You would think wouldn’t you that if you were hiring a person from a Muslim background to act as a partner in the UK Government’s PREVENT counter extremism programme, then you would hire someone either from a branch of Islam that is less violent and hateful than some, or an individual who was of impeccable and peaceful character. Sadly that’s not what HMG did.
Also it might be thought reasonable that should your Muslim partner suddenly come out with a whole load of Jew hating shit and spouted out about how ‘mujahideen’ and ‘shahids’ were good things and backing ‘Palestinian’ militants, that they would be sacked and told never to return even if they did say ‘sorry’. Again, even more sadly, that’s not what HMG did.
What the Government has done however is to accept the apology of Imam Irfan Chishti MBE for coming out with a whole lot of Israel hating, Jew hating and pro-extremist bullshit. By accepting this apology the UK Government has given him and his organisation a path back to his £1500 per day taxpayer funded PREVENT programme position.
This is incredibly weak behaviour by the Home Office. If someone involved with PREVENT, even as a conractor, reveals themselves to be favourable to extremist views then they should be gone with no way back. After all this ‘get out and stay out’ policy would without a doubt be used if a Government partner in the third sector made statements criticising Islam, the Cult of Trans or any other of the identitarian idols that we are told to worship.
The Jewish Chronicle said:
A Muslim cleric who was caught on film calling Israel a “terrorist state” and praising “martyrs” who have “given their life for Palestine” is to return to his well-paid job on the government’s counter-extremism programme.
Home Secretary Priti Patel ordered an inquiry into Imam Irfan Chishti, MBE, after he was filmed giving a speech to a pro-Palestine rally in Rochdale during the recent Israel and Gaza conflict in which he said, “We ask you Allah that you accept every single shahid (martyr) who has given their life for Palestine.”
The Home Office inquiry into Chishti’s actions has, as many might have expected, decided to accept Chisti’s excuse that his speech in Rochdale contained a ‘poor choice of words’. Furthermore he’s still acceptable to the Home Office and the organisation he leads is still likely to pick up £1500 per day for counter extremism work.
The Jewish Chronicle added:
The cleric issued a fulsome apology when his comments came to light. The JC understands the imam has received a written warning and been cleared to return to his paid role as an adviser on the government’s counter-terror strategy, Prevent.
His company, Me and You Education, is a Prevent partner and gives training to the police, the NHS and schools on how to spot extremists and neutralise radicalisation.
I get the distinct impression here that he only apologised because he was caught. If his words had not ‘come to light’ as the JC puts it, would he have voluntarily confessed to the Home Office about the content of his words? I don’t believe he would. Hopefully this written warning he has been given will put him on some sort of notice that he’s not to cross the line again.
This case raises two big questions for me. The first is to ask whether there is some sort of double standard in operation at the Home Office? This is because I’m pretty sure that if a non-Muslim or a Christian or a Jew said something unpleasant about Islam or transgenderism or gay rights then they’d be out on their ear pretty sharpish and told never to return. The second big question that I would like to ask is how many more Islamic characters who are working for or with the Home Office or the PREVENT programme are spouting similar bullshit to that of Chishti but who have not yet been caught?
The PREVENT programme is a complete mess. It doesn’t seem to be preventing religious radicalisation to any appreciable extent and some of those who have been involved in PREVENT linked deradicalisation schemes have signed off for release from gaol individuals who have gone on to commit further Islamic terror offences. It’s notable that both the individuals involved in the London Bridge II and Streatham terror attacks had been released from gaol after those associated with PREVENT and deradicalisation schemes supported their release.
These failures of deradicalisation are bad enough but how can the majority population or those Muslims who reject jihad in all its forms have any confidence in a PREVENT programme that allows back into its fold those who have been shown to be amenable to extremism? The answer is that we can’t have confidence in PREVENT. Not only has PREVENT and the deradicalisation programmes associated with it failed spectacularly and badly on two high profile occasions, but we cannot even have confidence that those Muslims employed by PREVENT to tackle Islamic extremism don’t hold extreme views themselves.
I’m all for giving people second chances in life on the grounds that everyone screws up sometimes. But on this occasion it would have sent a very powerful message to both the nation and to religious extremists if Imam Chishti had been given the boot and given it in a very public manner indeed.
As a non-muslim whose very existence is threatened by every muslim to a greater or lesser degree, I would never hire a muslim.
That is a muslim who follows the doctrine of islam which has been and still is a source of jihad and terrorism against non-muslims since it began its first stirrings in the sewers of the Middle East around 3-4000 years ago where the supremacist doctrine of judaism was also created.
The problem is that in order to gain access for deradicalisers and PREVENT programme officers to Islamic communities then some Muslims need to be hired to do this. The trouble comes from the sorts of Muslims that the Home Office and its agencies end up hiring. Rather than hire people from paths within Islam that are much less horrible than some, such as the Ahmediyya or the Ismailis, they end up hiring those from the Sunni community mostly and in particular not individuals who do not those who wear their religion lightly or who have a record for rejecting extremism, but those for whom the division between extremism and non-extremism is pretty vague and flexible.
A particular one of your evergreen descriptors would suit Chishti or a better Greek name for him Chistos, he’s a “mendacious grievance-mongering Taqiyya artist” and the wantonly gullible, “inclusive and diverse” dhimmis, the Islamopanderers of the Home office and those in thrall to the corrupt unverifiable mosque-whipped mass Muslim postal vote, are either fookin’ stoopid, are terrified of being called waaaycist or “phobic”, are in all likelihood the usual institutionalised Jew-haters, leftist pali-cock-gobblers, know exactly what they’re doing or as I suspect, willingly all of the previous.
It certainly seems that the vetting procedure for those clerics associated with PREVENT seems to be somewhat lacking in vigor.
