Islamic Party of Britain suspends activities with immediate effect

A decision by the Islamic Party of Britain to suspend its activities until further notice brings to an end almost 15 years of independent British Muslim political involvement. The party was founded in 1989 amidst the “Rushdie Affair”, and party leader David Musa Pidcock’s book “Satanic Voices” remains one of the most comprehensive rebuttals of what the party perceived to be a concerted effort to discredit Islam. The party first contested council elections in 1990 and a by-election in Bradford in the same year, but it never managed to gain the undivided support of Muslims in those constituencies. When it became increasingly clear that the chances of electoral success remained slim, the party developed into more of a think tank, contributing analysis and alternative policies through its quarterly publication “Common Sense” edited by its general secretary Dr Sahib Mustaqim Bleher.  The decision to suspend active political campaigning was taken on the basis of an assessment that whilst the party had succeeded in kick-starting a political debate amongst Muslims in Britain, shifting the focus of the Muslim community from cultural and minority issues to dealing with the social and political realities of modern Britain, the British Muslim community remained too divided to present a united political challenge to the existing political establishment. Whilst strategic and tactical voting might have assisted in changing the political landscape at the time of the party’s foundation, the patronising nanny state of new Labour, brought into power with the support of the majority of Muslims in the UK, holds little such promise for the foreseeable future. 
“Muslims who complain about Islamophobia and demonstrate against the present government’s anti-Muslim policies, including the war on Afghanistan and Iraq, need to examine their own complicity”, said Dr Bleher. “British Muslims were too busy competing with each other for acceptance by the establishment to realise the increasingly totalitarian nature of all-pervasive government.” “The open hostility of our current government against Islam, the hysteria against asylum seekers and would-be terrorists, coupled with the ongoing allegiance of major Muslim organisations to Muslim movements abroad, has resulted in a community made up of intolerant and frustrated extremists on the one hand, career-opportunistic stooges on the other, and an ever growing political apathy and cynicism amongst the greater majority of Muslims living in the UK”, he added. 
The party will retain its internet presence at  for the time being and does not rule out a come-back, should the political climate change substantially.

The Islamic Party Guide to Media Control

There is no denying that the pen is often mightier than the sword, and that before and alongside every shooting war there is a propaganda war being waged. In the battle for the hearts and minds of people the media play a pivotal role, and it is legitimate therefore to where there loyalties lie, with their readers or with their financers. Media publication today is big business and stretches across national borders. There is no such thing as impartiality. As aptly put by John Swinton during his retirement speech from the New York Times in the 1930s, when asked to respond to a toast to an independent press: ”What folly is this toasting an independent press. Everyone present here tonight knows there is no such thing as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who would dare to write his honest opinions, and if he did, you know before hand they would never appear in print. I am paid 250 dollars a week to keep my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar work. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and sell himself, his country, and his race for his daily bread: We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks they pull the strings, and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are the property of these men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

But the picture need not be doom and gloom. Might is not always right, and the more arrogant those who have usurped these power bases become in assuming that have total control, the further removed they become from reality. The internet has opened up new channels of information, for example, and has provided individuals and groups with source material to challenge the official view. Governments and media moguls alike will eventually have to face up to a stark choice: to listen to the public or to become increasingly isolated from them. Here, lobbying is the key, and to assist in the task this issue also contains advice and contact details to help you make your point.

The unhappy search for the “gay” Muslim

As anyone who has criticised Zionism, we’ve been accused of being anti-Semitic, and now we are likely to be called homophobic too, for not conceding that homosexuality is a normal condition and simply a matter of choice. However, as our guest writer Alexander Baron points out in his article in this issue, these are smear terms coined to discredit and bereft of any real meaning. People who disagree with homosexuality are not afraid of homosexuals, as the term homophobia would imply, they are disgusted by them. Nor is there anything gay about the unhealthy and unstable lifestyles of members of the vociferous GLBT (Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transsexual) movement.  
So why do we concern ourselves with them in this issue of Common Sense? All too often have Muslims in the West closed their eyes and buried their heads in the sand vis-à-vis the civilisational diseases surrounding us, hoping and praying that they were somehow immune to them. Ignoring a problem does not make it go away, and the problem of homosexual propaganda and intimidation must be addressed rather than ignored or laughed off. Young people especially are vulnerable and more susceptible to propaganda. The Muslim youth are confused and unsure of their identity, they have dabbled into rap music and drug culture, they are experimenting with relationships, whilst their elders pretend that all is fine as long as they continue flattering each other at the mosque about the great services they render to the community. Our youth are a welcome prey to ill-meaning people with an agenda.  
In the past “gay rights” campaigners limited themselves to trying to make Muslims feel bad for not understanding and for “victimising” them. Muslim speakers at universities were asked to give an undertaking that they would not say anything considered prejudicial to people with a different “sexual orientation”. In the old one rule for one, another rule for another tradition, non-Muslim speakers were never asked not to offend Muslim sensitivities during their lectures. Muslim bashing remains the acceptable face of anti-Semitism.  
On an international level a similar approach brought repeated attempts to have an unnatural sexual orientation enshrined as a human right. Once this concept were accepted, UN support programmes or any other assistance could then be tied to the condition placed upon the recipient party to safeguard this “human right”. Thus, bullying and bribery remain the most potent means of changing the minds of people who refuse to be convinced by a spurious argument.  
Meanwhile, the movement feels confident enough to target the Muslim community more directly, very much in the same way as they have already broken the resistance of the Catholic Church, for example. The high-profile reporting of homosexual priests portrays Christian opposition to such unnatural practices as hypocritical. If Muslims could be made to “come out”, or be exposed, as homosexuals, the persistent opposition of Muslims as a whole might equally be broken.  
A cursory search of the internet, this hotchpotch of truths, half-truths, and the bizarre shows a growing presence of such attempts. It also shows the increased confidence of those who want to undermine and pervert Islamic teachings. There is, for example, a group called “Queer Jihad”, which used to be run by a Sulaiman X, a self-styled admirer of Malcolm X with Buddhist leanings. His approach was one of pleading for “tolerance” for Muslims who “discovered” that they were gay or lesbian, advocating a non-physical “love” relationship between Muslim members of the same sex attracted to each other whilst acknowledging the opposition of Islamic teachings to such a relationship. He obviously realised that a religion which does not even condone heterosexual casual relationships and insists on marriage as a precondition for intimacy would hardly be lenient towards members of the same sex living in sin together.  
This “pioneer” of the Muslim branch of the homosexual movement has now been replaced by a former Baptist convert to homosexual Islam who has come with his own agenda. From the plea for tolerance of his predecessor this advocate of the homosexual lifestyle has moved to dabbling into the interpretation of Qur’an and Hadith and trying to make the case that homosexuality is Islamically acceptable per se. The people of Lot were not destroyed simply because they were homosexual, but because they tried to force themselves with lust upon others who were not, he argues. It’s the public rape they were guilty of, not the same sex activity amongst each other. He goes further trying to construe from a selection of Hadith that homosexuality was an accepted practice at the time of the prophet, provided that those engaged in it did not intend to marry a member of the opposite sex at a later stage.  
Absurd as all this may sound, it is a poison administered at a time where the new generation of Muslims are no longer well versed in the teachings and source texts of Islam and obtain much of their information from the world wide web. Unless one understands that this is a concerted propagandistic effort by a well-organised and funded movement, not just the “queer” ramblings of a few eccentric and deranged people, there is a real danger that the certainties of faith will be eroded as has happened in the case of other religions.  
The “gay” lobby in this country is powerful enough to force a leadership debate in the Conservative Party. Public sympathy for homosexuals is not as common as the propaganda suggests, but neither is there much sympathy for Muslims. Just as the British National Party joined the convenient bandwagon of anti-Muslim sentiment to pursue its racist agenda, the homosexual movement will find this an opportune time for attacking Islam’s “homophobia”. To withstand this onslaught, we must address the issues in an informed way and avoid being apologetic.