The Charity Commission's laughable approach to radical Islam

Spectator

6 days ago

It's taken me a while, but I've finally realised the purpose of the Charity Commission. I'd always thought its role was to regulate charities – to check that they comply with their charitable aims (and with the law) and then to take action if they don't.
But it's finally dawned on me that the real purpose of the Charity Commission is satire. Once you realise that the Charity Commission exists in fact to satirise how pathetically weak we are in the face of radical Islam then everything falls into place – especially its otherwise inexplicably pathetic response to the hate preaching that is commonplace in mosques up and down the country.
On Wednesday, the Charity Commission issued a press release over its action in response to two mosques which it found had promoted 'inflammatory and divisive' language. Let's look at one of them, the Mosque and Islamic Centre of Brent. As the Commission put it yesterday, it 'opened a case after concerns were raised in the media about speeches held at the charity's premises. The sermons were promoted on the speaker's social media channel.'
In November and December 2023 Sheikh Babikir Ahmed Babikir gave a series of sermons in which he said that 'any Muslim who speaks against the Palestinians, any Muslim who stands against even Hamas, you are a hypocrite.'
In another sermon he compared the proscribed terrorist organisation with Nelson Mandela, saying he was 'shocked' when asked about Hamas at a meeting: 'I said to the person that was asking me, 'what did you used to think of Mandela?' … Yesterday he was a terrorist but tomorrow he's the best leader in the world.'
Discussing the 'Gaza mujahideen' in a sermon on 29 December 2023, he said: 'These are people whom Allah has chosen, Allah has empowered. They make their own weapons, with the least they have, with all the difficulties in front of them, and they are managing to destroy the most hardest, advanced weapon man be proud of… Your job and my job is to support them and to help them.'
As for Zionists: they plot to 'control the world' by manipulating banks, media organisations and regimes. They are in league with the Dajjal – which in Islamic theology is an evil false prophet like the Antichrist: 'Zionism is like a political party, preparing for the Dajjal to come to rule the world, and their main function is to make sure that all the organs of states across the world and the national and international bodies will be in their hold. They hold the media, they hold all the financial institutions, they control a lot of the political regimes around the world and once they have that they will try to control the world.'
In another sermon he said that Zionists bribe UK politicians to 'use their false narrative and fabricated stories to push their agenda.' They are, he said, 'soldiers of the devil'. Videos of his sermons were then posted on YouTube.
On Wednesday, over 18 months after its investigation began, the Charity Commission found that 'of five speeches given at the charity's premises in November and December 2023, four included inflammatory and divisive content, two contained content that could reasonably be interpreted as encouraging support of Hamas, a proscribed organisation, and one could be reasonably interpreted as discouraging worshippers from engaging with democratic processes.' You don't say.
Let me hazard a guess that it took you all of a second to reach that same conclusion about the sermons. But for the Charity Commission, that was 18 months' work. And that's not even the most ludicrous aspect of all this.
Wielding its big stick in response, to ensure that charities don't spread hate (or, if we are being technical, don't 'have effective policies in place to manage risks related to speakers at the charity', as the Commission put it), the Commission sanctioned the Mosque and Islamic Centre of Brent and another mosque, Central Oxford Mosque Society, which it said posted 'graphic cartoons…just three days after the attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. The Commission considered that the sharing of these cartoons could create community tensions in the context of the conflict in the Middle East.'
The sanction for both? An official warning. Not just any warning, oh no, but an official one. That's them told.
Pathetic doesn't even come close. Which is how I've realised what's really going on. I refuse to believe that sentient, intelligent humans can seriously think that the way to deal with radical Islamic preachers and the mosques that host them is to tell them they've been naughty and ask them not to do it again.
So it simply has to be satire – and a rather brilliant one at that, since it unambiguously exposes how, as a nation, we refuse to act against the preachers who turn our freedoms against us and who use the platforms we give them to spread their poison. Well done, Charity Commission. Superb work.