Mick Hartley

Fiyaz Mughal in the Times on the hate preachers stirring division and antisemitism in Birmingham:

The decision to bar Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from next month’s match at Villa Park in Birmingham raises a serious question: who sets the boundaries of public order in Britain today? While some Maccabi fans have a history of violence and anti-Arab or anti-Muslim rhetoric, when the police take the easy option — tarring all supporters, rather than addressing the elephant in the room — it signals that toxic extremism now shapes our security priorities.

Birmingham has long been a warning on this front. It was home to Moinul Abedin, Britain’s first al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist, and to Parviz Khan, who led a plot to behead a British soldier. A study in 2017 by the Henry Jackson Society think tank found that 14 per cent of people convicted of Islamist terror offences between 1998 and 2015 came from Birmingham, which accounted for 8.7 per cent of the country’s Muslim population. That concentration demands honest scrutiny.

Part of the problem lies in the small but vocal minority of preachers who stir division with their inflammatory rhetoric. The Birmingham imam Asrar Rashid, for example, was filmed telling worshippers they should “show no mercy” to visiting Maccabi fans. In July, he was recorded at a Workers’ Party demonstration praising Palestinians for their “armed struggle” against “the banker’s state”. And in 2023, he rhetorically asked how much the “Yahud” (Arabic for Jews) would pay people to betray their faith.

Why do these hate preachers go unchallenged? Would the same kind of vile rhetoric from rabbis or C of E vicars against Muslims be so readily tolerated? Not a chance.

The decision to ban Maccabi supporters is not a one-off misjudgment, but a symptom of a deeper drift: an official reluctance to face Islamist intimidation directly. Countering extremism means defending pluralism and standing firm against those who shout the loudest. The test now is whether civic and religious leaders have the courage to meet that challenge.

I think we know the answer to that one.