Mosab Hassan Yousef
Introducing Mosab Hassan Yousef, 30.
Mosab’s father is Sheikh Hassan Yousef, senior Hamas figure in the West Bank, currently serving a 6-year prison sentence in an Israeli prison.
Mosab helped Israel’s security forces kill and arrest members of the Islamic militant group, Hamas. He is probably marked for death and but he has published his story in his new book, ‘Son of Hamas’.
A fromer deputy of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service said he was one of their agents, helping to prevent Hamas attacks on Israel. This will be an embarrasment for the militant group, which prides itself on its tight discipline.
Mosab has renounced his Muslim faith, converted to Christianity and denounced his father’s organisation. By doing so, he has exposed his family to persecution in his home town of Ramallah and endangered his own life.
From the Jerusalem Post:
George Galloway claimed the IFE played a “decisive role” in his election victory to become MP for Bow and Bethnal Green. Yesterday the Sunday Telegraph reported Galloway had used IFE influence in the area to consolidate his victory:
George Galloway, a London MP, admitted in recordings obtained by this newspaper that his surprise victory in the 2005 election owed more to the IFE “than it would be wise – for them – for me to say, adding that they played a “decisive role” in his triumph at the polls.
Mr Galloway now says they were one of many groups which supported his anti-war stance and had never sought to influence him.
Indeed he does. Galloway has now sprung to his own defence, as he does, and in a quick and dirty entry in his blog, distanced himself from the IFE and now pleads ignorance of their brand of sectarian, supremacist politics.
This is the story of how a bent copper in the Met managed to keep his detractors at bay by playing the Institutional Race card repeatedly.
The only thing black about Commander Ali Dizaei is his hair dye. Yet this Iranian-born policeman, the most senior officer to be jailed for corruption in more than 30 years, was a president of the National Black Police Association. The NBPA was not the only organisation to have been made a fool of by this arch-manipulator of racial politics: the BBC had made his dishonest memoir its Radio 4 Book of the Week, and The Guardian was also a willing media partner in his campaign to become the country’s most powerful policeman.
Joan Smith writes an interesting piece on Begg’s ride to Amnesty’s own human rights poster boy and “Human Rights Victim of 2009″.
While all this was going on, Begg and his organisation Cageprisoners are busily fetishising anything to do with Anwar al-Awlaki and lionising any two-bit, violent Islamist radical who ever voiced a jihadi sentiment or got into trouble with the authorities. Inclusive of Omar Khyam, Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza.
Let’s return now to Begg. In 2001, he took his wife and children to live in Afghanistan, then under the control of the Taliban. Women scurried from place to place in burkas, risking a beating if a passing Talib spotted an inch of flesh, and could not even speak to a doctor except through a male relative; the horrors of the regime have been brilliantly described in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. In Begg’s own book, he describes his interrogation by the CIA who wanted to know why a young man from Birmingham was living in Afghanistan. “I wanted to live in an Islamic state – one that was free from the corruption and despotism of the rest of the Muslim world,” was his reply. When they expressed scepticism, he complained: “I knew you wouldn’t understand. The Taliban were better than anything Afghanistan has had in the past 25 years.”
From the East London Advertiser:
TOWER Hamlets council has launched a disciplinary enquiry over pro-Islamist emails sent to a London Euro-MP.
Two e-mails, with a town hall address, attacked proposals by the UK Independence Party to ban Muslim face coverings, including burkas and hijabs, in public places and accused the party of trying to “stoke a religious war on the streets of Britain.”
London MEP Gerard Batten has lodged a formal complaint with Tower Hamlets council and is demanding to know what disciplinary action will be taken against any individual found responsible for sending the emails.
The emails, which have been linked to a Town Hall employee’s email account, were sent last month.
One message said: “Teenage pregnancies, binge drinking, that is what is associated with British culture. Islam is the dominant religion in the United Kingdom. If you don’t like it, go live somewhere else.
Some levity for a Saturday afternoon:
Despite having served for years as a distinguished Pakistani diplomat, Akbar Zeb reportedly cannot receive accreditation as Pakistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The reason, apparently, has nothing to do with his credentials, and everything to do with his name — which, in Arabic, translates to “biggest dick”
According to this Arabic-language article in the Arab Times, Pakistan had previously floated Zeb’s name as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, only to have him rejected for the same reason. One can only assume that submitting Zeb’s name to a number of Arabic-speaking countries is some unique form of punishment designed by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry — or the result of a particularly egregious cockup.
The Arabs never offered the Pakistani Foreign Office an explanation for their decision. So the Pakistani FO assumed the US was behind it. Obviously.
The National Secular Society has lodged a complaint against Cherie Booth, QC, (Tony Blair’s wife) for ruling to keep a violent man out of jail because he was “religious”.
Shamso Miah, 25, of Redbridge, east London, broke a man’s jaw following a row in a bank queue.
Sitting as a judge, Ms Booth – wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair – said she would suspend his sentence on the basis of his religious belief.
Also in the Telegraph:
Shamso Miah had left a mosque when he grabbed Mohammed Furcan and punched him. The thug ran outside but Furcan chased after him and demanded to know why he had been struck. Miah punched him again.
The National Secular Society claims her attitude was discriminatory and unjust:
Presenting the antisemitic, anti-Sunni, anti-atheist, ‘non-Muslims are cattle‘, ‘Muslim World-ist‘, big-C Conservative hating ‘progressive leftist‘ - that’s right folks, Mehdi Hasan hosted by Quilliam Foundation and the Conservatives in a day-long love fest, apparently. Who would have guessed it?
This is a time of unprecedented change for British Muslims. With Muslims facing rising levels of anti-Muslim sentiment, hostility due to terrorism and other factors, questions are increasingly being asked about what it means to be British and Muslim both in the challenging present and uncertain future. It is in this context that we, in co-operation with the Al-Karimia Institute and the St Paul’s Institute, would like to invite you to the first in a series of events designed to build trust and confidence between Muslim thought leaders.
This is an invitation-only event, aimed for a limited number of some of Britain’s most influential Muslim thinkers, activists and scholars to attend and discuss issues of socio-political importance. The gathering will be held at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, on Saturday 23rd January 2010.
Massoud Shadjareh, head of the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), has a good turn of phrase. Asked to give his opinion on airport profiling, he is reported to have said:
“Any such measure would not only alienate people, it would also be ineffective in terms of stopping terrorists. What’s to stop them dressing up as orthodox Jews in order to evade profiling-based searches?”
Hilarious but why specifically mention “orthodox Jews”?
Shadjareh’s talent for dangerously witty repartee is extensive. It appears that it isn’t just profiling that he is opposed to. Shadjareh has also expressed his opposition to the new security measures that are due to be implemented following the aborted terrorist attempt by the Underpants Bomber on the Christmas day United Airlines flight.