US Muslim preacher 'who advocated beheading of gay men allowed to lecture in the UK'
Group hosting Mr Sodagar has defended the lecture series, saying his comments on gay men have been deliberately misinterpreted by right-wing media
Click to follow
The Independent Online
The Independent Online
A US-based Muslim preacher who allegedly advocated killing gay people is giving a lecture series in London after being allowed to enter the UK.
The Home Office has been urged to retract the visa of Hamza Sodagar who is giving a series of lectures in the capital city between 3 October and 12 October.
Mr Sodagar appeared in an online video recorded in 2010 in which he details ways in which gay people can be ‘punished’ for their sexuality, including being beheaded or thrown off a cliff. Footage shows him apparently telling an audience: “If there’s homosexual men, the punishment is one of five things. One, the easiest one maybe, is cut their head off, that’s the easiest. The second is, burn them to death. Third, throw them off a cliff. Fourth, tear down the wall on them so they die. Fifth, a combination of the above.
“We have a hadith on that. Now, whether someone’s going to accept that, that’s up to the jurists to read that and understand. There’s definitely some of those apply… maybe the combination [fifth option]. These are things which are there.”
LGBT rights activist Peter Tatchell called on the Home Office to revoke Mr Sodagar’s visa. He said: “In a free society, Hamza Sodagar has a right to believe that homosexuality is sinful but not to preach about ways to kill lesbians and gay men. Many people with far less extreme views, who have never advocated violence, have been banned from entering the UK. Calling for death to LGBT people crosses a red line.
“The Home Office was wrong to grant him a visa and should now revoke it. The cleric should be ordered out of the country.”
His lectures are being facilitated by the Ahlulbayt Islamic Mission at the Islamic Republic Of Iran School in London. Literature advertising the lecture series has been posted on the group's website and Twitter feed.
The Mission have defended their decision to host Mr Sodagar, saying his comments did not mean he endorsed murder of gay men and had been taken out of context. In a statement, the group said: “The unfortunate rise of right-wing extremism has resulted in a malicious campaign to misconstrue the positions of Islam and dehumanise Muslims.
We are saddened that the UK media is able to publish materials that clearly follow a right-wing extremist agenda of spreading hatred and Islamophobia.
“In remarks made in 2010, as part of a series of lectures delivered on mercy, love and hatred in Islam through a commentary of a supplication from the Islamic tradition, Shaykh Hamza explained the position of Islam on homosexuality, and that it is not compatible with Islam. This is a clear and undeniable position that is upheld by Islam as found in Islamic scripture and tradition. In this regard, it must be understood, as was mentioned in the very same lecture series, that Islamic penal code cannot be administered outside the framework of law-enforcement and legal process within a legitimate government.
"De-contextualised excerpts of this series, were used by right-wing media to suggest that Shaykh Hamza was calling for ‘the beheading and burning of homosexuals’. This is untrue and a mischievous and malicious accusation to make.”
When approached by The Independent, a Home Office spokesperson said they were unable to comment on individual cases. They said: “An individual can be excluded on the grounds that their presence is ‘not conducive to the public good’ if it is reasonable, consistent and proportionate based on the evidence available.”
FBI and Obama confirm Omar
Mateen was radicalized on the internet
James Comey says
Pulse nightclub shooter was inspired ‘by foreign terrorist organizations’ but
there is no evidence of a link to a foreign network
Tuesday 14 June 2016 07.06 BSTFirst
published on Monday 13 June 2016 20.14 BST
The man who killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub
in the worst gun rampage
in US history, was strongly radicalized using the internet, Barack
Obama and the head of the FBI have confirmed.
The US president told reporters at the White House
following a meeting of security officials that Omar Mateen, the American-born
gunman who brought terror to Pulse gay club, had been “inspired by various
extremist information that was disseminated over the internet”.
The president’s words were echoed shortly afterwards
by James Comey, director of the FBI, which is leading the investigation into
the Florida attack, who said there
were “strong indications of radicalization by this killer, and of potential
inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations”.
Trump
insinuates Obama is harboring secret agenda linked to Orlando attack
Read more
Comey added that he was “highly confident” that Mateen
had been radicalized at least in part online. In chorus with Obama he emphasized
that there continued to be no evidence, however, of any direct plot, or
direction of the shooter, by any foreign group or network.
“There is no clear evidence that he was directed
externally,” Obama said.
The mounting evidence of the killer’s online radicalization,
together with the absence of links to organized terrorism and his potent hatred
towards the gay community provide a toxic soup that is already permeating the
debate around this year’s presidential election.
The potent emotions generated by such a bloody
outrage, combined with Florida’s lax gun laws and the shooter’s embrace of Isis
in calls made during the rampage, have the potential to send the race for the
White House in unpredictable directions.
Obama sought to keep a level head in the fallout from
the attack by refusing to identify the massacre as either merely a terrorism
issue or a question of gun control. It was both, he said.
The president warned against “getting into an either
or debate”, saying that both access to weapons and terrorism were factors that
equally needed to be addressed.
“If we have self-radicalized individuals in this
country, then they are going to be very difficult to find ahead of time, and,
how easy it is for them to find weapons is, in some cases, going to make a
difference as to whether they are going to be able to carry out attacks like
this,” he said.
Earlier on Monday, Hillary Clinton made a pointed
intervention in the post-Orlando discussions by calling for the reinstatement of the
assault weapons banthat had been a cornerstone of her husband Bill
Clinton’s administration in the 1990s. The legislation that banned AR-15-style
assault weapons of the sort used in many of the most bloody and notorious
recent mass shootings – including the 2012 Sandy Hook killing of 20 children
and their teachers in Connecticut – was allowed to lapse after 10 years in
2004.
