A postscript to the Vancouver Rowling disavowal:
From the Times:
A mosque attended by the Manchester synagogue attacker was previously reported to the Charity Commission over a sermon accused of fuelling antisemitism and division.
Jihad al-Shamie, 35, from Prestwich, Lancashire, began worshipping at Masjid Sunnah Nelson in 2022.
In 2023, Fountains of Knowledge, the charity that opened the mosque in 2021, was reported to the Charity Commission over a sermon in which the imam linked the war in Gaza to the “plotting of the kuffar against Islam”. Kuffar is a derogatory term for non-Muslims.
The National Secular Society (NSS), which filed the complaint, said Masjid Sunnah Nelson was among charities “fuelling antisemitism and division, as well as potential support for Hamas and other anti-western actors”.
Well, this is a huge surprise. Who could have guessed?
In November 2022, he attended a three-day “knowledge conference” at the mosque with his younger brother.
And three years later, after this “knowledge conference”, he killed Jews as a self-proclaimed IIS supporter.
Messages sent by Shamie to one of his three wives, who claims he raped her, said: “I rly love the mosque there.” Footage shared on the mosque’s Instagram page appears to show Shamie sitting in a chair wearing a striped robe.
Naveed quoted a religious text during a sermon last year describing Yahud — Jews — as “treacherous”.
In a sermon last month, Naveed said: “The husband in the house is the one who has the word. He is the man, he has the first and last word. So, this is what they call guardianship. It means that the wife does not do anything except what? Except with his permission.”
The mosque is associated with the Salafi movement, a fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam.
Was anything done about this? Was the NSS complaint followed up? Of course not. Will anything be done about those spreading hatred under the shield of charitable status? Of course not. Meanwhile the government tinkers with its Islamophobia definition…
The Hill, Hampstead, this morning:
Meanwhile, Canadian Greens are leading the way in the vital work of disavowing JK Rowling:
Plausible background to this new Gaza peace deal – here, from Ahmed Fouad Alkatib:
What caused Hamas to agree to give up its chief bargaining chip, the Israeli hostages, for phase 1 of the deal was the unprecedented pressure against the terror group from Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt. The Turks want sanctions relief, the F-35 stealth fighter, new F-16s, and greater cooperation with the US. The Qataris got the apology from Israel for the failed airstrike and the US commitment to Doha’s national security through a new agreement/pact, and in exchange, had to deliver the hostages, which means delivering Hamas. Egypt has been terrified of the specter of forced displacement of Gazans into Sinai, and its mobilization of the Egyptian army on the country’s eastern border raised tensions with Israel and threatened the peace treaty between the two countries, not to mention US foreign aid. Cumulatively, this meant that the three countries (Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt) applied enormous pressure on Hamas, which is isolated, militarily weakened, its allies defeated, and without options.
Julie Bindel at UnHerd on the transformation of the Greens from a party committed to saving the planet – especially the whales – to a party obsessed with ideological purity and gender ideology:
The Green Party was once defined by its defence of science. Its reputation was forged in the battles against climate denial, nuclear propaganda, and industrial greenwash. Once a force for good, filling a gap left by every other political party, today, it is unrecognisable. It spouts idealistic purity of little use to the working classes it affects to stand up for. As Peter Ungar points out, “The Greens became a mainstream party without a reason to exist. So they invented one: narcissistically driven identity politics.”
The cynical promotion of Gaza-obsessive Mothin Ali as deputy leader adds another grim element to the mix – Islamist grievance. “We will NOT be silent. We will raise the voice of Gaza. ALLAH HU AKBAR!”. As we’ve seen, parties of the left who think they’re being smart by allying with Islamists may find themselves taking on more than they bargained for.
At the JC, Robin Simcox offers five suggestions for the government to tackle the current situation after Manchester. He was the government’s independent adviser on extremism between 2021-25. – so “I have a good idea of where government action on counter extremism has proven insufficient”.
First, ban Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood:
Hamas has been well established in the UK for decades. We know who the key players are, we know the NGOs which serve as support groups, and we know what media outlets they rely upon to propagandise. We also know that rather than being treated as a foreign terrorist group that is unwelcome here, their leaders have been given citizenship and council houses.
This is not just a Hamas issue. After all, those aligned with al-Qaeda also used the UK as a base in the 1990s at the state’s invitation. The difference is that after 9/11, we quickly understood that was an obvious security risk.
We do not treat Hamas with the same level of seriousness. That is in part because Hamas has not yet launched attacks inside the UK. But it is very open about its genocidal intent with Jews and British citizens have carried out suicide attacks on its behalf in Israel. If the government wants to demonstrate it takes Jewish concerns seriously, it must surely unpick Hamas’s architecture in the UK.
Second, stop the hate preachers:
The post 7/10 landscape has demonstrated just how much easier this is said than done. The anti-Jewish, pro-terror and conspiratorial vitriol unleashed in mosques up and down the country is now prevalent across social media. I saw first hand just how often mosques that had hosted some of the most malevolent extremists and antisemites relied on public funding to operate via, for example, protective security funding. This was never leveraged properly to induce better behaviour from such mosques.
What made this particularly frustrating was that they were almost always registered charities. British Muslims who wanted to give to humanitarian causes in Gaza were donating to a part of the world that was controlled by Hamas. Yet it is an open secret that the charitable sector lacks visibility into how the money is being used. It is impossible to believe that none of that money has ended up with Hamas. This seems to be accepted because the greater good is for aid money to flow into Gaza. Whether that cost-benefit analysis works for British Jews seems a reasonable question to ask.
The Charity Commission must now be given the powers it needs to tackle this extremist abuse. At present, investigations take too long and punishments are insufficiently punitive to induce change. Accepting that some institutions have been set up specifically to subvert democratic values and are unreformable would also be welcome. Closing down charities with ties to the Iranian government, for example, will be no loss to our philanthropic culture and could help demonstrate to British Jews that a hostile state that loathes them is no longer able to operate so brazenly on British soil.
Another sensible step would be to take a more proactive approach to keeping hate preachers out of the country. Towards the end of the Sunak government, a task force was established in an attempt to do precisely this. We know there are clerics who frequently visit the UK and who preach an antisemitic version of Islam. We should not tolerate it any longer.
His other suggestions: curb the endless protests about Palestine; no more funding for, or engagement with, extremists; make combatting antisemitism central to counter extremism efforts.
You sense some frustration here. What, for instance, happened to that Sunak government initiative to keep hate preachers out of the country? Quietly dropped by the new government, it would seem. No more funding for, or engagement with, extremists? Police and local authorities apparently visited mosques where antisemitic preachers had visited, in a misguided effort to bolster “community cohesion”. It didn’t work, of course. All it did, as Simcox says, was to “expose how poorly understood extremism is for certain arms of the state”
As for the last – making combatting antisemitism central to counter extremism efforts – apparently the obsession with preventing another Southport has made the government move the other way, trying instead to concentrate on violence-obsessed loners, so that Prevent has become more of a violence reduction programme – sounds nice, but what does that actually mean? – and has lost its focus on counter-terrorism.
Will Manchester now concentrate some minds?
Very good. On the “prevailing antizionist narrative”:
This is very good.
Mick Hartley 