Via Harry's Place, I note that Dublin-based Imam Shaheed Satardienon, originally from South Africa, but now preaching to a congregation in the city is not performing the dog-ate-my-homework contortions of the Muslim Council of Britain, judging by an unusually frank and comprehensive statement to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, including this reference to the behaviour of Arab leaders, including Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Amin, during WW2:
It is sad to discover that although the majority of Muslims involved in WWII fought with the allies against the axis powers, there was collusion between a hand-full of prominent but unrepresentative Muslim clerics with the Nazi regime.
The Observer's Henry MacDonald gave more background on the Imam in an article in January.
Satardien fell out with the main Dublin mosque at Clonskeagh, singling out the influence of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian born sheikh who has spoken openly in support of suicide bombers and issued fatwas on gays.
According to Satardien, al-Qaradawi's European headquarters is based at the Clonskeagh mosque in south Dublin. Its own website refers to al-Qaradawi and to Clonskeagh as the headquarters of the sheikh's European Council for Fatwa and Research. The authorities at the Clonskeagh mosque and at the South Circular Road mosque, the other main establishment in Dublin, angrily deny the extremist accusation. They point out that these mosques attract thousands of mainstream Muslims to their doors each week.
Satardien, however, is adamant that extremist Wahhabi sects have infiltrated the republic's 40,000-strong Muslim community, especially in Dublin. 'Young, impressionable Muslims in Ireland are being raised to think that suicide bombers are cool. I know for a fact that when the Americans killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq who died after an airstrike in June last year] there were prayers for him in this city. This was for a man who slaughtered other Muslims. What I am trying to do is convince the young people that such practices are un-Islamic, that there is another way,' he says.
A big open question is what role the organisation Qaradawi leads, the Muslim Brotherhood, plays in Ireland. Given the Brotherhood's open role in terrorism in Israel - through its branch there, Hamas - in the violent insurrection in Syria in the eighties and earlier against the Egyptian government of Nasser - there's no question that it's extreme in its aims and perfectly willing to use violence, whether against outsiders or other Arab Muslims. So much so that, according to Foreign Office
memos leaked to the New Statesman's political editor Martin Bright, British diplomats, in spite of the Camel Corp stereotype, see no realistic possibility of talking to the Brotherhood.given the lack of common ground and its imperviousness to reason. All in all, the Brotherhood seems to be the same as same as Opus Dei is unfairly portrayed by Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code, a power-hungry group of fanatics who place no value on human life in their quest for power. Shouldn't somebody be doing some checking in Dublin?
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