Jihad is fundamental and integral to islam (see passim the unholy texts of islam). Therefore no muslim who follows islam rejects jihad, especially when it will lead to him, with his brand of islam, having complete say over all those around him.
islam is racist.
I concur that there are a lot of aspects of Islam that could reasonably be classed as racist. However, there are individual Muslims who are worried about extremism and who reject extremism themselves. My view is that the first and primary victims of Islam and especially extremist Islam are other Muslims. They live in fear of the extremists if they are heterodox in belief or reject jihad.
ECAW (who occasionally comments here) termed it the “pretend” strategy in that it gives the pretense that government is doing something about “extremist” (orthodox) Islam without having to admit that far from it being the case that “Islam is the solution” (as the MB have it) Islam is the problem.
One problem is simply that of Taqqiya. Orthodox Muslims consider themselves under no obligation to deal truthfully or honestly with non-Muslims especially in matter pertaining to Islam itself and given that Muslims, and especially the prominent “community leaders”, often say one thing to a Muslim audience and another to a non-Muslim audience (as has been reliably documented many, many times) then, to be fair to government (and again I mean of all political stripes) it is difficult to decide who really is an orthodox, yet peace-promoting, Muslim (assuming that that statement isn’t an inherent oxymoron) and whom a “mendacious grievance-mongering Taqiyya artist”.
Many politicians of all political stripes (and ignoring the usual cast of overt Islamopanders and terrorist lovers – yes, I mean you JC, amongst others) have been caught associating with “moderate” Muslims who then turned out to be otherwise.
@F211:
Your suggestion that the Home Office hires “Ahmediyya or the Ismailis” falls on the grounds that both Sunni and Shia regard the Ahmediyya as heretics (they have the dubious honour of being the most persecuted minority in that “pure land” for Islam, Pakistan) and the Sunnis (>80% of Muslims) largely regard the Shia as heretics – and that view is warmly reciprocated.
So hiring “Ahmediyya or the Ismailis” would hardly work for the majority of Muslim Jihadis who are Sunni.
“My view is that the first and primary victims of Islam and especially extremist Islam are other Muslims. They live in fear of the extremists if they are heterodox in belief or reject jihad.”
I found that rather illuminating.
If the “other Muslims” are heterodox because they don’t agree with the Jihadist ideology that implies that those Muslims who do agree with it are orthodox, thus the “extremist” label is misapplied.
This is something that I am at frequent pains to point out.
What we perceive as “extremist” Islam can trace its roots by way of many well-respected Muslim authorities from the modern (Qutb, Maududi, Shafi, Wahhab etc.) through those of the “classical era” (Qurtubi, ibn Tammiya etc.) back to ol’Mo and his cutthroat gang.
Worse: orthodox Muslims often consider the heterodox to be apostates for “not being Muslim enough”.
It was Abu Bakr, Mohammed’s immediate successor as Caliph, who launched the “Riddah wars” (war against “apostates”) in the Arabian peninsula, thus savage sword-Jihad against the heterodox/apostate (the crime of those on the Araban peninsula was to refuse to pay Zakat rather than out-right rejection of Islam and who thus might well be termed heterodox) is fully legitimated by the earliest example of the “rightly guided Caliphs”.
Thus there is nothing of a “fringe element” (or indeed a “tiny minority”) about those Muslims who hold to those beliefs we think of as “extreme”.
They are extreme in civilisational (or perhaps I should say anti-civilisational) terms, but they are not extreme in Islamic terms and until we can bring ourselves to fully acknowledge that, at the root of the problem of “Islamism”, “extremist Islam”, “political Islam” (as if Islam had ever been non-political!), “Islamofascism” (one of the daftest labels), “Bin Ladenism”, “Militant Islam”, or whatever else you wish to call it, is Islam itself – its teaching and the example of ol’Mo, his companions (cf Abu Bakr) and their immediate successors – then we cannot comprehend nor understand the magnitude of the existential threat posed by a resurgent Islam.
Completely agree that there is an issue of extremists pretending to be otherwise that needs to be taken into account.
I’m very aware that the Ahmediyya are considered as apostates by many Sunni Muslims and that the Ismailis, whilst peaceful, do not have anything like the religious and political influence that Sunni and Shia Islam has. However, we should, in order to stay true to our culture and beliefs, choose to work with those Muslims and Islamic paths that share if not all but at least the majority of our values. There are Ismaili and Ahmediyya Muslims who do both as individuals and as faith paths that do share a lot of our values, such as for the Ismailis not treating women like dirt and they would be better people to work with than the pretend moderates that the government chooses to work with from the Sunni and Shia communities. Advancing and promoting those from more reasonable Islamic paths would be less of a moral hazard than taking at face value the sometimes false claims made by the pretend moderates.
In a way the Muslims in Britain are in a pretty awful situation as regards representation. Secular Muslims, heterodox Muslims all seem to be ignored and end up being represented by people who don’t represent them. An analogy would be with Jews. I’m a non-Orthodox Jew and I’m very lucky in so far as my branch of Judaism is represented when the Government talks to the Jewish community. Imagine if you will a situation where the only Jews that HMG spoke to or promoted or gave publicly funded positions to were from the Haredi Jewish community. Now I have great respect for the learning and tenacity of the Haredim but would I want the Haredim alone representing my interests as a non Orthodox Jew to Government? The answer is no I would not because I believe stuff, such as it’s OK for a woman to be a Rabbi for example that many Haredim would consider anathema and I don’t believe that the Haredim because of their beliefs would stand up for mine. This is the position that many reformist, heterodox and secular and semi secular Muslims are in in that they are being represented by people who don’t represent them and chosen by Government bodies that don’t understand Islam.