Quote of the week

This actually appeared in last week's Spectator. Charles Moore's comments are worth quoting in full:

Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, the leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, was in the clerical party at the Cenotaph for Remembrance Day. I wonder what he was commemorating. The MCB consistently refuses to condemn the killing and kidnapping of British servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The day before, Dr Abdul Bari said that Britain resembled Nazi Germany. In its recent report, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, the think-tank Policy Exchange revealed that among the various publications for sale at Dr Abdul Bari’s East London Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre (as well as one called Women Who Deserve To Go To Hell) is a multi-volume, Saudi-funded work called Islamic Verdicts. The book includes questions and answers. In one, a man seeks guidance because he lives with ‘Christian brothers’. The answer starts by saying that the phrase must be ‘a slip of the tongue’ because ‘there is absolutely no brotherhood between the Muslims and the Christians’. Dr Abdul Bari stood with Christian clergy in apparent fraternity in Whitehall on Sunday, yet when the Daily Telegraph on Saturday invited him to condemn the publications sold under his roof he defended them on the grounds that the bookshops are ‘independent businesses’. I rather think that if you could buy a book called, for instance, The Only Good Muslim is a Dead Muslim, in the Westminster Abbey bookshop, Dr Abdul Bari would (rightly) have something to say.