Andy Slaughter, the Labour MP for Hammersmith, has been in touch to complain about my blog post entitled “Labour’s shadow justice minister to share platform with Muslim hate preachers”. In it, I said:
Labour’s shadow minister for justice is due to share a platform with Muslim hate preachers later this month. Andrew Slaughter, the MP for Hammersmith, is speaking at the Global Peace and Unity Conference at the ExCel, alongside Sheikh Said Rageah. Rageah, who you can read about here, is on record as saying Muslims shouldn’t be friends with the “kuffar”, Muslim women should be imprisoned in their homes and and any Muslim with the temerity to leave the faith should be killed.
Another of the speakers at the conference is Sheikh Muhammad Al Shareef, a graduate of the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia – an institution that has produced hate preacher after hate preacher. His opinions about the Jews are unpalatable, to put it mildly. Not only do they control the media, according to Al Shareef, but they kill prophets and should be shunned.
I’m happy to publish Mr Slaughter’s denial (see above). The conference in question is being organised by a group called Global Peace and Unity (GPU) and the pages including Mr Slaughter’s name have now been removed from its website – though, weirdly, they weren’t removed until two days ago. (You can see cached versions here and here.) That’s quite a long time given that the first piece drawing attention to this appeared over two weeks ago and my blog post was published on November 8th. Another article about this was published on Harry’s Place earlier this week, but that has now been taken down after Slaughter threatened the site with legal action. The author of that piece, Mehrdad Amanpour, has written a follow-up in which he urges Slaughter to consider legal action against GPU:
Mr Slaughter has told me that he is taking legal advice for my “false and malicious statements” about him being a speaker at GPU 2013. I hope that as part of that advice, he considers his options with regard to the GPU organisers for misrepresenting him in this way, despite the fact that he had not even been asked.
I suppose we should be grateful that Mr Slaughter has finally disassociated himself from the GPU. But it seems a bit over the top to threaten legal action against a website for linking him to the organisation when he has praised its events in the past and, until two days ago, was billed as a speaker at its forthcoming conference.