Two days ago this blog covered Shady al Suleiman, one of the speakers at this year’s “Global Peace and Unity” (GPU) conference in London, an event organised by Mohamed Ali Harrath’s Islam Channel.
In addition to the coverage in that post, it should be noted that even senior people at Alsuleiman’s own mosque in Sydney find him troublesome:
But senior Muslims associated with the mosque have told the Herald that Shady has divided the congregation and its leadership. ”At the start we were with him. He was getting these young people off the streets. But then we found these people were being radicalised. His sermons are not just fire and brimstone,” said one, who did not wish to be named.
Dandan dismisses the schism but Hilaly, the most senior imam at the mosque, has condemned the young imam. ”Shady and those who speak like him are like fast food who give no substance and no spiritual nutrition,” he said through his translator, Keysar Trad.
The mosque is certainly not a place to turn to for help in terrorism cases:
SYDNEY’S Muslim community leaders last night condemned authorities over the conviction of five men under terrorism laws, describing their sentencing as a “travesty of justice”.
Senior Muslim figures, including 10 imams and 20 community leaders, met privately at Lakemba Mosque before releasing a statement to The Australian late last night demanding police produce the evidence proving the criminal “intentions” of the men.
“Until we see the real evidence, we believe that the reason for the arrests and convictions is that these young men expressed or hold opinions that contradict Australia’s foreign policy towards majority Muslim countries,” the statement said.
“No civilised society can pretend to know the intention of people. It is a travesty of justice to penalise people on suspected intention.”
Hundreds gathered at the mosque in Sydney’s southwest to hear the outcome of the meeting.
Outside the mosque after the meeting, a group of young men pumped their fists in the air and accused ASIO [Australia’s intelligence agency] of being “dogs”.
Now let’s look at another scheduled GPU speaker, Zaghloul Al-Naggar. The Egyptian extremist will be a good fit with Shady Alsuleiman. He is a Muslim Brotherhood veteran:
The spirit of anti-colonialism was early inculcated in El-Naggar and his siblings. It was at this time that the war in Palestine erupted and during a Ramadan Sohour that Al-Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the prominent scholar and celebrated mufti of Jerusalem, visited Cairo. “He was a guest of my father’s. We were delighted as teenagers to meet such an Arab nationalist and upright Muslim figure. From him we learnt about the Jewish question and settler colonialism in Palestine.”
It was at that time also that he met two “remarkable men” who were to profoundly influence his political thinking — Hassan Al-Banna and Sayed Qutb. These men had a grand social vision. They were his political mentors and he was determined to help them realise their dream of a new social order dominated by pristine Islam.
El-Naggar took part in anti-British demonstrations. Two of his fellow activists were martyred: the Muslim Brothers Omar Shahin and Ahmed Al-Mineisi.
Many Egyptian officers affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood resigned from the army to fight Jewish settlers in Palestine. “That was a big step in those days.” The spirit of Islamic Jihad was in full swing.
Al-Naggar is still a strong supporter of the “spirit of jihad”. Have a look at him here:
Let me be clear. Jihad is the only way to resolve this issue. With the Jews, one cannot achieve anything by means of peace, or a settlement, or open borders, or diplomatic and commercial ties. They are devils in human form. Many people think that Judaism is a religion, but today’s Jews are not really Jews, and have nothing to do with Moses [AS] and the Torah. They are a gang of evil thieves who stole this land. By nature, a thief who knows he has no right to the land imposes his presence by means of force, by bloodshed, by excessive massacres, by excessive killings, and by destruction, in order to prove that he has rights in this region.
This is the nature of thieves.
It is inconceivable that we deal with this band of thieves as a state. We made a big mistake by treating them as a state. This is not a state. These are gangs of evil thieves and murderers.
…
I blame the Islamic countries as well, not just the Arab countries. I say to Iran: Where are your missiles? You raise the banner of Islam, but where are your missiles? Where are all the soldiers you parade in military marches? I say to Hizbullah: Where are your missiles? When will you use them, if not now? I say to Syria, part of whose land has been occupied for over 30 years: Where is your army? Where are your missiles?”
That clip was broadcast on Al Rahma TV, a satellite channel that has been banned by France for antisemitic content.
In fact Al-Naggar has written a whole book about the “Zionist plot”. The plot’s goal is nothing less than world domination, just as the notorious antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion says:
Zionism is a Jewish-Western project, personifying the elements of the Jewish-Crusader [i.e., Christian] racist beliefs… it aspires to establish a state for all the Jews of the world within boundaries they [the Jews] have defined in their sick imaginations as being from the Nile to the Euphrates . Their aim is [for the Jewish state] to be the foundation for controlling all the people of the globe through what they [the Jews] call “the global government,” as mentioned in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion .
For Al-Naggar, if there are false books, they are to be found in Judaism and Christianity:
I say to the People of the Book [i.e. Christians and Jews]: The books you have today are forgeries. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the original revelation.
Indeed Muslims must be warned, for non-Muslims are at war with Islam:
Therefore, I say to the officials in the Arab and Islamic world, that they must understand that we face the most difficult circumstances. Due to their material superiority, the non-Muslims have overcome us, and they are waging a fierce war, both overtly and covertly, against Islam.
Egypt’s Copts are among the enemies:
Three monasteries closed their doors this month following threats of vandalism after the rumoured killing of Wafaa Constantine, a priest’s wife who had reportedly converted to Islam in 2004 and then reverted to Christianity.
The security threats came on the heels of an interview with Zaghloul el Naggar, an Islamic scholar, in which he accused the Church of killing Constantine for refusing to return to Christianity.
Luckily Allah is on the case. By way of tsunamis, for example:
El-Naggar even sees moral meaning in the earthquake that triggered the 2005 tsunami and washed away nearly a quarter of a million lives. Plate tectonics and global warming be damned: God had expressed his wrath over the sins of the West. Why, then, had God punished Southeast Asia rather than Los Angeles or the coast of Florida? His answer: Because the lands that were hit had tolerated the immoral behavior of tourists.
And by sending AIDS to punish the “current materialistic civilization, given birth by the Zionistic movement”:
Those human devils have gone against the innate nature (Fitrah) that Allah has created them with, and have reached – with their acts – a stage, which is lower than that of animals.
Allah, Exalted and Glorified be He, has punished them with diseases that humanity has never known before, just as He punished the sodomites of previous times with an unprecedented punishment.
Al-Naggar does some practical work for the cause as well as preaching. He is a founder and director of Bank Al Taqwa of the Bahamas. The US designated the bank as a terrorist entity in 2001:
Bank Al Taqwa, for which Nasreddin is a director, was established in 1988 with significant backing from the Muslim Brotherhood. They have been involved in financing radical groups such as the Palestinian Hamas, Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group, Tunisia’s An-Nahda, and Usama bin Laden and his Al Qaida organization.
The bank’s top men have been a mix of Islamist extremist figures and neo-Nazis:
Ahmed Huber, a 74-year-old Swiss businessman and former journalist who converted to Islam in the 1960s, is a board member of Nada Management, a financial services and consultancy company which is part of the international Al Taqwa group. The US says this group has long acted as financial advisers to al-Qaeda.
Mr Huber, who is based in Bern, is known in Switzerland and Germany as an Islamic fundamentalist who attempts to forge links to far-right and neo-Nazi movements.
A spokesman for Germany’s office for the protection of the constitution, the internal intelligence agency, said on Thursday that Mr Huber “sees himself as a mediator between Islam and right-wing groups”. He also belongs to the revisionist movement, which believes the Holocaust did not take place, the spokesman said.
Klaus Beier, spokesman for the NPD, one of Germany’s main far-right political parties, said Mr Huber has often addressed NPD events.
Mr Huber confirmed that he had had contact with associates of Osama bin Laden at an Islamic conference in Beirut. He is quoted in the Swiss media as saying that these people “are very discreet, well-educated, very intelligent people”.
More background on al Taqwa is available here and here.
Home Office guidelines on exclusion from the UK target views which:
– Foment, justify or glorify terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs;
– Seek to provoke others to terrorist acts;
– Foment other serious criminal activity or seek to provoke others to serious criminal acts or;
– Foster hatred which might lead to inter-community violence in the UK.This list is indicative, rather than exhaustive; types of behaviour not on the list may also be deemed unacceptable.
If Mr Al-Naggar is not a prime candidate for exclusion from the UK, who is?
