The East End has one of the best local papers in Britain, a genuine mirror of its community. But curiously, this week's issue seems to have missed a story which has been making some serious waves in that very community. One of the local MPs, Labour's Jim Fitzpatrick, was quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, and on national television, as saying that his party had been infiltrated by a secretive, fundamentalist organisation, the Islamic Forum of Europe – which he compares to the Militant Tendency in the 1980s.
At the same time, the area's other MP, George Galloway, was quoted – albeit on a secretly recorded tape – as saying that the IFE played a "decisive role" in his election victory, and admitting that he owes them "more than it would be wise… for me to say". Lutfur Rahman, the council leader in Tower Hamlets, repeatedly refused to deny that the IFE helped him win the leadership. And the reports also pointed out that a great deal of public money has been channelled to IFE-linked projects, causing council officers major concerns.
The IFE, based at the hardline East London mosque, claims to be an "open and tolerant" social welfare institution. In fact, as undercover reporters for Channel 4's Dispatches found, it is working, in its own words, to change the "very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed… from ignorance to Islam". It may not manage that – but it has already won significant political power over a multiracial community through democratic, secular parties whose values are diametrically opposed to its own.
I admit an interest – I made the programme, and wrote The Sunday Telegraph report. But I think I know why others are reluctant to address the issues we raised. That reason is fear. In six months of research, we spoke to dozens of people in the Tower Hamlets Labour Party. Almost everyone who talked to us said exactly the same thing – but no one, save Mr Fitzpatrick, was brave enough to say it on the record.
Graham Taylor, the chairman of the party, has been forced to make a grovelling apology for suggesting that the town hall was a "centre of Islamic fundamentalism" (he says the comment was meant ironically). Rushanara Ali, the Labour candidate in Mr Galloway's Bethnal Green & Bow constituency, is a secular moderate. But she issued a weaselly statement which can be read, as it was no doubt intended, as an attack on Mr Fitzpatrick, who represents the neighbouring constituency of Poplar and Canning Town.
In the back of every politician's mind lurks the fear that taking on the IFE will cost them votes. In the back of every journalist's mind is the knowledge that writing anything even faintly questioning of the East London mosque will incur tedious correspondence with its hair-trigger libel lawyers. In the back of every white person's mind lurks the fear of the IFE's favoured charge, "Islamophobia".
Dispatches's answer to that charge is that 70 per cent of our interviewees were Muslim. The most important people in the film are the locals of the area – Harmuz Ali, the vice-chairman of the Brick Lane mosque, Badrul Islam, the chief executive of the Ethnic Minority Enterprise Project, and many others. They reject the IFE, knowing better than anyone that it does not represent their community. They dismiss as nonsense the claim that any attack on it is an attack on Islam itself.
Interestingly, too, the IFE's and the mosque's response to the reports has so far been rather more muted than their pre-publication threats would suggest. The Muslim community of East London is calling the IFE's bluff. Given the importance of this issue, it is time for others to find similar courage.
telegraph
