Another misunderstander of Islam?

'An American supporter of al-Qaeda has pleaded guilty to trying to blow up the Pentagon and US Capitol with explosives-laden remote-controlled model planes.

US citizen Rezwan Ferdaus, 26, was arrested after a sting operation in which federal officers posed as al-Qaeda members to supply explosives.

Prosecutors and defence lawyers agreed to recommend a 17-year jail term.

Ferdaus had been planning "jihad" since 2010, according to prosecutors.

He pleaded guilty to two charges: attempting to supply materials to al-Qaeda, and seeking to damage US government buildings with explosives.

Ferdaus said he would accept the 17 years' imprisonment term under a plea deal with the prosecution. He could have faced 35 years for the two charges together if the case had gone to trial.'

This is from the BBC's report of the case but the bit that struck me as oh so revealing was this:

'Asked about the possibility of killing women and children, Mr Ferdaus allegedly said all non-followers of Islam were his enemies.'

Now where have I heard that language before? Oh yes:
1. the words of Sheikh 'Ahed Ahmad 'Abd Al-Karim Al-Sa'idani:

'"If by 'innocent people' the inquirer means Jewish or Christian civilians [who live] in the country [where the jihad operation is to take place], then he should know that these people are fundamentally not innocent. Rather, they are aggressive combatants who are party to [the deeds of their leaders] in money, opinion, and counsel. Even if some of them are innocent, but cannot be separated from the aggressors whom the mujahideen aim to target – the [Muslims] scholars have ruled that, in the case of a surprise attack, it permissible to kill all of them [i.e., the bystanders along with the targets]...

"If by 'innocent people' the inquirer means Muslims who may be accidentally hurt during a military operation, [he should know that] it is neither permissible nor reasonable to refrain from fighting the infidels out of fear of hurting some Muslims, because this would mean stopping the jihad. Most of the infidel countries that are fighting Islam have some Muslims living in them. It is inconceivable [to stop the jihad on their account], especially in the current situation, when most Muslim countries are waging defensive jihad."'

2. the words of Anjem Choudary:

'"When we say innocent people we mean Muslims, as far as non-Muslims are concerned they have not accepted Islam and as far as we are concerned that is a crime against God... As far as Muslims are concerned, you are innocent if you are a Muslim, then you are innocent in the eyes of God. If you are a non-Muslim then you are guilty of not believing in God"

"I must have hatred to anything that is not Islam"'

 3. the words of the Muslim Brotherhood's Kamal Al Helbawy from 1998:

'"Dr. Kamal Al-Hilbawi: I condemn the targeting of any civilian, but incidentally, I believe that every Israeli civilian is a future soldier.

Interviewer: He is what?

Dr. Kamal Al-Hilbawi: A future soldier.

Interviewer: Even if he is two years old?

Dr. Kamal Al-Hilbawi: A child born in Israel is raised on the belief that [the Arabs] are like contemptible sheep, and that this is a land without a people, and they are a people without a land. They have very strange concepts. In elementary school, they pose the following math problem: “In your village, there are 100 Arabs. If you killed 40, how many Arabs would be left for you to kill?” This is taught in the Israeli curriculum. What would you say about that? Should a child studying this be considered a civilian? He is a future soldier."'

The western media, I fear deliberately, allows Islamic leaders to state their opposition to the murder of innocents without asking the question 'who do you consider to be innocent and who do you not consider to be innocent?'. As I blogged over five years ago:

'Inayat Bunglawala is the media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain and as such is often interviewed by British media outlets at times such as this. Mr Bunglawala has a set phrase that he uses whenever he is asked for his opinion or that of the Qur’aan on acts of terrorism. This phrase is along the lines of "We condemn the killing of all innocent people wherever they are". This sounds nice and simple but the one follow-up question that is never asked is "are those people who don't pray to Allah five times a day and who don't follow the tenets of Islam, innocent?". We heard during the trial of the thwarted terrorist Jawad Akbar who planned to commit slaughter on the Ministry of Sound's dance floor "No one can turn around and say, 'Oh, they were innocent', those slags dancing around. Do you understand what I mean?" So in his view these were not innocent people, how about in the view of Inayat Bunglawala?

I see in The Guardian that Muhammad Abdul Bari, the MCB secretary general, used a similar form of words when he said "Those who seek to deliberately kill or maim innocent people are the enemies of us all. There is no cause whatsoever that could possibly justify such barbarity." Once again there is the use of the word innocent.

I am not saying that Muhammad Abdul Bari or Inayat Bunglawala are terrorists, I am not saying that they support terrorism within the UK; however I am saying that the question "in your view and in the word of the Qur’aan, what types of people are innocent and what types of people are not innocent?" should be asked of, and answered, by them.'

Why do the British and American media deliberately miss this point when allowing Islamic spokesman to hide behind the word 'innocent'? Are they naive, stupid or actually and deliberately enabling the deception to take place?

Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi

Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi expressing views that I would hope all civilised people would find unacceptable. How about Inayat Bunglawala? Well in November 2009 he wrote:

'It is very unfortunate that Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi has been barred from visiting the UK since early 2007 by the British government, following pressure from pro-Israeli lobbies. Sheikh Al-Qaradawi is an Islamic scholar who commands huge respect among millions of Muslims worldwide.'

Inayat Bunglawala arrested

The Mail reports that

"A Muslim who advised the Government following the July 7 London bombings has been arrested after an alleged stabbing.

Inayat Bunglawala, 39, was held on suspicion of attacking another man at his £300,000 home.

Mr Bunglawala, who also briefed former Security Minister Tony McNulty on the threat posed by Islamic radicals in the UK, was arrested two weeks before Christmas last year.

The identity of the alleged victim is unknown and it is not clear what circumstances led to the alleged attack in the early hours of December 13 last year.

Mr Bunglawala has been released on bail while the Crown Prosecution Service considers bringing charges."

I have reported on Inayat Bunglawala and the Muslim Council of Britain before and no doubt will have to do so again. So I was intrigued to read in the same Mail article that:

"In his final years as Prime Minister, Tony Blair came to distrust the organisation amid claims it was linked to Islamic extremism. But the MCB has enjoyed a renaissance under Gordon Brown and briefed Counter-Terrorism Minister Bill Rammell on community tensions last week. MCB representatives also advised Foreign Secretary David Miliband during last year’s Israel-Gaza War."

The MCB in the UK and CAIR in the USA need very very careful monitoring.


UPDATE:
On March 17, 2009, the Crown Prosecution Service said they would not take any action against Bunglawala.

Who is "innocent"?

I have blogged before about the the never asked question "Who is innocent". Inayat Bunglawala and Muhammad Abdul Bari of the Muslim Council of Britain were oft heard to say in the days after the London bombings that

"we condemn the killing of all innocent people wherever they are" or "Those who seek to deliberately kill or maim innocent people are the enemies of us all..."

I pointed out Anjum Chaudri's revealing explanation

"When we say innocent people we mean Muslims, as far as non-Muslims are concerned they have not accepted Islam and as far as we are concerned that is a crime against God... As far as Muslims are concerned, you are innocent if you are a Muslim, then you are innocent in the eyes of God. If you are a non-Muslim then you are guilty of not believing in God"

"I must have hatred to anything that is not Islam"

I now note that al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al Zawahiri, has issued a declaration that includes this

"we haven’t killed the innocents, not in
Baghdad, nor in Morocco, nor in Algeria, nor anywhere else. And if there is any innocent who was killed in the Mujahideen’s operations, then it was either an unintentional error, or out of necessity as in cases of al-Tatarrus [taking of human shields by the enemy]... we are confronting the enemies of the Muslim Ummah and targeting them, and it may be the case that during this, an innocent might fall unintentionally or unavoidably, and the Mujahideen have warned repeatedly the Muslims in general that they are in a war with the senior criminals – the Americans and Jews and their allies and agents – and that they must keep away from the places where these enemies gather."

Muslims are forbidden to kill innocent people

Last year I blogged about the never asked question "Who is innocent". Inayat Bunglawala and Muhammad Abdul Bari of the Muslim Council of Britain were oft heard to say in the days after the London bombings that "we condemn the killing of all innocent people wherever they are" or "Those who seek to deliberately kill or maim innocent people are the enemies of us all. There is no cause whatsoever that could possibly justify such barbarity."

I said at the time "I am not saying that Muhammad Abdul Bari or Inayat Bunglawala are terrorists, I am not saying that they support terrorism within the UK; however I am saying that the question "in your view and in the word of the Qur’aan, what types of people are innocent and what types of people are not innocent?" should be asked of, and answered, by them.

