A UK journalist has reported that the anti “Islamophobia” group known as Engage has lost its ties to the UK Parliament. According to the report:
Two weeks ago I reported how Islamists had established a bridgehead in Parliament. A group called Engage (or iEngage) got itself appointed as the secretariat of a new all-party parliamentary group on Islamophobia. Islamophobia is rapidly emerging as the Islamists’ favoured new front – they have taken to conflating themselves with the entire Muslim community and damning any attacks on their tiny minority reading of Islam as an “Islamophobic” assault on the whole faith. Engage is at the heart of this process, an organisation which specialises in defending fundamentalist bodies such as the East London Mosque and the Islamic Forum of Europe and attacking all criticism of them as “Islamophobic.” It attacked the BBC’s recent Panorama documentary on racist Muslim schools – showing that some children are being taught anti-Semitism and Sharia punishments – as a “witch-hunt.” Typically, it launched its attack before even seeing the programme. It attacked me for writing about the East London Mosque’s hosting of the terrorist preacher, Anwar al-Awlaki, in 2009 – advertised with a poster showing New York under bombardment. It peddled the straightforward lie told by the mosque that no-one had realised Awlaki was a bad egg at that stage. It wrote to the Home Secretary to protest against the ban on the extremist preacher, Zakir Naik, who has stated that “every Muslim should be a terrorist.” It attacked the Independent columnist, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, one of the country’s major voices of moderate Islam, for her opposition to the niqab and the burka. Today, I am delighted to say, Engage has been dropped as the secretariat to the all-party group. I understand that a number of parliamentarians on the group threatened to resign once they were made aware of its true views and links. Congratulations to the Harry’s Place blog, Conservative Home and the former MP Paul Goodman for drawing attention to the issue, and keeping up the pressure. As we have seen with the East London Mosque, Islamists have in the past won access to power by being dishonest about their objectionable views. Today’s news is the latest evidence that now that their tactics are being exposed, and the truth about them is being told, they are being consistently pushed back.
A previous post noted that Engage had 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.