By Andrew Gilligan 22 February 2015
Baroness Warsi gave official roles to people with links to Islamist groups
Lady Warsi arrives in Downing Street on July 6, 2010 Photo: Getty Images
Entryism, the favourite tactic of the 1980s’ Militant Tendency, is when a political party or institution is infiltrated by groups with a radically different agenda. Since Militant’s Trotskyites were expelled from the Labour Party, the word has rather fallen out of fashion.
But now, according to one Muslim leader, Islamic radicals are practising entryism of their own — into the heart of Whitehall – courtesy of a woman who was until recently a government minister.
Baroness Warsi, the first Muslim woman to sit in Cabinet, handed official posts to people linked to Islamist groups, including a man involved in an “unpleasant and bullying” campaign to win planning permission for the controversial London “megamosque” proposed by a fundamentalist Islamic sect.
He sits – alongside other radicals or former radicals and their allies – on a “cross-Government working group on anti-Muslim hatred” set up by Lady Warsi and Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister.
Some members of the group are using their seats at the table to urge that Whitehall work with Islamist and extremist-linked bodies, including one described by the Prime Minister as a “political front for the Muslim Brotherhood”. Some are also pressing to lift bans on foreign hate preachers from entering Britain, including Zakir Naik, who has stated that “every Muslim should be a terrorist”.
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Fiyaz Mughal, a former member of the working group, told The Telegraph that he had resigned in protest at its activities. “I was deeply concerned about the kinds of groups some of the members had connections with, and some of the groups they were recommending be brought into government,” he said. “It seemed to me to be a form of entryism, by people with no track record in delivering projects.” Mr Mughal is head of Tell Mama, the national organisation for monitoring anti-Muslim attacks.
Another member said: “The working group was Sayeeda [Warsi]’s personal project and she was responsible for the appointments. There was very little transparency about who was put on.”
The working group, set up in 2012, has continued after Lady Warsi’s resignation last summer in protest at the Government’s “morally indefensible” policy on the Gaza crisis. It is based in Eric Pickles’s Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and includes officials from there, the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, the Department for Education, the Foreign Office and the Crown Prosecution Service.
Among its most prominent non-government members is Muddassar Ahmed, a former senior activist in the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), an extremist and anti-Semitic militant body which is banned from many universities as a hate group.
Unitas CEO Muddassar Ahmed speaking as chair of John Adams society at parliament
During Mr Ahmed’s time, MPAC campaigned heavily against “Zionist” MPs, in particular Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, and Lorna Fitzsimons, the former Labour MP for Rochdale. She lost her seat after MPAC sent thousands of leaflets to local Muslim voters saying they should sack her because she was “Jewish”. She is not Jewish. MPAC has stated that Muslims are “at war” and that “every Muslim who does not participate in that war is committing a major sin”.
Mr Ahmed said that his “regrettable” MPAC activities were “many years in the past” and he was now a “very different person from what I was then”. He had not been involved in the racist campaign against Ms Fitzsimons, he said, but had concentrated on Mr Straw. The Government also insisted that Mr Ahmed had “dissociated himself” from MPAC and its “approach” to politics.
More recently, Mr Ahmed and his PR company, Unitas Communications, have played a role in a body called the Newham People’s Alliance (NPA), which was created to demonstrate “community support” for plans to create Britain’s biggest mosque near the Olympic Park in the east London borough of Newham.
The NPA blockaded Newham Town Hall after councillors refused planning permission for the mosque. It has run a virulent campaign against Sir Robin Wales, the borough’s mayor, calling him “Dirty Robin”, a “Zionist” and a racist and saying that no Muslim should vote for him.
It fiercely supports Lutfur Rahman, the extremist-linked mayor of the neighbouring borough, Tower Hamlets, saying Newham should be more like Tower Hamlets. “It was a very vicious campaign, with a lot of lying and making things up, and they were close allies of Lutfur,” said Sir Robin last night.
“Muddassar Ahmed wanted to stand as candidate for us [Labour], but we blocked him because of his background.”
The mosque applicant, Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative Islamic sect accused by some of being a gateway to radicalism, is appealing against the refusal of planning permission.
Mr Ahmed and others from Unitas Communications represented the Newham People’s Alliance at the planning inquiry last June. “The NPA were very unpleasant and bullying people to deal with,” said Alan Craig, a former Newham councillor who led a rival campaign, MegaMosque No Thanks, at the inquiry.
The planning appeal will be decided by the Department for Communities and Local Government, the same ministry which runs the working group on anti-Muslim hatred on which
Mr Ahmed sits, although it reports to the Deputy Prime Minister. The decision will be announced next month.
Also on the working group is Iqbal Bhana, who has repeatedly praised the work of a body called the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). The group has defended Abu Hamza, saying he has been “demonised” and claiming his recent terrorism conviction in America was an example of the “double standards of the British justice system in relation to Muslims”.
Other members include Iftikhar Awan, a former trustee of Islamic Relief, a charity with links to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and Sarah Joseph, a former spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), with which the current and previous governments have broken ties over its links to Islamism.
Iftikhar Awan
Some members of the working group have tried to get the Government to rebuild ties with the MCB and also to open new links with the IHRC and the Cordoba Foundation, a body described by David Cameron as a “political front for the Muslim Brotherhood”.
One working group member opposed to these attempts said: “Civil servants in the DCLG resisted strongly. They kept saying that there was nothing showing a change in the voice and opinions of these groups. But they were under tremendous pressure from Warsi.”
The working group was set up after Lady Warsi claimed in 2011 that Islamophobia had “passed the dinner-table test” and was “widespread and rising”. According to police figures at the time, anti-Muslim crime had been falling. Since the murder of Lee Rigby, the soldier, in 2013 such crime has risen, but still does not appear widespread. According to the Home Office, faith hate crimes, not all of which would be anti-Muslim, account for 5 per cent of hate crimes reported in England and Wales.
The Metropolitan Police, the only force that reports numbers for anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic and homophobic crime, reports that per head in London, gay people and Jews are about four times more likely to be victims of hate crime than Muslims.
While there is no doubt that anti-Muslim hatred is real and is disgraceful, the charge of Islamophobia has also been abused by Muslim wrongdoers and their allies to smear critics and deter scrutiny. Another former member of the working group, Chris Allen, an academic, claimed that the “Trojan Horse” scandal – where schools were taken over by hard line Islamists – was a “hoax” and an example of Islamophobia in the UK.
Not all members of the working group are Islamist or radical sympathisers and there is no suggestion that any member is a supporter of violent extremism. Another member, Matthew Goodwin, the associate professor of politics at Nottingham University and an expert in hard-Right political movements, said he was not aware of any attempt by the group to push an Islamist agenda. He said that he and others had been frustrated at the group’s lack of progress.
Mr Ahmed said he was not responsible for the behaviour of the Newham People’s Alliance. He said they were a “very loose group, a group of guys we grew up with who asked us to help them out at the planning inquiry. Tablighi Jamaat have never been linked to any sort of extremism and we have got to be careful not to alienate them from mainstream discourse.” He said he and Unitas had not been paid by the sect or anyone else.
A DCLG spokesman said: “We are very clear that we will not fund or engage with groups which promote violent or non-violent extremism.
“All individuals represented on the cross-government working group on anti-Muslim hatred are committed to the peaceful integration of all communities.”
Lady Warsi was unavailable for comment. Last month, she fiercely criticised the Government for “defining many groups and individuals as beyond the pale,” saying: “We needed to bring more people into the fold rather than increasingly adopt positions which pushed groups and individuals out to the fringe.”
