Harry's Place

The Khomeinists of the self-styled Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) appear to be confused. Ahead of their annual “Al Quds Day” Israel hatred march, scheduled for this Sunday in London, they have issued this statement:

Flags: participants are welcome to bring flags that show solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Flags of proscribed (illegal) organisations will not be allowed. For example, you can bring a Hizbullah flag to show support for the political wing of Hizbullah. This is because the political wing of Hizbullah is not a proscribed organisation.

Let’s help the poor dears with this silly “wings” fiction of European diplomacy. This line should bring them hurtling back to the truth here on earth:

Everyone is aware of the fact that Hezbollah is one body and one entity. Its military and political wings are unified.

That’s Hezbollah political affairs official Ammar Moussawi speaking.

This could be of assistance as well:

However, jokingly I will say – though I disagree on such separation or division – that I suggest that our ministers in the upcoming Lebanese government be from the military wing of Hezbollah!

That’s Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah rubbishing the “wings” nonsense.

Now Hezbollah is very busy slaughtering Syrians these days. So if the lines above aren’t enough we can’t expect them to intervene in a London dispute as they get on with their crucial mission for Assad’s regime.

So how about someone closer to home? Mick Napier of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, for example, who is due to speak at the rally this Sunday.

Here he is at Al Quds Day in 2012, fancying his movement as some sort of Hezbollah UK. He calls on people to take on the fearsome target of the Israeli dance group Batsheva. “Drive Batsheva out of London while Hezbollah drove them out of Lebanon and while the Arab resistance drives them out of Israel”. No “wings” nuance there! Or perhaps the “political wing” hurled some harsh words at Israeli forces in Lebanon and that’s why they left?

Sure enough, thugs did disrupt that Batsheva tour. Takbir!

Or perhaps Mr Corbyn could help? After all, he is a friend of Hezbollah and likes to “make the case for Iran”. He is also very fond of the IHRC and has addressed Al Quds Day crowds himself, alongside Mr Napier.

I like the way it works, I like the sense of values surrounding it, and I’ve found them extremely helpful in bringing cases to my attention of individual abuses of human rights that they’re concerned about. But also general issues concerning the rights of people in the Middle East. The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I’ve found them generally extremely helpful, extremely positive, and help to challenge the notion that human rights is somehow or other something based on Romano-Christian law and based on Europe rather than the rest of the world.

I like the concept that Islamic Human Rights Commission represents all that’s best in Islam concerning the rights of individuals to free expression, to peaceful assembly, and the rights of individuals within a society.

This Al Quds Day lot seem rather frank so perhaps they could help too. Hezbollah is not enough. No, add “marg bar Mousavi” (death to Mousavi) as you abuse a small group of Iranian opponents of the regime in Tehran.

I do trust the IHRC will see clearly before Sunday and abandon their imaginary one-winged bird. They wouldn’t want to be seen as ignorant. Let alone a pack of hopeless liars. Would they?

Yesterday Tarek Fatah informed his followers that this was a  ’March for Sharia’ in London.

There have been plenty of seriously unwelcome demonstrations in London, including genuine marches for Sharia, as well as the  Al Quds Day march, due to be held this Sunday.

However the clip Fatah linked to in his tweet was in fact an Ashura march, marking the death of Husayn Ibn Ali.

It’s a pity that, although several people have pointed this out to him, he hasn’t issued a correction, and hasn’t engaged fairly with those raising the issue.

There are, obviously, plenty of absolutely valid criticisms to be made of Islamism – Fateh has recently tweeted this good piece by Sara Khan – muddying the waters in this way increases distrust and undermines the credibility of those working against extremism.

Whereas other forms of racism tend to demean people because of their race, ethnicity or sexuality the Jews are hated because they are considered omnipotent therefore responsible for all the evils of the world.

But the antisemitism expressed by members of the British Labour Party didn’t stop the electorate voting for them in their millions. Even on election day a woman was filmed at a polling booth in a Jewish area calling on people to vote Labour “to get the Jews out.”

And in the end the Jews were powerless to help themselves. In the end the leader who brought all this antisemitic controversy with him to the fore was returned with more seats than his ethnically Jewish predecessor. I suppose it’s testament to the faith British Jewry has in the British people that they assumed the reporting of incidents of antisemitism would disgust their fellow citizens enough to put them off Corbyn. Instead we’ve seen many come to believe that the reports of antisemitism are a “plot” to “smear” the exalted leader Corbyn to hold him back.

All this reminds me of a statement made by a demonstrator attempting to prevent Hen Mazzig from speaking at UCL in Central London. While standing in a crowd of screaming demonstrators who were just appalled that a small group of Jews might want to hear a talk by an Israeli officer in the IDF she said “in the 21st century we don’t need no Jewish majority state”. Of course this whole sordid affair demonstrated perfectly why, even in the twenty first century, we do.

