For those who may have missed it, the BBC recently ran an interview and supporting article with Abdullah Faisal, the radical cleric convicted for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred in 2003 and deported to Jamaica in May 2007.
Faisal was not confined to his country of origin for long, and is now preaching his radical version of Islam in South Africa, as a prelude to visiting Nigeria. Faisal says this is down to Africa’s spirituality and receptiveness to his message.
Faisal has previously encouraged his followers to kill non-believers and undertake jihad, telling them that Muslims and non-Muslims are locked in an enternal struggle. He was tracked down by the BBC preaching in Durban, to a boarding school of Muslim teenagers. Faisal has apparently toned down some of the jihadist rhetoric that led to his imprisonment, and while not condemning the 7/7 bombers- one of whom he helped radicalise- he did say to the BBC that “Jihad takes place on the battlefield. Jihad doesn’t take place on buses, at tube stations, at parks, at restaurants”.
However it would be hasty to cast Faisal as a reformed figure. He still managed to find time to attribute paedophilia to ‘monkishness’, and blamed the “kaffirs” for using “their biased news media...to put out the light of Allah." However when it serves his interest Faisal’s use of the media is rather more selective, as in his interview with the BBC he said that television and the internet were in fact the reason that young Muslims were becoming radicalised, and not the sermons of a cleric such as himself:
“Young angry Muslims do not need a cleric to tell them about jihad. The internet is there inciting them to join the struggle against their adversaries.”
and:
“They blame what they see on their television screen. The massacre of their brothers and sisters occupied Palestine. They didn’t say ‘we are going because a cleric told us to go”.
Faisal then decries the West’s foreign policy as “racist” and described the “kaffirs” as “venomous in their hatred of this Deen (faith)”.
In this context, serious questions must be asked regarding Faisal’s globetrotting:
1. Why is the government of South Africa (and presumably Nigeria) allowing a preacher convicted of soliciting murder to preach to a variety of Muslim audiences, including teenagers?
2. Where is the funding coming from for Faisal to finance these trips? Earlier this year, in a password protected section of the radical Islambase website, friends of Faisal’s were appealing to members of the messageboard to fund his need for a new computer; clearly finances are now not the problem they once were.
Islaam stands for truth and whoever to tries cover the truth will never be sucessful