Mosaic Magazine reports:
The UK may be paying the wrong people to turn Muslim youth away from terrorism.
The United Kingdom has created or sponsored programs to bring young Muslims deemed at risk of radicalization into contact with Muslim “anti-extremists” who will help them toward a more peaceable vision of their religion. While these anti-extremists are genuinely opposed to Islamic State and al-Qaeda, writes John Ware, their views about Israel are far from moderate. One of them, the government-approved mentor Hanif Qadir, refers to Palestinians who stab Jewish civilians as “resistance fighters”:
A first stage in the development of
extremist ideas can be, as Prime Minister David Cameron has said, a
belief in conspiracy theories about Jews exercising malevolent power. So
what about this tweet from Qadir when Israel launched Operation
Protective Edge, its 50-day military assault on Gaza to stop rocket fire
into Israel in the summer of 2014? “A whole nation is being radicalized
to exterminate the Palestinians. Where are the interventionists? Who is
going to prevent this terrorism?” “Exterminate”? There could be no more
serious, nor tendentious, charge against Jews. . . .
At the height of operation Protective
Edge, Qadir also tweeted a picture showing Israelis supposedly playing
badminton inside the al-Aqsa mosque. . . . The picture was captioned:
“One of the most disturbing images of today. This is inside al-Aqsa
mosque!! Palestinians were not allowed to pray inside but these people
are allowed to play!” Attached to it were pictures of what look like
smoldering Qurans and a woman defiling a Quran by standing on it with
her bare feet and painted toenails.
The picture . . . appears to have come
from Turkish media reports in July 2013 showing badminton (and karate
and soccer) being played—not in Jerusalem but in the Milas mosque in the
Mugla province of Turkey. A simple Google search would have alerted
Qadir to his error.
Read more @ Standpoint
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