IslamExpo 11-14 July.

[NGONGE]

^^ I was not. Not in that last post anyway.

[Paragon]

Went there once. Ne'er going back.

[-Serenity-]

^hehe! Maxaa kugu dhacay?

 

I've never been to any of these events, so I'll try to check it out this time.

 

The only thing that caught my interest was the debate chaired by Raageh Omar tomorrow. I think thats worth going to if you're in the city.

 

20.15 - 21.45 Sponsored by Aljazeera: Media: Propagating Information or Prejudice?

 

Debate

 

Frank Gardner, Seumas Milne, Andrew Gilligan and Wadah Khanfar.

 

Chair: Rageh Omaar

 

Location: Main Hal

[Haneefah]

Originally posted by Ibtisam:

ISLAMIC GARDENS

Relax and reflect in our Persian, Andalucian, Mughal and Ottoman Gardens. Listen to Quran recitation, storytelling and poetry.

A Moorish garden? Really? *Imagines sipping mint tea in the below garden, listening to my favourite qasidah being recited, aaaah*

 

 

Ibty, do me a favour and go experience some for me, will ya? (However far it may be from the real deal )

[N.O.R.F]

Serenity, did you go?

 

Some political shananigans before the debates.

 

IslamExpo has gained the moral high groundPoliticians who failed to attend the four-day festival arranged by British Muslims have been left looking craven and small-minded

 

 

You might imagine that a four-day festival organised by British Muslim activists to showcase Islamic culture and engage in political debate with Muslims and non-Muslims alike would be welcomed by anyone who cares about the future of community relations in Britain.

 

IslamExpo, which has been running in London's Olympia for the past three days, has certainly lived up to its billing: more than 40,000 people have already attended an extraordinary celebration of the diversity of Muslim art and culture, while the range of discussion about some of the most contentious issues surrounding the Muslim community has been impressive by any reckoning.

 

US academic specialists like John Esposito, John Voll and Robert Leiken have debated political Islam with the likes of Tariq Ramadan and Rached al-Ghannouchi, who played a crucial role in reconciling mainstream Islamism with democratic principles in the 1990s.

 

In a panel on the media chaired by Rageh Omar on Friday, I spoke alongside Peter Oborne of the Daily Mail, Wadah Khanfar, head of the al-Jazeera network, and the Evening Standard's Andrew Gilligan, who was happy to denounce the Muslims4Ken London election campaign and the Muslim Council of Britain for supposedly being "too close to radical Islamists".

 

But instead of taking part in the dialogue they all claim to believe in, several frontline politicians pulled out of the event at the last minute, including the employment minister Stephen Timms, international development minister Shahid Malik and Sayeeda Warsi, Tory community cohesion spokeswoman.

 

The trigger for their sudden withdrawal from a rare opportunity to engage with thousands of British Muslims (others such as the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes resisted the pressure to withdraw) seems to have been an Evening Standard article by the increasingly extreme anti-Islamist campaigner Ed Husain comparing the event to a British National Party rally.

 

The basis for his absurd claim were the real or imagined links of some of the organisers with Hamas, winners of the last Palestinian elections, or the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest political movement in the Arab world. The main squeeze was put on by Hazel Blears' communities and local government department, which has been playing an increasingly retrograde and self-defeating role in relations with the Muslim community.

 

Several other anti-Islamist crusaders — including Martin Bright of the New Statesman and Douglas Murray, director of the rightwing Centre for Social Cohesion — then also grandly pulled out of IslamExpo debates they had earlier agreed to take part in. The pretext given was the fact that one of the organisers is suing the neocon website Harry's Place over a highly inflammatory mistranslation of a comment reported on the al-Jazeera website.

 

The net result of all this is that organisers of IslamExpo – who have shown themselves to be committed to pluralism and ready to engage in a dialogue with their harshest critics – have been handed the political and moral high ground. The New Labour and Tory frontbenchers and their ideological spine-stiffeners, on the other hand, have been left looking craven, small-minded and unable to face up to some of the most pressing demands of our time.

