And another thing…

ANWAR AL-AWLAKI is an extremist Muslim preacher who has been banned from entering the UK. In January this year – ten months ago – he said this:

As Muslims we should not subject Islam to the whims of the people, “if they chose it we implement it, if they don’t we accept the choice of the masses”.

Our position is that we will implement the rule of Allah on earth by the tip of the sword whether the masses like it or not. We will not subject Sharia rule to popularity contests. Rasulullah says:

“I was sent with the sword until Allah alone is worshiped.” That path, the path of Rasulullah, is the path we should follow.

Yet it took until last Wednesday for Osama Saeed – SNP candidate, former adviser to Alex Salmond and recipient of the SNP government’s largesse – finally to condemn him. Until then, Saeed described Al-Awlaki as “a preacher of peace”.

Saeed with his benefactor and former employer

Undoubtedly, Saeed, who is determined to affect an air of respectability, given his position within the SNP and the SNP-funded Scottish-Islamic Foundation, sees the danger in being associated with a man who has now been implicated in the Fort Hood murders and whose mosque was attended by three two of the 9/11 terrorists.

Saeed says he now feels “cheated” by Al-Awlaki. When did this feeling emerge? Was it only when Al-Awlaki’s alleged links to the Fort Hood murderer emerged? If so, why not sooner? Why not last year when Al-Awlaki told a Somali jihadist group:

We are following your recent news and it fills our hearts with immense joy… The ballot has failed us but the bullet has not.

Beautiful sentiments. But this was not enough for Saeed to feel he should reverse his previous comments praising him.

And Saeed, remember, is the person who described Yusuf Qaradawi – he who said capital punishment was an appropriate punishment for homosexuals – as “an eminent scholar”.

Maybe the reason Saeed is such a fan of Al-Awlaki and Qaradawi is not so much their rather conservative views on gay rights and armed aggression, but because of their support for the re-establishment of the worldwide Islamic caliphate – a cause which Saeed admits he supports.

And apparently he was the best of the candidates put before the selection panel!

No doubt, the usual nat apologists will leave comments criticising me for criticising Saeed. But even they must know, in their heart of hearts, that their party has made a colossal mistake in selecting this man as a candidate.

HITLER managed to “put the Jews in their place”, according to this video of radical Islamist scholar, Yusuf Qaradawi.

According to this paper, written by Qaradawi, the beating of wives is acceptable. And here, Qaradawi writes that western tolerance of homosexuality “put man in a position even worse than animals” and suggests that capital punishment is an appropriate response to homosexuality.

But, according to Osama Saeed, who leads the Scottish Islamic Foundation, Qaradawi is an “eminent scholar”. Saeed has complained that the BBC accurately reported Qaradawi’s relelant views of violence against women and homosexuals.

Oh, and did I mention that Saeed was last week formally endorsed as a parliamentary candidate for the nationalists in Scotland?

In doing so, the nationalists have become the first “mainstream” party in the United Kingdom to endorse an Islamist candidate. 

Saeed, a former aide to Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, and whose organisation was given £400,000 of public money by Salmond shortly after it was set up, subscribes to the fundamental principle of Islamists throughout the world: the re-establishment of a worldwide caliphate.

Why has a party which has made such strides in establishing its “moderate” credentials allowed itself to become the only party in the country trying to elect an Islamist to parliament?

I suspect that if you were to speak to nationalists at every level in the party, from leafleter to Salmond himself, you would find an ignorance, or even apathy, about Islamism and the threat it poses. It’s more important, they will claim (probably only privately), to have an articulate young Muslim fighting a seat that is currently held by Scotland’s only Muslim MP, Mohammad Sarwar, and which will be fought at the next election by Sarwar’s son, Anas, as Labour’s candidate.

Perhaps Saeed’s views on separate state-funded Islamic schools and his support for clerics’ extremist views will play well in the seat which has a high population of Muslim voters, they have concluded. If so, then endorsing an Islamist is a small price to pay for the prospect of winning the seat, surely? That’s a very patronising and ignorant view, of course, so highly likely to be held by the SNP.

Salmond and the rest of his party are turning a blind eye to Saeed’s views. Either that or they fully understand the illiberal and intolerant nature of Islamism and wish deliberately to entrench it in Scottish and British society, or see such infection of the body politic as a small price to pay for winning some votes.

Or perhaps, like the Scottish media, they believe that different standards should be applied to Muslim and non-Muslim candidates, or at least tolerated? This is a dangerous and sensitive area to write about, after all, and no-one wants even to risk being accused of racism. “Islamism? Isn’t that the same as Islam? Well, it’s a cultural thing, isn’t it? All very complicated…”

No electoral prize could justify the endorsement of an Islamist as a Parliamentary candidate. There is a huge difference between Islam and Islamism. Islamism, the view that Islam is a political as well as a religious movement, has found its voice in controversial organisations such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Association of Britain (for which Saeed acted as spokesman for a number of years) and Al-Quaeda.

