A disgusting comparison

Apparently Inayat Bunglawala, the Muslim Council of Britain's assistant general secretary, has told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that there was a danger of the terror threat being magnified "out of all proportion". "What you had in the 1930s was all sorts of popular fictions were spread about the Jewish community that they were responsible for all ills that were occurring to Germany. "They were made into folk-devils, and I think there is a danger that the word Muslim in the UK is becoming synonymous with bad news.""
I think it should be pointed out to Mr Bunglawala, about whom I have blogged before, that there are some key differences about the way Jews were treated by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and how Muslims are being treated now. So far as I am aware no law has been passed to prevent Muslims marrying native Britons, neither has any law been passed stripping Muslims of their citizenship. Perhaps Mr Bunglawala should read up on the Nuremberg Laws. Again, so far as I am aware, Muslims are not being herded into concentration camps there to be worked as slave labour before being killed in extermination camps by shooting or gassing.

Inayat Bunglawala and Muhammad Abdul Bari (his boss at the MCB) who has also been interviewed about this matter, need to be reminded that there is another difference between Jews in 1930s Germany and Muslims in 21st century Britain. In the 1930s no Jews had blown themselves up on Berlin's transport system killing themselves and killing and maiming inhabitants of Berlin. Neither had any Jews driven a car into the port at Hamburg in an attempt to blow up the passenger terminal there. Again as far as I am aware there were no synagogues in Germany where rabbis were calling for the killing of all "goyim". Jews were not attending training camps in the Black Forest or oitside of Germany to learn how to use guns and explosives.

I absolutely agree that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, however the vast majority of the terrorists who threaten this country are Muslim. Various surveys have shown that at least 1% of Muslims in the UK support to some extent terrorism in the UK, with a Muslim population of around 2 million that is a possible 20,000 supporters of terrorism. If there are only 10% of this number actively involved in plotting terrorist acts in the UK as MI5 say then I would quite like them to be prevented from killing or maiming any more UK citizens. I knew someone who was killed in the 7/7 bombings, they didn't deserve to die and their family and friends did not deserve to have to wait for their body to be identified.

Terrorists kill and maim innocent people, since the current threat is from Muslim terrorists I do not see why the that fact cannot be stated.

I should also point out that Muslims were not exactly concerned about the Jews during the 1930s and 1940s. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, became a Nazi agent after meeting Adolf Eichmann (one of the architects of the Holocaust) in Palestine in 1937. With Nazi funds he organized the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 which led to the British closing Palestine to Jewish immigration, thus by closing off one of the main avenues of refuge facilitating the final solution. In 1941 the Grand Mufti orchestrated a short-lived, Nazi-backed generals' coup in Iraq. One of the participants in that coup, Gen. Khayrallah Tulfah, was Saddam Hussein's uncle and mentor.


You may be interested in this post from Samizdata on the same subject.