Q: Who in particular is exploiting the weaknesses of Britain?

MCB spokesman Inayat Bunglawala is a good example of what I mean by the extreme version of Islam. He is always playing down the real threat. People like Bunglawala have read the same books as me and understands Jihad like most Muslims do.  In number the Islamists like him may be a minority, but the influence they represent is powerful because they use historical edicts in the Quran to mobilise the masses. It is up to Muslims to reject and lead the way by rejecting this modern Jihad and rejecting backward practices.

Why oh why do TV stations allow these men on their shows to talk about us Muslims? They do not represent us - they enslave us with a backward mentality.

We are free agents we didn't need backward-thinking Muslims representing us.

It's proved counter-productive. They do not represent plural Islam. They have an issue with gays, with the Jewish, with liberal Britain. The government has been taking advice from the wrong people for the last 10 years. That is obvious.

Q:  Who do you blame?

I blame the government of this country for the rise in Islamism. They were too slow while Islamists leaped ahead in order to turn British Muslims into Islamists. Europe and America have been given the wrong advice for the last 10 years too. If the best they can come up with to win the hearts and minds of people is a Bunglawala or Tariq Ramadan - who isn't even a citizen of this country - then we're in big trouble.

Q: It's not a battle between men and women amongst the British Muslim community?

No. Just recently, modern British Muslim men pointed out to me that they are just as alarmed when they see an increasing number of Muslims (British Pakistani women) adopting the full veil. The same happens to all of us - you end up just staring at them, on the Ladypool road, Stratford road In Birmingham, Alum Rock Rd etc

British Pakistani Muslim women have steadily shrugged off the beautiful chadors and head scarves full of vibrant colours that have always reflected the Indian or Pakistani culture and are turning to morbid colours of black. I personally call this revival of desert Islam. It really is beginning to look and feel like a cult; a political statement and a sign of women participating in their own oppression believing Allah ordained it. What's wrong with the Pakistani outfits?? It didn't happen at this rate in Pakistan until the media showed us the veiled women with sticks demonstrating outside the Red Mosque. Such an event could happen here - we may have democracy here but that isn't stopping Islamists from demanding Sharia law or special treatment in schools, councils or in the public sphere just because they are Muslims.

Dr Naseem Nawaz - a member of Hibz ut Tahrir - is a good example of a woman who wishes to live under the raw power of Islamists, dreaming of a revived Calpihate.

Men look at these people as though they are weird as well but they believe they are superior. There are women totally subjugated in some Islamic states forced to wear the veil, that's a different issue. The veil causes segregation in the West and these women know it.
 

Q: Is the area becoming a no-go area for non-Muslims?

It is becoming a no go area in some parts of Birmingham. Non Muslims are becoming suspicious and uneasy as are secular Muslims. Why should Rev Ali (the Bishop of Rochester, pictured) be accused of racism when he is actually speaking the truth? Trevor Philips was spot on too - non Muslims are leaving these areas because Muslim leaders have allowed our areas to turn into Muslim ghettos.

Hazel Blears and William Hague say they don't recognise these areas? Well they only need to visit and see. I have respect for Blears and Hague and I'd like to put them right. It's one thing trying to be diplomatic , it's another if you don't face up to a serious ideology that is aiming to mobilise the Muslim community and the next generation. No other religious group has asked for special demands. Who is instigating this special need for Muslims and Islam? Not Muslims like me or people I know.

So many British people from nearly every religion and race have said to me that something is going on but they just can't put their finger on it. I know exactly what they mean.

Q: So British mainstream politicians are missing the point here?

They have missed the point for the last 40 years.

Mr Brown, Mr Cameron should pay close attention next time they want to visit a Muslim community like mine. They could start counting the mosques springing up like mushrooms and the lack of resources for the youth in the community, especially for Muslim Girls. They should introduce a law prohibiting total square metres of one religion's buildings exceeding a certain amount in a given area per capita. Next time when they are up here they could visit bookshops and run-down Islamic schools. They have abandoned these communities.

Polygamy is more common than the British realize. Young teenage forced marriages and honour killings have escalated.  So why was our plight ignored and why the Islamists appeased? I could take them to some really nice mainstream English, Irish, Indian, Jamaican, Sikh and 'Modern' Muslims who sense and fear this rise of Islamism but because Britain is a civilised, tolerant society they remain silent. Most fear being called Islamophobic or racist. The public needs educating. As one decent Indian family told me, Islamists were trying to buy a pub in Hodge Hill to turn into yet another Islamic centre.

There are not many Muslims in Hodge Hill but this is how the Islamists operate. People in Hodge Hill are going to either get angry and move out or worry about their young becoming converted.

Muslims and non Muslims at grassroots level know something isn't right. They should talk to people, not just representatives or leaders. I am not scaremongering.

If you integrate you get to hear all sides like I have. Anyway I was in the minority who was standing up to radicals 20 years ago, no-one would listen to me then either. I feel the tide is turning - the Islamists have gone too far too soon. Britain is waking up and will show the world how to deal with these people.

Britain's political leaders have ignored the plight of Muslim women, although every day now the media is reporting honour killings, forced marriages and even the BBC Asian network debated polygamy recently. The silent taboos are being broken.

The forced marriage unit run by the foreign office will tell you that (although our hero is a British Sikh woman Jaswinder Sanghera, who had raised the issues of honour killing and forced marriages) they established the crimes against Muslim women are amongst the highest in the Pakistani communities in Britain. Take a look at Britain's most wanted list and a shocking amount of those wanted are Muslims. Young British Asian girls are still taken out of school and taken back to South Asia, denied a  British Education and freedom of choice.

My God, it was the British themselves who passed the Marriage Act setting the minimum age to 14 for girls and 18 for boys in 1872 during the British Raj. They were themselves shocked at the practice of child bride marriages then. Over a century and half later and regardless of the abolition of slavery we didn't get very far did we?

Thank God for Jaswinder Sanghera and other activists like Dr Shazia Sovaisi.

Q: And meanwhile unelected groups are setting the local agenda?

A union member, a British Muslim mother, emailed me the 'manifesto for schools' that the MCB printed. She, as well as her Muslim female students, were stunned and opposed the manifesto. Others echo the same concern. They should read the emails I get.

I went to school in Britain too, my parents were Muslims and desired no special treatment for me at school - thank God. My faith was my business, between me and God, that if I wanted to fast, I didn't expect every one else to put up with my whims, we never asked for special treatments above everyone else. But the Islamicization of this country is headed by men like the MCB and their focus is on women's status as they perceive it and British Muslim children's education as they want it.

They have been manipulating government bodies and want to influence foreign policies.   Hello?? Are we all living in the same country or not? Gender apartheid printed on an MCB letterhead isn't going to stop the young from falling in love or marrying non Muslims. Human beings are human beings. Teenagers will be teenagers. I'm sick of these ringleaders of Islam forcing their backward anti-Jewish, anti- gay, anti- women, anti- ex Muslims ideologies down our throats. Who gave them- these unelected nobodies - the right?

They are not Gods ambassadors, God doesn't need any. They have no right whatsoever to tell Muslims how to live in Britain.

They have to stop forcing the hand of God on us all and reject the writings of Maududi and Syed Qutb. They need to stop inflicting one brand of Islam on us all. They politicized young Muslims the wrong way. The Middle East are not what every Muslim worries about. The situation in Britain has to be addressed.

Q: You say the MCB and the other self-elected Islamist groupings are affecting your human rights?

The declaration of Human rights in 1948 is now being used by Jihadists. We never got a look in as abused Asian Muslim women. The defenders of freedom are letting the people of this country down. There are 52 Muslim countries around the world. If you don't like the West and their liberal way of life no one is stopping an Islamist from leaving the country on a one way ticket.

The likes of Dr Bari - the MCB leader - should be more concerned about his own people and their tragedies in Bangladesh than whether the British should adapt to arranged marriages. He's really getting peoples backs up. He has no right to put down the western woman or compare her to the pious Muslim woman, there is no such thing as the perfect religion or perfect human being. And they have no right to dominate and stress our status in British Islam. Islam is not as rigid as they would want it to be because it is still down to Muslims making their own choices, we are free agents. There's real inadequacy shining through these men in their actions and their ideology.

Another big Islamist myth is that arranged marriages rarely end in divorce. Today every other British Muslim woman I have come across is divorced or a lone mother. The lone mother isn't in the Islamic conscience but she is in the conscience of this great country. Sharia law defines the family structure but is silent on the status of the lone mother. Islam nor can God protect women from the raw power of male hierarchy exercised in Muslim communities. Arrange marriages are the norm. What isn't normal is being forced into or being manipulated into marriage for the sake of honour or extended family. They pretend to be in denial about the real issues Muslim women endure in the name of honour or because of the status they wish to keep us confined in.

They have done nothing for the emancipation of Muslim women, in fact they advocate the opposite. They emphasize our duties not rights. Just like Maududi, who was not a scholar - he was a journalist who engaged with Syed Qutb in the mid 19th century. Men, who wanted Muslims to control the sexuality of women, advocated the burkha and a revival of 7th century Islam. They welcomed extreme Islamists from the Middle East. In so doing they fouled up. They do not represent the majority of mainstream Muslims.

We have to protect ourselves through learning to be independent, through education, skills, employment, housing, money for food, clothes and shelter. Where else in the world is the lone mother protected so that she can live with dignity? Most move out of Muslim communities that have turned into ghettos. It's no place for a lone mother.

Islam's ambassadors and spokesmen don't protect you here just because you're a Muslim woman. Ask the Muslim teenager who was ganged raped in a Muslim area by Muslim men. Was Islam's ringleaders or Sharia law there to protect her or give justice? No - only the British law and the services in place to support her protected her. These men have no idea what they are talking about except when it comes to reinforcing the burstable bubble that is political Islam.

Q: You believe that these organisations serve Muslim women no purpose?

Absolutely no purpose.  Community leaders are in denial about the real issues manifesting in Muslim communities besides Jihadism. Rape, sexual harassment, forced marriages, honour killings, polygamy, forced conversions, domestic violence, depression, drugs, gang culture and paedophiles all exist on our streets too, in our communities. And we remain shamefully silent. There is no such thing as a pious, true Muslim country or community. Not in Pakistan or in 'the great republic of Iran', where religious police force the subjugation.

No wonder Muslim women feel they need to wear the veil in Muslim communities. We get harassed in Muslim areas. But I'm not afraid to speak the truth now.

Public harassment is on the rise in such areas. Ask the local women. That's what happens when communities go backwards and not forward.  That is the consequence when women are denied leadership in mosques or not given the space to have dialogue with the government. OUR VOICES ARE DROWNED OUT BY THE ISLAMISTS.

I hope Hazel Blears succeeds in this idea to empower Muslim women against extremists. What did Bunglawala have to say this time in response? Instead of welcoming the idea he said the government is asking women to be spies. With this obfuscation you can see that he is actually at war. The thought of Muslim women being empowered and standing up to their ideology threatens them.

I'd like to tell Bunglawala, I know who I would want outside my house protecting me and my children against harassment, extremism or Jihadism. Not the likes of him, who are part of the problem not the solution. If they're not blaming the police, they're blaming the Americans or the Zionists or they latch onto foreign policies. They never look within. They take on the mindless rhetoric that we Muslims have lost our true path and must return to 7th century Islam. Millions of Muslims want to live and let live and that's why we have to break our silence.

Q: So strong women are the answer?

The empowerment of Muslim women is crucial against this backward male dominated ideology. Any change in the thinking and behaviour of mothers has a strong impact on children and the next generation. Benazir Bhutto is an inspiration, even after her death, Muslim youths in colleges are signing up to join the PPP and Muslim women and men respected her, If she can oppose this ideology,  oppose Islamists,  why aren't we doing the same in Britain? Isn't this ideology in collision with democracy?

