On 31st October 2009, thousands of Muslims from up and down the country plan to converge in the heart of Central London in a spectacular procession to make their demands for the overthrow of the British establishment clear.

At the time of writing, that message, which was posted on 4 March 2009, is still on the website of Islamist nutjobs, al-Muhajiroun. But a few days ago they added another message, in the form of a press release, saying that it had

become apparent that certain right-wing/anti-Islamic organisations had become intent on preventing the march from going ahead, using threats of physical violence, including bomb and death threats to any member of the Muslim community who happened to attend the march.

In light of this, organisers of the March4Shariah campaign, after careful consultation, have decided to relocate the march in favour of securing the safety of the hundreds of Muslims who may have attended the march to voice their support for the Deen of Haq (Truth).

Well, I’ll be blowed! The Islamist warriors who, earlier this year, had bravely stood protected by police officers on a Luton pavement and screamed abuse at the 2nd batallion of the Royal Anglian regiment’s homecoming parade, chicken out after a few anonymous hotheads threaten them? I mean, hello! What did they expect? That they could march through London slagging off the country that has given them the freedom to do so and that nobody would mind?

I wonder if they thought we wouldn’t notice that the proposed “thousands” who “planned to converge” on London had, nearly eight months later, shrunk to “hundreds” who “may have attended” if only those nasty men hadn’t been all horrid and started threatening people. Not that I would ever, of course, condone the threatening of any sort of violence against anyone. Indeed, normally I wouldn’t hesitate to condemn such behaviour. But in this instance the condemnation sort of sticks in my throat and I can’t quite bring myself to voice it, for some reason. I don’t even know if these threats actually took place and, if they did, whether they were the real reason the march was cancelled. Who cares?

On Saturday, I was delighted to join Muslims, ex-Muslims and others in a protest against al-Muhajiroun.

The occasion was even more enjoyable knowing that the “spectacular procession” the Islamists had boasted of had been, let’s say, re-invented as a secret rally somewhere away from the public eye. Did it take place at all? I’ve no idea. To be strictly truthful, I admit I was a tiny bit disappointed not to get any photos of the nutjobs in their fancy dress costumes.

In order to comprehend just how batshit insane these people are, I recommend watching a bit of the video of the press conference that accompanies the latest press release and learn how only Allah can legislate and any Muslims in parliament or the House of Lords are not considered “true believers” because they have taken the role of legislator on themselves. The nutjobs also share some of their vision of how the UK will look under Sharia.

The pic is of Stringfellows nightclub with a police notice across it saying ‘closed’. The pink advertising board in front of it says, “Women’s college coming soon.”

Got it? Strip clubs and nightclubs (the same thing, as far as they are concerned) will be closed because they are disgusting places where women are exploited. UK under Sharia will be a an official ‘no fun’ zone and women will be educated separately.

It’s easy to snigger but it’s not their lunatic vision for the UK that matters rather than the fact that Sharia Law is creeping in and affecting the lives of people in this country and not in a good way, whatever the nutjobs might claim. At the launch of the One Law for All campaign at the House of Lords back in December last year, we heard disturbing stories from a Muslim woman about women in her community in the North of England appealing to religious tribunals over forced marriages and domestic violence only to be told to stay with their husbands and, believing that the Sharia court had the final say on the matter, that’s what they did. It doesn’t matter what rights women may have in reality if they don’t have the freedom — and in some cases the language — to access them.

The self-styled anti-fascists of the ultra left, by the way, don’t seem to have a clue about this. A typical view is expressed on this forum:

The threat of sharia is a bogey man to whip up people on the far right to support racist policies…The BNP and scummy little tory rags like the Sun, the mail, the telegraph make up stories about Muslims to help the right wing grow and to divide the working class.

