The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), Britain’ largest Islamic forum, Yasmin Qureshi, Labour MP from Bolton, slammed Prime Minister David Cameron for claiming Muslims ‘quietly condone’ terrorism’….reports Asian Lite News
Mrs Qureshi said ‘white population’ is never asked to apologise for atrocities carried out by racists, the Daily Mail reported.
The Labour leader said she was fed up with having to say sorry for terrorist attacks carried out by Islamist fanatics. She said white people were not asked to say sorry for the racist slaughter of nine black people in a church by a white man in South Carolina.
But Mrs Qureshi accused the Prime Minister of confusing religious conservatism with the support for extremism.
She told Radio 4’s The World at One: ‘I speak to my constituents who are very religious and whenever an incident happens they are shaking their heads in disgust and they’re actually saying ‘Our religion is being maligned’.’
She said that Muslims were tired of constantly being called on to apologise for the actions of extremists.
‘It feels absolutely awful. In Charleston you had a white man who went and killed nine black people in a church. I don’t hear anybody saying that the whole of the white population has to apologise for the action of one white man.
‘So why is everyone else [having to apologise].’ She added: ‘To make the comparison he has done the way he has done, it is not only unhelpful but actually wrong.’
Meanwhile, Dr Shuja Shafi, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), also took issue with how Cameron’s speech was portrayed by some of the media, including the Daily Mail, which ran a front-page story headlined “PM: UK Muslims Helping Jihadis”.
He said that simplifying the causes of radicalisation for tabloid consumption helped no one but the extremists, and called on Cameron to work with all sections of the Muslim community.
But Cameron’s decision to highlight the issue was welcomed by Labour, but the shadow home secretary and leadership candidate, Yvette Cooper, said the government needed to do more to “help community-led organisations prevent extremism and radicalisation in the first place”.