Islam versus Europe

Inayat Bunglawala, media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, essentially the British face of the Muslim Brotherhood, has announced that he has filed complaints about Melanie Phillips to the Press Complaints Council and the police. The complaints relate to the following passage in a blog post she made about the murder of the Fogel family in Israel, a murder which included the beheading of a 2-year-old child:

So to the New York Times, it’s not the Arab massacre of a Jewish family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ -- because the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages -- but instead Israeli policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive.

Let's review some of Mr Bunglawala's history. In his student years, he participated in the protests against Salman Rushdie's book, the Satanic Verses. Recalling the episode later, Inayat Bunglawala admitted he was consumed by a spirit of hatred and savagery:

on February 14 1989, when the Iranian Islamic leader, Imam Khomeini delivered his fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie's death, I was truly elated. It was a very welcome reminder that British Muslims did not have to regard themselves just as a small, vulnerable minority; they were part of a truly global and powerful movement. If we were not treated with respect then we were capable of forcing others to respect us.

Ironically for someone accusing Melanie Phillips of racism, Bunglawala has a long and undistinguished history of anti-semitism himself. He has promoted the idea of a vast, Jewish conspiracy in the media:

“The chairman of Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade and Alan Yentob…[They are] close friends… so that’s what they mean by a ‘free media’.”

There is more on Bunglawala's anti-semitism here.

Bunglawala is also on record as having praised the terrorists Osama bin Laden "freedom fighter" and Omar Abdul Rahman, the "courageous" blind sheikh.

Interestingly, in 2009 Bunglawala was arrested by the police for having stabbed a man six times.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council claimed it was all a conspiracy got up by the "the Daily Mail and the Zionist blogosphere" motivated by a desire to "financially and psychologically hurt one of the bulwarks against Israel amongst British Muslim leaders".

According to MPAC, the true story was this:

What actually happened for those who do not know, is an intruder tried to break into the house of Inayat in the middle of the night. Inayat's 3 year old child was sleeping as was his pregnant wife, woken by the noise of a man who at first tried to kick in the front door and then failing that, smashed the downstairs window. Inayat confronted the intruder and in the scuffle the intruder was stabbed.

...

It is time we Muslims learned to get political, to demand an end to this outrage, this witch hunt, this racist, malignant Islamaphobia pushed by Zionists in the media and Parliament that now infects the country’s elite and through them, the good people of Britain. Until Muslims start to stand up, we may as well give up on the word freedom and prepare ourselves for slavery.

So it was all self-defence then? The police indeed decided not to proceed with a prosecution. Bunglawala had close ties to the previous Blair-Brown Labour government, so perhaps that is not surprising. Of key significance, though, as the photograph shows, is the fact that Bunglawala stabbed the man six times in the back. How do you stab someone six times in the back defensively?