Many people lecture Jews about what they’re allowed to believe, what they’re allowed to be offended by, what they’re allowed to be concerned by, what does and does not constitute antisemitism against them and few are listening to what Jews are saying about it. Furthermore many people are shocked and appalled, not by the antisemitism, but by the attempts by Jews to defend against it. “Smear” they shout, “plot” they scream. motivated by their own twisted morality they go to great lengths to scream from the rooftops that there’s no antisemitism, that it just doesn’t exist, it’s a conspiracy don’t you know!

Now the Labour Party has surged. It did not win the general election but it did gain a significant number of seats and force a hung Parliament. It gained momentum and swept through constituencies it hasn’t previously held for years.

And the antisemitism? Forgotten, irrelevant. Along with the victims of it.

Now instances of antisemitism will clash with the prevailing wind. Young people filled with hope for a left wing future voted for Jeremy Corbyn in droves. From now on it will be against their voices that young Jews will be shouting. Now the Jews will be the spoilers, the ones ruining everyone else’s good time when they talk about their antisemitism problems. It was bad enough before, now it will be impossible to point them out without being shouted down.

In the wake of Al Jazeera’s documentary “The Lobby” one Member of Parliament wrote to Theresa May concerned that there was a plot against British democracy. His name was Jeremy Corbyn. His concern for British democracy wasn’t so evident when he was accepting money from the Islamic Regime in Tehran to work for their mouthpiece Press TV. The timing couldn’t have been worse, he was appearing for them while the thugs of the regime were murdering pro-democracy Iranians on Tehran’s streets. But I suppose the young hopeful British voters don’t care about that either.

This dilemma is hardly one Jews are unfamiliar with. Time and again Jews have been forced to choose between remaining and fleeing from the countries they were born in. Time and again Jews have remained in the land of their birth only to understand too late what a terrible mistake that was. A million Russians waited impatiently for the Iron Curtain to fall before clamoring into Israel. French Jews are leaving in droves, not just for Israel but for the UK too. I hope they haven’t made a mistake. I hope British voters haven’t made a mistake. But I know that they have.

When it comes to whether to vote for promises to shore up an ailing health system, invest more in infrastructure and scrap tuition fees, Britons sold their votes cheaply for Corbyn’s empty promises. The concerns of the Jews complaining about antisemitism were ignored. And now we get to sit and wait, far from omnipotent. Jews raised their concerns and were ignored because, you know, their concerns were irrelevant.

A few years ago I found it dispiriting that so many people in the UK seemed bored or even completely alienated by politics.  Then Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn came along – be careful what you wish for.

But whatever you thought of the result, it’s healthy for people – perhaps particularly young people – to witness so much unpredicatability and realize that voting can make a difference.

Often it seems that you can look at the results from a few bellwether seats and know the entire outcome, more or less. Isaac Asimov took this idea to extremes in his short story ‘Franchise’.

But on Friday morning the results were all over the place.  Early news from the North East suggested the exit polls were wrong, that there was a big swing to the Conservatives – but that was because people weren’t factoring in the particular local effects of UKIP’s collapse.

Labour victories in places like Canterbury, number 104 on their target list, seemed to indicate a landslide.  But once again this was down to local circumstances – in particular a high student population – and there were surprises in the other direction too, such as Mansfield.

Safe seat shocks, tense recounts and incredibly marginal outcomes would have made first time voters see that their participation, and collective action, can make a difference. And on the topic of young voters – I think this is an important point.

Yesterday some were claiming that Theresa May would have been beaten outright by a different Labour leader.  Maybe, given how dire Theresa May’s campaign was, they were right.  However although some voters, and perhaps those in more crucial seats, might have preferred a Labour moderate, quite a few others probably wouldn’t have voted at all, or would have voted for a Green or independent candidate, if it wasn’t for Corbyn.

Of course not everyone was galvanised by Jeremy Corbyn.  Just a few more Labour votes, in line with London-wide trends, in Hendon, Chipping Barnet and Finchley and Golders Green could have made a crucial difference to the overall result.

Comment here. You might want to wait until there actually are election results to comment on.

You can watch former FBI director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee starting at 10 a.m. EDT.

A mere two months after 9/11 Jeremy Corbyn attended an anti War rally in Trafalgar Sq.

Note the sign of Osama bin Laden’s face and words “Make no mistake this is a war against Islam”

It appears that as soon as eight days after the 9/11 attacks, while the dead were still being collected and the total casualties being tallied Jeremy Corbyn was speaking at anti War meetings.

The picture above is of Dilly Hussain, he’s the deputy editor of a website called 5 Pillars. They claim;

“The Muslim community is under siege from a hostile government and an Islamophobic mainstream media. So we need our own media to tell our own stories on our own terms to launch the fightback.”

