Members of Islamic Forum Europe, despite what their defenders say, are concealing their real views in order to win power
.... Perhaps our unemotive, factual quotation from original IFE documents has helped still those complaints about "defamation" and "vindictiveness". Such as, for instance, the transcript of a 2009 recruit training course where the organisation tells its new members:
"Our goal is not simply to invite people and give da'wah [call to the faith]. Our goal is to create the True Believer, to then mobilise those believers into an organised force for change who will carry out da'wah, hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law] and jihad [struggle]. This will lead to social change and iqamatud-Deen [an Islamic social, economic and political order]." [Guardian Cif] Read more
Watch out: democratic Muslims about .... Gilligan's chief charge was that recent years had seen the IFE gradually increasing its influence in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. His programme accused them of trying to "infiltrate" the local Labour party so that they could subvert the local council and bend it to an extremist "Islamist" ideology in a tactic reminiscent of Militant tendency in the 1980s. [guardian.co.uk] Read more
Mr Bunglawala (deliberately?) misses the point. Nobody is complaining about Muslims taking part in politics. What people object to is the IFE (The Islamic Forum of Europe) not saying what it really stands for and vote fiddling. See what Guardian CiF readers think here
Muslims Found In Mosque Shock Channel 4 Dispatches used to be a haven of serious documentary, but has degenerated into a stream of Islamophobia. .... These Muslims actually wanted society to be ordered in an Islamic way on Islamic principles. To try to achieve this they were - shock horror - undertaking political activity and joining political parties! [Craig Murray] Read more
The IFE: Riding the Climate of Fear .... In response to the programme, IFE stalwart Azad Ali has produced not one but two angry personal tirades against Gilligan on the IFE blog. .... This comes after he lost an attempt to sue the Mail on Sunday for publishing an article with the headline “Civil servant ‘backed fanatic’s call to kill our troops in Iraq’”. Justice Eady said in his summary judgment that Ali’s case was bound to fail and had about it “an absence of reality”.
A similar absence of reality permeates Ali’s last two blog entries. They also contained sneers at the members of the Bangladeshi community who spoke out against the IFE in Gilligan’s documentary. [The Spittoon] Read more
Islamist radicals: Complain early, complain often… You may have noticed that any newspaper articles or TV programmes exposing the doings of Islamist radicals - such as the ones about the Islamic Forum of Europe which I’m in the process of bringing out at the moment – always attract weirdly formulaic, oven-ready complaints (”what the well-known racist and CIA agent Andrew Gilligan conveniently forgets to acknowledge is the decisive role of the IFE in promoting community cohesion, ending world poverty, stopping climate change,” etc, etc.) Well, I think I’ve solved the mystery. [telegraph.co.uk] Read more
