The Muslim Council of Britain’s Inayat Bunglawala writes in defence of neo-Nazi supporter, Asghar Bukhari.
‘This story has mysteriously surfaced at this time in a clear attempt to try and discredit Asghar Bukhari and MPACUK. Asghar’s donation of sixty pounds to David Irving over six years ago may be regarded as perhaps overly idealistic and indeed naive. However, it is disgraceful – though not unexpected, of course – that the usual suspects have tried to use this incident in an attempt to portray Asghar as an anti-semite.
I know that Asghar is a staunch critic – and rightly so – of Zionism and the bloody and repressive policies of the Israeli government, but also that he has absolutely no truck whatsoever with anti-semitism or any other form of racial prejudice.
I hope MPAC will not be deterred by this episode and continue to focus on encouraging British Muslims to play their full role in the mainstream of British society and not allow themselves to be marginalised through inaction and passivity.’
Asghar Bukhari is, of course, a racist and – despite his denials – an enthusiast for Holocaust denial. He donated money to Irving – in Bukhari’s own words – to support “your fight for the Truth” and believes that Irving has suffered as a result of “trying to expose certain falsehoods perpetrated by the Jews’.
Bukhari’s error, in 2000, was not to disguise his pure racism as “anti-Zionism”. The claim that his support of Irving was motivated by naivity and Irving’s supposed anti-Zionism is a lie. Irving is a world-famous neo-Nazi polemicist, and is not a prominent anti-Zionist.
Indeed, earlier this year Bukhari’s MPAC was republishing material which were sourced from neo-Nazi websites, including David Irving’s own online publications. It is clear that Bukhari and his chums must spend an awful lot of time reading neo-Nazi material. It is therefore simply implausible that he does not have a very good understanding of the politics of the extreme right. Indeed, he shares that politics.
For Bunglawala to express support for Bukhari in this manner, and to characterise his fawning over a neo-Nazi as “over-idealism”, indicates that Bunglawala is, at best, a racism-denier.
He is unfit for his role in a prominent Muslim lobby group.