Qaradawi is no longer welcome in the United Kingdom.
Will Gordon Brown also ban Hezbollah’s Ibrahim Mousawi, as David Cameron has argued he should?
Mousawi was the editor of Al-Manar: Hizbullah’s satellite TV channel. Al-Manar claimed that 9/11 was a Zionist conspiracy, and broadcast a TV show called ‘The Diaspora’ which is based on ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. Here are a couple of scenes from that show. When the French broadcasting authority proposed banning Al-Manar for inciting antisemitism Mousawi complained that this was because of ‘political pressure by the Jewish lobby’. Mousawi also told the New Yorker that Jews are ‘a lesion on the forehead of history’.
Mousawi was invited to the United Kingdom by the Stop the War Coalition last year. And now they’ve invited him back, for an eight date UK speaking tour.
The Socialist Workers’ Party is outraged by the suggestion that a vicious racist be excluded from the United Kingdom. They argue, in Mousawi’s defence:
In 2005 Mousawi invited Jewish religious leaders to a conference in Beirut and hosted them as guests on his talk show.
The “Jewish religious leaders” in question were Neturei Karta: a tiny, religious fundamentalist Haredi sect who see the exclusion of jews from the “Holy Land” as a “Divine Decree“: that is, a punishment for jewish infidelity to the word of god. Accordingly, they wish to see a secular Israel destroyed, so that it can be properly rebuilt by the Messiah, as a reward to jews for embracing the particular form of religious extremism that they peddle.
Great!