Local media has reported that one of the killers of British soldier Lee Rigby had attended the Welsh campus of a theological training facility associated with the European Muslim Brotherhood and Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi. According to a Wales Online report:
A controversial Muslim cleric who supports suicide bombers was behind the curriculum at a top Islamic college in Wales where one of Lee Rigby’s killers studied, it’s emerged.
The work of Egyptian Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who was banned from Britain in 2008, helped shape courses at the Llanybydder-based European Institute of Human Sciences attended by Michael Adebowale.
As well as backing suicide attacks on Israelis chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars Al-Qaradawi is reported to have said it’s okay to beat women ‘lightly’, lash gays and suggested rape victims should be punished if dressed immodestly.
Terrorism expert Professor Anthony Glees said Adebowale’s time at the Ceredigion college should have set alarm bells ringing for MI5 and helped prevent the murder of the British soldier.
Professor Glees, who heads the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, said: ‘This is something which definitely should have been recorded against this person in any file the security service would open against them.’
Adebowale studied at the college in April 2012. Its courses were drawn up by a council of scholars chaired by Al-Qaradawi.
The college, which once had links to the former Lampeter University, is now said to be unable to offer any courses and largely standing empty.
Read the rest here.
The European Institute of Human Sciences (EIHS) is the UK branch of the Institut Européen des Sciences Humaines (IESH), an educational facility in France associated with the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE) and its French member the Union Des Organisations Islamiques De France (UOIF), both organizations representing the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. A 2004 IESH web page explains that the school’s curriculum was designed by a “Scientific Council” that included Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi. A confidential report on IESH from 2004 contained the following conclusions about the facility:
- IESH is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood
- IESH does not appear to serve its stated purpose of developing Imans trained in the European context.
- IESH has failed to graduate significant numbers of trained Imans to serve in French mosques.
Previous posts have discussed the low graduation rate from the IESH campus in St. Denis and plans by FIOE to establish a new body to train European imams located in Brussels. In 2009, the GMBDW reported that the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) had announced that EIHS was opening the second of its UK branches in London. The MAB is also known to have been a FIOE member and has long been part of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK.