According to documents obtained by the FOIA Centre, the British Home Office has been providing funding to radical Islamic front group (lgf: search) The Muslim Council of Britain: Home office funds muslim council of Britain. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

And the requests for money from the MCB are a glimpse into how radical Muslims use Western guilt and PC multiculturalism to portray themselves as eternal victims—victims whose rage may erupt into violence at any moment unless they get what they’re demanding.

Letters between the home office and a high-profile muslim group reveal that the government has given at least £150,000 to it. The muslim council of Britain (MCB), led at the time by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, received the grant after asking the government for £500,000, according to correspondence disclosed under the freedom of information act (FOIA).

The financial relationship between the group and the home office is bound to raise questions – especially among muslims – about the MCB’s independence from the government. However, correspondence between Sacranie and a home office minister shows that he has been critical of the government. [No kidding. —ed.]

Ministers have seen the MCB, which in June 2006 elected Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari to replace Sacranie as secretary general, as the organisation through which to reach out to Britain’s muslim population in the wake of the September 11 attacks in America and the bombings in London last July. However, some British muslims complain that the MCB does not speak for them.

In February last year, a policy advisor at the home office’s ‘cohesion and faith’s unit’ (CFU) sent a letter to the MCB’s treasurer Dr Akber Mohamedali offering the group a grant of £148,160 for the financial year ending the following March.

The money was to fund five projects that the MCB had proposed: MCB leadership development programme; MCB leadership mentoring programme; MCB direct, a web portal for information on islam and muslims; British citizenship programme; and British muslim equality programme. ...

The MCB had submitted, in January last year, a £500,000 bid to fund the programmes in a proposal entitled, “British muslims: from alienation to engagement.”

The proposal says: “There is now a growing body of evidence that British muslim communities suffer some of the sharpest forms of both race and religious discrimination and disadvantage. They are, however, inadequately protected from either.”

“It is suggested that this defining experience of muslims, of discrimination and disadvantage, often leads to detachment and alienation from the mainstream of British society.

“This alienation has been further fuelled more recently – in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 – by a backlash of increased levels of Islamophobia in all sections of society, the over-zealous use by law enforcement agencies of new draconian anti- terrorism provisions resulting in a disproportionate impact on muslims, the intense focus of the media on muslims as the ‘enemy within’, the gains of the far right across Europe and Britain’s role in the ‘war on terrorism’ in muslim countries.

“The level of alienation is in some cases so high that it results in not just ‘parallel lives’ but such high levels of disaffection as to threaten the kind of disorder experienced in some northern cities in 2001. It also helps the recruitment of young men by extremist tendencies.”

“Much is already underway on different fronts to address the British muslim experience and what may be brewing just below the surface as a result.”

The released correspondence shows that, since being offered the £150,000 grant, the MCB has sought more funding from the home office.