A Conservative MP who was called “a dog” when he attended an Aston Villa match has said Islamists are becoming “emboldened” in the UK.
Speaking on GB News Nick Timothy said: “This was a football match between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv from Israel. The local politicians and Islamist activists campaigned very nastily to try to get the match itself cancelled.
“The match went ahead, but the local authorities, the police and Birmingham City Council, conspired to stop the Israeli supporters from attending. They said it was because there’s a hooliganism problem among the Israeli supporters, but we all know that actually it was because they were concerned about clashes with local activists from within the Muslim population.
“[Political Islam] is very concerning, and it’s been concerning for a really long time. I think it’s becoming more prominent, partly because the Islamists themselves are becoming more emboldened.
“But we’ve obviously had a serious extremism problem going back to at least since the 1980s with the Salman Rushdie affair and things like that. But we’ve had a serious terrorism problem for more than a couple of decades, and increasingly, what we’re seeing is public authorities and even elected offices now dominated by people who hold Islamist beliefs.
Nick Timothy GB News 11:11.jpg
“This is very worrying, because it’s affecting the impartiality of services like the police.
“I think any of the politics of communalism that are entering into elected office and our democratic system is something that we should be really, really worried about. [Your Party MPs] are in Parliament. There are local elections next year where we may see more such people elected at a local level, and you can see the effects that it’s having already.
“Ayoub Khan, the Gaza Independent MP in Birmingham, was behind the original protests that led to the ban on the Israeli Jewish supporters coming to Villa. But you can see how the Labour Party is reacting, because they fear losing their Muslim voters.
“They’re proposing an official definition of so-called Islamophobia, which allies the protection of people from harm with the protection of religious ideas from any kind of criticism.
“I think it’s ridiculous that it should take a lengthy legal process and to navigate the complexity of equality laws to be able to determine whether we’re free to say these things.
“But this is the second legal ruling in a row now, after the successful appeal by Hamit Coskun who was found guilty of public order offences after desecrating a Quran and saying things that were offensive to Muslims.
“So that’s two legal rulings now which have confirmed our right to criticise religious ideas. But if the government does go ahead and introduce this official definition of Islamophobia, then we’re going to be back, if not to square one, then several steps back.
“The whole purpose of the Islamophobia definition is to protect religious ideas and beliefs from any kind of scrutiny, criticism, satire or whatever.
“The record of the Conservatives on immigration is incredibly disappointing, and like the rest of the country, and I say this is a newly elected MP, I’m angry about that record. Every one of those Conservative governments was elected saying we would reduce immigration. We didn’t succeed in doing that.
“The Brexit referendum was supposed to give us control of the immigration system and of our borders, and immigration went up to record levels afterwards because of an excessively liberal policy that was introduced.
“On extremism itself, various things were done under the different Conservative governments: massive clamp downs on hate preachers coming into the country and things like that.
“But we have to be honest, the problem hasn’t gone away. It’s got worse. So we need a completely different way of looking, not just at immigration, but how we handle these kinds of politics of religious separatism.”
