British lord joins UK Islamists in praising Erdogan

The UK's first Muslim life peer has joined forces with a number of British-based Islamists to sign a letter praising Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who walked out of a recent debate after a bitter argument with President Shimon Peres over Gaza. Lord Nazir Ahmed recently led a delegation to the Turkish Embassy in London to pay tribute to Erdogan for walking off the stage during the appearance with Peres at last month's Davos Conference, according to a London-based think tank, the Center for Social Cohesion (CSC). The letter was signed by a number of radical Islamists, including Mohamed Ali Harrath, who was convicted in absentia in 1992 for terrorist-related offenses by a Tunisian court, and Mohammed Sawalha, described by a US court as a former Hamas leader, and presented by the delegation to the embassy. Harrath was on Interpol's most-wanted list, and had connections to Osama bin Laden, the CSC said. According to the BBC, Sawalha masterminded much of Hamas's political and military strategy in the West Bank. He also served as president of the Muslim Association of Britain, described in parliament as the British wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. In a document submitted as evidence in a US federal court, the movement's goal is described as a kind of grand jihad aimed at destroying Western civilization from within and "sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated, and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions." "By being part of this delegation, Lord Ahmed is allying himself with some of the most radical Islamists in the UK," CSC researcher Robin Simcox said. Previously, Ahmed used his influence to introduce the lord high chancellor to Sheikh Suhaib Hasan to discuss introducing Islamic divorce laws into the UK, the think tank said. In a 2008 documentary, Hasan said, "Even though cutting off the hands and feet, or flogging the drunkard and fornicator, seem to be very abhorrent, once they are implemented, they become a deterrent for the whole society. This is why in Saudi Arabia, for example, where these measures are implemented, the crime rate is very, very, low." According to the British current affairs magazine Spectator, Ahmed recently threatened to mobilize 10,000 Muslims to prevent the House of Lords from screening Fitna, a short film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders that claims that Islam sanctions terrorism. He also threatened to take the organizer of the event to court. He called the decision not to screen the film a victory for the Muslim community. In 2005, Ahmed hosted a book launch in the House of Lords for a writer who frequently uses anti-Semitic stereotypes in his work. Russian-born Israel Shamir claimed the blood libels against the Jews were in fact true and that all political parties were Zionist-infiltrated. Shamir is a citizen of Sweden, where his legal name is Adam Ermash. In an interview on Press TV, an Iranian satellite channel, during Operation Cast Lead, Ahmed said that Jewish student groups actively recruited for the IDF, and that British Jews who fight in the IDF should be arrested and, if necessary, charged with war crimes. "We know that there are student unions that have been actively recruiting young people in Britain to join the IDF and we also know that there are young Jewish students who go and serve on the kibbutz and also in schools, who are also then doing national service in Israel," he said. "How many of those have been involved in war crimes? How many of those have broken the Geneva Convention? When they come back to this country, we want our government to take some legal action against them," Ahmed said.