The Centre For Social Cohesion

A Salafi group calling for the establishment of a Sharia based Islamic state in England is being left free to recruit and openly discuss its ideologies in a busy town market.

Followers of Call of the Salaf, a Luton based group, were seen openly handing out flyers advertising their ideologies while calling on shoppers to attend a talk on ‘Sharia & Khilafa: Every Muslims Duty’.

The Islam Channel has been fined £30,000 by Ofcom, the media regulator, for breaking the UK's broadcasting code.

Ofcom said the channel had been wrong to allow presenters who were standing in an election to use their own television shows to promote their campaigns.

It also said that the channel had often failed to provide balance in its reporting - citing one example where a report on Jerusalem's disputed status contained only Palestinian points of view.

Cambridge University Press has just banned a book. Alms for Jihad has been withdrawn from sale by CUP, which is also writing to libraries asking for it to be pulled from their bookshelves.

The book’s authors, Robert Collins and J. Millard Burr have seen their publisher abandon them completely after the extremely wealthy (to the tune of some $3.1 billion) Saudi Sheikh Mahfouz claimed that the book linked him with terrorism.

Euston railway station is set to be the first transport hub in London to utilise facial recognition software through its network of CCTV in an attempt to spot criminals and terror suspects.

Once installed, the technology will monitor petty criminals before moving on to jihadis' once the trial period proves successful later in the year.

Ehsan Jami – the 22-year old chair of the Dutch committee for ex-Muslims – is in hiding tonight after being attacked again at the weekend. The young Jami (who is also a PvdA councillor for Leidschendam-Voorburg) was beaten up by three men as he left a local supermarket. He has been attacked twice before but has still not received protection.

His friend Afshin Ellian – the renowned columnist and academic from Leiden University – has highlighted Jami’s plight after the weekend attack. Ellian himself is forced to live under 24-hour security because of threats to his life from Islamic fundamentalists.

Channel 4 has been referred to Ofcom, the broadcasting authority, by the Crown Prosecution Service, for its undercover Dispatches programme on hate-preachers in British mosques.

Explaining the decision, Anil Patani of the West Midlands police said that the authorities had reviewed the 56 hour of footage used to create the hour-long programme and concluded that the Channel 4 editors had used quotes selectively:

"The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying."

Welcome to journalism, Anil...

A moving and important story from yesterday’s Sunday Times by Shiraz Maher recounts ‘How I escaped Islamism’.

Most interesting of all is Maher’s account of a recent conversation with a current Hizb ut-Tahrir member. Talking of the message being conveyed by both Maher and the author of The Islamist, Ed Husain, Maher writes:

Yesterday saw the publication of a report on the Middle East by a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Media accounts of it have largely focussed on one of its principal recommendations. This is that the Government ‘should urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas as a way of encouraging it to meet the three Quartet principles’.

A 40-year-old man has been charged with assault after an attack on an imam inside Regents Park Mosque.

The assault which left the imam critically injured, has highlighted fears that Muslims are suffering a sharp increase in race attacks, following terrorist attempts to blow up clubbers and holiday seekers this summer.

Ryan Donegan, 40, was charged with committing grievous bodily harm and assaulting a police officer, the police said in a statement.

The 58-year-old cleric, suffered heavy blood loss and damage to both eyes, Mosque officials said.

Al-Dubayan, the mosque’s spokesman, described the gruesome attack in detail.

A series of co-ordinated suicide attacks against a small town in northern Iraq by al-Qaeda has caused the highest death toll of any single attack since the conflict began.

Early report say that more than 200 people were killed when five explosive laden trucks were detonated in the town of Kahtaniya on Tuesday evening.

But this was no ordinary truck bombing for the victims were mainly Yazidis, members of an obscure pre-Christian religion.

The five Guantanamo Bay inmates who are due to be returned to Britain are, according to the Pentagon, ‘extremely dangerous’ men with links to Al-Qaeda.

This news comes at the same time as Britain gives off the worst possible signal about our country by debating whether we owe any loyalty to those translators who have helped us, and their fellow countrymen, whilst risking their lives with the extremists, in Iraq.

More than a dozen angry Arab protesters gathered outside Regents Park Mosque calling for the removal of the Saudi-backed board and justice for the Sheikh who was assaulted earlier this month.

