It’s just one triumph after another for the General Synod these days. Yesterday they passed regulations to allow women to be consecrated as bishops by the end of the year. Today, another showstopper: they have invited Fuad Nahdi, a man with connections to Muslim terrorist organisations to be the first non-Christian to address the Synod. Nahdi has been associated with The Muslim Brotherhood which is classified as a terrorist group by security services and by many nation states. It is banned in Egypt. Nahdi has also been involved with Jamaal-E-Islam and he set up the Muslim pressure group Radical Middle Way following the 7/7 London bombings. RMW was part of the Labour government’s PREVENT strategy which was designed to promote discussions with “moderate Muslims” and the organisation received £1.2millions of public money. PREVENT was widely regarded as a catastrophic venture when it was discovered to be funding traditional Muslim antipathy towards homosexuals , the subjugation of women and rampant anti-Semitism.

RMW has hosted as speakers men such as Kemal-El-Halbawy, a supporter of Osama bin Laden who also has described Jews as “satanic” and praised that other terrorist outfit  Hamas as being guided by a “divine programme.”

Other speakers listed on the RMW’s website include preachers such as Jamal Badawi, Muslim Belal and Suhaib Webb.

Badawi, a Muslim Brotherhood cleric, has described suicide bombers and Hamas terrorists as “freedom fighters” and “martyrs,” and advocates for the right of men to beat their wives

Muslim Belal is a “performance poet” who composes nasheeds (Islamic songs without instruments) that promote fundamentalist Islam. One of his nasheeds expresses support for the Al Qaeda operative and convicted murderer, Aafia Siddiqui.

Suhaib Webb is an Islamic preacher who, according to FBI surveillance documents, spoke at a dinner in 2001 alongside Al Qaeda operative, Anwar Al-Awlaki, in order to raise £100,000 for the legal defense of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (aka H. Rap Brown), an Islamic fundamentalist who murdered two American police officers.

Even without RMW, Nahdi’s connections are troubling. In 1992, he founded Q News, an Islamist youth magazine that promoted Jamaat-e-Islami ideology. Nahdi’s colleagues at Q News included Fareena Alam, who would later also be involved with RMW while simultaneously working for Press TV, the Iranian regime’s propaganda outlet.

In 1997, Nahdi wrote an obituary for The Guardian of an Islamic scholar who was once a contributor to Nahdi’s Q News publication, Sayed Mutawalli ad-Darsh. Nahdi described ad-Darsh as “respectable, approachable and sensitive — he was the peoples’ Imam.” The “people’s Imam,” however, called for the killing of homosexuals and adulterers, and expressed justification for suicide bombings. He also denied that there was such a thing as rape within marriage.

I wonder if the Synod will invite Nahdi to say what he thinks on the issue of women bishops?