Beorn
03-14-2009, 11:59 PM
Britons who HATE Britain
The Muslim extremists hell-bent on segregation rather than integration
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/03/13/article-1161855-03D1B0D0000005DC-649_468x312.jpg
This was the scene that greeted homecoming soldiers in Luton this week. Behind it is a community where integration has abjectly failed, breeding a small but rabid band of poisonous fanatics
The call to morning prayers begins at dawn: 'Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar' (Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest). The voice echoes across the rooftops from an amplifier on a minaret at Luton Central Mosque.
Outside, men in beards and tunics are arriving. They slip off their shoes, douse their faces in water, then kneel with foreheads meeting the carpet.
So it was yesterday, Friday - the most sacred day of the week for Muslims.
The mosque, with its distinctive golden dome dominating the skyline, is the most visible symbol of Islamic life in the town. It was also one of seven Muslim centres in Luton chosen to receive Home Office funding last year for a project called 'Preventing Violent Extremism'.
So far, £200,000 has been handed out via grants from the council. Another £400,000 has been set aside to capture the 'hearts and minds' of young Muslims.
In the wake of the scenes which greeted soldiers taking part in a supposedly morale-boosting homecoming parade in Luton this week, some might wonder whether this is money that has been well spent.
Members of 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment faced jeering protesters waving placards saying 'Butchers of Basra'. It seems that some hearts and minds have not been captured.
One in five of Luton's 200,000 population is Muslim. But in the Bury Park district, where Luton Central Mosque is situated, the figure is much higher. Indeed, the original indigenous white population has all but disappeared from these back-to-back terraces near the Kenilworth Road football stadium.
Bury Park has effectively become a town within a town, with its own madrasah (faith school), Islamic primary school and high street, where the local butcher has been replaced by the halal store and the corner shop by a Muslim grocery. Boutiques now sell Day-Glo saris and other traditional Asian clothes.
So far, so familiar in modern Britain - but there is another side to life here.
While the majority of Muslims are peace-loving, industrious people, it would be wrong to deny that there are deeply disturbing tensions in the area.
When a Mecca Bingo Hall opened in the heart of Bury Park, its windows were smashed. The neon Mecca sign, some Muslims claimed, was an insult to their religion because it associated the name of their holiest city with gambling.
Adverts and billboards featuring women deemed to be showing too much flesh have been defaced. An evangelical church was daubed with graffiti.
Over the past 18 months or so, around 30 non-Muslim homes in the area have also been attacked. One white couple in their 80s had bricks - and, on one occasion, a lump of concrete - hurled through their front window. A West Indian woman in her 70s was watching television when a metal beer keg crashed through her bay window.
The culprits have never been caught. Rightly or wrongly, the victims of these incidents are in no doubt that they were targeted by a small group of religious extremists who want non-Muslims out of Bury Park.
Sadly, the process of integration, which began back in the 1970s when thousands of families from the Indian sub-continent came to Luton to work at the Vauxhall car factory, has turned into segregation in all but name.
Multi-culturalism in Bury Park now seems to mean a Muslim from Pakistan living side-by-side with a Muslim from Bangladesh, not white living next to black and brown.
Multi-culturalism also, presumably, means allowing a group of young men the freedom to hand out inflammatory leaflets in the street - entitled 'Return of the Khilafah' - just 24 hours after they had launched that ugly protest against the Anglian Regiment returning home from Iraq.
A Khilafah, for those who may be unfamiliar with the term, is an Islamic state created by Jihad, or holy war. Osama Bin Laden is the standard-bearer for these beliefs.
The Luton extremists - part of a network, it should be stressed, that is only 35 strong - may not have made the headlines before this week, but they have been waging their own local Jihad for a number of years.
At the Luton Central Mosque, one respected Muslim leader - who asked not to be named - told me this week that the group were the Islamic world's equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan.
Recently, Holocaust memorial ceremonies attended by many moderate Muslims were among the events the extremist group tried to disrupt. Almost all of the fanatics, according to the Muslim leader at the mosque, are on the dole or claiming benefits of some kind.
'They wouldn't have the time to stir up so much trouble if they worked,' he said. So the state is supporting them even as they plot to overthrow it.