On facebook, a page appeared advertising a Protest against March4Sharia and the EDL! It including a long diatribe explaining that the involvement of BNP members in the English Defence League (EDL) “reveals their true agenda; they are racists. Wherever such forces find room to organise, they pose an immediate physical threat to ethnic minorities, asylum seekers and others.” They also include a more reasonable point about how the dangers of the Islamists are exaggerated by the press and by the far right but, viewed as a whole, the piece gives the impression that these people neither know nor care that much about Sharia in Britain. The point that you don’t have to be a radical islamist to take advantage of Sharia law and that it’s enough just being a violent husband in a close-knit Muslim community anywhere in Britain, is lost on them. What the loony left seem to want is any excuse to go out and confront people they perceive to be right-wing racists or fascists. Whether such people are indeed racists or not, doesn’t seem to concern them in the slightest.

But the most disgusting thing about them was their disdain for the protest I joined myself because, according to them, the Muslims (and friends) for Secular Democracy,

in addition to failing to mention the English Defence League, essentially waves the Union Jack and endorses the British legal, political and social status quo. We do not believe that bourgeois liberalism can effectively challenge the growth of either Islamism or fascism, both of which feed off the social decay and despair of British society today.

I don’t know what became of the planned protest from the loony Trots because they never showed up. Perhaps they couldn’t get permission. They weren’t missed.

The 40 or so supporters of the EDL who did turn up to oppose Al-Muhajiroun seemed amiable enough. I eavesdropped on an interview with one of them in which he gave the standard EDL message that they are not racist, they welcome anyone of any race or creed who opposes Islamic extremists. It would appear the EDL have a tiny number of black and Asian supporters and on their website forum I’ve seen people they would describe as “moderate Muslims” warmly welcomed and encouraged to join. The accusations by anti-fascist groups that the EDL are a nazi organisation with links to the BNP are beginning to sound tired and a bit desperate.

The EDL who emerged earlier this year out of spontaneous protests in response to the Al-Muhajiroun demo in Luton, is not (as yet) a membership organisation. It doesn’t have a constitution or policies as such. It is just a loose association of working class and overwhelmingly male “supporters” and, having been observing them pretty closely for a couple of months now, I surmise that they include some people who are BNP sympathisers and many who are not. The BNP have publicly disdained them and threatened their members with disciplinary action if they attend EDL events.

The EDL focus is not on race but on Islamic extremism and the threat to British cultural heritage and way of life, which they seem to think is a lot greater than it is — thanks, no doubt to people like the Archbishop of Canterbury. The (self-appointed, it seems) EDL leaders are making every effort to package the group as a multiracial one and appeals for people to behave nicely are circulated before every demo, a number of which have taken place so far in several of Britain’s cities. (Behaving nicely in EDL terms means not shouting abuse at innocent spectators in hijab, or making seig heil salutes. It doesn’t preclude them shouting E-E-EDL and sounding like a bunch of lobotomised apes).

As I said in an earlier post, the most objectionable thing about the EDL is not their politics but their puerile nationalism. Frankly, most of them don’t have the brains to be political thinkers and that lack of cerebral power is something they have in common with both the BNP and the UAF, as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which group’s supporters are the biggest overdosers on stupid pills.

In stark contrast, witness the wit and intelligence of the British Muslims for secular democracy as evidenced by this short promotional video for Saturday’s protest:

Finally, here’s a reminder:

Saturday 21 November 2009
Time: 1200-1400
Venue: North Carriage Drive, Hyde Park, London (Closest underground: Marble Arch)

“Show your opposition to Sharia Law and all religious based tribuanls….Demand one secular law and universal rights.” More here.

Related posts by skepticat:

EDL, UAF…WTF?

Loony Islamists mistake Humanist centre for Mosque

No Sharia: One Law for All!

the oldest freethought community in the world. It was founded in 1793 as a dissenting congregation and for more than two centuries has been a focus for serious discussion of basic ethical principles. By 1888 SPES had rejected the existence of God and became an Ethical Society, the only one which now survives. SPES is now an educational charity and maintains a proud tradition of free enquiry in all areas of thought and action.

So it was a bit of a surprise and actually quite alarming to arrive there on a hot summer evening and find a number of women shrouded from head to foot in black being shepherded upstairs by men who were dressed a good deal more comfortably.

I can think of three possible reasons why women would be dressed like that in the Conway Hall in the heat of summer:

She might have been there

1. They are mentally ill;

2. They are forced to dress like that by their boorish and tyranical menfolk;

3. They choose to dress like that as a political statement.

I’m guessing that the third of these options is the one they’d tick themselves though, in reality, I wouldn’t rule out a combination of all three. To be fair, not all the women there were wearing the niqab. With some of them, you could actually see their noses and mouths. Risky! I’m surprised they didn’t get raped. To be honest, the sight of these ninja sisters openly flaunting just how oppressed they are made my blood boil but even so I’m guessing that I wasn’t as uncomfortably hot as they were.

They were there to attend an event entitled The Great Debate: Sharia Law v British Law. It was to feature radical psuedo-Cockney Islamist, Anjem Choudary — a thoroughly nasty piece of work who defends the murder of people who don’t see things his way thus:

At the end of the day, when we say “innocent people” we mean “Muslims”. As far as non-Muslims are concerned, they have not accepted Islam. As far as we are concerned, that is a crime against God.

The above quote was lifted from a BBC TV interview about the 7/7 bombers who murdered 52 people in London, included several Muslims.

Opposing him was to be the rabid neo-conservative Douglas Murray, whose talent for hyperbole often makes him an entertaining read, if one hard to take seriously e.g.

Our cowed police appear to have become little more than the militant wing of The Guardian.

( Laughing my arse off at that but I bet Ian Tomlinson‘s grieving family aren’t.)

I’d arrived early for my own meeting so I killed time watching the ninja weirdos flitting about the foyer and up and down the stairs and it struck me how they were so much more visible than anyone else there. I suppose the point of dressing bizarrely is to attract attention to oneself but it doesn’t sit very comfortably with the notion of modesty, as I understand it. It’s those of us who dress to blend in with the crowd who are the truly modest ones, girlies, so shame on you.

I noticed, from my vantage point halfway up stairs, that down in the foyer there was some commotion starting: a crowd was forming around South Place Ethical Society Chairman, Giles Enders, and voices were being raised. Islamists shouting and being confrontational? Surely not! The next thing we’ll have Giles telling us they made death threats. Anyway, my meeting in the upstairs library was about to start, so I left them to it.

Settled with some fifty others into the library,  the shouting from outside the room seemed to get louder and louder. In fact, it sounded like very loud chanting in unison. I wondered if in fact their debate was about to start and they were just kicking off with some weird religious ritual. Whatever it was, it was bloody noisy.

Our speaker was the heroic human rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell, speaking on Multiculturalism and the Subversion of Human Rights. I’m sure the irony of his topic wasn’t lost on any of us and I’ve made notes for a post on it some time.

It wasn’t long before Giles Enders knocked on the door of our room and asked permission for police officers to enter so they could “survey the demonstration going on outside” from the library balcony. The police had been called because he had “refused to respect their segregation of women” and the Islamist brothers didn’t like it.  And, yes, he had received death threats.

When it comes to utterly bizarre and moronic religious or cultural practices, it can sometimes take a long time for the penny to drop with me.

Islamists having hissy fits

Until that point, it hadn’t seriously occurred to me that the Islamist stewards had been ushering the ninja sisters and other women upstairs because they thought they could practise Sharia in our Humanist Centre and reserve the seating in the main hall for the men and the smaller space in the upstairs gallery for the women.

Presumably there was some objection to this segregation from people who wanted to attend the debate but who didn’t consider themselves bound by Sharia and wanted to sit wherever they chose. As Giles wasn’t about to squander the liberal, freethinking, humanist heritage of the building (and this country) by giving in to the lunatic demands of a bunch of bigoted religious fanatics, he cancelled the debate and the fanatics threw their toys out of the pram and stood outside shouting for over an hour before dispersing.

