Islamic radicals 'infiltrate' Labour Party - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

British Environment Minister Jim Fitzpatrick has claimed that members of the radical 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. Fitzpatrick told the Sunday Telegraph that the IFE had become 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. Fitzpatrick, the MP for Poplar and Canning Town, said the IFE had infiltrated and “corrupted” his Labour 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 one billion pound budget. They also said they have used over 10 million pound of taxpayers’ money to “prevent violent extremism”. IFE leaders were recorded expressing opposition to democracy, support for sharia law or mocking black people. The IFE organised meetings with extremists, including Taliban allies, a man named by the US government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and a man under investigation by the FBI for his links to the September 11 attacks. Moderate Muslims in London told how the IFE and its allies were enforcing their hardline views on the rest of the local community, curbing behaviour they deemed “un-Islamic”. The owner of a dating agency received a threatening email from an IFE activist, warning her to close it.