I have just found some video from a while back of an interview with British Mullah Anjum Chaudri in which he answers this question rather revealingly, here's the video...




So to put that in writing, Anjum Chaudri believes that:


"I will never condemn a Muslim brother."


"When we say innocent people we mean Muslims, as far as non-Muslims are concerned they have not accepted Islam and as far as we are concerned that is a crime against God... As far as Muslims are concerned, you are innocent if you are a Muslim, then you are innocent in the eyes of God. If you are a non-Muslim then you are guilty of not believing in God"

"I must have hatred to anything that is not Islam"



Maybe Muhammad Abdul Bari and Inayat Bunglawala could state where they stand on this issue.

Bishop Nazir Ali has an ally in the Church of England

Finally another leading member of the Church of England has stood up against the Islamisation of the UK. Mrs Ruoff, a member of the General Synod is reported by the Daily Mail to have "called yesterday for the building of mosques to be banned. Alison Ruoff said more construction would lead to Islamic no go areas dominated by exclusively Muslim populations living under sharia law. Mrs Ruoff, a member of the General Synod, the Church's parliament, added: "If we don't watch out we will become an Islamic state. It's that serious.""

The Daily Mail's article continues: "Speaking on Premier Christian Radio, she said: "We are constantly building new mosques, which are paid for by the oil states.

"There are enough mosques for Muslims in this country.

"You build a mosque and then what happens? You have Muslim people moving into that area, all the shops become Islamic, all the housing will become Islamic and that will be a no-go area for anyone else.

"They will bring in Islamic law. We cannot allow that to happen.

"We are still a Christian country, we need to hold on to that.""


Of course there had to be a response from the Muslim Council of Britain and it came from this blog's old "friend", Inayat Bunglawala the assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain. He is reported to have said: "These are very narrow-minded and bigoted remarks." Well if anyone should know about narrow-minded and bigoted remarks I would imagine it would be Inayat Bunglawala.


"As a Christian, she surely ought to be working to build good ties between different communities."

Taken out of context? (Part 2)

Back in August I blogged that "There was a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary a while back called "Undercover Mosque" which showed several Muslim preachers using rather inflammatory language. You can watch the documentary on You Tube from this page, either in bits or as one piece.

The West Midlands Police investigated the preachers but the Crown Prosecution Service decided that there was no case to answer by the preachers and to instead report Channel 4 to Ofcom over the way the programme was edited. This is clearly a sensitive subject, so before I comment I think you should watch the original programme"


Today we read that "Channel 4 has been vindicated by the media watchdog Ofcom after police complained about an investigative programme that exposed extremism in British mosques. West Midland's police had faced criticism for targeting the producers of the show rather than the controversial preachers depicted in it. Ofcom added fuel to that debate by praising Undercover Mosque as a "legitimate investigation, uncovering matters of important public interest." The watchdog added: "Ofcom found no evidence that the broadcaster had misled the audience or that the programme was likely to encourage or incite criminal activity. "On the evidence (including untransmitted footage and scripts), Ofcom found that the broadcaster had accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context."...Following today's ruling, the Channel 4 called the police's actions "perverse" and said they had, in some people's eyes, given "legitimacy to people preaching a message of hate"."


The Telegraph report reminds us that "The programme featured undercover recordings from speakers alleged to be homophobic, anti-Semitic, sexist and condemnatory of non-Muslims. Excerpts from preachers and teachers included "Allah created the woman deficient" and "by the age of ten, it becomes an obligation on us to force her (young girls) to wear hijab and if she doesn't wear hijab, we hit her". Other statements included "take that homosexual and throw him off the mountain" and "whoever changes his religion from Al Islam to anything else - kill him in the Islamic state"."


The Telegraph report concludes with the unsurprising news that "Ofcom also rejected the 364 viewers' complaints it received after the programme was broadcast, which it said appeared to be part of a campaign."



You might to want to take a read Media Watch's reporting on Undercover Mosque.



Maybe an apology from Inayat Bunglawala and the other professional Islamist complainers would be in order.

Inayat Bunglawala who wrote this back in January.

