Deportation of Muslim cleric over unfounded claims was wrong

By Billow Kerrow

In the just concluded London conference on Somalia, UK Prime Minister David Cameron warned that ‘young minds are being poisoned by (Islamic) radicalisation, breeding terrorism that is threatening the security of the whole world’.

Barely a year earlier in a speech in Munich, Cameron defined this radicalisation as ‘real hostility towards Western democracy and values’ espoused by Muslim preachers ‘encouraging Muslims to identify themselves solely in terms of their religion’.

Last month, the International Crisis Group published a report on the growing radicalisation of Kenya’s Muslim youth and warned that it would be a ‘profound mistake to view the radicalisation solely through counter-terrorism lens’.

It observed that radicalisation was mainly due to ‘long standing grievances against the State, and inequality’ particularly among the Muslim youth in Nairobi, Coast, and North Eastern.

Concerns about radicalisation of Muslims has spirited the Government to take some unsavoury actions that the community may view as discriminatory and inimical to their constitutional rights. For instance, the Government has taken the liberty to ban Islamic scholars from entering the country at will. Early this week, a prominent Muslim scholar, Dr Bilal Philips, was returned from the airport. The Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) told the Press that he was ‘on police terror list because of his links to terrorist suspects’ and that he was a ‘dangerous man who has been in terror circles’.

Clearly, the police merely acted on reports that Bilal was denied entry in some Western countries. In recent years, as an attempt to curb the growing influence of Islam in their societies, these countries have resorted to banning Muslim preachers on catchy tags such as anti-democracy, anti-Western values, unacceptable behaviour, anti-gay, anti-Semitism, extremist, Islamist, hate speech, etc. More than a half a dozen of our Cabinet, including our former AG, are banned from visiting UK or US for all manner of reasons. Does our Government justify these bans? Highly unlikely!

Bilal, a Canadian citizen, is resident in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE for the past 35 years, as a scholar, preacher and lecturer, and runs many institutions globally. These countries are major allies of the West in the anti-terrorism war, and would be the last ones to accommodate him if what ATPU says is true. He is a lecturer at American University in Dubai, the only US-accredited university in the Gulf. In UK, he is a member of the Academic Supervisory Board of London Open College. He was here in 2009, and was not denied entry.

True, he was denied entry to UK in 2010 because of his anti-gay remarks. In 2011, he was asked to leave Germany after he attended andIslamist’ conference in Frankfurt. In US, he was accused of being ‘an unindicted co-co-conspirator’ in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. In 2007, Australia denied him entry because he reportedly said ‘Western culture, led by the US, is the enemy of Islam’. And Kenya simply followed suit without ascertaining whether these allegations are true.

In many public forums and interviews available on the net, Bilal has denied any involvement in terrorism and considers himself a ‘moderate Islamic scholar’ who is the ‘loudest voice in opposition to those who commit acts of indiscriminate wanton violence in the name of religion’. In the US case, he says it is a matter of guilty by association and has never been denied entry into that country.

In US, an unindicted co-conspirator is a person or entity alleged in an indictment to have engaged in conspiracy, but who has not been charged for evidentiary reasons. Like the many names bundled around in our ICC hearings by witnesses last year. Indeed, in 2007, a Texas court named over 300 prominent Muslim organisations as unindicted co-conspirators, including Cair, Isna and Nait. In an appeals court in 2010, all were expunged by the court.

So, how did our ATPU conclude Bilal was active in terrorism and radicalism?

The writer is a former MP for Mandera Central and political economist