Taxpayer-Funded Jihad

We've known for decades that left-wing causes are financed with taxpayers money - the pro-criminal, anti-punishment Centre For Crime and Justice Studies at Kings College London being just the latest example (see Ross F and Pommygranate).

You didn't think that radical Islam would fail to pick up on this, did you ?

Public libraries serving the densest population of Muslims in London have been inundated with extremist literature, according to a report. Multiple copies of books were found in Tower Hamlets that would feature on any jihadist reading list, the report obtained by the BBC said. Tower Hamlets Council said their Islamic collections had been imbalanced, but they were improving.

The report is available here (pdf).

By 'inundated' they don't mean someone's leaving leaflets on the tables. We're paying for this stuff.

It is to be expected – and indeed applauded – that public libraries in areas with large Muslim populations should be receptive and responsive to the interests of local people. However it now appears that because of mistakes by library staff, or the presence of ideologues in the library system, a number of publicly-funded libraries – in Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Birmingham and Blackburn – now stock excessively large collections of certain Islamic texts designed to incite hatred and violence.
In the opinion of the authors of this report, there is no harm in libraries stocking a small number of radical Islamic texts alongside a larger number of mainstream Islamic works and critical texts – just as a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf could be legitimately stocked in sections dealing critically with the Third Reich. However if the Second World War section of a library was stocked largely with books by Hitler and his followers, or if such books were stocked in a libraries’ ‘spirituality’ or ‘selfhelp’ section, questions would rightly be asked. Equally it is unhelpful for libraries to present books by radical authors such as Maududi, Qutb and ibn Abdul Wahhab as neutral guides to Islamic practices and beliefs.

It is not the aim of this study to point fingers and ask how so many libraries, including eight council-run libraries in the heart of Tower Hamlets (one of the UK’s most Muslim areas), have became saturated with extreme Islamist books. Certainly negligence has played a role; maybe senior library staff are unaware of the content of books in Arabic, Bengali and Urdu. However, the huge number of such books, in all languages, makes it unlikely that so many intolerant, and often violent, texts could have been acquired purely by accident. Whatever the cause, it is time that the UK’s library services regained control of their collections.