A number of the extremists attend a mosque in Bury Park and, at one time or another, their group has gone under different names: One Nation, Muslims Against British Atrocities, The Saviour Sect (anyone who does not follow their path is 'damned') and now Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah.
This latest is said to have succeeded the Luton branch of Al-Muhajiroun, the banned organisation led by 'preacher of hate' Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who is now in exile in Lebanon.
Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah (ASWJ) operates mainly through an invitation- only internet forum set up in 2006. Sheikh Bakri Mohammed is a regular contributor, along with Anjem Choudry, who this week taunted the grieving families of three Royal Anglian Regiment members killed in a friendly fire incident and who yesterday said he wants to see an Islamic flag 'flying over Downing Street'.
One journalist who penetrated ASWJ found recordings of Osama Bin Laden on the website.
Luton, according to a leaked intelligence report, remains a focus of concern for anti-terror police and continues to be a 'magnet' for extremists, alongside Beeston in Leeds, Birmingham and parts of London.
One of the first signs of the impact of extremist ideology being propagated in Luton came in 2001, when two British Muslim men from the town were killed fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Six years later, it emerged that one of the militants convicted of plotting to use a fertiliser bomb to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre in Essex came from the town. And in a further chilling twist, the ringleader of that gang was revealed to have met the leader of the 7/7 London bombers four times. (The London gang congregated at Luton station before heading to King's Cross.)
One of the organisations which is now getting government money to combat the militant threat in Luton is the Islamic Cultural Society, based in Luton Central Mosque in Bury Park.
The £25,000 it received last year is helping to fund two full-time teachers whose job it is to engage and educate potentially disaffected young Muslim men. The unemployment rate in the town is more than 8 per cent, but significantly among the Asian population it is estimated to be as high as 25 per cent.
Again, the great majority of these unemployed people are peace-loving, but, as we have already said, there are tensions.
Mansfield Road is as good a barometer as any to chart the sweeping social changes that have taken place in Luton. The street contains 90-odd terraces and semis.
Today, Alfred and Doreen Harrop, 83 and 84 respectively, are the last remaining white household in Bury Park. The old corner shop run for decades by proprietors with names like 'Lee' and 'Woodford' now sells Asian silks.
The Harrops' lounge, with their 1946 black and white wedding photograph on the mantelpiece below the flock wallpaper, is a throwback to a previous generation. In his youth, Alfred was a draughtsman with an engineering company.
'If you wanted a good suit or sports jacket, you went to John Pope & Son Tailors in Dunstable Road,' he recalls. 'You got your meat joint from Waller the butcher, and your shoes from Freeman Hardy Willis.
'But the old families began to die out. Their children didn't want to be in the business, so they began to disappear. Suddenly they were all gone.'
A similar transformation was taking place in their street. First came the Jamaicans, then the Asians and Poles. The vast majority of their neighbours now are Muslims.
The couple have one granddaughter, but have become almost surrogate grandparents to Asian children next door. 'We got on with everybody,' said Alfred. Or, at least, they thought they did - until one day nearly two years ago.
In the morning, Alfred found the rear wipers had been ripped off his car and the wing mirror had been snapped off. 'I just thought it was drunken yobs,' Alfred says.
But it happened again the following night. Then, a few days after, they were woken by a loud 'bang' in the early hours. A brick had been hurled through their window. It was the first of five such attacks, which continued for at least six months. At one stage, police stayed the night in their home to try to catch those responsible. Security cameras were installed, to no avail.
'It got to the point where we were scared to go to bed,' said Alfred.
But the Harrops were not the only ones being subjected to such violent harassment. In nearby Newark Road, two families were attacked; one white, the other West Indian.
On the other side of Bury Park, another Jamaican was targeted. He told police a gang of Asians were responsible. A pattern seemed to be emerging.
Daphne Palmer, 76, lives in Selbourne Road with her disabled son Charles, 44, and daughter Carole, 41. Daphne and her late husband Charles moved to Luton nearly half a century ago.
Daphne was experiencing the same ordeal as Alfred and Doreen and all the others, which is why a CCTV camera is still trained on the front of their home. The family had their windows smashed on at least ten occasions.
'My mother could have been killed if she had been in the lounge,' said Carole. 'It was not just us. I woke up one night after hearing a disturbance and saw an Asian youth running away from my (black) neighbour's house after bricks had been hurled against it.'