Giles has since given this account to the New Humanist magazine website:

These thuggish bouncers wouldn’t allow anyone in, so I said we would call the police. But the police took forever to come, so in the end I had to send our maintenance man across to the police station to get them. It became extremely aggressive in the foyer – somebody got hurt and was bleeding. I said to the bouncers that I run this bloody hall and what I say goes and they pushed me away. They wouldn’t even allow me in the hall, so I went round the side way and got on the stage, and made an announcement through the mic that the meeting was not to take place. After I said this I stood on the stage with all the chanting mob screaming at me in Arabic, and pointing fingers like guns at me. Then they then cut the mic I was using, as one of their people was operating the sound control box. Then the main speaker [Choudary] got hold of a radio mic and started shouting in Arabic. So I grappled that off him, and then I sat on the stage.

Was the whole thing engineered by the Islamists as a publicity stunt? Possibly. I did wonder what exactly was the purpose of this debate (as I wonder about the purpose of many public debates). It’s a pretty safe bet that the only people attending would be people who felt passionately for one side or the other (and from where I was looking, I’d say one side outnumbered the other by at least twenty to one) and none of these people were going to have their minds changed that evening or any time soon.

Did Douglas Murray agree to participate because he thought it would be fun? Because he thinks it an essential part of his work as Director of the misnamed Centre of Social Cohesion to participate in confrontational debates about Islamism with people from the opposite end of the spectrum? Because he thought his report on it would make an entertaining read?

No. According to this report on The Independent newspaper’s website, Murray agreed to take part because “(Choudary’s) opinions have to be countered”. Ah, that explains it. Naturally I wish him all the luck in the world in countering the views of an extremist Islamist in a room packed with his devoted followers.

At least the same report makes the reason for Choudary’s participation a bit clearer:

Mr Choudary intends to re-launch Al Muhajiroun at a debate entitled “Sharia Law vs British Law” between himself and the Centre for Social Cohesion think-tank, which is being adjudicated by the Global Issues Society.

So that’s it. The debate was basically a front for a re-launch party for Al Muhajiroun, a group that wants Britain to become an Islamic state and which was banned by the British government in 2005 for its glorification of terrorism. Perhaps they thought a party on its own wouldn’t generate as much publicity or, indeed, any publicity seeing as no respectable building would’ve let them hire a hall if they’d been upfront about their purpose. Or perhaps they intended to kidnap Douglas Murray and behead him. Who knows?

One charming website puts it this way,

Purpose of Debate

The purpose of this debate is ultimately for the truth to prevail and for the falsehood to vanquish, and we hope that by this illuminating discussion the British public will experience the superiority of al-Islam over that of the British Law.

As most of the British public neither knew nor cared about this debate and would be unlikely to want to watch it on youtube, one can only marvel at what kind of fucked-up brain produced that particular piece of reasoning. Nevertheless, the idea of the British public experiencing the “superiority of al-Islam” at an event taking place at the Humanist Centre is so deliciously ironic, I almost wish it would happen. Given their obduracy over the relatively small matter of seating arrangements and the hissy-fit they threw when they didn’t get their own way, I wouldn’t rate their chances of winning over the hearts and minds of the British public on anything else.

Here’s a report from the National Secular Society: Misogynist Islamist group forced to leave Conway Hall.

From the New Humanist blogspot: Battle of Conway Hall

And from The Guardian newspaper: Douglas Murray on why we must debate the extremists

And finally, also from The Guardian: Islamist Al-Muhajiroun relaunch ends in chaos over segregation attempt.

Outside, Choudary criticised British society as “dirty” and predicted that, within one or two decades, Muslims would make up the majority. Asked why, if society was so bad, he was living here, he said: “We come here to civilise people, get them to come out of the darkness and injustice into the beauty of Islam.”

Charmed, I’m sure.

Related post by Skepticat:

No Sharia: One Law for All