This is a guest post by habibi
A week has passed since the Observer revealed that Daud Abdullah, the deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), recently attended a conference of Islamic extremists in Istanbul.
This was an assembly for jihad. Delegates at the February conference included representatives of Hamas and theological and political supporters of some of the worst forms of Sunni extremism. The BBC has more.
The conference declaration, signed by Daud Abdullah, was a pro-Hamas tirade. It hailed the terrorist group’s “victory” in the recent fighting in Gaza and called for it to be supported with money and material, including weapons.
It also demanded opposition for anyone in the way, such as the Palestinian Authority and Arab governments that support peace plans. In particular, the extremists said in a “legal judgment”, those closing crossings to Gaza (Egypt, that is) and preventing weapons supply were engaged in nothing less than “high treason in the Islamic Nation, and clear support for the Zionist enemy”.
Let’s be clear: this is a theological mark of death for the Muslims chosen as enemies by the extremists gathered in Istanbul.
In another “legal judgement”, the declaration warned the US and Europeans of mayhem should they be so bold as to order their navies to interdict Hamas weapons suppliers at sea:
The obligation of the Islamic Nation to regard the sending of foreign warships into Muslim waters, claiming to control the borders and prevent the smuggling of arms to Gaza, as a declaration of war, a new occupation, sinful aggression, and a clear violation of the sovereignty of the Nation. This must be rejected and fought by all means and ways.
The Royal Navy has been volunteered for just such an interdiction role by Gordon Brown. This has been public knowledge since mid-January, before the Istanbul conference. A deployment came one step closer last Friday at a meeting in London. Should British naval forces actually take on interdiction missions in the region, Daud Abdullah will presumably find any attacks on them entirely justified in Islam, just like his cohorts at the conference.
Queried by the Observer, a spokeswoman for the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) had this to say about Daud Abdullah and the conference:
We are aware of the conference held in Istanbul last month and are very concerned that the statement from the event calls for direct support for acts of violence in the Middle East and beyond. We are also aware that a senior member of the MCB may have been a signatory to this statement. If it is proven that the individual concerned had been a signatory, we would expect [the MCB] to ask him to resign and to confirm its opposition to acts of violent extremism.
To the best of my knowledge, at present neither Daud Abdullah nor the MCB have publicly distanced themselves from any of the Istanbul statements.
Politically speaking, why should they? Despite the MCB’s lengthy controversial record, in January 2009 Mr Abdullah was deemed an appropriate partner for a Home Office discussion of “social cohesion” in the context of the Gaza war. Now the DCLG has required “proven signatory” evidence before it can say that the British government will demand action from the MCB.
This is extraordinary. First of all, you’ll find Daud Abdullah at number 17 on this list of signatories.
More importantly, never mind Istanbul for a moment. Many other scenes from Daud Abdullah’s life as an extremist are available for all to see and hear. Have a look at this video from February 2007:
Note these words in particular:
There is no winning in this battle. They cannot win a guerrilla war when the people are not in favour. When the people are against them, you cannot win. They tell us it is a war against the Taleban. It is not a war against the Taleban, it is a war against the Afghan people. There’s a national resistance in Afghanistan today.
Daud Abdullah is a liar as well as an extremist. A recent poll of Afghans for the BBC and ABC found that only 4% of them wanted the Taleban back in power, while 58% saw the vicious brigands as the “biggest danger” facing the country.
Next, here is a video of Abdullah at the 10 January Gaza demonstration in London:
Do government officials really need to be told that statements like this one are only for racist haters who support terrorist violence:
The blood of those who shed in the Gaza strip will not be in vain. The blood will water the machine of resistance. It will fuel the hearts of those who fight you in Gaza strip.
Apparently so.
So let’s give them a little more help. Here’s Abdullah making repellent use of the Holocaust as a stick to beat Jews:
The Holocaust is of course one of Abdullah’s favourite rhetorical weapons. He was among the hard core at the MCB who consistently backed the boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day.
Radicalism has also taken Abdullah to the door of the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC). He has been a researcher there since 1996. As reported on Harry’s Place before, the PRC is an openly pro-Hamas group that is determined to wreck any peace process with even a remote chance of success. If you’re interested, there are plenty of his ramblings to read on the PRC web site, including blatantly anti-Semitic comments like this one about Ariel Sharon and America, in the context of a UN report on the fighting in Jenin in 2002:
Still, the incumbent US administration claims that the instigator of this war is a ‘man of peace’ and should be allowed go about his business unimpeded. And, for whatever reasons, the UN has endorsed this line of reasoning. By so doing it has allowed itself to be hijacked by the messianic extremists who formulate Israeli national policy and enforce it through the US State Department.
There are more stories to tell about Daud Abdullah, but let’s wrap up this post with a talk he gave on Palestine at Regent’s Park Mosque in 2002. It was pure incitement to racial and religious hatred, with the coalition troops who had just liberated Afghanistan among the targets, though Jews are evidently the ultimate root of evil for Abdullah:
Dear brothers and sisters, when I see gatherings like these, numbers of Muslims coming together on occasions like these, it reminds me of events which took place in Medina just around the advent of our prophet.
You know, in Medina, there were people of the book – Christians and Jews. The Jewish tribes in Medina, they used to say to the Muslims, that there will come a prophet, a prophet will be raised in the Arab peninsula, and we, the Jewish tribes, we will join with this prophet to fight against you Arab tribes.
So these Arab tribes, Avs and Hazrach, who constituted the majority, they met the prophet at the outskirts of Medina, around the eleventh year of the hijrah (migration to Medina), and then he told them that he was the messenger of Allah. So the Avs and Hazrach, they knew that this was the individual that the Jewish tribes were speaking about. So rather than wait until the Jewish tribes joined with the messenger and fight against them, they took the initiative and became Muslims before the Jews could do so.
Now what I am trying to say here is that the animosity, the hostility that was meted out against the Arab tribes in Medina by the Jews unintentionally made the Arab tribes move closer and more readily to Islam.
And that is exactly what is happening today. The more they persecute the Muslims, in Palestine, in Chechnya, in Afghanistan, in Gujarat, in Eritrea, in Sudan, wherever Muslims have been persecuted, this pressure upon Muslims is drawing the ummah closer together.
I can give you another example. You see, in Medina, what happened, there was this Jewish king called al Fityun. Every Arab tribe from Avs and Hazrach who married, this king, he had to deflower the bride as a matter of custom. The Arab had to bring his bride, on the night of the wedding, to this Jewish king al Fityun. This was the kind of viciousness, of bestiality, that was meted out to the people at the time. So when [the prophet] came with this message of deliverance, with this message of guidance, you see, they welcomed him. I’m saying, again, that it was the hostility, the aggression, the wrongdoing, which forced these people, drove them towards Islam. And this is exactly what we have seen here in the world today.
Why would anyone want to discuss “social cohesion” with such a fanatical and hateful man? Or an organisation that employs him at the senior level and refuses to cut him loose? What’s the point?
