Gilligan Continues His Anti-IFE Crusade in Tower Hamlets

Tuesday, 24 August 2010 12:32

Writing on his Telegraph blog today, Andrew Gilligan has attempted a throw back to his documentary, “Britain’s Islamic Republic”, by “exposing” the name of a person he had kept hidden at the time due to legal advice.

He writes,

“You’ll notice that in our transcript we omitted the name of the IFE official – we just called him ‘Mr A.’ This was on legal advice – we and all our sources were sure about his affiliations but we did not have enough evidence to connect him publicly to the IFE.

Today, however, we can reveal that ‘Mr A’ is Hira Islam, a Tower Hamlets council officer, former trustee of the IFE-controlled East London Mosque, director of a number of IFE-linked companies and senior member of the IFE.”

The shoddy nature of Gilligan’s documentary, aired in March, ahead of the general election, was highlighted at the time by Engage. In it he sought to undermine the work of local Muslim groups and institutions to mobilise the local Muslim populations in playing an active role in local community affairs and local politics. This, he suggested, was part of an Islamist plot to take over the institutions of Tower Hamlets. At the time, his documentary attracted over 1,000 complaints to OFCOM and instigated a planned march by extremist group, the English Defence League (EDL) through Tower Hamlets calling for the East London Mosque to be closed.

This time, his “expose” acts as a prompt to highlight the upcoming selection of Tower Hamlets’ first directly-elected Mayor. What use could his comments have except in attempting to, once again, undermine and de-legitimise the active participation of British Muslim citizens in the democratic process? In a time of heightened Islamophobia in the country, the comments of Mr. Gilligan can only serve prompt to the xenophobic elements of our society to continue their tirade against Muslims.

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