Rashad Ali is a Director of CENTRI, an organisation that specialises in countering extremism
Robert Lambert yesterday mistakenly criticized the government for its position on excluding and subsequently arresting the hate preacher Raed Salah, as reported on Newsnight , not for his political views, but for violating his notice of exclusion under UK immigration law. Lambert refers to Saleh as "Sheikh" and presents him as merely a persecuted Palestinian activist. In his piece, Lambert tries to say that the controversy is about Israel and nothing to do anti-semitism, extremism, support for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, or in fact any connections with officially-designated extreme or terrorist groups.
Lambert is either ignorant of the facts, incompetent or simply not concerned with them at all. He states that "anger and frustration with Israeli oppression is hardly the same as unwarranted hatred of a minority or majority community of any kind." But Salah has said: "We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children's blood," he said. "Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread." Clearly for Lambert this was nothing to do with hatred of Jews!
Salah also wrote: "Jews knew about the attack on the twin towers, left the building and did not inform anyone. 9/11...A suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work on September 11, 2001, and this is really what happened! Were 4,000 Jewish clerks absent [from their jobs] by chance, or was there another reason? At the same time, no such warning reached the 2,000 Muslims who worked every day in the Twin Towers, and therefore there were hundreds of Muslim victims.”
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