The group also alleged that a member of the Mosques, which we will refer to only as Ali, failed to act accordingly because of previous allegations made by the Egyptian Sheikh that ‘certain elements within the mosque are hauling money out of the gold pot’, a protester said.

Ali, feeling rather brave in front protestors, walked up to Mohammed, the ring leader, and demanded that he leaves the Mosque’s grounds.

The two tussled before police intervention.

Abu Hamza al-Masri, the most notorious of Londonistan's radical preachers, could return to Britain's streets after plans to deport him to stand trial in the US faltered.

US prosecutors had hoped to try the bearded cleric with attempting to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon after he completed his seven-year jail sentence in the UK.

Now, however, a key US witness against Abu Hamza, James Obama, said he might not testify.

The news will give a much needed boost to the hook-handed cleric who has been hit by a series of reverses in recent days.

‘How would the Muslim community respond if ITV made a programme challenging Muhammad as the last prophet?’

So, according to a report in Saturday’s Guardian, does Anglican canon Dr Patrick Sookhdeo protest against the decision by ITV to broadcast, on some as yet unnamed future Sunday, a one-hour documentary setting out the Muslim view of Jesus.

Doubtless, Dr Sookhdeo is perfectly correct to surmise, in the wake of the worldwide Muslim protests at the publication of Danish cartoons of Mohammad, that it is almost unthinkable in today’s climate that any British TV company would have courage enough to screen a documentary setting out Christian conceptions of Islam and of its founding figure.

However, neither that lamentable fact - nor the fact that, to Christians such as Dr Sookhdeo, the Koranic denial of Jesus’ divinity is ‘unacceptable’ - should be considered good enough reasons for right-minded people, whether they be Christians or not, to oppose the documentary to which Dr Sookhdeo takes such strong exception.

This is so for several reasons.

British Muslims will hold their own version of the Live 8 at Wembley Stadium to highlight the current humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

The concert on October 21, coinciding with the end of the holy month of Ramadan, will be aimed at raising awareness of the situation among Britain's 2.0 million population.

In light of the recent controversy surrounding the decision to allow Learco Chindamo – the murderer of Philip Lawrence – to stay within the UK, attention should be drawn to the case of Pegah Emambakhsh.

As of the 13th August, Emambakhsh – an Iranian lesbian - faces deportation back to Iran. Ms Emambakhsh sought asylum in the UK in 2005. She escaped Iran after her lover had been arrested, tortured and sentenced to death by stoning. It is highly likely that if Ms Emambakhsh were to return to Iran she would suffer the same fate.

Despite this, however, the UK Border and Immigration Agency (BIA) has ruled that she would not be in any danger if she were to return – even though not only is the UK government fully aware of Emambakhsh’s hazardous predicament in Iran, but Iranian human rights campaigners themselves have stated that numerous gays and lesbians have been executed since the Ayatollah’s accession to power in 1979.

While Britain’s university lecturers and Vice Chancellors obdurately continue to refuse to offer any form of assistance in the fight against on-campus violent extremism, a trial currently underway in a Glasgow courtroom suggests that the problem towards which Britain's academics seem willing to turn a complacent blind eye could well extend much further than the University sector.

The media has reported the recent YouGov poll about British attitudes towards Islam as though it were a terrific surprise. The Mail, for instance, states that ‘increasing numbers think "a large proportion" of British Muslims feel no loyalty to the UK and are ready to condone or even carry out terrorist atrocities, while far more people feel threatened by Islam itself than was the case five years ago.’

Anti-racism campaigners believe peer pressure is the best way of stamping out racist chants at football games.

Mido, Middleborough’s centre forward, was targeted by Newcastle United’s fans with songs referring to his Muslim background during last week’s premiership clash.

To the tune of Blue Moon, they sang: “Mido, he’s got a bomb Mido…”

Switzerland's largest political party, the Swiss People's Party, has proposed deporting immigrant families if their children are convicted of crimes involving violence, drugs and benefit fraud.

Ueli Maurer, the party's president, said: "We believe that parents are responsible for bringing up their children. If they can't do it properly, they will have to bear the consequences."

The party said foreigners, who make up 20 percent of the Swiss population, are four times more likely than native Swiss to commit crimes.

The Guardian has already likened the proposal to laws enacted by Nazi Germany.