Supping with the Devil; When religious leaders treat with supporters of Islamism
It pains me to write this. I have been a member of the Reform Synagogues Movement for decades but I can remain silent no longer in the face of its apparently willing collaboration with Citizens UK (of which much more below). I have little doubt that there are many members of other religious communities who are similarly affected by what they are witnessing to be able to identify with my great unease.
I would invite you to look at this video which gives a flavour of the influence that Citizens UK has over the Movement for Reform Judaism and very likely over other religious bodies, particularly in terms of support for Citizens UK’s open borders policy.
Particularly worrisome here is the deliberate use of emotional argument, for the main thrust of this attempt to tug at the heartstrings by the employment of fundamentally flawed comparisons of Syrian migrants with Jewish refugees during WW2. Of course the speaker is not comparing like with like. She is an intelligent woman and must know that so why then is she doing it? Most of us know and there is ample evidence that the majority of Jewish refugees in WW2 became productive citizens of the countries which gave them shelter, rather than behaved like far too many of the mostly adult male immigrants from Syria and elsewhere in the Muslim world, who rioted, raped or stole and exhibited the sort of exaggerated self-entitlement which alienated the citizenry of their host countries, see here , here , here and here.
As we have witnessed, there are sufficient common sense and public safety grounds, easily accessed from witnessing the experiences of other countries in Europe, for the UK government to impose sensible, monitored limits on immigration from Muslim war zones rather than accept it en masse and without question. Too many “Syrian refugees” are anything but. Syrian they may be but we cannot know how many are active sympathisers with Daesh. At best most of these are economic migrants, which should alert us immediately to alter the lens through which we are examining this issue. Most of them are also adult males rather than the wide-eyed and tearful children who were used initially to try to blackmail us emotionally, and very few women and children accompany them. I believe we can be forgiven for holding grave reservations about having in our midst the sort of men who might be willing to abandon their families and children to starve, or worse we are told, in pursuit of their own safety, if indeed that is what they have done, rather than been talked into hijrah as a way of pursuing jihad.
You may or may not agree with me that there is more than enough homegrown useful idiocy to suffice in religious leaders in the UK in respect of their mindless support for these particular Islamic enterprises, but even if you do agree , please believe me that much, much more is in the offing if it is allowed to continue unchecked. The latest source of those ideas and Citizens UK, the organisation responsible for promoting them, is disturbingly tenacious and the implications of that for religious and civic bodies may be unpleasant and far-reaching:
I chose to begin by referring to the relationship between the Movement for Reform Judaism and Liberal Judaism with Citizens UK not because I believe that the Reform Movement are particularly important dupes but rather because they are typical. We can just as easily use this behaviour as a template for Citizens UK’s conduct towards other faith groups.
Religious leaders of all stripes signed an open letter to The Guardian in support of open borders and unfettered immigration from war-torn Muslim countries. You may be forgiven if you thought along the lines of “Well they would, wouldn’t they?” and left it at that, but there is much more to this than meets the eye. My main concerns are about any “official” Jewish or Christian or other support for entities which are linked to and/or funded by, or are a front for others which are sworn to eradicate them. These should be approached with as much suspicion as can be mustered. This should be the case especially when one such entity is Citizens UK and has proven Islamist links.
In the light of that letter, I need hardly describe the double standards which prevail also in respect of the deafening silence from the established Christian churches in the face of Muslim persecution of Christians.
(A weather eye should be kept on the effects on Jews of such open support for the activities of Citizens UK by their dangerously wrong-headed Jewish leaders. Jew-hatred, always a light sleeper, has awoken and is growing again. An increasingly vociferous number of Jew-haters believe that Jews are actively working to undermine western societies by encouraging immigration from muslim countries. Readers may judge for themselves whether or not Jewish leaders’ useful idiocy for Citizens UK feeds into this delusion).
On the surface, however, Citizens UK seems harmless enough. From its page:
“Citizens UK organises communities to act together for power, social justice and the common good. We are the home of community organising in the UK, with diverse civil society alliances in London, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Birmingham, Wales and Leeds.
“We develop the leadership capacity of our members so they can hold politicians and other decision-makers to account on the issues that matter to them.
“Community organising is democracy in action: winning victories that change lives and transform communities.”
Delve a little deeper, however, and there is much that should cause one concern. Citizens UK has its fingers in many pies:
First, some background:
It is apparently associated with London Citizens, which appears to be the crucible in which Citizens UK was forged, and which, according to the Gatestone Review:
“…receives tens of thousands of pounds from the government every year, [and] is a coalition of faith groups that include extremist Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood organizations. London Citizens’ deputy chairman before 2014 was Junaid Ahmed, an Islamist activist who describes Hamas founder and leader Ahmed Yassin as a “hero” and has said that, “Every single [Palestinian] resistance fighter is an example for all of us to follow.”
Citizens UK’s members are active in encouraging demonstrations at home and abroad for open borders and work within communities and even in schools to encourage councils to take in more and more “refugees” from war torn Middle Eastern countries, and, more disturbingly, some of Citizen UK’s trustees have links to Islamist groups and to other less than wholesome entities:
One such trustee is Farooq Murad who, according to the Citizens UK page, has worked as a management and training consultant. He has developed and delivered regeneration solutions in the fields of education, training and employment. He has also delivered community leadership and cross cultural training programmes for government departments and voluntary sector. He was the Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain (2010-14) and Chairman of Muslim Aid (2004-08) Muslim Aid, according to Andrew Gilligan in the Daily Telegraph:
“… The charity Muslim Aid, which is also under Charity Commission investigation after “irregularities” in two of its overseas field offices, received £1,263,000 in Gift Aid from the Government in 2013. The investigation is not Syria or terrorist-related. However, Muslim Aid has admitted funding organisations closely linked to the banned terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and is itself banned in Israel as a funder of terrorism. It is closely linked to the extremist Islamic Forum of Europe, which wants to create a sharia state in Europe. .. “
Murad has also served as a constituent member of World Economic Forum at Davos.
Another trustee is Dr Manazir Ahsan MBE, who has been Director of the Islamic Foundation since 1985 and edits the Muslim World Book Review. He has authored over half a dozen books and many articles on aspects of Islam. He is Co-Chair of the Interfaith Network and Chair of the Inter Faith Relations Committee of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). Dr Ahsan was awarded an MBE in the year 2000 in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in recognition of his contribution to Interfaith and Community activities.
However, carefully omitted from his biography on the Citizens UK page is the fact that he is also a leading British Islamist who helped to coordinate the riots in the UK against Salman Rushdie over his book, “The Satanic Verses.” Manazir Ahsan was also founder of the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs, which organised book burnings and protests, and called for the book to be banned and Rushdie to be prosecuted. Rushdie is still at risk of harm. Ahsan has never yet recanted.
The dealings of the The Islamic Foundation are hardly above reproach either.
A third trustee is Saleem Kidwai OBE. He is an accountant who began his private practice 29 years ago and has seen it develop into a business with over 1,300 clients and 18 staff. He is the founder and Chief Executive of the Ethnic Business Support Programme, which has been running for the last seven years. Most interesting for our purposes is that Saleem is also a trustee of Muslim Aid , (which as I wrote above was under investigation by the UK Charities Commission and has links with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) He is also Secretary General to the Muslim Council of Wales. His diverse experience also includes being part of the CBI Wales Executive Committee and previous board membership of the Cardiff & Vale NHS Trust. He is known to have had links with CAGE in 2011.
There are other trustees, but the most obvious commonalities between the three mentioned above is that all are implicated in links with Islamist terror organisations. So far I have not been able to find even a hint of their dissociating themselves from the views of those bodies publicly or privately, much less condemning them or apologising for ever having allowed themselves to be linked with them. Even their current director, Neil Jameson, is on record as saying that he is proud of Citizens UK’s connections with the infamous East London Mosque, and had no criticism of his former colleague in London Citizens for the latter’s supporting of Hamas.
Another, more sinister commonality is their failure to dissociate themselves from the contempt, even hatred for people of other faiths, and Jews in particular, which is a a foetid seam particularly throughout extremist Islam. For example, the Inter Faith Network, co-chaired by Dr Manazir Ahsan above, is hardly a beacon of interfaith values in this respect. In July 2013 a delegate to an IFN conference in Birmingham UK told the other delegates that he had heard a senior IFN official claim that “Jews were a disease”. The delegate also denounced a number of IFN member bodies for their collaboration with signatories to the Istanbul Declaration, a document calling for attacks on British troops and Jewish communities.