No socially liberal, progressive, democratic party would ever have endorsed Osama Saeed as a parliamentary candidate. Following his endorsement by the SNP, it’s fair to say that no socially liberal, progressive, democratic party yet has.

JUST three months after it was formed, the Scottish-Islamic Foundation was awarded £215,000 by the SNP government, even though it hadn’t actually submitted all the necessary paperwork, according to today’s Scotland on Sunday.

SIF was founded, and is led, by SNP candidate Osama Saeed, who is also a former employee of First Minister Alex Salmond.

The report goes on:

“Along with Saeed, the SIF is being run by several other SNP figures, including SNP researcher Humza Yousaf, MSP Bashir Ahmed and former SNP researcher Noman Tahir. The board also contains members of Saeed’s family.”

In the meantime, Labour MSP Johann Lamont has asked a number of pertinent parliamentary questions about the “arrangement”.

OSAMA Saeed, SNP candidate in Glasgow Central, must have woken up with a smile on his face this morning. His decision to start up his very own Muslim organisation, the Scottish-Islamic Foundation, has certainly been noticed by those in the Scottish Executive who make funding decisions: in July it was reported to have been awarded £215,000 for… well, it was awarded £215,000.

Now The Daily Record report it has been given another £190,000.

Oh, did I mention that Saeed is an SNP candidate at the next general election? Or that he used to work for Alex Salmond? Just so we’re clear.

Let me make it clear that there is no doubt in my mind that if SIF had been founded by a former staffer to Jack McConnell, and was staffed almost entirely by Labour activists and office holders, then this funding would still have been awarded. (Cough!)

DESPITE criticism from the usual SNP suspects, Scotland on Sunday has published more damaging revelations about the SNP’s links to the Scottish-Islamic Foundation (SIF).

The story reports details of legal papers setting up SIF as a legal entity:

“This document – ‘the declaration on application of registration’ – was signed at 50 Wellington Street, the same office which contains the SNP Glasgow HQ. The document was then formally witnessed by Calum MacLeod, an SNP solicitor.”

Hmm…

So, in summary, the SNP set up an organisation – which many in Glasgow’s Muslim community have never heard of – which subsequently is awarded £215,000 by the SNP “government”. And who is in charge of the SIF? Osama Saeed (pictured left with Salmond), who is (wait for it) an SNP parliamentary candidate as well as a former employee of (drum roll please…) Alex Salmond, who is leader of the SNP which set up the SIF, and also head of the Scottish “government” which gave the SIF £215,000 of public money.

Gosh! That’s quite a muddle.

But we can all relax, because a spokesman for the Scottish “government” has dismissed all this as a “non-story”*. So that’s all right, then.

* label given to any story critical of the SNP

Here’s a tricky one for you: which SNP parliamentary candidate, according to The Times, describes Hamas suicide bombings as “martyrdom operations”?

WELL, that didn’t take long. Councillor Mark McDonald, deputy leader of the SNP group on Aberdeen City Council, has kindly located this excellent picture of our First Minister endorsing Osama Saeed as the nationalist candidate in Glasgow Central.
Bottle of House of Commons whisky on its way to you, Mark, if you let me have an address. Or I can hand it over to you in person if you want to meet up during the Glasgow East by-election campaign.

(NOTE: Mark McDonald has rightly pointed out to me that an addition I made to this posting after he commented made it look like he was ignoring the additional, political point. That wasn’t the intention, so I’ve amended this post – something I would only rarely do in retrospect.)

AN INJUSTICE has been perpetrated. Osama Saeed, SNP parliamentary candidate and supreme leader of the suddenly well-off Scottish Islamic Foundation, is rumoured to have been inexplicably cold-shouldered by his party’s leadership.

Possibly uniquely among SNP candidates, if rumour is to be believed, Osama has yet to have his picture taken with his leader and benefactor, Alex Salmond.

I’m not sure I believe this, however. It’s not as if Osama’s views on the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate or on Sharia law are out of line with SNP policy, surely?

So I’m announcing a nationwide competition: whoever can prove that Osama and Alex have indeed been pictured together in the time-honoured tradition of party leaders and their followers, will receive a fabulous gift from yours truly.

The search begins now. It must be out there somewhere, surely. Surely…?

Scotland on Sunday have broken what could turn out to be one of the most important Scottish political stories of the year.

UPDATE at 12.25pm: In anticipation of the howls of spontaneous “outrage” that will inevitably emanate from nationalist defenders over this story, let me pose this question: Had Saeed been a Labour candidate and Jack McConnell, when First Minister, had given him £215,000, how would the Nats have reacted?