Banning Islam4UK: The Fallout

It is now a criminal offence, punishable with a ten year jail sentence if you are a member of Islam4UK under “glorification” of terrorism laws. I’ve never been a fan of the group or their leadership, however, one has to look closely at the game being played.

While some have been debating whether or not they should be a proscribed organisation and the merits of it’s success, both sides have been playing a very careful game of propaganda.

Primarily, Anjem Choudary is given media time and publicity because big media need a pantomime villain or vocal outspoken Muslim (depending on your perspective) to demonise the entire Muslim community with, this of course has a double advantage in that it allows the government to push through more draconian laws to eat away at all of our ever shrinking civil liberties.

Secondly, my biggest fear from this is the government can now legitimise their position, whereby they can and will now silence anyone who opposes their murderous foreign policy. Increasing numbers of people are seeing the government as a totalitarian dictatorship when it comes to anyone who opposes their agenda.

The general view amongst the younger, less read Muslims will be an increase in a “blame the kuff” mentality. The general feeling of alienation runs prevalent among the themes of; they can be arrested for holding demonstrations and if you say the war is immoral or wrong, your group is banned and you are made to look like terrorists. If you open up new organisations, the government will invent a new law banning an individual from running an organisation that criticises the governments for state sponsored acts of terrorism against Muslims.

Anjem Choudary stated:

“What the people will see is if you don’t agree with the government and you want to expose their foreign policy, then freedom quickly dissipates and turns into dictatorship.”

The government sat on its hands for far too long, and waited for a catalyst of an event to take place, such as the proposed march through Wootton Bassett, before it would act, the only victory for any side here is pyrrhic at best.

Watching Anjem & Maj go at it on Newsnight lastnight (here on the BBC) was shameful to say the least, with the two bickering like little children in a school playground.

This is precisely the issue, neither of the two individuals, and the groups they represent, carry any sort of mass appeal to Muslims in the UK, yet they are given a platform on the media as so called 'representatives' of what Muslims in this country are like and these are the types of Muslims that the masses are allowed to see.

Seeing both of them are Muslims (far be it for me to pass takfir) perhaps they need to be reminded that we are told to constantly stick to the middle ground, follow the Siratul-Mustaqueem, it would be ideal for all to heed such advice.

There has been a sustained media scaremongering campaign, the net result has been a conditioning of our mindsets to accept the criminalising of dissenting opinion.

As I see it, if groups such as these are proscribed, they will be driven underground, they will become violent, thereby becoming the self-fulfilling prophecy that the government will have you believe about Muslims.