Back in June 2011, Islamic Movement in Israel leader Sheikh Raed Salah was identified by the British government as a negative and extremist influence and banned from entering the country on a speaking tour, which included a meeting in the Parliament building itself. Somehow, the UK’s Border Agency failed to recognize Salah who arrived in Britain unimpeded until the police caught up with him later.
Salah has spent the last 10 months fighting deportation, finally winning his case, much to the disgust of the British government and organizations concerned with the Sheikh’s anti-Semitism.
Having just returned to Israel, Salah launches a tirade against Israel’s alleged mistreatment of its Arab citizens in The Guardian amid claims that “Israel’s cheerleaders in Britain will continue to smear my character.“:
My people – the Palestinians – are the longstanding victims of Israeli racism. Victims of racism, anywhere, should never condone or support the maltreatment of another people, as Israel does. …
Despite the Israeli policy of “transfer” – another term for ethnic cleansing – the Palestinians will not go away. The Israeli state can occupy our lands, demolish our homes, drill tunnels under the old city of Jerusalem – but we will not disappear. Instead, we now aspire to a directly elected leadership for Palestinians in Israel; one that would truly represent our interests. We seek only the legal rights guaranteed to us by international conventions and laws.
Related content: MK Shills For Anti-Semite in Guardian
Here are but a few examples of why Salah’s presence in the UK was deemed by the government to be undesireable:
- A blood libel charge made during a speech in 2007 where he accused Jews of using children’s blood to bake bread?:
“We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children’s blood,” he said. “Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread.”
- Salah’s despicable promotion of the conspiracy theory that the 9/11 terrorist atrocities were carried out by Israel:
A suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work on September 11, 2001, and this is really what happened! Were 4,000 Jewish clerks absent [from their jobs] by chance, or was there another reason? At the same time, no such warning reached the 2,000 Muslims who worked every day in the Twin Towers, and therefore there were hundreds of Muslim victims.
- Salah’s Islamic Movement’s mourning of Osama bin Laden may have led the UK authorities to consider him worth excluding from the country:
We in the Islamic Movement condemn the assassination operation against the sheikh, the martyr Osama Bin Laden, if [reports are] true, at the hands of the American security arms.
The assassination, if true, proves collusion of mercenaries who have sold their consciences to cursed Satan.
