Heresy is another word for freedom of thought

This is a cross-post by habibi from Harry’s Place

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Here is some more drollery from the East London Mosque:

The controversial speakers who were able, in the past, to speak via third-party bookings of our facilities (circumventing our procedures) have now all been banned. All accusations of ‘extremism’ links are also historical: it is two years since the Awlaki issue arose, for example, and since then we have tightened our procedures and policies accordingly, to ensure no such issues arise again. Let me state once more: we deplore extremism of all kinds and fully support democracy.

Banned? Really?

Earlier this month the mosque’s London Muslim Centre hosted the Cageprisoners crowd, including Cageprisoners patron Yvonne Ridley and Asim “it is incumbent upon all of us to support the jihad” Qureshi. The purpose of the meeting was anti-American agitation on behalf of Aafia Siddiqui, the crudely antisemitic woman convicted earlier this year of attempting to murder US soldiers and officials in Afghanistan.

Andrew Gilligan reports on the Charity Commission’s failure when it comes to regulating organisations linked to Islamic fundamentalist groups. The Charity Commission which began investigations into Muslim Aid, earlier this year, after it was reported that it was funding terrorist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Muslim Aid states that it did not pay money to al-Ihsan after it was designated, in its own right, as a terrorist organisation in May/ June 2005. This claim is the slender thread on which the Charity Commission felt able to give MA the all-clear on the al-Ihsan issue. However, by its own admission, Muslim Aid did pay money to al-Ihsan in 2002 and 2003. At that time, al-Ihsan was already well known as having formal links to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, then as now a designated terrorist organisation. In December 2001, al-Ihsan was actually closed down by the Palestinian Authority (in the territories it controlled) for precisely that reason. (See the evidence below.)

This is a cross-post by Shiraz Maher from the Standpoint blog

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IEngage, once Inayat Bunglawala’s vanity project, has written about my piece in the Wall Street Journal from a few weeks ago.

In my piece I condemned the London Muslim Centre, inter alia, for hosting Khalid Yasin who has described the beliefs of Christian and Jews as ‘filth’. IEngage replies:

…note that Khalid Yasin should now be added to the long line of Muslim speakers to whom certain views are attributed without any indication of when they expressed those views, what the subject matter was and in what context those views were expressed

For the sake of clarity, here are the details.

Khalid Yasin makes his comments in his lecture, ‘Changing the world through Da’wah’ which is part of his ‘Purpose of life’ series. The publisher was IBC Ltd/1Islam Productions.

The blurb advertising this talk says: