Readers of Harry’s Place will know that Queen Mary, University of London is a regular host of events featuring the most extreme and disturbing of Britain’s hate preachers. It was at Queen Mary that CagePrisoners’ Asim Qureshi – who says jihad is “incumbent” on Muslims – told students that they had a legal right to fight jihad.
You will therefore be completely unsurprised to hear that a meeting of Queen Mary’s Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society was cancelled last night after threats of violence from an Islamist fanatic.
The talk, entitled “Sharia Law and Human Rights” was to have been delivered by Anne Marie Waters of the One Law For All campaign. This is what happened:
“Five minutes before the talk was due to start a man burst into the room holding a camera phone and for some seconds stood filming the faces of all those in the room. He shouted ‘listen up all of you, I am recording this, I have your faces on film now, and I know where some of you live’, at that moment he aggressively pushed the phone in someone’s face and then said ‘and if I hear that anything is said against the holy Prophet Muhammad, I will hunt you down.’ He then left the room and two members of the audience applauded.
“The same man then began filming the faces of Society members in the foyer and threatening to hunt them down if anything was said about Muhammad, he added that he knew where they lived and would murder them and their families. On leaving the building, he joined a large group of men, seemingly there to support him. We were told by security to stay in the Lecture Theatre for our own safety. On arriving back in the room I became aware that the doors that opened to the outside were still open and that people were still coming in. Several eye witnesses reported that when I was in the foyer a group of men came through the open doors, causing a disruption and making it clear that the room could not be secured. Unfortunately, the lack of security in the lecture theatre meant we and the audience had to leave and a Union representative informed the security that as students’ lives had been threatened there was no way that the talk could go ahead.
“This event was supposed to be an opportunity for people of different religions and perspectives to debate, at a university that is supposed to be a beacon of free speech and debate. Only two complaints had been made to the Union prior to the event, and the majority of the Muslim students at the event were incredibly supportive of it going ahead. These threats were an aggressive assault on freedom of speech and the fact that they led to the cancellation of our talk was severely disappointing for all of the religious and non-religious students in the room who wanted to engage in debate.”
You can expect Queen Mary to insist that it has no extremism problem.
UPDATE