Back in Mansfield Road, someone was arrested in connection with the attacks on the Harrops' home. He was eventually convicted of an unrelated matter. He was Asian and lived a few doors away from the Harrops.
Detectives initially treated all the incidents as racial crimes, but say there was no evidence to support this line of inquiry. We must take their assurance for that, but more than 30 attacks - all but a few on non-Asian homes in an overwhelmingly Asian neighbourhood - are hard to dismiss.
When we caught up this week with six of the extremists who took part in the Luton demonstration, they were standing in Dunstable Road - which dissects Bury Park - around a plastic table serving as a makeshift stall, littered with hate-filled propaganda.
Among them was Abu Abdullah, 32, who moved to Britain with his parents when he was young.
'The reports on the demonstration were racist,' said Abdullah, who claims to be a telecoms engineer, but who clearly wasn't working on the day of the march.
'They did not mention the bacon that was thrown at us. They did not say that none of our group was arrested.'
Of their 'spiritual' mentor, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who once arranged conferences in praise of the 'Magnificent 19' 9/11 hijackers, or Anjem Choudry, there was no mention.
Nor was there any sign of 29-year-old Sayful Islam, the so-called Sword of Islam (real name Ishtiaq Alamgir) who was one of the leading protagonists in the protests this week.
Islam, the middle- class son of a British Rail engineer who came to this country from Pakistan, was among those hurling abuse at the soldiers in Luton. He was once the leader of the town's branch of extremist Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun.
His elderly father, Parvaz, still worships at Luton Central Mosque.
'His father is not happy about what he does,' said a member of the Muslim Community. 'But he is his son. What can he do?'
Sayful Islam was not at a number of addresses we were given for him, but when contacted on his mobile phone, he was still defiant. 'Most people who were at the protest were not activists, they just came from the community,' he insisted. 'The anger has been rising up. The parade was the final insult.'
The events of Tuesday were indeed an insult - but not in the way Sayful Islam means. And though he only represents a very small minority, his views are deeply disturbing, not just for Luton but for Britain in general.
Source (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1161855/Britons-HATE-Britain-The-Muslim-extremists-hell-bent-segregation-integration.html)
The Muslim extremists hell-bent on segregation rather than integration
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/03/13/article-1161855-03D1B0D0000005DC-649_468x312.jpg
This was the scene that greeted homecoming soldiers in Luton this week. Behind it is a community where integration has abjectly failed, breeding a small but rabid band of poisonous fanatics
The call to morning prayers begins at dawn: 'Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar' (Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest). The voice echoes across the rooftops from an amplifier on a minaret at Luton Central Mosque.
Outside, men in beards and tunics are arriving. They slip off their shoes, douse their faces in water, then kneel with foreheads meeting the carpet.
So it was yesterday, Friday - the most sacred day of the week for Muslims.
The mosque, with its distinctive golden dome dominating the skyline, is the most visible symbol of Islamic life in the town. It was also one of seven Muslim centres in Luton chosen to receive Home Office funding last year for a project called 'Preventing Violent Extremism'.
So far, £200,000 has been handed out via grants from the council. Another £400,000 has been set aside to capture the 'hearts and minds' of young Muslims.
In the wake of the scenes which greeted soldiers taking part in a supposedly morale-boosting homecoming parade in Luton this week, some might wonder whether this is money that has been well spent.
Members of 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment faced jeering protesters waving placards saying 'Butchers of Basra'. It seems that some hearts and minds have not been captured.
One in five of Luton's 200,000 population is Muslim. But in the Bury Park district, where Luton Central Mosque is situated, the figure is much higher. Indeed, the original indigenous white population has all but disappeared from these back-to-back terraces near the Kenilworth Road football stadium.
Bury Park has effectively become a town within a town, with its own madrasah (faith school), Islamic primary school and high street, where the local butcher has been replaced by the halal store and the corner shop by a Muslim grocery. Boutiques now sell Day-Glo saris and other traditional Asian clothes.
So far, so familiar in modern Britain - but there is another side to life here.
While the majority of Muslims are peace-loving, industrious people, it would be wrong to deny that there are deeply disturbing tensions in the area.
When a Mecca Bingo Hall opened in the heart of Bury Park, its windows were smashed. The neon Mecca sign, some Muslims claimed, was an insult to their religion because it associated the name of their holiest city with gambling.