 

[N.O.R.F]

Ed Hussain's piece

 

Four suicide bombers on London's transport system is what it took to jolt Britain awake in 2005. Politicians of all parties turned a blind eye to the underworld from which suicidal terrorists emerge. Much has changed since 7/7. But not enough has happened to foster a real sense of belonging for all communities across Britain.

 

Extremists from all sides are on the rise. While conventional politicians conduct business as usual in Westminster, activist fascist politicians at street level have changed tack. The BNP appears in suits and increasingly focuses on Muslims, while Islamist extremists are busy embedding themselves among moderates to seem normal.

 

For fascism and racism are not the sole preserve of white people. A significant number of activist Muslims, better known as Islamists, are every bit as fascist as any far-Right party. By their own admission they oppose democracy, aim to create a dictatorial "caliphate" with an expansionist army, wish to destroy Israel and to subjugate normal Muslims to their harsh version of Islam.

 

Just as popes abused Christianity during the Crusades, some Muslim clerics today support suicide bombings in the name of Islam. Supporters of these clerics are more organised in London today than in any other city in Europe.

 

What has changed since 7/7 is the tactics and the public rhetoric of the extremists. Under pressure from Muslim activists, "Islamophobia" has become accepted as a phenomenon on a par with racism, as examined in tonight's Channel 4 documentary by political journalist Peter Oborne, for example.

 

Outside a few flashpoints where the BNP is at work, most Muslims would be hard-pressed to identify Islamophobia in their lives. Yet that is the charge every time the extremists press for new "rights" - over dress in the workplace, for example. If there is anti-Muslim sentiment, we Muslims have to ask what some of us have done to provoke such feelings in a country that is proudly multi-cultural. Islamist extremism might be a good starting point.

 

But the greatest shift since 7/7, for an array of groups that are offshoots of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, has been to embed themselves into the British and Muslim mainstream. I was once part of those movements - I know their psyche. And well-meaning liberals who would not share a platform, even for a debate, with a BNP supporter, are only too keen to be seen with Muslim versions of the BNP.

 

For example, this week, just days after the 7/7 anniversary, London's Olympia will see a massive, four-day event sponsored by the London Development Agency, a Ken Livingstone commitment to his friends. Called IslamExpo, the event seems ostensibly harmless and is sure to attract tens of thousands of young Muslims.

 

Journalists and academics, non-Muslim and Muslim, will speak at the event to lend it a veneer of respectability. But closer examination of the programme reveals something else. The most frequent speakers at this event are advocates of suicide bombing. The directors of Islam Expo Limited, as registered at Companies House, include well-known supporters of clerics who provide theological support for suicide bombers.

 

Azzam Tamimi, a director, has repeatedly expressed his belief that suicide bombings are martyrdom operations, and lead to paradise in the next life. Another director, Kathem Sawalha, was named as a co-conspirator in a 2003 indictment brought by US federal prosecutors in Chicago against Hamas activists in the US. According to the indictment, before Mr Sawalha moved to London in the early Nineties, he was a Hamas leader in the West Bank. Why are such men being allowed to organise and repeatedly address young Muslims in London?

 

Their endorsement of martyrdom operations in Tel Aviv makes it theologically possible to attack innocents in London and New York. The suicide bomber who seeks his place in paradise, as promised to him by clerics such as Yusuf al Qaradawi (hosted by Ken Livingstone), sees Brits and Israelis as one thing: kuffar, or infidel.

 

If you doubt my words, ask the innocent people at university campuses in Pakistan about how Islamists control - through violence and intimidation - their secular Muslim student opposition. Or ask those who live under the tyranny that is Hamas in Gaza. If you still want evidence, then read the writings of the founding father of Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, and digest his view of non-Muslims and Muslims as distinct races and peoples.

 

Islamists are a threat to Islam and Muslims. Before they started bombing Western cities, they started their campaign of terror by killing fellow Muslims in Egypt, inspired by the writings of Qutb and the repression practised by most Arab governments.

