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Al-Muhajiroun refuses to condemn London bombings, warns of more attacks
Tony Blair met leading British Muslims at No 10 Downing Street today and said afterwards that the Muslim community was agreed on the need to tackle "head on" the problem of extremism in its midst.

The terror summit came nearly two weeks after four young Muslims blew themselves up in co-ordinated suicide bombing attacks on a London bus and three Tube trains, killing at least 56 people.

Mr Blair said all those at the meeting, which included 25 Muslim representatives and business leaders, agreed on the need to help identify and weed out potential terrorists in Muslim communities.

"There was a strong desire from everybody there to make sure that we establish the right mechanisms for people to be able to go into the community and confront this in a serious way," he added.

The meeting is expected to lead to the creation of a taskforce, whose members will be asked to listen to young Muslims across the country, and find out what turns young men leading visibly normal lives into mass murderers.

Shahid Malik, the Labour MP for Dewsbury, where one of the London bombers lived, said as he emerged from the summit: "The feeling was that there is a profound challenge. I think everyone here is up for the challenge. We have to work better at confronting these evil voices, minute as they are in our community."

But before the meeting, two of the country's most controversial Islamic militants said that Muslims should not be sitting down to negotiate with the Government. In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Anjem Choudary, leader of the dissolved militant group al-Muhajiroun, refused to condemn the July 7 suicide bombings and gave warning that there was a "very real possibility" of another terror attack in the UK.

"I don’t think one should legitimately sit down and negotiate," Mr Choudary said. "I think the time for talking, quite honestly, is over. Now is the time for action. You can’t sit down and negotiate while you are murdering Muslims in Iraq."

He added: "It is not a question of whether one condemns or condones what took place on 7/7 - 7/7 is a reality. We need to see what caused this particular effect, otherwise we are going to continue in a cycle of blood and I believe another 7/7 is a very real possibility."

Mr Choudary's comments were echoed by Omar Bakri Mohammed, the radical Syrian-born cleric who has been accused of trying to foment hatred in the UK. Although he condemned the July 7 attacks, he said the British people only had themselves to blame because they re-elected Mr Blair despite the Iraq war.

Mr Bakri told the London Evening Standard: "I blame the British Government and I blame the British people. They are the ones who should be blamed. The British Government has said, ‘You are with us or with terrorism’. I don’t think that is the way forward."

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said that the meeting was "an important listening exercise for the Prime Minister and people across the Muslim spectrum". He added that what was was needed now was a "bit of space" so that no-one "rushed into solutions".

Michael Howard, the Conservative Party leader, and Charles Kennedy, of the Liberal Democrats, also attended. Mr Howard said: "I think the one thing really that comes out most strongly from this meeting is the responsibility of the Muslim community for reaching out to those who have been the targets of the merchants of evil and hatred. We know that they have been targeting young Muslims and filling their minds with their messages of hate."

The three major parties yesterday reached cross-party agreement to rush new laws on to the statute book by December preventing the preparation and incitement of terrorist acts and the training of terrorists.

Longer-term measures also under consideration by the Government include forcing mosques to make criminal record — and possibly police intelligence — checks on any person given unsupervised access to young people.

Schools and children’s homes already have a statutory obligation to make these checks. Many religious groups routinely follow suit, but most mosques and Muslim community centres do not. Ministers are understood to be astonished that no screening is done of imams, officials and volunteers in mosques, who can spend hours talking to impressionable teenagers.

Another area of concern is the role played by more than 100 independent Islamic schools operating outside the state system. David Bell, the head of Ofsted, said in January that such schools were a potential threat to national identity. He called on the Government to monitor their growth to ensure that pupils learnt "the wider tenets of British society", such as "respect for other cultures in a way that promotes tolerance and harmony".

There has been controversy over state-funded Muslim "faith schools". But ministers believe that these are a better way of meeting parents’ desire for an Islamic education, not least because they have to follow the national curriculum and are subject to regular inspections.
Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-07-19
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=124473