A Labour minister has said his Party has been infiltrated by Islamists who want to remove democratic principles and exercise political influence and power on all levels to create an ‘Islamic social and political order’ in the United Kingdom.
Jim Fitzpatrick, Minister of State for the Environment, said the group called the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), an Islamist organisation based in London, has placed sympathisers in elected Government offices and claims to be able to achieve ‘mass mobilisation’ of voters for the upcoming elections.
The Islamist group is dedicated, in its own words, to changing the ‘very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed … from ignorance to Islam’.
Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Fitzpatrick said the IFE had become, in effect, a secret party within Labour and other political parties.
‘They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level,’ he said.
Mr Fitzpatrick, the MP for Poplar and Canning Town, said that the Islamists believe that the UK should develop Sharia law and behave ‘completely at odds’ with Labour’s programme. He said the IFE had infiltrated and ‘corrupted’ his party in east London in the same way that the far-Left Militant Tendency did in the 1980s.
A six-month investigation by Channel 4's Dispatches and The Daily Telegraph into the IFE and its political activities revealed it had ‘consolidated’ its influence at the London Borough Council of Tower Hamlets, which has a budget estimated at £1bn.
Other recordings by undercover reporters include leaders of the group saying they opposed democracy and supported Sharia law.
The investigation revealed the group had received £10m in taxpayers’ money from government funds designed to ‘prevent violent extremism’. It also uncovered evidence that moderate Muslims were being targeted by group leaders who resent their ‘un-Islamic’ behaviour.
The Daily Telegraph reports that the East London Mosque at the heart of the East End has become the headquarters of a secretive, fundamentalist political network for a number of Islamists linked to IFE.
Although the mosque calls the IFE a ‘social welfare organisation’ and says that the IFE presents itself as committed to ‘community cohesion’ and ‘tolerance’, the undercover reporters discovered that it was a sophisticated Islamic political group with a structured rank system and hard-line goals.
One undercover reporter was told that she would have to take an exam and swear an oath of allegiance and ordered to keep her membership of the IFE a secret.
The reading list for the recruits’ training course consists of the key works of the revolutionary political creed known as Islamism, which advocates the overthrow of secular democratic government and its replacement by Islamic government.
(See the Daily Telegraph report)
In October last year, it was reported that another Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, whose goal is to combine all Muslim countries in a unitary Islamic caliphate and which is regarded as an ‘organisation of concern’ by the Home Office, has secured more than £100,000 of taxpayers’ money for grants to teach their ideology to children.
(See the CCFON report)
A recent study by the think-tank Civitas found that there are at least 85 Islamic sharia courts operating in Britain. The number is almost 20 times as many as previously believed.
(See the CCFON report)
A large number of reports indicated that there is an acknowledged problem of Islamic radicalisation of both British-born and foreign students on university campuses. Officials at every university are now encouraged to work with the Government, the Police, and security services to monitor the activities of Islamic student societies.