The UK's paranoid Muslims

Times:

To wander the streets of Sparkbrook yesterday, from shabby corner shop to proud, white-domed mosque, was to enter a world where conspiracy theories are the breath of life.

Many ordinary Muslims did not believe that Wednesday’s arrests were an act to foil a terrorist plot aiming to visit unspeakable barbarity on a young British soldier.

Rather the entire operation was a giant con trick. This fits a growing perception of a post-9/11 world in which innocent Muslims are demonised, and the terror threat manufactured to suit the dark designs of the West’s Judaeo-Christian elite.

The decision to distribute 5,000 multilingual leaflets, carefully setting out details of the anti-terrorist operation and the events leading up to it, may have sought to offer a well intentioned reassurance “that the police are not targeting communities or faiths, but suspected criminals”.

To many Muslims that message has fallen on deaf ears. That many seem not to believe police reassurances is at least in part because they are listening to a very different message from mosques across the city. Take the Birmingham Central Mosque, where up to 4,000 people will be attending Friday prayers today.

Its chairman for the past 32 years has been Mohammed Naseem, a past champion of interfaith dialogue who was for many years regarded as a voice of Islamic moderation. A year ago, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Birmingham.

Dr Nasseem, 83, yesterday told The Times of his certainty that the nine arrested men were innocent of any crime and would eventually be released without charge.

He spoke of his conviction that the Government was “pursuing a policy of maintaining a perception of a [terrorist] threat to justify the draconian anti-terror laws they have been passing”.

He went on to compare Tony Blair’s Britain to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. People were beginning to realise, he said, that the Government had embarked on “a campaign to strike terror in the hearts of the Muslim people”.

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Mohammed Idrees was prepared to talk. A 37-year-old car mechanic, he was polite, friendly and utterly certain that any plot to kill a British Muslim soldier had been the work of “the Government or people hired by the Government”.

Mr Idrees went on to explain that his duty as a Muslim came before his duty to Britain. He would leave the country rather than fight against a fellow Muslim in a country such as Iraq or Afghanistan.

There are mosques in Birmingham whose views are far more radical than the Central Mosque.

The Markazi Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith, on Green Lane, was outraged to be the subject of an undercover television investigation last month in which a preacher was secretly filmed as he allegedly spouted hatred of Christians and Jews. Osama bin Laden was better than a thousand Tony Blairs, explained Abu Usamah, before going on to describe homosexuals as “perverted, filthy dogs” and explaining that all women have a deficient intellect.

The mosque, which is affiliated to the Muslim Council of Britain, later complained that it was “committed to promoting interfaith dialogue and political harmony”. It said it did not necessarily agree with the views of all the scholars who spoke in its premises.

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Do these guys have any idea how their paranoia lowers respect fro Islam as a religion. If these people can believe the paranoid nonsense they are spouting what does that say about the religion they profess to believe?