The Centre For Social Cohesion

Understandably, when he got wind of who was to be the chief guest of honour at the opening of the Centre, Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, declined to accept an invitation to attend. Instead, he contented himself with sending a message of good-will. In it, after declaring the LMC to symbolise the fact that the voice of Islam was now part of our national conversation, Chief Rabbi Sacks prayed that ‘together the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian communities, the children of Abraham, may work together in peace and mutual respect to bring God’s blessings, and healing to our divided and fractured world’.

Sadly, it would appear that, to date, Sir Jonathan Sacks’ prayer has gone unheeded. He was, however, right that, to our national conversation, the LMC has added a particular voice of Islam. It is, however, not one that makes it overly obvious how its considers its contribution to that conversation improves the quality of life and community cohesion.

Last week’s Sunday Times contained an interesting piece by a British-born Muslim of south Asian descent, Ed Husain. In it, he relates how, as a youth, he was drawn into radical Islamism after being induced by East End Bengali peers to attend the ELM, rather than the more moderate Sufi-oriented Brick Lane mosque where his father attended for prayers.

Mr Husain recounts his growing disillusionment with Wahhabism after time spent in Saudi Arabia where he became increasingly appalled by the racism, sexism, and militant fanaticism he encountered there.

In an accompanying piece, entitled ‘Rediscovering a kinder, gentler Islam’, Mr Husain recounts how, through attending the ELM, he was ‘introduced … into a world heavily influenced by Sayed Qutb’s book ‘Milestones’ and as a result became increasingly radicalised. Sayed Qutb was, along with Hassan al-Bannah, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was also spiritual mentor of Abdullah Azzam attendance at whose classes at the King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda in the nineteen seventies, along with those of Sayed Qutb’s brother, Muhammed, radicalised Osama bin Laden as a young man.

In the conclusion of his account of his descent into the underworld of radical Islam, Mr Husein explains the role that the misplaced policy of multiculturalism played in making his descent all too easy. He writes:

‘ In the name of multiculturalism, we have created ghettoes, In east London you can go to a nursery and then a school and then get a job and almost everyone in your life will be a Muslim. There is a Muslim underworld here, and that is the only frame of reference for young Muslims. We are sitting on a time bomb.’

His words chime well with those of Hussein Haqqani, a former adviser to three previous Pakistani prime ministers and now a director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. Last August, after the arrest of a score of British-born East End Muslims in connection with a plot to blow up flights from the UK to the USA, Mr Haqqani took part in a PBS news broadcast about the plot. In it, he had the following to say by way of explanation of their radicalisation, despite their being British citizens:

‘Well, they don’t think of themselves as British … They feel actually like fish out of water. They’re not sufficiently British, because of their skin colour, but they’re not Pakistanis any more either.

‘And then [along] come radicals with issues which matter to these people, images of injustices in Chechnya, and Bosnia, and Kashmir, the whole question of Lebanon and Iraq. And so some of these peoples think, “Maybe my calling is to turn to a more extreme version of my faith and do something about changing the injustice”.

‘And the environment of freedom that is afforded by Western society enables radical groups to recruit and operate and propagandise more freely than certain countries of the Muslim world itself.

‘In London, for example, there are many international networks of radical groups already operating, They operate Web sites in the English language, which focus on the whole culture of grievance. You know, it’s a call, “Let’s do something about Palestine, let’s do something about the war in Iraq, et cetera".

‘And then the young men who get radicalised say, “How do we get trained to become radicals?” And that’s when the Pakistani connection becomes useful, because… the infrastructure exists in Pakistan. So if you’re a young man in East London who wants to act out his desire to do something in a terrorist way, then he finds somebody who has a contact in Pakistan who enables him to operationalise his desire.’

Not for one minute am I suggesting that the ELM-LMC has deliberately set out to serve as a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda. However, one has to question the sincerity of its declared aim of promoting community cohesion, given the nature of the literature that is freely available for young people to download on the website of the Young Muslim Organisation UK (YMOUK) that operates out of its premises. As well as Qutb’s ‘Milestones’, it includes works by the likes of Hassan al-Banna, the other co-founder of the Brotherhood and Shaikh Yussuf Al-Qaradawi.

Exposure to such literature would not be so bad, if there were any countervailing material available on the website to offer accounts of other, less extreme versions of Islam, or even literature that was altogether critical of it. But all such literature is conspicuous by its absence. This suggests that those who avail themselves of what the website provides may often find themselves on the nursery slopes of a slippery slope that can end them up in a madrassa in some far-off land undergoing training for a suicide bombing mission.

There is serious need for an urgent review of what such web-sites provide, bearing in mind that the ELM-LMC also houses an OFSTED approved school intended to turn out future generations of home-grown British imams.

For those who think I exaggerate the danger that exposure to such a uniform diet of literature might have upon impressionable minds, let me leave you with what, under the general heading ‘Great Movements of the 20th Century’, one of the articles on the YMOUK website states is the ‘theme and slogan’ of the Muslim Brotherhood:

“Allah is our objective. The Messenger is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way, Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

Perhaps, in light of all this, the reason for my choice of title for this posting, with its allusion to the famous sxities Animals pop-song, has now become clearer:

There is a house in London’s East End,
It’s called the ELM-LMC.
It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy,
And God I hope I’m not one
-- of their victims.

Oh, by the way, I almost forgot to mention, last week’s Sunday Times also contained a news report that, according to a leaked MI5 document, ‘al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq are planning the first “large-scale” terrorist attacks on Britain and other western targets’, that one operative has said will be on “a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki”.

Could this be why, as a recent posting on the Israeli Y net news web-site reports, there is a document currently circulating on a number of al-Qaeda websites offering readers guidance on how to survive a nuclear war?