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Documentary reveals clerics ‘preaching hate’ in UK mosques

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: Britain’s Channel Four is to air a documentary today that shows clerics at a number of leading British mosques exhorting followers to prepare for jihad, to hit girls for not wearing the hijab, and to follow Islamic law over UK law, The Observer reports.

The documentary, Undercover Mosques, Dispatches, contains video footage secretly filmed in British mosques over a period of 12 months.

At the Sparkbrook mosque, run by the UK Islamic Mission (UKIM), an organisation that maintains 45 mosques in Britain, a preacher is captured on film praising the Taliban. In response to the news that a British Muslim solider was killed fighting the Taliban, the speaker declares: “The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.”

Another speaker says Muslims cannot accept the rule of non-Muslims. “You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir,” Dr Ijaz Mian tells a meeting held within the mosque. “We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others.”

When contacted by The Observer, UKIM said: “We are a nationwide organisation and hold different programmes in our mosques. We are very concerned about this. We have instructed all our branches not to allow any more speakers with radical or fundamentalist views.”

Elsewhere the documentary records the huge popularity of DVDs and Internet broadcasts produced by extremist preachers. At the Islamic bookstore at Regent’s Park Mosque in central London, DVDs of a preacher called Sheikh Yasin are sold. In one DVD, Yasin accuses missionaries from the World Health Organisation and Christian groups of putting the AIDS virus in the medicine of African people.

Inside the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, a preacher is recorded saying: “Allah has created the woman deficient.” A satellite broadcast from the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, beamed into the Green Lane mosque suggests that Muslim children should be hit if they don’t pray: “When he is seven, tell him to go and pray, and start hitting them when they are 10.” Another preacher is heard saying that if a girl “doesn’t wear hijab, we hit her”.

Another preacher says: “The time is fast approaching where the tables are going to turn and the Muslims are going to be in the position of being uppermost in strength and, when that happens, people won’t get killed - unjustly.”

A spokesman for Green Lane mosque said Islam does not denigrate women and that the instruction to hit a child was merely a smack. He accused Channel Four of intensifying the “witch-hunt” against Muslims. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) accused Channel Four of attempting to foment division and sectarianism among Britain’s 1.8 million Muslim community, news agency PPI reported.

The MCB said the documentary “mischievously tried to prove that key Muslim institutions are teaching exact opposite to Islam commanding Muslims to deal positively and peacefully with those around us”. The producers were “resorting to the dishonest tactic of selectively quoting from some recorded speeches for purpose of misrepresentation,” MCB Secretary General Abdul Bari said.

“Their aim is to attach guilt by association. This continuing demonisation of British Muslims and risible attempt at promoting sectarianism among British Muslims will be firmly rejected,” Bari said.

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