Most disturbing of all, however, is the existence of the Commissioners, openly referred to on Citizens UK’s page. True, they include a respectable sprinkling of non-Muslim names but they are quite open that they exist in order to promote Muslims’ entry into influential areas of society. Set against the backgrounds of their trustees (see above) we could be forgiven for concerns that they may well be trying to implement and fulfil in the UK the promise of the Muslim Brotherhood to its followers the US as it set out in its Ten Year Plan for the United States:
“……. that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands … so that … God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions…”
So, as well as links with, and evident sympathy for supremacist, violent Islamist entities, we find that some of Citizens UK’s trustees are associated with organisations which are either open in their Jew-hatred (and where that exists it is more than likely that other hatreds exist also) or have not tried particularly hard to hide it. That being the case it beggars belief that Jewish or Christian bodies should be associated with them, officially or otherwise. For these are not “reformed characters.” They have never apologised publicly for their hypocrisy or recanted their anti-Jewish views or condemned Muslim persecution of Christians and others. One cannot even argue that all this is in the past, so why have Christian, Reform Jewish and other faith bodies exhibited such indecent haste to make common cause with Citizens UK, the body which appointed them?
My own theory is that these leaders support Citizens UK and its policies and tacitly condone its Islamist links because they are actually in the grip of a much deeper, more entrenched form of cognitive dissonance than were the mythical couple I described in another of my published articles entitled “How Islam Fascinates the West.”
I used Joe and Jane Public in that article to illustrate how Islamism ensnares the naïve and unwitting and uses them as useful idiots in order to bed in its ideas in the general population. We now see that not only has nothing changed but that matters have got worse. Extremist Islam has, unfortunately, become more emboldened. It has upped its game and is ensnaring actual gullible religious leaders too, and those leaders expect their flocks to follow blindly wherever they lead.
In the light of all that, I believe that those of us who are mindful and not susceptible to extremist Islam’s fascination trance have a duty. We should lose no time in naming and shaming those religious leaders, and even insist that they resign from office if necessary, if we are to protect their communities from the inevitable results of those leaders’ dangerous naivete.
There is also an argument for taking action which will benefit those Muslims who want little more than to earn a living and look after their children, and contribute to wider society, but who are too afraid to speak out. Their interests cannot be best served by allowing the influence of Citizens UK to spread unhindered.
I will close with an excerpt from the sermon, delivered in 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia by Rabbi Shalom Lewis to his congregation at the Jewish New Year. Transcripts of it went viral. Readers may judge for themselves how prescient were his words:
“.. Everything we are. Everything we believe. Everything we treasure, is at risk.
“ The threat is so unbelievably clear and the enemy so unbelievably ruthless how anyone in their right mind doesn’t get it is baffling. Let’s try an analogy. If someone contracted a life-threatening infection and we not only scolded them for using antibiotics but insisted that the bacteria had a right to infect their body and that perhaps, if we gave the invading infection an arm and a few toes, the bacteria would be satisfied and stop spreading.
“Anyone buy that medical advice? Well, folks, that’s our approach to the radical Islamist bacteria. It is amoral, has no conscience and will spread unless it is eradicated. – There is no negotiating. Appeasement is death…”
ADDENDUM – I continued researching and found out the following:
As I have written above, Citizens UK’s foot soldiers are useful idiots who are being manipulated by active supporters of islamism who have links with the Muslim Brotherhood, and who have never recanted much less condemned islamist violence.
Citizens UK is also quite shameless and open about their 8 step program for forcing councils to take in more “immigrants”, see http://www.citizensuk.org/8_step_guide , and if anyone has any doubts about the intentions of this nasty lot, you need only look at “… The key aim of your group is to build enough power so that the Council decides that it is better to work with, than oppose you.. “ (emphasis added) in the penultimate sentence of the first paragraph there. Given the islamist/Muslim Brotherhood way of doing things, I would say that the inherent threat in that sentence alone is distinctly sinister. (What might they do if councils refuse to have anything to do with their “welfare schemes”?) That is a rhetorical question. Given that these are linked with the Muslim Brotherhood, for whom fitna is their stock in trade, you may well be able to guess.
So, if you live in the UK, if you have real interest in preventing the slide into oblivion which comes from promoting and facilitating islamism by mindless and cowardly government support of egregious organisations like this one, please write to your MP, to Theresa May, and to the Home Secretary, and demand that our taxes are not spent on funding them. This needs to happen sooner rather than later.
If they are at all true to type, it will not be long before they slip up and then we can complain to the Charities Commission too about their ways of working.
Please do not ignore this!!
Leftists “tolerance” in action.
University of New Hampshire Professors Call for Trump Supporters to be Expelled
If Trump is not your president then it could only be one of the two possible reasons:
1) You’re a foreigner.
2) You’re a traitor.
PS to my latest reply to @ Walter – I have just heard that Ian McLoone has resigned with immediate effect from the Luton UK law firm of which he was a partner.
