UK Prime Minister David Cameron has criticized the Muslim Council of Britain for comparing the government to the far right over its letters to the country’s mosques.
Cameron has said that the Muslim Council of Britain “has a problem” after it accused ministers of behaving like the “far right”.
This followed the Telegraph disclosure of official letters by the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles to 1,100 mosque imams and Islamic leaders, saying that they must do more to root out “men of hate” who preach extremism.
The Muslim Council of Britain responded by urging Pickles to clarify his request, asking if like “members of the far right”, he was suggesting that Islam is inherently apart from the rest of British society.
This was met by Cameron’s defense of the letters, where he said: “It’s absolutely right to write this letter, to say we all have a responsibility to fight extremism.”
Now Raza Nadim, member of the London-based Muslim Public Affairs Committee, says: “The concern of British Muslims has been quite ignored for the last couple of years, and specially after Charlie Hebdo, there seems to be an… amount of focus on the Muslim community, placing the blame of terrorism only at the door of Muslims, but when it has to do with foreign policy at large part.”
Nadim told Press TV’s UK Desk on Monday that “the rhetoric that we are seeing from the British government does not come to us as foreign. It’s to do with in my opinion with the counterterrorism bill, which is trying to be rushed through the parliament, and this bill was actually a very dangerous piece of legislation. If you actually look at what it contains, it’s actually very damaging for freedom in this country, how it can snoop on people’s private discussions etc. It is a curtailing of people’s personal freedom specially Muslims.”
He concluded that the UK’s and in general the West’s foreign policy in countries like those in the Middle East was to blame for the upsurge in radicalism.
RSH/GHN
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