manicstreetpreacher comments on what will hopefully (yeah, right!) be the last time we will have to put up with this clown.
Islamist hate-preacher, Anjem Choudary, made a complete fool of himself on Tuesday night’s edition of Newsnight (11 January 2010) when he debated Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation on the UK government’s decision to ban his crackpot fundamentalist organisation, Al-Muhajiroun, also known as Islam4UK.
The full interview can be viewed over at BBC iPlayer. The report begins at c. 20 minutes and it will be available until 11:19pm on Tuesday, 19 January 2010. I will update this piece to include the YouTube videos as soon as some kind person edits and uploads them. 😮
UPDATE 29 January 2010
The YouTube clip is below.
Choudary comes across incredibly badly and will not make any friends from this appearance. He relies on shouting and talking over people as a tactic in debating and by being evasive and deceptive. Harry’s Place has listed all the lies and evasions that Choudary spouted during the interview:
Lie 1
- “Al Muhajiroun is not a HT offshoot” – ALM was set up by Omar Bakri who used to be the leader of HT in the UK and set up ALM after he had been expelled from HT.
Lie 2
- “I was never with HT” – Anjem was an activist with HT for a number of years and met Bakri through HT lectures. I personally met him when he was with HT, as did many others including Maajid.
Lie 3
- “I have never met Maajid Nawaz” – Anjem represented Maajid in a legal case at Newham College in 1993 and they met again on The Big Questions last year.
Lie 4
- “I have not received any money from the government” – Anjem and his family of 4 have been living off state benefits for over 10 years.
Lie 5
- “We don’t believe in appealing against man made law” – Yet Abu Izzadeen (ALM member) lodged an appeal at the court of appeals in 2008.
Lie 6
- “Islam4UK got banned because it was exposing the Government foreign policy” – Islam4UK is working to bring convert Britain into a Caliphate under Shariah law and they support the Taliban and Al Qaeda in places like Afghanistan. They also approve of terror tactics and praise terrorist attacks. It is not a lobby group that exists to highlight bad policy – there are many such lobby groups that have not been banned.
Lie 7
- “Britain is an apartheid system” – Anjem clearly does not know the meaning of this word. He lives freely in the UK, has the same legal rights as everyone else, is free to express his anti-western views, speak out against British Foreign policy and claim generous state benefits. As Maajid pointed out, he has not spent any time in jail and is regularly invited on various TV shows to express his views. Clearly, his organisation has abused these privileges to incite violence, support terrorism and spread fear and hate. As such they deserve to be banned.
Questions avoided
- “Are you on the dole?”
- “Will I (Maajid) be executed in Anjem’s version of the Khalifate?”
- “Is non-Muslim blood halal for you”
Choudary’s and Nawaz’s previous clash on BBC One’s The Big Questions from March 2009 can be viewed below:
Part 1/2
Part 2/2
I was left rather cold by Nawaz after seeing him against Choudary on this occasion. He attempted to portray the mad mullah as a fringe radical who was a perverting “true Islam” and his use of the “serious scholarship” card (known to atheists as “The Courtier’s Reply”) made my eyes roll. I have recently given my thoughts on this brand of religious moderation, but in a nutshell, Choudary may well be a nasty piece of work who risks giving demagogy a bad name, but he is no psychopath.
A layman listening to Nawaz would not think that the core texts of Islam were to blame, when I know that they are most definitely are. I have to disagree with the writer of the above Harry’s Place post on a few points. While Choudary is a “charlatan” with “neither principles nor basic manners” and “how anyone can look up to the guy or regard him as a leader” is indeed beyond me, he is still a man guided by his faith. He does really believe this stuff.
Nevertheless, Nawaz redeemed himself on Newsnight by playing a blinder in asking Choudary the same three questions over and over again without getting a straight answer. Even the usually stone-faced Paxman was practically in stitches as Choudary avoided Nawaz’s questions about whether he would be executed as an apostate under Choudary’s caliphate and how much in state benefits he was claiming. It was all rather reminiscent of Paxman’s notorious interview of former Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard where he asked his subject 12 times about his alleged overruling of the head of the Prison Service, Derek Lewis without success.
However, what is utterly tragic about Choudary is that a few years ago, he was a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, soft-core porn reading student who had a sense of humour like the rest of us.
I only hope that now his pathetic jihadist organisation has now finally been criminalised, mainstream television can stop giving him airtime, even if it is to wheel out the court jester.
manicstreetpreacher 