 

Mohammed Siddique Khan, the lead bomber behind 7/7, did not read Qutb. But those fanatical ideas of separation and superiority had gained a hold among many young Muslims - hence Khan's "martyrdom" video message, in which he said Britain was at war with "his people". Fellow Brits were not his people but an imagined "Muslim nation".

 

These ideas still loom large in London. Britain's central mosque in Regent's Park allows extremists from Hizb ut-Tahrir to hold public meetings every Saturday afternoon. A satellite television channel, calling itself the "Islam Channel", run by droves of Islamists, is beamed into young Muslim homes across Britain from London. And this week there's IslamExpo.

 

My challenge to extremist Islamists is this: if you're not peddling an ideology, Islamism, then declare yourselves normal Muslims and condemn suicide bombings, privately and publicly, disown clerics such as Qaradawi, and jettison Islamism. Accept that Britain is a secular country, not open to Islamisation. Why should ordinary Muslims have to pay the price for your political agenda?

 

Livingstone made a major mistake during his time as Mayor in pandering to these extremists - a position that seems to have come from believing ethnic and religious minorities were always right, no matter what. That kind of attitude helped create a victimhood mentality and the constant playing of community politics, rather than emphasis on individual citizenship.

 

Boris Johnson has a fresh mandate. He knows the organisers behind this week's event are those that cry Islamophobia. Will he co-opt them, appease or oppose them? His starting point could be to expose their Westophobia, and empower the right side in this battle of ideas.

 

* Ed Husain is co-director of the Quilliam Foundation, a Muslim think-tank, and author of The Islamist (Penguin, 2007).

 

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23511284-details/Stop+pandering+to+the+Islamist+extre mists/article.do

Erm erm you write for the Standard mate :rolleyes:

[N.O.R.F]

Minister told to stay away from Islam event by Labour officials

 

Britain's first Muslim minister has been prevented from addressing an Islamic conference after an interdepartmental row over the alleged political affiliations of an organiser of the London event.

 

Shahid Malik, the international development minister, had been due to speak at the opening ceremony of Islam Expo on Friday evening, alongside the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes and Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London.

 

The behind-the-scenes dispute, involving fierce opposition to the event voiced by the Department of Communities and Local Government, lasted for several days, and is understood to have dragged in officials at Downing Street. A spokesman for the department said: "We have reservations about the organisers of the event, therefore we [the government] chose not to send any ministers."

 

Around 40,000 people will have attended the four-day event in Olympia, in west London, by the time it closes later today. It featured sessions on Islamic art, cooking and culture, as well as debates.

 

Hours before the event, Malik contacted Anas Altikriti, one of the directors of the conference, and apologised for the fact that he would not be able to attend.

 

Malik had accepted an invitation to speak at the opening ceremony. "It seems that by Wednesday he got into difficulty with certain people - within his own party - advising him not to come," Altikriti said. "Shahid realised the importance of the event and was going to try everything in his power to make it. He realised ... how untrue the criticism of the events and the organisers were.

 

"A few hours before, he informed me that the pressure was mounting from all quarters ... After that he called and apologised for not being able to turn up."

 

During their discussion, there were exchanges about alleged political support by another of the organisers for the Palestinian group Hamas.

 

Altikriti said: "It's quite breathtaking ... to ban one of the most prominent Muslim politicians and [stop] him saying what he wishes. [Malik] had been told that among the organisers were people associated with Hamas. This isn't a Hamas project."

 

Asked about his withdrawal, Malik said: "I obviously apologised to the organisers. It was unfortunately due to matters outside of my control."

 

The Tory Muslim peer Lord Sheikh had also been due to attend the opening ceremony. Altikriti said the peer had been unable to make it due to a bad back.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/14/islam.race

[Fabregas]

And who is "Lord Sheikh", baalayo idin Lordisaye?

[N.O.R.F]

I didn't know what his name was the Development Minister :confused: