The heinous crime extinguishing the lives of three young British girls in a dance class in Southport reverberated across the Atlantic. I spoke to my mother, a British Pakistani Muslim woman and retired National Health Service pediatrician who dedicated her life to the well-being of British children. Now in her 80s, we mourned the devastating loss so unfathomable we both were lost for words. In the aftermath, Britain’s suffering deepens as we see riots, destruction, and violence including injury to police officers and others triggered by this painful event.
Before the perpetrator’s identity was known, suspicions that this was an Islamist terrorist attack by a Muslim individual animated anti-Muslim sentiment. While deplorable, to make such an assumption when approaching 25 years post 9/11 – which introduced to the world the modern Islamist jihadist and 15 years later the war on ISIS which specifically called to individuals to engage in solitary violent jihadism – is not incomprehensible, however much we as Muslims might wince.
Elements which may or may not have been instigated in part or whole by far-right movements in Britain saw an opportunity. British Mosques were attacked and vandalised and other British Mosques remain imperiled. British Muslim worshippers – from images it seems mostly male youths – then emerged to confront the rioters and the temperature rose further. The Muslim community is calling for more security to Muslim places of worship, Muslim centers, and mosques. Laudably, the responsive British police, in places almost a standing army is responding in full force to protect the very British value – the right to religious freedom. Some are calling for our well-known Islamophilic-leaning monarch, His Majesty King Charles, to reassure the nation.
So, at this time of tremendous domestic tension, when even conservative writers are deploring the lack of leadership shown by Nigel Farage (who could have calmed the British right), we find the British Muslim community is spectacularly failed by the extraordinarily incendiary remarks made by the Chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission in his letter addressed to the Home Secretary.
While the chairman rightly denounces the violence and appeals for protection for the Muslim community, almost immediately he exposes his rank Islamism as he writes suggesting far-right rioters have been ‘enabled by their Zionist financiers abroad’.
Islamism not Islam – de facto incorporates wholesale antisemitic tropes and religionises it as creed. Only Islamism can account for this remark. Only rank antisemitism can account for this remark. Islam cannot do so. Islam particularly detests the deliberate division of one’s own nation. In contrast, Islamism thrives on dividing domestic populations by fragmenting and insulating the domestic Muslim population to wedge deeper, both real and manufactured divides in any society. We have seen this time and time again in the way Islamist ideology operates in political systems.
Once again my instincts prove right.
Communicating with colleagues in Britain, today I discovered the IHRC has an established record of not only antisemitic words but actions. Previously the group has cautioned in its publications in 2018 against Zionist efforts to engage with the British Muslim community to normalise Zionism – (presumably they are opposed to the Abraham Accords). The 2023 report Prevent Counter Extremism Review identified the commission as an Islamist-aligned group with troubling ‘extremism links and terror sympathies’.
This tremendously disappointing antisemitism by the Islamic Human Rights Commission thus represents much more Islamist ideology than Islamic values – perhaps the commission should consider renaming itself as an advocate for Islamist human rights?
Blaming unrest on mysterious opaque invisible ‘Zionist financiers’ both demonises not only Jews but also we Muslims – tarring us all as Islamist antisemites who believe in an invisible Jewish conspiracy financing the world – and completely fails Muslims in Britain.
Only recently, Dr Muhammad Al-Issa, Secretary General of the Muslim World League, delivered remarks as guest of Policy Exchange, talking about the importance of Muslims integrating in their own host nations and working together with their own host nations wherever we find ourselves overseas as being a central Islamic value. It seems the Chairman didn’t get the memo.
It is my opinion that the Islamic Human Rights Commission in Britain is feeding division, demonising a vulnerable minority ie the Jewish community, and fueling further animosity towards Muslims – who are also a British minority. It is difficult to harbour hope that this remark somehow escaped his attention when this letter was drafted, but I am fearful that this might represent thinking at the apex of an important charitable British institution claiming to represent Islam and not Islamism. I believe the word Zionism is very deliberately inserted rendering the antisemitism even more malignant at this time in world affairs.
Before British Muslim leaders repugnantly call upon fictional Zionist financing to create division, I would like to see this commission, so concerned with human rights, expose the tentacles of financing from the moneyed patrons of Muslim brotherhood ideology at work in promoting anti-Jewish propaganda, including via bot farms and social media, fuel injected antisemitism and demonisation to the point of delegitimisation of the sovereign Jewish State.
If the Islamic Human Rights Commission was truly committed to advancing human rights it might like to join me in bearing witness to the dehumanisation, destruction, and eliminationist antisemitism Muslim Brotherhood patrons and Islamist financiers wrought by their proxy army Hamas on human beings on October 7 – devastation I personally examined in Israel’s morgues last October.
The unstoppable gusher of financing for Muslim brotherhood ideology, ideologues, and both nonviolent and violent Islamism remains wide open – one wonders if some of those plentiful currencies have made their way to Britain. A general inspection seems highly appropriate by His Majesty’s Revenue Services.
Actively dividing a previously very well-integrated British Muslim community that I knew when I grew up in England, and deliberately fragmenting it from the wider pluralist secular liberal democratic population, is exactly how Muslim Brotherhood ideology and Islamic ideology operates. Contrast this to the extraordinary outpouring of the British people of Hartlepool when the Nasir Mosque received thousands of pounds from locals after sustaining some damage after a night of unrest. Locals immediately responded because the mosque had served over 30,000 meals during the pandemic and raised tens of thousands of pounds for veterans through the British legion. In other words, when Muslims practice Islam, not Islamism, they support Britain, not divide it and in response the British embrace them fully and warmly.
Islamism is entirely distinct, however much it may claim to disguise itself within Islam. Claiming victimhood all the way, Islamism delegitimises and demonises other minorities denying them their own statues.
As Muslims, it is our role to promote peace and integration wherever we go and at times of crisis to call for calm, and build bridges, not the demonise the world’s most persecuted minority at a time of grave crisis, domestically, and internationally. Islamic Commission for Human rights you shame us as Muslims when you betray our ideals of Islam and you shame us as Britons but boy do you do the Brotherhood Boys proud.