Adverts and billboards featuring women deemed to be showing too much flesh have been defaced. An evangelical church was daubed with graffiti.
Over the past 18 months or so, around 30 non-Muslim homes in the area have also been attacked. One white couple in their 80s had bricks - and, on one occasion, a lump of concrete - hurled through their front window. A West Indian woman in her 70s was watching television when a metal beer keg crashed through her bay window.
The culprits have never been caught. Rightly or wrongly, the victims of these incidents are in no doubt that they were targeted by a small group of religious extremists who want non-Muslims out of Bury Park.
Sadly, the process of integration, which began back in the 1970s when thousands of families from the Indian sub-continent came to Luton to work at the Vauxhall car factory, has turned into segregation in all but name.
Multi-culturalism in Bury Park now seems to mean a Muslim from Pakistan living side-by-side with a Muslim from Bangladesh, not white living next to black and brown.
Multi-culturalism also, presumably, means allowing a group of young men the freedom to hand out inflammatory leaflets in the street - entitled 'Return of the Khilafah' - just 24 hours after they had launched that ugly protest against the Anglian Regiment returning home from Iraq.
A Khilafah, for those who may be unfamiliar with the term, is an Islamic state created by Jihad, or holy war. Osama Bin Laden is the standard-bearer for these beliefs.
The Luton extremists - part of a network, it should be stressed, that is only 35 strong - may not have made the headlines before this week, but they have been waging their own local Jihad for a number of years.
At the Luton Central Mosque, one respected Muslim leader - who asked not to be named - told me this week that the group were the Islamic world's equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan.
Recently, Holocaust memorial ceremonies attended by many moderate Muslims were among the events the extremist group tried to disrupt. Almost all of the fanatics, according to the Muslim leader at the mosque, are on the dole or claiming benefits of some kind.
'They wouldn't have the time to stir up so much trouble if they worked,' he said. So the state is supporting them even as they plot to overthrow it.
A number of the extremists attend a mosque in Bury Park and, at one time or another, their group has gone under different names: One Nation, Muslims Against British Atrocities, The Saviour Sect (anyone who does not follow their path is 'damned') and now Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah.
This latest is said to have succeeded the Luton branch of Al-Muhajiroun, the banned organisation led by 'preacher of hate' Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who is now in exile in Lebanon.
Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah (ASWJ) operates mainly through an invitation- only internet forum set up in 2006. Sheikh Bakri Mohammed is a regular contributor, along with Anjem Choudry, who this week taunted the grieving families of three Royal Anglian Regiment members killed in a friendly fire incident and who yesterday said he wants to see an Islamic flag 'flying over Downing Street'.
One journalist who penetrated ASWJ found recordings of Osama Bin Laden on the website.
Luton, according to a leaked intelligence report, remains a focus of concern for anti-terror police and continues to be a 'magnet' for extremists, alongside Beeston in Leeds, Birmingham and parts of London.
One of the first signs of the impact of extremist ideology being propagated in Luton came in 2001, when two British Muslim men from the town were killed fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Six years later, it emerged that one of the militants convicted of plotting to use a fertiliser bomb to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre in Essex came from the town. And in a further chilling twist, the ringleader of that gang was revealed to have met the leader of the 7/7 London bombers four times. (The London gang congregated at Luton station before heading to King's Cross.)
One of the organisations which is now getting government money to combat the militant threat in Luton is the Islamic Cultural Society, based in Luton Central Mosque in Bury Park.
The £25,000 it received last year is helping to fund two full-time teachers whose job it is to engage and educate potentially disaffected young Muslim men. The unemployment rate in the town is more than 8 per cent, but significantly among the Asian population it is estimated to be as high as 25 per cent.
Again, the great majority of these unemployed people are peace-loving, but, as we have already said, there are tensions.
Mansfield Road is as good a barometer as any to chart the sweeping social changes that have taken place in Luton. The street contains 90-odd terraces and semis.
Today, Alfred and Doreen Harrop, 83 and 84 respectively, are the last remaining white household in Bury Park. The old corner shop run for decades by proprietors with names like 'Lee' and 'Woodford' now sells Asian silks.