Above is a photo of him being interviewed on Sky News (standing on the far right) discussing the government’s PREVENT programme aimed at de-radicalising extremists and making sure Jihadi ideology is countered wherever it’s found. He says the following;

“Can the Muslim community do more? Yes the Muslim community can do more but they must be allowed to do more and what I mean by that is to allow scholars and activists to address some of these issues because as soon as they are censored or as they are labelled there’s a disconnect, there’s a vacuum in knowledge as soon as there’s a vacuum in knowledge the youth will seek knowledge elsewhere ie the internet.”

For a moment I wondered what scholars Hussain is referring to that “the youth” need to hear. Then I found out by looking at his Facebook account;

This is an interesting list indeed. Hasan al Banna is the Godfather of Islamism, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Syed Qutb who Hussain calls “ash-shaheed” a term of endearment for a witness or one who bears testimony was a member of the MB who was executed for plotting to murder Gamal Abdul Nasser and was hanged in 1966. His seminal work Milestones laid the foundations of Islamist ideology picked up by every Islamist group you can think of including the likes of Hamas and al Qaeda. Here’s a particularly charming quote (p123);

“Beyond this limited meaning, this statement about culture is one of the tricks played by world Jewry, whose purpose is to eliminate all limitations, especially the limitations imposed by faith and religion, so that the Jews may penetrate into body politic of the whole world and then may be free to perpetuate their evil designs. At the top of the list of these activities is usury, the aim of which is that all the wealth of mankind ends up in the hands of Jewish financial institutions which run on interest.”

Meanwhile Sheikh Abdullah Azzam founded a little known terror organisation you might have heard of called al Qaeda. Abul Maududi is the founder of Jamaat e Islami. To a large extent it’s his work of politicising Islam that a lot of hardworking people are trying their best to undo as it has this unfortunate problem of leading to innocent people being massacred by those who think they’re doing Allah’s work. He was a big fan of establishing a worldwide Islamic state of the kind Hizb ut Tahrir have a tendency to call for and he thought that big war of Muslims against everyone else was the way to get there.

Can anyone spot a theme developing among the “Islamic revivalist figures” Hussain would like to take a boat ride with? And what’s with “two others who died in the past 10 years that I cannot name for obvious reasons”??

Moments after the news broke that an attack was ongoing Hussain shared the info on Facebook to a reaction that makes one doubt whether he even thinks it was Muslims who perpetrated the attack at all.

While we’re all still reeling from the impact of three terror attacks in three months it’s worth noting that the annual Quds Day hate fest run by the Islamic Human Rights Commission is due to hit the streets of London on the 18th of June.

While you’re thinking about that also bear in mind that the chairman of the IHRC said the following about suicide bombers in April 2002;

In the wake of a suicide bombing carried out not by a Palestinian but by a Mancunian one wonders whether Shadjareh will argue that the UK should have given poor Salman Abedi a free M-16 so that he wouldn’t have had to blow himself up in order to murder British kids at a pop concert.

These comments were made way back in April 2002 (incidentally on a platform Shadjareh was sharing with the man who might be our next Prime Minister) he has had time to change his views, to moderate, to blame terrorists who murder people for the actions of terrorists who murder people instead of “the West”. Perhaps he has stopped blaming all the ills of the world on the country that adopted him, perhaps he has stopped damning the West when it does intervene and damning the West when it doesn’t and damning the West for anything he can;

“Undoubtedly this cholera and indeed the suffering and the disease and the malnourishments and all the atrocities which are being committed in Yemen would not have happened if it wasn’t because of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been the forefront of this and indeed those who are helping Saudi Arabia like the West, Britain and the United States in particular, are equally responsible,” Shadjareh told Press TV in an interview on Sunday.

Surprised? Nah me neither.

If you want a taste of what al Quds Day is like take a look at last year’s event.

Let’s say a far right group is in a spot of bother. A rival group has accused it of not being properly hardcore. It risks losing followers and needs to act. So it puts these words up on its website:

How dare you slander us. We say the penalty for following Islam is stoning to death. Some of us add that stoning is not enough – the criminals should be hanged too. This has always been our position on the horrible crime of following Islam.

How long before the howls of outrage sweep across the land and the cops pay the group a visit? Not long at all, I reckon, and rightly so in such a scenario.

Now turn to Barking.

The Jabir Bin Zayid mosque in Barking – attended by London Bridge attacker Khurram Butt in the past – is a mission of the Ibadi sect of Oman.

The sect has faced criticism from fellow Muslims. So Oman’s Grand Mufti decided to burnish its theological credentials. This way:

How then, could this slander be attributed to the Ibadhis whereas the Ibadhis consider the penalty for homosexuality to be stoning similar to the penalty for adultery! There are even those who see that a homosexual should be hanged and stoned to death. The Ibadhis have pre-determined this and have maintained it throughout their history and have been penalising those committing this horrible crime accordingly.

You will find these words on the website of the Jabir Bin Zayid mosque. Right out in the open. On a page published by a registered charity.

This is intolerable. As in, it should not be tolerated. This death cult preaching must end, everywhere in the UK, and above all in East London.

It won’t happen, I suspect. Some “conversations” are just too “difficult”.