- MELANIE PHILLIPS - MAY 12, 2022 -
Once again, London has an Islamist-run borough
I don’t usually cross-post other people’s work. However, this piece by the excellent Sam Westrop, director of Islamist Watch, seems to me important enough to warrant it. Westrop reports on the implications of a disturbing development in last week’s local council elections in Britain, which has received nothing like the attention it deserves.
This is what Westrop writes:
The United Kingdom’s local elections at the beginning of May were dramatic. Across Britain, much was made of the fact that the ruling Conservative Party lost almost 500 council seats in the wake of scandal and sleaze. Meanwhile, endless hours of analysis on the BBC have been dedicated to Northern Ireland, where Sinn Fein, the political offshoot of the IRA, achieved a majority for the first time.
But it is in the London borough of Tower Hamlets where more focus should perhaps be placed. The Islamist-linked Aspire Party has just won a sweeping victory. It now controls a majority 24 of the 45 seats available, with the party’s founder — Islamist activist and fraudster Lutfur Rahman — now the mayor.
This is not Rahman’s first stint in charge of this important London borough. He served as mayor from 2010 to 2015, initially as a representative of the Labour Party. His tenure was marked by widespread Islamist extremism, cronyism and outright corruption — all exposed by expertly-conducted documentaries and investigations from mainstream British media, although largely ignored or downplayed by police and national politicians.
The danger Rahman posed was apparent from the beginning. In his first year, Rahman was thrown out of the Labour Party for his Islamist links, after a local secular Bangladeshi politician, Helal Abbas, revealed Rahman’s ties to the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE).
Abbas’s warnings concerned many. The IFE was founded in 1990 by Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, a leading member of the violent Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami – one of the most active extremist groups in South Asia, of which offshoots include terrorist organisations designated as such under US law.
In November 2013, a Bangladeshi War Crimes Tribunal sentenced Mueen-Uddin to death in absentia for his role in the abduction and murder of 18 journalists and intellectuals during the 1971 Liberation War against Pakistan. Mueen-Uddin was reportedly in charge of Jamaat-e-Islami’s Al-Badr killing squad, which collaborated with the Pakistani regime.
Mueed-Uddin then imported his extremism to Britain. For the last three decades, IFE has served as a key “European wing” of Jamaat-e-Islami.
A 2009 training course organised by the IFE for its members featured hardline Jamaat-e-Islami literature, with one IFE official, Muhammad Rabbani, explaining that “Our goal is not simply to invite people and give da’wah [call to the faith]” but to “mobilise those believers into an organised force for change who will carry out da’wah, hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law] and jihad”.
To achieve this new political order, the IFE “strives for the establishment of a global society, the Khilafah … comprised of individuals who live by the principles of … the Shari’ah”.
In east London, the IFE has been working to impose this political vision. A series of investigations by leading British journalist Andrew Gilligan uncovered that the IFE had been crucial in the election of Rahman and other radical politicians.
George Galloway, a frequent fellow traveler of Islamists (and today a leading apologist for Vladimir Putin), as well as an ally of Rahman, declared in 2005 during a speech at the IFE headquarters, following his own election victory: “I am indebted more than I can say, more than it would be wise — for them — for me to say, to the Islamic Forum of Europe. I believe they played the decisive role … in this historic victory.”
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