Dr Usama Hassan, who is vice-chairman and one of the imams at Masjid al-Tawhid, in August described the police's assessment as entirely accurate. He said: "We have given thousands of hours of positive, wholesome, sensible teaching, teaching people to be good citizens as well as good Muslims. It's egg on their faces for Dispatches and Hardcash. It was a very poor documentary cobbled together in a great hurry, and hopefully they'll learn from it and be more balanced and professional. "We should be able to have honest dialogue and that includes criticism. People should be able to politely make their point. Journalists have to have a sense of responsibility. Things like this can be as dangerous as religious fanatics causing problems.""

Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation, Rochdale, in a letter to The Guardian in August welcomed the complaint made by West Midlands Police to Ofcom, thus "We totally condemn Channel 4 for its arrogance in defending this programme, when it was clear to us that the makers had taken contributions out of context and edited speeches. We urge Channel 4 to suspend all the Dispatches programmes immediately so that corrective action can be taken to ensure that this sort of journalism is eliminated. The Ramadhan Foundation has always been very clear that the mosques have an important role in promoting tolerance and peaceful coexistence, but to use these sensitive issues to demonise Muslims shown in the programme is shocking and deeply disturbing. There can be no justification for this kind of journalism. The complaint is total vindication for the Muslim organisations which complained that the Undercover Mosque programme had taken the views of contributors out of context. Channel 4 should apologise immediately for the hurt they have caused those people. Channel 4 has given journalism a bad name and this adds to their failings over the past few months. We will also be urging Ofcom to investigate Channel 4's behaviour."

Inayat Bunglawala

I blogged a few days ago about Inayat Bunglawala's interview on the Today programme. If you want to listen to the interview it is at the beginning of this BBC listen again and lasts around 5 minutes 40 seconds.

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.

Inayat Bunglawala and Star Wars music - That's a title I could never have predicted I would ever write

Channel 4 News tonight had a report on King Abdullah's visit and a little piece about the report on Islamic extremism in UK Mosques and bookshops. There was also a Jon Snow interview with Dean Godson, Research Director of the Policy Exchange who produced the report and Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain. You can watch the video here




Read more about the Policy Exchange report here on the Telegraph website or the whole report here on their own website.


In case you are unsure the "tune" the band played to greet the arrival of King Abdullah was the "The Imperial March/Darth Vader's Theme". As Wikipedia says "The theme...represents the totalitarian Galactic Empire as a whole, and Darth Vader specifically. More than other Star Wars themes, the March has attained an iconic status in the Western consciousness as a general "evil theme", and as such is used to portray power at public events". An accidental choice of music or something more subversive, you decide...

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Council of Britain and other matters jihadi

The Muslim Brotherhood is an organisation that has its origins in 1928 Egypt and a very questionable present but my attention has been drawn to this article that reminds me that in 1991 the FBI found out more than enough about the Muslim Brotherhood but took no action. The document they discovered 16 years ago was an "explanatory memorandum," which outlined the "strategic goal" for the North American operation of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Here's the key paragraph: "The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack."

The entire 18 page platform outlines a plan for the long haul. It sets out the Muslim Brotherhood's comprehensive plan to set down roots in civil society. Back to the Dallas News "It begins by both founding and taking control of American Muslim organizations, for the sake of unifying and educating the U.S. Muslim community – this to prepare it for the establishment of a global Islamic state governed by sharia.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory out of a bad Hollywood movie – but it's real. Husain Haqqani, head of Boston University's Center for International Relations and a former Islamic radical, confirms that the Brotherhood "has run most significant Muslim organizations in the U.S." as part of the plan outlined in the strategy paper."

"The HLF trial is exposing for the first time how the international Muslim Brotherhood – whose Palestinian division is Hamas – operates as a self-conscious revolutionary vanguard in the United States. The court documents indicate that many leading Muslim-American organizations – including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim American Society – are an integral part of the Brotherhood's efforts to wage jihad against America by nonviolent means.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an affiliation of at least 70 Islamist organizations around the world, all tracing their heritage to the original cell, founded in Egypt in 1928. Its credo: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." Sayyid Qutb, hanged by the Egyptian government in 1966 as a revolutionary, remains its ideological godfather. His best-known work, Milestones, calls for Muslims to wage violent holy war until Islamic law governs the entire world."