Sign
up for Guardian Today US edition: the day's must-reads sent directly to you
Read more
A similar firearm was deployed by Mateen at Pulse,
along with a semi-automatic Glock handgun.
Clinton said that Mateen had used a “weapon of war” – legally
purchased in Florida some time last week despite the fact that
the shooter had been on the FBI’s anti-terrorist radar – “to shoot down at
least 50 innocent Americans”. She criticised the gun lobby and said: “I believe
strongly that commonsense gun safety reform across our country would make a
difference.”
As if to underline the vast gulf that now lies between
the two main candidates to replace Obama in the White House next January, the
presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump unleashed his opposite, and highly
polarizing, take on the Pulse tragedy. Following his tweet on Sunday in which he had
congratulated himself hours after the disaster for having proposed a ban on all
Muslims entering the US, he berated the Muslim community in this country for
failing to report potential terrorists such as Mateen, who he called a “whack
job”.
“They knew that this guy had a potential for blow-up.
They don’t report them. For some reason the Muslim community don’t report
people like this,” Trump told CNN.
Donald Trump used a speech yesterday in New Hampshire
to make the election a referendum on “radical Islam”. The presumptive nominee
said “this is not just a national security issue, it’s a quality of life issue”
and argued: “We need to tell the truth about how radical Islam is coming to our
shores, and it’s coming with these people, folks, it’s coming.”
One account of events inside the club suggested the
gunman had laughed as he killed a bathroom stall full of victims.
Deyni Ventura, a pastor in nearby Sanford and a friend
of the mother of a clubgoer described what she had been told. “He was laughing
frantically, ‘ha ha ha ha ha’, as he was spraying people with his gun,” she
said.
Ventura, said her friend Vanessa’s son Norman, who she
would identify only by their first names, had received four gunshot wounds to
his back but was expected to be released from hospital by Tuesday.
Speaking to reporters outside the family assistance
center close to Pulse nightclub, she said: “He was in a bathroom stall with 30
other people, and those 30 other people are deceased. He is the only one that
lived,” she added.
“When he laughed he took his gun and sprayed under the
bathroom stall and on top of the bathroom stall, so then the bodies started
collapsing and blood was going everywhere in the handicapped stall, 30 people
squished in there getting shot. He was laughing like he was making fun of the
victims.”
In his briefing in Washington, Comey, the FBI
director, gave further details of the shooter’s declaration of allegiance to
Isis that he made over the course of his three-hour rampage at the club. At
about 2.30am on Sunday morning – half an hour into the attack – Mateen spoke
three times to a 911 dispatcher, declaring that he was acting on behalf of the
leader of Isis.
Hole
in wall helped free dozens held hostage during Pulse nightclub shooting
Read more
The gunman also declared his
solidarity with the Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out the Boston
Marathon bombing in 2013, as well as to Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, a Palestinian
American who worshipped in the same mosque as Mateen in Fort Pierre, Florida,
and who carried out a suicide attack in Syria in May 2014.
Comey said these various allegiances were puzzling as
the Tsarnaevs were not linked to Isis and Abu-Salha was working for the
al-Nusra front which was actively in conflict with the terrorist group. “That
adds a bit to the confusion around his motives,” the FBI director said.
The FBI itself is facing heat over the fact that it
had Mateen in its sights, interviewing him three times in 2013 and 2014 for
suspected extremism and connections with Abu-Salha. On both occasions, the
information gleaned was considered too thin to merit further action.
Comey said agents had used informants, and recorded
conversations and surveillance, as well as an extensive search of government
databases. But Mateen had convinced them that his outspoken comments in 2013
were made because he was angry towards co-workers who had teased him for being
Muslim.
The FBI chief said the bureau was looking into whether
it had made any mistakes, but added: “So far I don’t think so. We are looking
for needles in a nationwide haystack, and that’s hard.”
As the political storm raged across the country, in
Orlando the sombre job of informing families of those who had died continued.
In latest figures, authorities confirmed that 49 people had died, of whom all
but one had been identified, plus the shooter.
A further 53 people were injured, six of whom have
been discharged from hospital. Among those remaining in hospital, five were
said to be in “grave condition”.
Of the dead, the families of 36 had been notified and
their names listed on an official website. They ranged form the
youngest, Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, aged 20, to the oldest, 40-year-old Javier
Jorge-Reyes.
Four of the 36 were women. The victims came from diverse
employment backgrounds, including a travel agent, technician and brand manager,
but they shared a common embrace of the LGBT culture and a love of dancing that
brought them to Latin dance night at Pulse.
Reflecting that Hispanic accent of the night, most of
the deceased were Latino, many from Orlando’s large and growing Puerto Rican
population. Last names such as Sotomayor, Almodovar, Ortiz-Rivera and Perez
abound.
Obama said that amid the febrile focus on the
shooter’s terrorist radicalization, the fact should not be forgotten that he
had targeted a gay nightclub. Groups such as Isis and al-Qaida used their
“perverted Islam” to “target gays and lesbians because they believe that they
do not abide by their attitudes towards sexuality”.
Obama added that there are “clearly connections
between and attitudes of organizations like this and attitudes toward tolerance
and whether all people are to be treated equally regardless of their sexual
orientation”.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire
Aidez-moi à améliorer l'article par vos remarques, critiques, suggestions... Merci beaucoup.