Bye bye, Faisal
Abdullah Faisal, the extremist Muslim preacher who was jailed in 2003 for delivering speeches which incited murder and racial hatred, has been deported to Jamaica after serving a large part of his sentence. I do not object in the least to his deportation, because he was guilty of what he was charged with, and worse. His lectures did indeed incite murder, and I listened to a few of them.
His lectures have been cited as an influence on the London tube bomber Germaine Lindsey, also of Jamaican origin, which goes to show that a taped, and widely distributed, lecture can have influence beyond what was intended when it was delivered. I do not know if Faisal approved of the London bombings or was aware of Lindsey's existence, but his lectures make it clear that he approves of terrorist acts and violence far beyond what is accepted by orthodox Islam.
However, the BBC news story I linked above repeats the same pattern of media coverage of the Faisal case, which is to mention what he said about Jews and Hindus but not what he said about his fellow Muslims. He issues takfir – pronunciations of disbelief against another – on numerous occasions, on one occasion telling his audience to repeat the words "kill him!" in regard to the US "salafi" preacher Abu Usama, and tells his followers "you kill the Bareilawi before you kill the Christian", Bareilawis being a large proportion of the Muslim population of India and Pakistan. Notwithstanding his occasional offensive anti-Jewish joke, my guess is that Jews, Christians and Hindus have far less to fear from those influenced by Faisal than the average Muslim, which makes the media's blindness to their threat to us somewhat galling.
