Friday, November 24, 2006

Bukhari Defends Himself

The revelations about MPACUK's founder and David Irving must have truly hit a nerve. Now, almost a week after the story came to light it is Bukhari's turn to try and defend himself. In a long article he discusses anti-Semitism and Zionism. Some highlights:

To this day I believe that any pro-Muslim or pro-Palestinian person charged with anti-Semitism is almost definitely innocent. If ever I heard that they were calling someone anti-Semitic, I no longer believed it, and I still don’t.
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More charges were to follow. A picture of a monster with horns on his head under an American flag was deemed “anti-Semitic.” It was obtained after typing words like “Zionist power” into a Google image search. I can’t believe MPAC pulled the picture due to the pro-Israeli blog’s complaining about it. How can a monster with a flag be anti-Semitic? The Zionists are monsters (they kill kids), and they have influence in America (AIPAC), what’s the problem?
I realise that maybe 60 years ago some German may have used monsters to depict Jews, did that mean we could no longer use monsters to depict Zionists?
This is a completely pathetic argument. Depicting a person with horns is a classic piece of anti-Semitic imagery and, by his own admission, Bukhari knew this. Using such an image could only mean that he either didn't care that it invoked anti-Semitism or was purposely trying to do so; neither option is particularly pleasant.

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They accused us of using an article from a Holocaust denier’s website. The article was actually written by the Guardian Newspaper, reproduced on Irving’s website. Is that somehow altered because it appeared on Irving’s site?
No, but it begs the question of why you were surfing Irving's website and using articles from it.

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At the end of his long article is this classic line:
Please note I wrote this not because of any pressure from the Irving smear, because I don’t care what these Zionists think of me. But after reading a Blog by a sincere non-Muslim who seemed to stick is neck out for MPAC (conscientious blogger at Lenin's Tomb) I thought the least I can do is tell him and others like him where I am coming from, and why I made any of the mistakes I made in the past and may make in the future in my journey to freedom with my people.
Come off it Asghar. For a start the only reason he was writing that article was because of the "Irving smear", so it is in response to "what these Zionists" think of you. But, the fact is that for the last week MPACUK has been desperately trying to deal with this revelation. It hasn't worked.

There is no way you didn't know who David Irving was, and your letter to him talking about "the Truth" heavily implies that you knew exactly what he was about. There's an old adage, "when you find yourself in a hole, the first this to do is stop digging".