Today the self-styled Islamic Human Rights Commission held a meeting in London titled “Genocide Memorial Day 2010”.
Here is the flyer. The top line reads “Genocide – the systematic extermination of an entire national, religious, racial, political, or ethnic group.” The picture on the top left is from the Shoah. The one on the lower right is from the Gaza war.
At the bottom is a citation from the Qur’an which starts with this: “And why should ye not fight in the cause of Allah and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated and oppressed?” Hello Hamasniks.
The suggestion is clear – Israel is like the Nazis and it is committing genocide.
This kind of grotesque abuse of memory is fairly common among British Islamists.
Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is historically absurd. The real game here is to demonise and taunt Jews with the worst suffering in their history. Short of acts of violence, which are justified in the name of Allah in the flyer, one cannot go lower.
So, who might attend or support such a foul event? Here’s the line-up:
Guest Speakers include:
Imam Achmad Cassiem (Former Robben Island Prisoner) – modernity, genocide and genocidal acts
Lee Jasper (Human Rights Activist) – genocide and slave trade
Rabbi Ahron Cohen (Neturei Karta) – Nazi Holocaust
Assed Baig (Journalist and Campaigner) – genocide in Srebrenica
Randeep Ramesh (Guardian Correspondent)
With messages from:
Ward Churchill (American Writer) speaking on the genocide of the Indigenous Americans.Hasan Nuhanovic (Campaigner and UN translator) on the genocide of Bosnia.
And a special contribution from a Nazi Holocaust survivor.Supporting organizations include:
Stop the War Coalition, Muslim Association of Britain, CAMPACC, Neturei Karta, British Muslim Initiative, Palestinian Return Centre, Ahlul Bayt Islamic Mission, Innovative Minds, Ahlul Bayt Societies and Islamic Forum Europe.
Achmad Cassiem is a Khomeinist thug from South Africa. We have covered him and his close links with the IHRC before. He wants to see Israel annihilated. He supports terrorists in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. His Qibla, PAGAD and Islamic Unity Convention groups have promoted hatred and carried out acts of intimidation and violence in South Africa.
Holocaust denial is part of the repertoire. In the 1990s, the Islamic Unity Convention’s radio station broadcasted lies, refused to back down legally, and wrangled in the courts for years rather than renounce and regret its distribution of poison:
In 1996, Radio 786, a Muslim radio station, had to apologize for airing an interview with Dr Ahmed Huber who spoke of the ‘Holocaust swindle’. Two years later the same radio station interviewed Dr Yaqub Zaki who, besides claiming that the “million plus” Jews who died in the Second World War had died of infectious diseases, spent much of his time engaged with elaborate Jewish conspiracies, including a bizarre connection between Jewish financiers, the Boer War, Alfred Milner and Zionism. In June this year (following an eight year legal wrangle brought by the Jewish Board of Deputies against the radio station and lengthened by technical disputes) the Independent Broadcasting Authority found Radio 786 guilty of contravening its broadcasting codes.
Nor will being Muslim preserve you from Cassiem’s thuggery. On the contrary. Consider this story:
The first sensational conflict between Pagad and the Muslim religious establishment came on Friday 10 January 1997, when a 50-strong Pagad group, watched approvingly by its balaclava-masked amir, invaded the Muir Street mosque during the mid-Friday prayers before Ramadan, to abuse and manhandle the congregation’s Sheikh Mogammad Moerat and his family. The MJC issued a statement expressing:
…our strongest condemnation of the abhorrent behaviour. This constitutes a violation of the sacred time of Ju’mah, the sacred space of the masjid, and the sacred person of an individual, and calls for the highest censure.
