Some pretty unsavoury and very antisemitic associates:
....
But you donāt have to go back very far in Khanās past to find links with some pretty unsavoury characters. Some of these associations date back to his time as a director of Liberty and a human rights lawyer ā
trying to get the UK to lift its ban on the American Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has described Jews as āblood-suckersā and called Hitler āa very great manā, and speaking at the same conference as Sajeel Abu Ibrahim, a member of the now proscribed Islamist organisation that trained the 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan. But other instances are less easily explained away by his professional commitments.
For instance, in 2004 he appeared on a platform with five Islamic extremists at a conference in London organised by Al-Aqsa, a group that has published works by the notorious Holocaust denier Paul Eisen. He was billed not as a director of Liberty or human rights lawyer, but as a Labour parliamentary candidate.
In the same year, Khan was the chair of the Muslim Council of Britainās legal affairs committee and was
involved in defending the Muslim scholar Dr Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, whom the MCB described as āa voice of reason and understandingā. At the time, the MCB issued a press release blaming the āsmear campaignā against Qaradawi on āthe Zionist lobbyā. Khan himself gave evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee in which he saidāthere is a consensus among Islamic scholars that Mr Al-Qaradawi is not the extremist that he is painted as beingā.
So who is this Muslim scholar, who was warmly welcomed to London in 2004 by Ken Livingstone?
Among other things, heās the author of a book called The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam in which he justifies wife beating and discusses whether homosexuals shours be killed. Most notoriously, he condones āmartyrdom operationsā, i.e. suicide bombings, against Israeli civilians, which he describes as āGodās justiceā: āAllah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do.ā
In spite of holding these views, Qaradawi is not an āextremistā in Khanās eyes.
In 2006, by which time heād been elected to Parliament, Khan was one of the signatories of a
letter to the Guardian that
blamed terrorist incidents, such as 7/7, on British foreign policy, particularly Britainās support for Israel. āIt is our view that current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad,ā it said.
So 10 years ago Khan held similar views about 7/7 to those of Ken Livingstone, who sparked outrage last November when he
said on Question Time that Tony Blairās foreign policy was to blame for the terrorist attack that left 52 Londoners dead....
Is it āIslamophobicā to draw attention to Sadiq Khanās links with extremists? | Coffee House
