25th November 2003

Dear Sir,
While Barbara Amiel continues to enjoy the privileged position of being the wife of your paper’s proprietor, I suppose we will continue to have to endure – in the words of your former editor Max Hastings – her ‘fantastically long articles in support of Israel’.

What we don’t have to endure, however, are her outright untruths. The Sept 29 2001 MCB statement from Imams and ‘Ulama to which she refers (Daily Telegraph, Nov 24th 2003) unequivocally condemned the Sept 11 attacks. That statement did not ‘translate into no condemnation of September 11 at all’ by ‘condemning the bombing of al-Qa'eda and the Taliban in Afghanistan equally and in the same terms’. This latter statement is an invention of Ms Amiel’s - the war against Afghanistan had not even begun at that time.

The MCB and the vast majority of British Muslims certainly opposed the later bombing of Afghanistan. Contrary to Ms Amiel’s assertion it was not just al-Qa’ida and the Taliban who were at the receiving end of the ‘daisy cutters’. At least, 10,000 Afghan civilians were murdered during the obscene high-altitude bombing campaign of that poor country. I have looked in vain for Ms Amiel’s lengthy articles in the back issues of the Daily Telegraph expressing her sympathy for them and their families. I wonder if that regrettable oversight is explained by the fact that they did not happen to be Israelis?

Yours faithfully,

Mr Inayat Bunglawala,
Secretary,
Media Committee,
The Muslim Council of Britain