Alex Deane has posted on the extreme views being taught in Regents Park Mosque as shown in tonight’s Channel 4 Dispatches programme Undercover Mosque: The Return. The TaxPayers’ Alliance wants the Government to ensure that those responsible have their state funding eliminated until they put in place procedures to ensure the end of this hateful preaching.
British Muslims are being indoctrinated to hate Britain and its values in British Mosques. Viewers will witness preachers in London’s Regents Park Mosque urge worshippers to murder gays and ex-Muslims and to hate non-Muslim Britons. Eighteen months ago, Dispatches original programme Undercover Mosque showed preachers praising the murderers of British troops and asking their followers to “live like a state within a state, until you take over”. The Government must act now to stop funding the groups mentioned in the report because they have clearly failed to tackle extremism.
Taxpayers provide significant financial assistance to British Muslim bodies. In 2005 the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) received £50,000 from the Home Office. In 2006 the MCB was awarded £300,000 by the Department for International Development. The Government’s Pathfinder Against Violent Extremism scheme, launched in 2007, is distributing £70 million to Muslim community groups. We need to ensure that none of this money goes to extremist groups or groups which fail to combat the extremists in their midst and that this expenditure yields clear positive results such as greater Muslim cooperation with the police or more moderate preaching in Britain’s mosques.
The problem of extremism in British Mosques is not new – it has been documented many times. In 2005 Panorama questioned whether the existing British Muslim leadership could adequately tackle extremism in their programme A Question of Leadership. In 2006, the then Home Secretary, John Reid, urged Muslim parents and leaders to “look for the telltale signs” or risk losing their children to fanatics. In 2007 Muslim leaders promised they would introduce a code of practice to ensure integration. But in 2008 we still see preachers at the Mosque urging believers to reject inter faith dialogue and disassociate themselves from British society – see here. UK taxpayers expect some return on the millions they are providing to Muslim groups but there does not seem to be any evident benefit we can point to for this expenditure.
The Government must use our funding to put pressure Britain’s mosques to root out extremism. The message should be that if you do not cooperate we will cease this funding. Greater police vigilance of the content of sermons and the material distributed in Mosques should be authorized to enforce compliance. A good start would be for the police and the Mosque authorities to review the two main points Dispatches make. Firstly, that the content of some of the classes in the Mosques covered is extreme and needs to be monitored. Secondly that some of the literature distributed in the Mosques is extreme and needs to be removed (a point also highlighted by Policy Exchange in it’s 2007 report The Hijacking of British Islam).Unfortunately, the response of the Mosque authorities has (so far) been inadequate.
The Government should review its current expenditure on Muslim groups and ensure it complies with the suggestions made in Policy Exchange’s report on the Hijacking of British Islam. Mosques and other Islamic institutions should be required to remove to remove extremist literature from their premises and public institutions should not deal with those who do not. In addition, Mosques should be required to monitor the preaching that takes place in their institutions and be held responsible for it. It will focus minds if the next time the inter faith department at Regents Park Mosque makes an application for public funding the Government refers them to the revelations in Dispatches programme and demand answer before signing another cheque.