The Harrops' lounge, with their 1946 black and white wedding photograph on the mantelpiece below the flock wallpaper, is a throwback to a previous generation. In his youth, Alfred was a draughtsman with an engineering company.
'If you wanted a good suit or sports jacket, you went to John Pope & Son Tailors in Dunstable Road,' he recalls. 'You got your meat joint from Waller the butcher, and your shoes from Freeman Hardy Willis.
'But the old families began to die out. Their children didn't want to be in the business, so they began to disappear. Suddenly they were all gone.'
A similar transformation was taking place in their street. First came the Jamaicans, then the Asians and Poles. The vast majority of their neighbours now are Muslims.
The couple have one granddaughter, but have become almost surrogate grandparents to Asian children next door. 'We got on with everybody,' said Alfred. Or, at least, they thought they did - until one day nearly two years ago.
In the morning, Alfred found the rear wipers had been ripped off his car and the wing mirror had been snapped off. 'I just thought it was drunken yobs,' Alfred says.
But it happened again the following night. Then, a few days after, they were woken by a loud 'bang' in the early hours. A brick had been hurled through their window. It was the first of five such attacks, which continued for at least six months. At one stage, police stayed the night in their home to try to catch those responsible. Security cameras were installed, to no avail.
'It got to the point where we were scared to go to bed,' said Alfred.
But the Harrops were not the only ones being subjected to such violent harassment. In nearby Newark Road, two families were attacked; one white, the other West Indian.
On the other side of Bury Park, another Jamaican was targeted. He told police a gang of Asians were responsible. A pattern seemed to be emerging.
Daphne Palmer, 76, lives in Selbourne Road with her disabled son Charles, 44, and daughter Carole, 41. Daphne and her late husband Charles moved to Luton nearly half a century ago.
Daphne was experiencing the same ordeal as Alfred and Doreen and all the others, which is why a CCTV camera is still trained on the front of their home. The family had their windows smashed on at least ten occasions.
'My mother could have been killed if she had been in the lounge,' said Carole. 'It was not just us. I woke up one night after hearing a disturbance and saw an Asian youth running away from my (black) neighbour's house after bricks had been hurled against it.'
Back in Mansfield Road, someone was arrested in connection with the attacks on the Harrops' home. He was eventually convicted of an unrelated matter. He was Asian and lived a few doors away from the Harrops.
Detectives initially treated all the incidents as racial crimes, but say there was no evidence to support this line of inquiry. We must take their assurance for that, but more than 30 attacks - all but a few on non-Asian homes in an overwhelmingly Asian neighbourhood - are hard to dismiss.
When we caught up this week with six of the extremists who took part in the Luton demonstration, they were standing in Dunstable Road - which dissects Bury Park - around a plastic table serving as a makeshift stall, littered with hate-filled propaganda.
Among them was Abu Abdullah, 32, who moved to Britain with his parents when he was young.
'The reports on the demonstration were racist,' said Abdullah, who claims to be a telecoms engineer, but who clearly wasn't working on the day of the march.
'They did not mention the bacon that was thrown at us. They did not say that none of our group was arrested.'
Of their 'spiritual' mentor, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who once arranged conferences in praise of the 'Magnificent 19' 9/11 hijackers, or Anjem Choudry, there was no mention.
Nor was there any sign of 29-year-old Sayful Islam, the so-called Sword of Islam (real name Ishtiaq Alamgir) who was one of the leading protagonists in the protests this week.
Islam, the middle- class son of a British Rail engineer who came to this country from Pakistan, was among those hurling abuse at the soldiers in Luton. He was once the leader of the town's branch of extremist Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun.
His elderly father, Parvaz, still worships at Luton Central Mosque.
'His father is not happy about what he does,' said a member of the Muslim Community. 'But he is his son. What can he do?'
Sayful Islam was not at a number of addresses we were given for him, but when contacted on his mobile phone, he was still defiant. 'Most people who were at the protest were not activists, they just came from the community,' he insisted. 'The anger has been rising up. The parade was the final insult.'
The events of Tuesday were indeed an insult - but not in the way Sayful Islam means. And though he only represents a very small minority, his views are deeply disturbing, not just for Luton but for Britain in general.
Source (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1161855/Britons-HATE-Britain-The-Muslim-extremists-hell-bent-segregation-integration.html)