The key here is that it has taken many years of pressure by various experts on the Islamic threat to the West for the Main Stream Media to acknowledge that there are demands for a return to the caliphate in Muslim lands. Still interviewers and presenters fail to ask what is a Muslim land. They allow the Islamist interviewee to say Muslim lands and move on. The inconvenient truth is that Muslim lands are anywhere that has ever been Muslim territory. Just as no building that has ever been a Mosque can be used as anything other than a Mosque, so any land that has been ruled as Muslim land is considered as Muslim land.

At this point you might want to read an earlier article where I include Hassan Butt's explanation of what motivates British jihadis - "though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice."

"How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?

There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.

Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.

For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).

Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world."

"Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.

In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians. "


It is not enough to glibly say that Islam is the Religion of Peace. There are Islamists who use the Qur’aan to justify their murderous attacks, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel & the Palestinians, Chechnya are all red herrings - the truth is out there, go look.

This links in with another article I wrote about the language used by Inayat Bunglawala and Muhammad Abdul Bari of the Muslim Council of Britain (incidentally why not Great Britain and what about Northern Ireland?) when they are asked for their opinion or that of the Qur’aan on acts of terrorism. They say something along the lines of "We condemn the killing of all innocent people wherever they are" or "Those who seek to deliberately kill or maim innocent people are the enemies of us all. There is no cause whatsoever that could possibly justify such barbarity." The key word is "innocent" as we heard during the trial of the thwarted terrorist Jawad Akbar, who planned to commit slaughter on the Ministry of Sound's dance floor, "No one can turn around and say, 'Oh, they were innocent', those slags dancing around. Do you understand what I mean?" So in his view these were not innocent people, how about in the view of Inayat Bunglawala and Muhammad Abdul Bari? The follow-up question that is never asked of these representatives of the MCB is "are those people who don't pray to Allah five times a day and who don't follow the tenets of Islam, innocent?".

I am not saying that Muhammad Abdul Bari or Inayat Bunglawala are terrorists, I am not saying that they support terrorism within the UK; however I am saying that the question "in your view and in the word of the Qur’aan, what types of people are innocent and what types of people are not innocent?" should be asked of, and answered, by them.

Inayat Bunglawala

I raised a question about Inayat Bunglawala the other day. More background on Inayat Bunglawala has come to light at Harrys Place where a poster that appeared in Trends magazine when Inayat Buglawala was the editor is reproduced, you can see the poster here

In case you cannot read the text here, courtesy of Harry's Place, it is:
"
Let those who fight in the Cause of God,
Who sell the life of This World
For the Hereafter
For unto him who fights in the Cause of God
Whether he is slain or gets victory,
We shall in time grant a mighty reward."
- Al Qur'an 4:74"

I believe the dome in the poster is that of the "Dome of the Rock" the mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This mosque stands there even after 40 years of Israeli rule. I predict that if/when Hamas take Israel by force, the "Wailing Wall" will be destroyed within a year.

So Inayat Bunglawala what say you about this poster?

You can listen to Inayat Bunglawala being interviewed on The BBC's Moral Maze here.

"Innocent people" - the never asked question

Inayat Bunglawala is the media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain and as such is often interviewed by British media outlets at times such as this. Mr Bunglawala has a set phrase that he uses whenever he is asked for his opinion or that of the Qur’aan on acts of terrorism. This phrase is along the lines of "We condemn the killing of all innocent people wherever they are". This sounds nice and simple but the one follow-up question that is never asked is "are those people who don't pray to Allah five times a day and who don't follow the tenets of Islam, innocent?". We heard during the trial of the thwarted terrorist Jawad Akbar who planned to commit slaughter on the Ministry of Sound's dance floor "No one can turn around and say, 'Oh, they were innocent', those slags dancing around. Do you understand what I mean?" So in his view these were not innocent people, how about in the view of Inayat Bunglawala?

I see in The Guardian that Muhammad Abdul Bari, the MCB secretary general, used a similar form of words when he said "Those who seek to deliberately kill or maim innocent people are the enemies of us all. There is no cause whatsoever that could possibly justify such barbarity." Once again there is the use of the word innocent.

I am not saying that Muhammad Abdul Bari or Inayat Bunglawala are terrorists, I am not saying that they support terrorism within the UK; however I am saying that the question "in your view and in the word of the Qur’aan, what types of people are innocent and what types of people are not innocent?" should be asked of, and answered, by them.