Why are we allowing Islamists to mobilise our minds? Why are we participating in our own oppression?

If my son hadn't been approached by radical Islamists on the streets of Ward End and if I didn't know a British Christian woman from Birmingham whose teenage son as converted by Salafists and then tried to kill her because she refused to convert, I would have been ignorant too of the power of Jihadism embedded in our communities.

Mr Bunglawala doesn't fool me. These men like Bunglawala are exactly the kind of Islamic men than Pakistani women in Pakistan wouldn't trust or give their vote to.

In fact Hazel Blears could be thinking of empowering non Muslim women too. The rate of conversions is alarming. Most converts seem to be indoctrinated with extreme Islam and political Islam. I have met British black and white, Indian, Sikh mothers who have the same fear as I do for our growing children. If the government continues to fail its people and the next generation through lack of knowledge and education then we are in a lose lose situation. The gulf they want to create will widen.

The MCB don't give a damn about the Muslims or non Muslims. They are using their position to mobilise the masses towards political Islam.

Why? What's wrong with the British law?? It trumps their barbarity. It's about time the voices of British Muslim women and secular and reformers were heard.

Why doesn't the government ask British born Muslim women to advise them?

Women like Samira Malik were on the conveyor belt towards Jihadism but she clearly hadn't read up enough about the rewards for women jihadis, or asked her Islamist male mentors enough questions. I hope the Samira Malik case deters other radical females from dreaming of 'martyrdom'. According to what I have read, women won't enjoy the bounties of heaven as much as the men will. Even in the after life women will be treated as sub human and have to put with all the virgins they will inherit, so say the Islamists.

Q: Where's the platform for you to promulgate your feelings and solutions?

Peaceful mainstream British Muslims are the silent majority. We have no platform where we can oppose the Jihadists' propaganda.

There are millions of Muslims in this country that are proud to be British, that abhor honour killings, forced marriages, polygamy, the veil, abhor the Islamists, abhor the suicide human bombs that Jihadism has created. There are thousands of British Muslims who respect the Jewish people, accept Israel as the one of the best democratic countries in the Middle East and would never abuse let alone behead a Jew or apostle.

Contrary to interpretations, mainstream Muslims respect people of other religions and the importance of a pluralist modern reformed Islam. We live and let live. There are millions who supported a woman leader Benazir Bhutto as she was the only beacon of light who could have instilled democracy in Pakistan. The last thing modern Pakistanis want is an Islamist party running the country. It's Islamists who discriminate or assassinate women in power as they have with Benazir.

People like my mother respected the British education, wanted their rights and freedoms, wanted their full humanity back. I hope Pakistanis makes the right choice.

Q: And you, Gina. What lies ahead for you?

I plan to carry on writing and doing interviews, I plan to work as an anti Jihad activist. I plan to challenge in any way I can the status that Islamists have enslaved us into. I will repeat over and over that I don't believe for one moment that the God who created me wanted me to walk out of my front door using only half the IQ he gave me. Nor is my brain deficient and nor are we any less human to the Muslim male.

I live in a democracy. I am lucky. I will exercise my freedom of speech and champion democracy, oppose Jihadism and empower women to stand up for their natural rights and full humanity. And I won't stop until the government of this country hears the voices of women/men like me who know they are living in one of the best democracies in the world.

No one owns Islam and the Islamists can't pressurise Muslims or non Muslims any longer. We must break our silence. British people are the nicest, the most tolerant and the most humane people on earth. I learnt more about kindness, forgiveness and humanity from the English, Welsh, Jamaican, Indian, Irish, Gays and Atheists, that no script on earth could have taught me.

We need to stop putting the country down and playing into the hands of Islamist. There's a dangerous ideology out there that is doing everything to cause a clash within this humane civilization. I hope to God that one day we can all as British people oppose this ideology from the mainstream without fear - as that is all it takes - or the future is bleak.

Staying silent just isn't an option anymore. What will we say to the next generation, our children, their children? That we had no backbone ?

Mahatma Gandhi has quoted '' I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills". That says it all for me.

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