@Walter (4.09pm) yes indeed. What you say about the US is already well under way in the UK and the rest of Europe. For example, I wrote in the article about how the Commissioners in Citizens UK have an openly-stated aim to insinuate muslims into every sphere of UK society. This presumably includes the legal profession, although I stress that I have no way of proving that.
The following makes me wonder, though: You may have heard about the most recent infamy from one Ian McLoone, a partner in a Luton-based law firm here in the UK, in which he publicised on Twitter the address of Tommy Robinson (who, with his wife and family have received death threats because of his openly stated views about islamism, and has what passes for protection from the local police). By broadcasting his address, hitherto kept private, all over the web, McLoone deliberately placed him and his family in danger. Moreover, McLoone was proud of what he had done! This has led to calls for him to be disciplined for conduct unbecoming by an officer of the court.
As you may know, Luton, UK, is a Salafist hotbed and Tommy Robinson has the misfortune to live there. Robinson is outspoken about the dangers from islam but unlike his muslim opponents has never advocated violence. Because of his outspokenness he often gets into trouble with Bedfordshire Police who probably fear that he is a rallying point for people who see only too clearly what is afoot.
You can google more about this latest infamy.
@Babs, what you keyboard was interesting to read .you mentioned Brigitte Gabriel. She is the founder and head of the group actforamerica.org .Her book entitled which is entitled THEY MUST BE STOPPED I had read . it also should be remembered the stealth and militant jihadists of Islam have set their sights on all Western nations. Including the UK and the USA. Furthermore, concerning the topic of Muslims now living in the United States of America is the following essay.
The message needs to be made known to all the Muslims who live in the United States of America who dislike and maybe even despise the US Constitution and would like to replace it with Sharia law. Those same Muslims instead in trying to force Sharia law on American citizens and their nation those are free to leave and really should leave the USA and then go to live in either Shii ‘ite, Iran or Sunni , Saudi Arabia if they actually feel the Sharia law is the grand, great and wonderful .
Moreover, all this is a strong reminder of the wise words declared by Theodore Roosevelt in a speech. “There can be no fifty –fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only one hundred percent Americanism , only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”
@Walter Sieruk islam is indeed the warp and weft of islamism and its deeds. I quite agree that in the absence of muslims who openly renounce the violence and supremacism of islam, there is little to choose between the political face (islamism) and the observance of its rituals.
We cannot know, can we, how many muslims actually agree with the barbarism of their fellows, since we rarely hear from them. We should not be held responsible for their cowardice in speaking out and doing what is right. Indeed, Brigitte Gabriel, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYjiSaV5VoE , has called those silent, allegedly moderate muslims irrelevant. In the absence of the same sort of outrage from allegedly moderate muslims as from the likes of us, I agree with her.
@Danny, thank you.
Citizens UK is, as someone knowledgeable about them and their modus operandi told me, “an awful organisation.” More awful still, and their behaviour smacks of those who collaborated with the Nazis in WW2, is the behaviour of religious leaders of all stripes who rather than acknowledge the dangers they present to decent people of all faiths everywhere, actually help promote them, not doubt in the probably vain hope that they will escape unharmed if islam gets the power it craves.
@Face the Truth, hijra, jihad by emigration, is yet another way that muslims emulate their prophet’s behaviour. This is, as you will know, a growing problem in the West, particularly in Europe, where the wilful blindness of leaders allows this to present a great danger to the indigenous population. When religious leaders choose to be blind to those dangers, however, they need to be named and shamed on public fora like this one. Nowhere is it written that we should go silent into the dark night which will ensue unless we speak out and act if necessary.
Muslims migrate to non-Muslim-majority lands to convert non-Muslims into Islamic faith.
When non-Muslims refuse to convert, Muslims start beheading, raping, murdering, looting, and bombing non-Muslims and non-Muslims’ everything.
Excellent article, Babs. I have noticed how Citizens UK is worming its way into all sorts of groups and it’s frightening how gullible people are.
Actually there is really no such word as “Islamism” it’s just Islam. The bogus word “Islamism” is a PC artificial word that was made up after 9/11 in order not to give offense to the followers of the religion of Islam who are not violent. The fake word of “Islamism” was fabricated after September 11,2001 and that fake word is not in any reference book on the topic of Islam before the date and day of 9/11. Likewise, the same is true for the false and pretend word “Islamist” that fake word was made up after September 11,2001 for the same reason that the fake word “Islamism” was fabricated after 9/11. Therefore, call things as they really are .For example, it’s wrong to use the term “Islamist terrorist” in contrast is keeping within the bounds of reality to use the term Muslim terrorists.