mankind on the Earth. “A new commandment I give unto to you that you love one another as I have loved you. By this all men shall know that you are my disciples if you have love one to another.”
I get that a lot: people thinking that I am remotely interesting. They soon learn different.
It was not me on the radio. I don’t do radio or television work. I did one interview for C4 many moons ago and I have been known to throw BBC World Service off the premises… mejja bouncer, that’s me.