Mick Hartley

I wish they wouldn’t refer to Trevor Forrest – Abdullah al-Faisal – as a race-hate preacher:

A race-hate preacher who influenced one of the men involved in the July 7 terror attacks on the London transport system was deported yesterday…

He told young British Muslims that it was their duty to kill nonbelievers, Jews, Hindus and Westerners, and urged them to adopt a “jihad mentality”.

The jury watched a video of al-Faisal after the September 11 attacks telling up to 150 young Muslims that the Koran justified attacking “kaffirs”, or unbelievers.

“When there is a legitimate target, you strike at it,” he said. “If women and children die, they become collateral damage.

Is it permissible to drop bombs on a kaffir nation, even if Muslims live there? It is permissible and the Muslims become martyrs.”

This isn’t race hate – it’s faith hate. To call it race hate is in a way to trivialise it; to take the sting out of it and make it something we can understand. It turns it into an offence we’ve already learnt the appropriate responses to; something nasty like a kind of reverse BNP. He’s worse than that. He thinks non-Muslims should be killed – that it’s a moral duty of Muslims to kill non-believers. Not because of what they are, but because of what they believe. It’s a long way from Nick Griffin.

Also, of course, this conflation of race and religion plays into the hands of the Islamophobia crowd, trying to make out that criticism of Islam is like racism.