This is a guest post by Ibn al-Waleed
In the last year the Scottish Islamic Foundation has made great strides towards becoming the Scottish version of the Muslim Council of Britain – albeit inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood rather than Jamaat-e-Islami.
Osama Saeed, the SIF’s founder, has so far persuaded the Scottish National Party to give the group almost £400,000 of public funds. In return, Saeed has promised the SNP that – given enough money – he can persuade Scottish Muslims to embrace Scottish Nationalism and turn their backs on Labour – the traditional recipient of Scottish Muslims’ votes.
What the Scottish government may have overlooked is that Osama Saeed, a former member of the Muslim Association of Britain, is a committed Muslim Brotherhood activist who will shamelessly use public money to promote his own bigoted form of Islamism.
Already, Saeed has invited Kemal Helbawy, the Muslim Brotherhood grandee, to Scotland to lecture young Scottish Muslims. Helbawy recently featured on Harry’s Place after justifying the murder of Israeli children (“future soldiers” in his words). Saeed plans to use more government money to hold a Scottish version of IslamExpo, the Muslim Brotherhood’s biannual London nutter-fest. To this end, Saeed arranged for Islamist bigot Ismail Patel, Muslim Brotherhood sprog Anas al-Tikriti and Hamas representative Mohammed Sawalha to hold talks with Scottish government ministers in Edinburgh on how the “success” of IslamExpo can be replicated in Scotland.
However it now appears that Saeed has decided that such sporadic actions are not enough. Saeed has now persuaded the Scottish government to put the SIF in charge of deciding which Muslim groups receive money from Scotland’s ‘Youth Development Fund’. This puts Saeed and his group in a position to decide which elements of the Scottish Muslim community thrive and which fail.
This absurd and profoundly undemocratic situation is elaborated on the SIF’s website. This states that Muslim youth groups applying for government money should send their applications to Faisal Hussein (the SIF’s youth director) whereupon their application will be “assessed by the [SIF’s] Board of Directors”. Applications that survive this initial assessment will then “be the subject of an assessment meeting with a member of Scottish-Islamic Foundation staff.”
So what sort of youth work might the SIF approve? And to which groups will they grant government money? Osama Saeed is himself on record as:
– Supporting a Caliphate (“a restored caliphate is entirely compatible with democratically accountable institutions”)
– Defending religiously mandate punishments (“The aim of Islamic law, contrary to popular belief, is not punishment by death or amputation of body parts. It is to create a peaceful and just society”)
– Calling for censorship of offensive cartoons (“You just don’t do pictures of the Prophet, period. It’s a cultural thing, accept it and respect it”)
– Encouraging resistance against the police (“Their job is to always push the boat out, to push the limits they can push, to come out and snoop and to erode freedoms. But our job equally is to resist that, and resist that we must”).
This does not inspire confidence. Helpfully, the SIF’s website also lists what sort of youth projects it might allow to receive government funds. These include “developing Scouts group that cater for muslim religious sensitivities” and the “development of local madrasah through policies, disclosure and training”
Conveniently the Saeed clan has already been involved in such issues for some years. Unfortunately, however, the Saeed family’s actions and statements in these fields reveal a hardcore Islamist agenda which repeatedly emphasises the need for Muslims and non-Muslims to be strictly segregated in order to prevent the corruption of the former by the latter. For example, Sohaib Saeed (Osama’s brother) has previously set up the UK’s first Muslim only Scout troop (Muslim prayers are said and the oath of loyalty to the Queen has been dropped) while Akhtar Saeed Bhutta (Osama and Suhaib’s dad) has campaigned for Muslim-state schools – he argues that Muslim children who attend ordinary schools may be “corrupted”.
The odious and self-serving arrangement between the SIF and the SNP has been increasingly obvious for some time. However this recent development reveals new levels of spinelessness by the Scottish government. Previously the SNP had seemed willing to merely turn a blind eye to the more unpleasant aspects of Islamist thought. Now, however, it is clear that the SNP is willing to go much further than this and is actively empowering the Muslim Brotherhood’s followers and giving them to tools to crack down and stifle the dissent, diversity and freedom in Scotland’s Muslim communities.
And it is this utter contempt for Scottish Muslims which is truely unforgivable.
