BBC Praises Muslim Leader Who Wants Sharia in the UK

As is well known, the BBC Television reporters covering the Middle East — John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Orla Guerin, Lyse Doucet, and Yolande Knell — are full of ill-concealed anti-Israel animus. At the same time, they often express support for the Arab enemies of the Jewish state. And now BBC Radio has its own “useful idiots” who praise pro-Sharia Muslims living in England, including Haitham al-Haddad, described by a Muslim reformer as “one of the most dangerous men in England.” More on this latest display of diseased sympathy at the BBC can be found here.

There appears to be no bounds to the ‘useful idiocy’ of the BBC when it comes to enemies of liberty.

At the weekend, BBC Radio London presenter Asad Ahmad sought the counsel of Haitham al-Haddad, the chair of the Muslim Research and Development Foundation (MRDF), over the race riots which had just erupted across England. Haddad, if you are blissfully unaware, is a stalwart of the Islamist far right.

These were not “race riots,” but protests against Muslim criminals. Islam is not a race.

Not that listeners would know this from Ahmad’s introduction. He referred to the Saudi-trained cleric as a ‘highly respected imam’. ‘Highly respected’ by whom exactly? Certainly not by anyone who supports secularism, democracy or human rights. After all, Haddad is a proponent of the regressive ideology of caliphism. [meaning that he supports the return of the caliphate]. He thinks that the UK is an ungodly society and should be replaced by an Islamic state with a system of Sharia governance….

What’s more, according to Evangelising Hate, Haddad ‘believes that criticising suicide bombing is wrong because to do so would be to “nullify” “defensive jihad”’. He says it is a duty of Muslims to engage in jihad and ‘fight everyone until they establish the law of Allah’. On the day of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom in Israel, he posted on Facebook a prayer for Allah to grant victory to ‘the people of truth in Gaza’ against ‘their oppressors’….

Haddad is certainly a busy man. He has recently been on a PR trip to Afghanistan to meet up with officials from the Taliban. You can also find him promoting his caliphism on the Islam Channel and other UK-based Arabic-language channels. There you’ll discover he’s closely associated with Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), which has been accused of harbouring ‘Islamists masquerading as civil libertarians’, and the Muslim Association of Britain, which was founded by activists from the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

It’s perplexing, isn’t it? It would be one thing for the BBC to invite Haddad on air to challenge his views. It is quite another to present him as a ‘highly respected imam’, supposedly the ideal man to calm things down after days of violent rioting. The presenter even asked him, ‘What is your advice to the media, what is your advice to politicians, what should they do?’.

The riots show how society can violently fracture if communities lose trust in each other. Yet how can we rebuild that trust, that social cohesion, when the myopic BBC chooses to treat bigots like Haddad as fonts of wisdom?

The BBC Radio praises where it should condemn. It should not be holding up Haitham al-Haddad as just the man to help bind up the nation’s wounds after the recent anti-Muslim protests by English people fed up with Muslim violence and criminality. He is an agent for Islamic imperialism. He wants the caliphate to be renewed, for sharia to be imposed on everyone in Great Britain, for conducting da’wa to spread Islam — until Islam everywhere dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere.

What can be done about the BBC? Those who pay the mandatory license fee should start a movement to withhold that payment until such people as the BBC Radio presenter Ahmad Asad are fired for using their programs to praise, and give a platform to, someone as dangerous to the wellbeing of British non-Muslims as Haitham al-Haddad. Withholding those fees should get the attention of the higher-up in Bush House, for whom appeals to common sense and decency clearly have not worked.

The BBC is a public corporation, supported by the license fees that are mandatory for all people in the UK who watch television, even if they never watch the BBC. The mandatory license fee is now over 160 pounds per year; the assumption has always been that the BBC could be counted on for unbiased coverage, and so deserved this support. But the evidence of systematic anti-Israel bias, on the part of so many of its reporters, as revealed in the recent Asserson Report, fatally vitiates that assumption, and is one more reason why the government, if the BBC refuses to acknowledge the evidence of its anti-Israel bias and to discharge those responsible, should stop paying for its news operation.