Category Archives: Islamism

A Divided Egypt

This is a comment by Karim Sabet in Cairo


I have not been able to sleep from what I think may be a day I hope I will never get to see again. I need to make one thing very very clear to all of you guys watching what is happening from your TV screens. Having spent 8 hours in Tahrir square yesterday, I can say that the majority of the people throwing rocks from the anti-Mubarak demonstrators were not the people I want representing me. Yes i am asking for the president to go, yes I am asking for changes to be made, and yes I will continue to go back there every day for the same cause but I will NOT accept that religious groups hijack what we have been doing for their own agenda.

A large group of the ones organizing them yesterday were people in galabeyas and long beards shouting “Al Jihad fe Sabeel Allah (Jihad in the name of Allah), you have to continue fighting, we will win this war, if you die here today, you will be a martyr and go straight to heaven, don’t stop, fight, fight, fight”.

Also posted in Democracy | 3 Comments

“A Good Death Is A Slow One”

Birmingham University ISoc to host the master of the cult of death. This is a guest post by Mr Happy


Today, one of my contacts from the University of Birmingham forwarded me a message on an upcoming event hosted by the Islamic Society.

The event is called “A day in the life of a Gazan Child”. I think we can all guess how that’s going to be played out. But what I haven’t told you is that this talk is in two parts. The first is to do with the Gazan Child but the second is “a presentation on Death” – both hosted by a gentleman by the name of Jalal Ibn Saeed.

It’s well documented that Islamists have made an economy out of the cult of misery and death. Add the two together and don’t stop stirring, and you often form the soft cement of anti-western hatred that hardens into radicalization.

Posted in Islamism | 1 Comment

An Alleged War Criminal Writes…

This is a cross-post by Lucy Lips


The Guardian today carries a letter from Mr Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, the founder of the Islamic Forum Europe, who has been accused in a Channel 4 documentary, and in an article in the Guardian, of involvement in genocide in Bangladesh. In that documentary, Mr Mueen-Uddin is said to have been a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s notorious Badr death squad, which abducted and murdered Bangladeshi intellectuals during their War of Liberation in the 197os.

Here is his letter:

It seems that western powers are slowly beginning to realise that the days of promoting freedom at home and subjugation abroad is becoming unsustainable. Statements proclaiming displeasure with the way their dictator friend in Cairo is treating his compatriots started to emanate from Washington, Berlin, Paris and London. Your report (Police crackdown as protesters defy ban and take to streets, 27 January) quotes statements of world leaders. One word is common in all statements and reveals the west’s priority. We would be fooling ourselves if we think that word could be “democracy”. No, the word on the lips of all world leaders is “stability”.

Also posted in War Crimes | 4 Comments

No Mubarak, No Hizb

This is a cross-post by habibi


On Saturday the extremist party Hizb ut-Tahrir tried to muscle into a demonstration against Mubarak at the Egyptian embassy in London.

The demonstration’s organisers were having none of it:

Hundreds protested outside Egypt’s embassy in London on Saturday calling for President Hosni Mubarak to go, but differences in message highlighted tensions between Islamists and others over the country’s future.

Islamists in one demonstration wanted an Islamic government and Islamic law to replace Mubarak’s 30-year autocratic rule, around the corner was a secular protest.

“Mubarak out, Islam in,” and “Allah take Mubarak the pharaoh,” chanted Islamist protesters, including organisers Hizb ut Tahrir, a hardline Islamist group. Women and men in the group protested separately.

Nearby, other demonstrators were careful to distinguish themselves from the Islamists, sticking to secular chants

Posted in Islamism | 6 Comments

Heroin

The very wonderful Mona Eltahawy has written an important piece on the (imminent?) Egyptian Revolution, which you can read here. In there is a passage that could be controversial:

Meanwhile, the uprisings are curing the Arab world of an opiate, the obsession with Israel. For years, successive Arab dictators have tried to keep discontent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2009 increased global sympathy for Palestinians. Mubarak faced the issue of both guarding the border of Gaza, helping Israel enforce its siege, and continuing to use the conflict as a distraction. Enough with dictators hijacking sympathy for Palestinians and enough with putting our lives on hold for that conflict.

I don’t see the British “liberal left” or advocates of British Muslim identity politics weaning themselves off that particular “distraction” anytime soon.

Also posted in Israel/Palestine, The Far Left | Leave a comment

Egypt: Don’t Be Fooled by the Radical Islamists

Abbas Milani writes in The New Republic, comparing the Egyptian revolution in 2011 to the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, and offers a word of warning:

For Egyptians, the history of the Iranian Revolution should serve as a warning. In 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini hid his true intentions—namely the creation of a despotic rule of the clerics—behind the mantle of democracy. More than once he promised that not a single cleric would hold a position of power in the future government. But once in power, he created the current clerical despotism. And when, in June 2009, three million people took to the streets of Tehran to protest decades of oppression, they were brutally suppressed.

Also posted in Democracy, History | Leave a comment

APPG Islamophobia Collapses

Remember how Kris Hopkins, Tory MP for Keighley, and the Labour peer Lord Janner closed the door last month on the Islamist lobby group iEngage from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia? Well, both of them have quit the APPG, after they failed to persuade other MPs to keep iEngage out of the secretariat.

The two of them have sent an email to the members citing their reasons for quitting the APPG, as Gilligan reports:

“The Group needs to be seen as above reproach and political leaning in order to maintain trust and confidence in its work.

Whilst iEngage are perfectly entitled to express their views, we did not believe it appropriate for them to do so whilst continuing to act for the group.

An orchestrated lobbying campaign on behalf of iEngage since we issued our statement has only served to reinforce our opinion.

Posted in Islamism | Leave a comment

The First Anniversary of Gitagate

On the 7th February, 2010, Gita Sahgal was suspended by Amnesty International from her post as Head of the Gender Unit after writing an article voicing her fears that Amnesty International has damaged its reputation by partnering with Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners.

Worldwide outrage, a facebook campaign and a global petition to restore integrity to human rights followed.

The result?

A vicious slander campaign against Sahgal, coordinated by pro-extremist reactionary bloggers and useful idiots – amongst them Sunny Hundal, Andy Worthington, Islamophobia-Watch etc.

Amnesty International initially claimed that they were not promoting Begg’s views, only his experiences. Then they decided that his view on jihad in self defence was ‘not antithetical to human rights‘.

Gita and Amnesty International parted company.

An internal review found that management had failed in their duty of ‘due diligence’ and had not investigated Cageprisoners. Although no investigation has been conducted, Amnesty International and other human rights groups have lined up to support Cageprisoners.

Also posted in Human Rights, Misogyny | Leave a comment

Quilliam: Egypt and the eclipse of the Muslim Brotherhood

The Quilliam Foundation has released a briefing paper on the recent upheavals in Tunisia and now Egypt and the speculative role of the Muslim Brotherhood and other extreme Islamic far-right political groups. These are the key points of their analysis:

Islamists do not have a monopoly on grassroots movements.
The ‘conventional wisdom’ that only the Muslim Brotherhood can organise grassroots opposition movements in the Middle East clearly needs re-thinking as does the idea that it is the ‘only real opposition’. While it is true that the Muslim Brotherhood is the most ‘organised’ formal opposition group in Egypt (and some other Middle Eastern countries but not in others such as Tunisia), advances in technology mean it can now be outmanoeuvred by spontaneous grassroots movements.

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Representation, the Islamist Way

Inayat Bunglawala is very concerned about the fate of his fellows in the fascist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The Brothers (Ikhwan) are not all demons and nor are they all saints. However, they are without doubt a major established component of Egyptian society and no government that deliberately excludes them from sharing power could be truly representative.

This suggests that any political structure which may replace the Mubarak regime, democratically or not, would be “unrepresentative” if it excluded the Ikhwan. This is an odd thing to say by someone who purports to support democracy.

Meanwhile his friends in the Islamic Forum Europe (IFE) have been caught red-handed by Labour NEC of a concerted campaign of vote rigging by creating 149 fake members in their efforts to elect Lutfur Rahman:

Posted in Islamism | 4 Comments
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