This is a re-post by of an article by Raziq first posted in August 2009
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Fear mongering seems to have become a past time for some Muslims: the fear that the whole world is against Muslims and there are numerous forces out there wanting to undermine and destroy Islam. One of the chief instigators of this paranoid delusional mindset is an individual called Abdul Karim Hattin. This short biography of him appears on the Islamonline website:
Abdul Karim became a Muslim when he was 19 years old and now at 30, he has completed a degree in Media Studies at the University of Luton. He is the co-director and founder of Halaqah Media and Black Banner Media. He wrote the documentary From the Shadows…Exposing the New World Order.
This is a cross-post of an article by habibi from Harry’s Place
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You have seen Abdul Karim “Spot The Fag” Hattin in action in this post. Alas he is not unusual. Let’s take a look at what some of the other preachers who have been welcomed in recent years at the East London Mosque and its London Muslim Centre have to say about gays.
As reported in this documentary, Khalid Yasin is an extremist, a 9/11 troofer and a fraudster. This is what he makes of homosexuality:
There’s no such thing as a Muslim having a non-Muslim friend. If you prefer the clothing of the kafirs over the clothing of the Muslims, most of those names that’s on most of those clothings is faggots, homosexuals and lesbians. [opening of the documentary]
Harry’s Place has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with someone over the last two days to bring you this video of the homophobic lunatic Abdul Karim Hattin speaking at the East London Mosque.
The video has been removed from YouTube three times, each time reported to YouTube for “breach of copyright” or “terms of use violation”.
For good reason of course, there has been a lot of focus on the Islamist radicalisation and entryism around the East London Mosque (as exposed in Monday’s Dispatches on Channel4), so it is unsurprising that no one has yet made a fuss of the fact that obnoxious lectures take place there inciting hatred of the gay community – as seen in the image above.
So let me be the fist to kick up a fuss.
The slide on the screen has a picture of openly-gay singer Elton John next to a very butch-looking Tupac Shakur. The presenter tells the audience: “This is a little game I like to play called ‘Spot The Fag’.”
He then launches into a rant about the ‘fag’ lifestyle.
Jews, gays and kaffirs are “filth” says fanatical cleric
Universities fail to block “gateways” to fundamentalism and terrorism
Sheikh Quick
London – 24 February 2010
In defiance of its own equal opportunities policy, King’s College London (KCL) is hosting the Muslim fundamentalist fanatic, Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick, this Thursday, 25 February, at 6pm in the Raked Lecture Theatre, The Strand, London.
He is anti-Semitic and homophobic. He denounces the “filth” of Jews (Yahood) and kaffirs. See here (about 3.50 minutes into the video):
The Pope’s abysmal comments urging Catholic bishops in the UK to fight the Equality Bill with “missionary zeal” have been met with a wave of revulsion and rightly so. For the Pope, homosexuality “violates natural law”, which is why it is only natural British citizens should not have to foot the bill (£20 million) for his proposed trip to the UK. The Vatican is a wealthy establishment and there are far more deserving (not to mention beleaguered) British institutions that would benefit from that kind of money.
Fuck the Pope, use protection
So here’s another useful petition worthy of your signature, from the National Secular Society:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ask the Catholic Church to pay for the proposed visit of the Pope to the UK and relieve the taxpayer of the estimated £20 million cost. We accept the right of the Pope to visit his followers in Britain, but public money would be better spent on hard-pressed schools, hospitals and social services which are facing cuts.
The human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has announced he will stand down as a parliamentary candidate for the Green party in Oxford East. He explains:
I was selected as the Green Party candidate for Oxford East in April 2007. A month later, I was badly beaten around the head by neo-Nazis during an attempted Gay Pride parade in Moscow.
This exacerbated the brain damage caused when I was bashed unconscious by President Mugabe’s bodyguards in Brussels in 2001, after attempting to make a citizen’s arrest of the Zimbabwean leader on charges of torture.
Following the Moscow assault, I never rested and recuperated. I carried on campaigning, with a very heavy schedule of commitments in Oxford East. After several months, I was severely exhausted. This stress and exhaustion probably intensified the damage and thwarted my recovery.
Nemat Safavi, 21 years old, has been sentenced to death by the juvenile court in Ardebil, a city northwest Iran.
Queers in Iran are put to death and persecution by their government, simply for being who they are. Now more than ever we need your help.
According to the Human Rights Activist Group in Iran, Nemat was detained by Iranian authorities when he was 16 years old because of his homosexual acts (Lavat). He was sentenced to death after being tried in the court of Ardebil. Mr. Safavi spent time since his arrest in a ‘rectification and education’ centre, and is now being kept in the division of youths in an Ardebil prison.
A final determination of Nemat’s fate will be made by Iran’s Supreme Court. However, these sentences frequently stand as decided.
Here at the Spittoon we have tended to give InayatBunglawalaabitofahardtime. But we also give credit where credit is due. In that spirit, he certainly deserves credit that, on the back of a panel discussion about religious freedom and sexuality in Dublin (in which he participated with Peter Tatchell), he has just written a spirited defence of gay rights.
In Muslim communities the issue of homosexuality is very rarely discussed in a candid manner and is all too often wished away as if it is an affliction that involves other groups, not them. Not far from the surface, however, are reports of gay Muslim men being pressurised into rushed marriages by parents desperate to avoid any social stigma. The woman’s family is never told the truth about her husband’s sexuality, of course, with the result that another soul has to endure unhappiness due to the initial failure to face up to the issue. It is a highly dishonest and unethical approach.
One of the bizarre hypocrisies of modern Britain is that criticising people who claim religious sanction for homophobia can be labeled bigotry but, at all other times, homophobia is the unacceptable bigotry.
I have always attempted to square this circle by drawing a line between those who say we are all sinners and homosexuality is a sin like any other judged by their god on judgment day (generally speaking, the Anglican answer) and those who say that it is a sin worse than all others (Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps, for example) and homosexuals deserve punishment in this world.
There is another way – and it is significantly more intellectually satisfying: to argue that religions can accept homosexuality. Dr Amanullah De Sondy does so today in the Sunday Times.
One of Scotland’s leading Muslim academics is challenging his religion’s orthodox opinion on homosexuality by suggesting Islam is compatible with a gay lifestyle.