The Muslim Council of Britain is a poisonous organisation. It presents itself as representing the moderate face of Islam (is there one?) but consistently reveals itself to be the very opposite of moderate, or even honest for that matter. The MCB hold the one provably peaceful sect of Islam, the Ahmediyya, in extreme contempt and consider this group as being ‘kuffar’, with all that that means in Islam, which normally means a death sentence.
The MCB also, like the disgraced Tell Mama organisation, have a habit of telling lies about Islam or whining dishonestly about how Muslims are ‘oppressed’ or ‘victimised’. They are a deeply unpleasant and dangerous group. Therefore I was pleased to see an article on the website of the Gatestone Institute laying into the Muslim Council of Britain. In particular the article, by Douglas Murray, focuses on the MCB’s Islamic ‘fact checker’ and assistant secretary general, Miqdaad Versi.
Here’s part of the Gatestone article and I would strongly advise readers to go and read the rest of it.
The Gatestone Institute said:
………during the last Labour government in Britain, the MCB’s behaviour and beliefs were exposed by the more progressive Muslim voices who were by then coming along, and also by a wider society which had become wise to the tricks of these self-appointed “community leaders.” The Labour government took a strong exception to the MCB’s then-Deputy Secretary General, Daud Abdullah, signing the ‘Istanbul Declaration’. As Home Office Minister Hazel Blears said at the time, it “supports violence against foreign forces — which could include British naval personnel… and advocating attacks on Jewish communities all around the world.”
In the years since then, the MCB has had a problem. Its self-appointed task is to act as an interlocutor with the government, but the government will not speak to them, a state of affairs which leaves the leadership of the MCB with a lot of time on their hands. Happily, the group’s Assistant Secretary General, Miqdaad Versi, has found a way to fill that time. Last year he hit the headlines in Britain for an especially observant piece of mid-morning television watching. While filling up his day, Mr Versi noticed that a piece of paper, on which the lead character in a children’s cartoon, called “Fireman Sam,” at one point slipped, appeared to resemble a page of Arabic writing.
By watching the clip over and over again, Mr Versi discovered that the page of writing resembled a passage from chapter 67 of the Quran. As a result, the makers of “Fireman Sam” were forced to issue a statement assuring the world that a full-scale investigation was underway into how this happened, and that, in addition:
“We are taking immediate action to remove this episode from circulation and we are reviewing our content production procedures to ensure this never happens again.”
Then last month — thanks to the BBC — we got an update on Miqdaad Versi’s activities. In January, the Victoria Derbyshire show ran a special feature on Mr Versi. The article — “The man correcting stories about Muslims” — portrayed Versi as an intrepid crusader for truth. In particular, it focussed on his work of systematically and continually complaining to the UK’s new press regulator, Ipso, whenever he thinks that a story in the British media contains inaccurate reporting on Islam or Muslims.
The BBC report described, for instance, how Versi had managed to get a major correction from the Sunday Times. In a front-page piece on a recent report into the state of integration in Britain by Dame Louise Casey, the Sunday Times had run the headline “Enclaves of Islam see UK as 75% Muslim.” The contents of the report were wholly accurate — the headline writer at the Sunday Times had merely wrongly extrapolated one point in the story and wrongly recounted the fact that pupils at one school featured in Casey’s report had said they thought the UK was between 50 and 90 percent “Asian.” The Sunday Times subsequently ran a correction. On another occasion, Versi had managed to get a correction from the Daily Mail which he presented as “huge.” The correction was that in a story about the President of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia, the paper had reported that Bouattia had said that young Muslims were going to join ISIS “because of government cuts to education” and had referred to a Birmingham university as a “Zionist outpost” because “it had a large Jewish society.”
Versi’s complaint about this piece centred on claiming that Bouattia had not said that cuts were the “only” reason people were joining ISIS, and that her suggestion that a British university was a “Zionist outpost” was not “because” of its large Jewish society. Both claims were highly disputable. Versi also complained that a use of the word “groups” should have been the singular, “group.” On the basis of this, the Daily Mail issued an apology, allowing supporters of the radical National Union of Students’ (NUS) President to pretend that she was the victim of a smear campaign by self-confessedly inaccurate media reports rather than a nasty anti-Semite whose back was being covered by a full-time pedant with dodgy facts.
Read the rest of this piece here: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9889/muslim-council-britain-miqdaad-versi#.WJ3wIUTxzZ8.twitter
This is yet another brilliant piece from Mr Douglas Murray. He has excellently filleted yet another Islamic liar and pretend ‘moderate’. Well done. By the way although the article states that the Government no longer listen directly to the MCB, they are listening to the MCB indirectly. A former Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, Farooq Murad, now serves on the Board of Trustees for the left wing and pro-Islam ‘community group’ Citizens UK which enjoys a large degree of privileged access to Government ministers and funding from Government departments such as the Cabinet Office. Although the MCB may be sort of gone, that doesn’t mean it’s operatives are wholly excluded from contacts with the government.
