This is a guest post by habibi
Ismail Patel has done well on the British Islamist circuit:
* In 1997 Patel founded the “Friends of al Aqsa”, which bills itself as a voluntary organisation “concerned with defending the human rights of Palestinians and protecting the sacred al-Aqsa Sanctuary in Jerusalem”. It publishes reams of anti-Israel leaflets, papers and journals, which are distributed at Islamist events as well as electronically.
* He is a spokesman for the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), a hard-core group that includes fugitive Hamas commander Mohammed Sawalha; Anas al Tikriti, who thinks Holocaust Memorial Day is an Israeli plot; and Azzam “Kaboom” Tamimi. The BMI played an important role in organising and leading the recent anti-Israel demonstrations in the UK. Many of the placards it distributed bore this repugnant Israelis-are-Nazis slur: “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza”.
* Patel has also served as a director of IslamExpo, an annual gathering in London that is organised by the BMI. It offers a mix of mainstream and extremist speakers, helping the political legitimation of the radicals. Hazel Blears clocked this last year and publicly snubbed the organisers. However, since ministers and senior opposition politicians failed to make the same decision in the similar case of the “Global Peace and Unity” event, this legitimation game is still on.
* Scotland too is in the legitimation frame: al Tikriti, Patel, Sawalha and founders of the Scottish Islamic Foundation met with the country’s Europe minister in January 2008 to discuss an “IslamFest” event in Scotland. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone opened this door, and the SNP gave the Islamists a warm welcome.
* The lobby group Conflicts Forum is entirely dedicated to the legitimation of extreme Islamists. For the retired spooky types who run it, presenting rogues in clubland and beyond as “the men we need to do business with” must be an entertaining past time. Ismail Patel is game and credibly extreme too, so he has been welcomed to the group as an advisor.
* Patel is a national member of the “Stop the War Coalition” (StWC) steering committee. He has represented the “antiwar” StWC at a Hezbollah jamboree in Beirut.
* The Guardian and the Independent have published several of Patel’s opinion pieces.
* He speaks frequently at the events of university Islamic societies. In recent years his appearances have included Birkbeck, Birmingham, Cambridge, De Montfort, Kingston, Leicester, Nottingham, SOAS, and Warwick.
Not bad, eh? Well, no wonder he’s a star in his circles. Look at him in delirium for Hamas in this video from the Gaza demonstration on 24 January 2009. He says to a cheering crowd:
“To the Palestinian resistance, we say we will support you until you gain your freedom!”
And here he is at the 10 January 2009 Gaza demonstration, saluting Hamas. He knows what’s best for Jews and who is a good Jew too:
“Hamas is no terrorist organisation. The reason they hate Hamas is because they refuse to be subjugated, occupied by the Israeli state, and we salute Hamas for standing up to Israel.” … “…to the state of Israel: you no longer represent the Jewish people. You have no moral authority to speak for the Jewish people when thousands of Jews are against what you are doing. And finally, to the British Jewish Board of Deputies, shame on you, to work, to promote the genocide of the Palestinian people and the war crimes of the Israeli government. You do not speak for the British Jewry who today have signed in the Guardian against the Jewish government, what it is doing to the Palestinian people. Shame on the British Jewish Board of Deputies.”
Ismail Patel is deliberately stirring up hatred in the UK on top of openly supporting a foreign terrorist group whose very essence is violent racism. He is an extremist. He should be excluded from mainstream politics and challenged wherever he shows up on the fringes.
There’s more. Look at him here in January 2009, cheering the repressive regimes of Iran and Syria, to the delight of IRNA, Iran’s official news agency.
Or here in the same month on Hitler lover Yusuf al Qaradawi’s IslamOnline: “…the present population of Israel is made of immigrants that have been brought from Russia, Europe and America.” Hmm, no one came from Muslim lands, just Europeans and Americans? Ahem.
Then there is this ode to Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas in a Conflicts Forum newsletter.
Or try Patel’s “Friends of al Aqsa” web site, where one finds that he publishes the work of some of the fanatical Israel haters well-known to readers of this blog, including Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir, Stephen Sizer, and Ben White.
He has also published this fine specimen of raw Jew hatred by Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh, who claims that Israel controls America and is destroying it from within:
Some of the most strident and audacious acts Israel and her agents in America have taken to destroy America from within has been the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. That unnecessary and manifestly disastrous war was conceived in and planned by Israel through the mostly Jewish neocons in Washington, D.C. … Again, if you are in doubt, ask those who dare to speak in Washington and they will tell you what you can’t count on the Zionist-controlled media to tell you. After all, Fox News, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek, to mention a few of the so-called “agenda setters,” are not really answerable to the American people. They are answerable to the lobby, because if and when officials at these outlets don’t go with the flow, they get fired immediately.
Or consider Patel’s evident fondness for Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, as documented by Engage and shown by citations of Garaudy in a Friends of al Aqsa report on the Nakba.
To conclude, this text comes from one of Al Aqsa’s boycott pamphlets. It is minor in the scheme of things Ismail Patel, but I think it does neatly capture just how low he has fallen in the pit of racist paranoia. Disney, you see, is part of the Jewish plot:
Walt Disney’s Millennium exhibition in Florida depicts Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The annexation of Jerusalem by Israel is illegal under international law. It cost $8 million to set up the exhibition, of which Israel contributed $1.8 million, as part of its campaign to mentally condition the world into accepting its claims over Jerusalem.
Only idiots and fellow racists would promote Ismail Patel and campaign alongside him. Britain seems to have quite a few of both these days.
One of those people (pick your category) is Martin Linton, Labour MP for Battersea, Balham and Wandsworth. According to a notice on the web site of the Hamas-linked charity Interpal, this Saturday Linton will appear at a Gaza conference at the Tooting Islamic Centre alongside Patel, Mohamed Ali Harrath, the Jew hating CEO of Islam Channel, and Stephen Sizer.
Linton also spoke at the 10 January Gaza demonstration, like Patel. Linton concluded his speech with this line: “Keep up the fight! We shall prevail!”.
Great work, boys, congratulations.
