Islamic radicals 'infiltrate' the Labour PartyA Labour minister says his party has been infiltrated by a fundamentalist Muslim group that wants to create an “Islamic social and political order” in Britain. By Andrew Gilligan
Published: 10:00PM GMT 27 Feb 2010Jim Fitzpatrick, the Environment Minister The Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) — which believes in jihad and sharia law, and wants to turn Britain and Europe into an Islamic state — has placed sympathisers in elected office and claims, correctly, to be able to achieve “mass mobilisation” of voters. Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Jim Fitzpatrick, the Environment Minister, said the IFE had become, in effect, a secret party within Labour and other political parties. “They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level,” he said. “They are completely at odds with Labour’s programme, with our support for secularism.” Mr Fitzpatrick, the MP for Poplar and Canning Town, said the IFE had infiltrated and “corrupted” his party in east London in the same way that the far-Left Militant Tendency did in the 1980s. Leaked Labour lists show a 110 per cent rise in party membership in one constituency in two years. In a six-month investigation by this newspaper and Channel 4’s Dispatches, involving weeks of covert filming by the programme’s reporters: IFE activists boasted to the undercover reporters that they had already “consolidated … a lot of influence and power” over Tower Hamlets, a London borough council with a £1 billion budget. We have established that the group and its allies were awarded more than £10 million of taxpayers’ money, much of…

  Robert Fisk’s World: From the crusaders on, contempt for the Arabs is written in stone What was it that bestowed upon our ancestors such ill-will towards the Arabs?   Saturday, 22 August 2009
Not long ago, the owner of a Majorcan palace found 13th-century graffiti on his basement wall. It was scrawled there by a knight en route to the Crusades. Translated, it read: "Sod the Arabs." I owe this sublime quotation to last Saturday's Financial Times property section – the only FT worth reading during the week, only to be perused, of course, after purchasing Saturday's Independent – but it coincided with a whole series of bons mots on the Arab world which I've been hoovering up from a collection of letters and books of the 1920s and 1930s. Many turn up in letters to Lawrence of Arabia after the 1914-18 war – although my favourite is a remark by Charles Doughty (of Arabia Deserta fame) to Lawrence himself. According to Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That), Lawrence told him that he had once asked Doughty why he had undertaken his Arabian adventure. "His answer," Lawrence told Graves, "was that he had gone there 'to redeem the English language from the slough into which it had fallen since the time of Spencer'." Poor old Arabs, it's as well that Gertrude Bell had some sympathy with them, albeit heavy with cynicism. Here she is, writing to Lawrence in 1920, advocating the creation of Arab governments before signing a peace with the Turks. "I took the example of Syria; Palestine is even better but we hadn't appointed a King of the Jews when I first began the campaign here. We've paid for our failure to make good our promises. We had a terrific Ramadhan [sic] with big religio-political meetings…

  The US isn't leaving Iraq, it's rebranding the occupationObama says withdrawal is on schedule, but renaming or outsourcing combat troops won't give Iraqis back their country Seumas Milne guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 August 2010 Article historyFor most people in Britain and the US, Iraq is already history. Afghanistan has long since taken the lion's share of media attention, as the death toll of Nato troops rises inexorably. Controversy about Iraq is now almost entirely focused on the original decision to invade: what's happening there in 2010 barely registers.That will have been reinforced by Barack Obama's declaration this week that US combat troops are to be withdrawn from Iraq at the end of the month "as promised and on schedule". For much of the British and American press, this was the real thing: headlines hailed the "end" of the war and reported "US troops to leave Iraq".Nothing could be further from the truth. The US isn't withdrawing from Iraq at all – it's rebranding the occupation. Just as George Bush's war on terror was retitled "overseas contingency operations" when Obama became president, US "combat operations" will be rebadged from next month as "stability operations".But as Major General Stephen Lanza, the US military spokesman in Iraq, told the New York Times: "In practical terms, nothing will change". After this month's withdrawal, there will still be 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, "advising" and training the Iraqi army, "providing security" and carrying out "counter-terrorism" missions. In US military speak, that covers pretty well everything they might want to do.Granted, 50,000 is a major reduction on the numbers in Iraq a year ago. But what Obama once called "the dumb war" goes remorselessly on. In fact, violence has been increasing as the Iraqi political factions remain deadlocked for…

 Men never know what women want    Jasper Gerard reports.According to a new survey, men don't know certain crucial details about their wives.