This is a cross-post by Edmund Standing
‘I believe in women’s rights. So did Muhammad’. So says ‘Sultana Tafadar, Barrister’ at the ‘Inspired by Muhammad’ campaign website (see my previous article on the claims made by the campaign here).
Curious to find out more about Ms Tafadar, I did a bit of looking around the web. Tafadar, it turns out, wrote a report for the Islamic Human Rights Commission in 2002 entitled ‘The Hidden Victims of September 11: Prisoners of UK Law’ (PDF) and spoke at an IHRC seminar on ’9/11 – The Hidden Victims’. In 2003, Tafadar again appeared at an IHRC event, this time speaking on ‘The Legal Case against Ariel Sharon’.
Anyone who might be wondering how the IHRC defines ‘human rights’ would do well to consult this excellent post at Harry’s Place. A sample:
It is a Khomeinist group that campaigns for Islamists in legal trouble, including convicted terrorists, such as Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheikh”.
He was the spiritual leader of the bombers of the World Trade Center in 1993. According to terrorism investigator Evan Kohlmann, in his sermons he derided Americans as “descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communists, and colonialists” and called on Muslims to attack the West: “cut the transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land”.
He was convicted of seditious conspiracy in 1995 and sentenced to life in prison. So what does the IHRC do, to this day? It calls (pdf) for his release and asks Muslims to pray for him.
What about Abu Hamza? When he was convicted, IHRC chairman Massoud Shadjareh was not best pleased:
‘This is creating an environment that can only further alienate the Muslim community’.
The IHRC is certainly “alienated”. It refuses to deal with the police, who – shock! horror! – have turned to Israel for insight on dealing with suicide bombers. One policeman even dared to be rude about Hitler fan Yusuf al Qaradawi! The cheek.
As for Tafadar, in 2002 she considered ‘Sheikh Faisal’ one of the ‘Hidden Victims of September 11′, writing:
Sheikh Faisal was arrested on February 18, 2002. He faces a sentence of up to life imprisonment if found guilty of the charge ‘soliciting to murder’ under section four of the Offences Against the Person Act 1891 on the basis that on or before February 18 this year he ‘encouraged others to murder persons unknown’.
He was initially refused bail and was held in custody, but was later released on bail on 21 August 2002 after the prosecution failed to hand over evidence they intended to use to his lawyer. He is currently awaiting trial.
In 2003, Abdullah al-Faisal (AKA Trevor William Forrest, AKA ‘Sheikh Faisal’) was found guilty of three charges of soliciting murder by an Old Bailey jury:
The jury found el-Faisal incited young, impressionable Muslims to kill non-believers, Americans, Hindus and Jews.
El-Faisal argued his words were taken from the Koran, the Muslim holy book, and had been misrepresented.
One tape, Jihad, contained the words: “So you go to India and if you see a Hindu walking down the road you are allowed to kill him and take his money, is that clear?”
He also said it is permissible to use chemical weapons to kill unbelievers.
In a tape called Rules of Jihad – thought to have been made before the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States – el-Faisal told his audience: “You have to learn how to shoot. You have to learn how to fly planes, drive tanks and you have to learn how to load your guns and to use missiles.”
He said: “You are only allowed to use nuclear weapons in that country which is 100% unbelievers.”
On a tape entitled Declaration of War, which had a picture of Osama Bin Laden on the cover and is thought to have been made in 2000, el-Faisal translates one of his speeches calling for a holy war against Americans and Jews to “drive them out of the Holy Land”.
The tape called Them Versus Us says: “There are two religions in the world today – the right one and the wrong one. Islam versus the rest of the world.”
It was also disclosed that controversial cleric Abu Hamza was due to be called as a witness in the case.
Another ‘serious concern’ expressed by Tafadar was ‘political interference in the judiciary’. Commenting on the case of Suleyman Zain ul Abidin – a friend of hate preacher Abu Hamza (as Comrade/Sister Yvonne Ridley acknowledges in this piece at the IHRC site on supposed CIA ‘hit squads’ in London) – Tafadar was particularly worried by the fact that ‘[t]he campaign against Zain ul Abidin was spearheaded by pro-Zionist Andrew Dismore’.
As is so often the case with such characters, Tafadar also has links to the far-left, having conducted an interview for ‘Socialist Lawyer‘, magazine of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. The Society’s website, unsurprisingly, offers links to, amongst others, the Communist ‘Morning Star’ newspaper, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and the Stop the War Coalition.
I think it’s a shame the ‘Inspired by Muhammad’ campaign’s biography of Tafadar was so sparse. Hopefully this post has done something to redress this injustice.