The MJC condemned Achmat Cassiem, leader of Qibla and the Islamic Unity Convention (IUC), and Radio 786 as responsible for creating an atmosphere of belligerence and intolerance. They violated Shari’ah by demonising Muslims who hold alternative viewpoints as munafiqs (hypocrites). Sixty-two imams, moulanas and sheikhs signed the statement, supported by the Muslim Youth Movement.Pagad activists manhandled, spat at, and called “hypocrite” and “pig” Sheikh Achmat Sedick, Secretary-General of the MJC. Pagad leaders now spoke of “economic gangsters” and “religious gangsters”. After criticising Pagad’s methods, Sheikh Nazeem Mohamed, a much-loved leader of the MJC for forty years, and then its president, had a hand grenade thrown at his house in mid-1998. Also publicly critical of Pagad’s methods was Ebrahim Moosa, a liberal Muslim academic theologian, Director of the Centre for Contemporary Islam at the University of Cape Town and among the first Muslims to be appointed in that department. The day after Pagad’s legal spokesman denounced him as an enemy of Islam (munafiq), which was reported on Radio 786, a bomb was thrown at his house. The bomb attack was preceded by a Pagad trademark, the balaclava-clad squad, who in this case made a road-block keeping people away while the bomb was planted. Pagad leader Abdus-Salaam Ebrahim denounced Moosa as a “religious gangster”. Moosa moved himself and his family to the USA. Many other imams, from Mountain View to Surrey Estate to Grassy Park congregations, had to endure aggressive confrontations from Pagad leaders and supporters. This echoes how Qibla had earlier during the 1980s alienated one congregation after another.
Here he is Cassiem in London, speaking up for “resistance” murderers at a London “antiwar” demonstration. The man behind him draped in a Hezbollah flag is Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the IHRC.
Moving on, I suppose Lee Jasper, one of Ken Livingstone’s cronies, needs no introduction here.
Rabbi Ahron Cohen is a member of Neturei Karta, the tiny sect British Islamists have long employed as their favourite Jewish fig leaf. His topic at the conference was the Holocaust.
How appropriate: in 2006 he and other Neturei Karta delegates attended the Holocaust denial conference in Iran, where they held two meetings with Ahmadinejad, Iran’s Holocaust Denier in Chief. On his return to the UK, Cohen said Jews had it coming:
Ahron Cohen, an Orthodox Jew from Greater Manchester and a leading member of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta movement, sparked new controversy on his return from Tehran by suggesting that God would have saved the victims of the Nazis if they had deserved to live.
Cohen, whose house in Salford was pelted with 1,000 eggs last year because of his extremist views, told The Sunday Times: “There is no question that there was a Holocaust and gas chambers. There are too many eyewitnesses.
“However, our approach is that when one suffers, the one who perpetrates the suffering is obviously guilty but he will never succeed if the victim did not deserve it in one way or another.
“We have to look within to improve and try to better ourselves and remove those characteristics or actions that may have been the cause of the success of the Holocaust.”
Assed Baig is a far left activist. It seems he has some, well, issues with white people:
In reality it is the white ruling elite which are responsible for much of the problems that we see today. Nuclear weapons, AK47´s and M16´s are all invented and made by white people. Fighter Jets, tanks and land mines are a white invention and largely made in the white dominated Western World. Terrorism has been perpetrated by white states.
Randeep Ramesh is an India correspondent for The Guardian. How surprising to find a representative of that newspaper speaking at an extremists’ meeting.
Ward Churchill is an American nutter and liar who enjoys a bit of memory abuse himself. He called the New York victims of 9/11 “little Eichmanns”:
There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .
Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” – a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.
The abuse of memory, the promotion of hatred, the celebration of violence – this is what the IHRC is all about.
In the UK, this will earn you an invitation to Parliament to discuss countering extremism. Seriously. At the session, no MP asked Shadjareh any even gently probing questions about his organisation’s own record of extremism.
The Westminster meeting was chaired by Phyllis Starkey MP. Next week she will speak at a London meeting of Israel haters and stoppers, where Holocaust mocker George Galloway, Daud Abdullah of Istanbul declaration fame, and rank antisemite Ismail Patel will also appear.
What an easy mark the UK is for Tehran and its sick friends.
