LONDON: The UK’s commissioner for countering extremism has warned the government that it must stop radical Muslim clerics from entering the country and should label a number of groups as terrorists.
Robin Simcox said Britain is experiencing a rise in extremist Muslim activist organizations. He added that a significant number of clerics who follow Mumtaz Qadri, who murdered the governor of Punjab in Pakistan in 2011 for criticizing the country’s blasphemy laws, have visited the UK.
They include Enayetullah Abbasi from Bangladesh, who called the perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks “brave lions” at the Islamic Conference in Birmingham earlier this year.
In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute, Simcox said: “I expect the (British) government to do more to bar such speakers traveling to this country.”
Simcox said the government should also ban public bodies, including universities and local councils, from boycotting Israel.
Writing in The Times in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against Israel, and subsequent pro-Palestine demonstrations in London and across the UK, he said the country has fostered a “permissive environment” for antisemitism, where anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment had become “normalized.”
His claim was rejected by Security Minister Tom Tugendhat, who told Times Radio: “I think that the UK is a country and an environment in which we take all threats to any communities extremely seriously.
“You just have to look at the response over the last 10 days — the way the prime minister, the home secretary and I and many others have been reaching out to the Jewish community, making sure policing is appropriate ... to give reassurance.
“The way in which we’ve been engaging as well with the Muslim community, some of whom are feeling also vulnerable at this time, feeling stigmatized.”
