The UK Muslim Brotherhood has criticized a recent BBC program that aired details of how a network of Saudi weekend schools has been using an extremist curriculum featuring anti-Semitism and fundamentalism. John Ware, the Panorama producer who produced the report in question, describes his findings as follows:
As Panorama has discovered, a network of more than 40 weekend Saudi schools have been offering to teach the Saudi national curriculum to Muslim children in the UK and some of it is very extreme indeed. Text books teach school children about the correct way to chop off the hands and feet of thieves – a hand for the first offence, a foot for the second. It tasks pupils to spell out the “reprehensible qualities” of Jews. It explains that the penalty for sodomy is execution – possibly by being thrown off a cliff – and that Zionists are plotting to take over the world for Jews. This is a reference to a late 19th century “plot” by Russian anti-Semites who claimed the elders of Zion had written a series of secret “Protocols” to achieve global domination of the economy and media.
These “Protocols” were exposed as a hoax 89-years-ago. But for 15-year-old Muslims studying the Saudi national curriculum here in Britain in the hope of getting into a Saudi university, the plot continues to the present day. There are “many proofs” of the Protocols’ “veracity”, the grade 10 text book says.
A website representing an organization known as “Engage” has posted an articled titled “Panorama’s John Ware Embarks on Another Witch-hunt” which was further linked to on the Twitter feed of the Muslim Council of Britain. The Engage website is registered to Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesperson for the (MCB) which in turn is a UK umbrella group dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. A 2005 UK media report described Mr. Bunglawala’s history of extremist statements as follows:
Inayat Bunglawala, 36, the media secretary for the Muslim Council of Britain, is understood to have been selected as one of seven “conveners” for a Home Office task force with responsibilities for tackling extremism among young Muslims, despite a history of anti-Semitic statements. Mr Bunglawala’s past comments include the allegation that the British media was “Zionist-controlled”. Writing for a Muslim youth magazine in 1992, he said: “The chairman of Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade [then the chief executive of Channel 4 and now BBC chairman]and Alan Yentob [BBC2 controller and friend of Salman Rushdie].” The three are reported to be “close friends… so that’s what they mean by a ‘free media’.” In January 1993, Mr Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, the satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman “courageous” – just a month before he bombed the World Trade Center in New York. After Rahman’s arrest in July that year, Mr Bunglawala said that it was probably only because of his “calling on Muslims to fulfil their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere”. Five months before 9/11, Mr Bunglawala also circulated writings of Osama bin Laden, who he regarded as a “freedom fighter”, to hundreds of Muslims in Britain.