On Saturday 22nd August, it emerged that all board members of the UK’s biggest Muslim charity will resign en masse. The resignations appear after The Times discovered and reported that the Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) had replaced a disgraced trustee with a man who had labelled terrorists as “heroes”. He had also described Israel as the Zionist enemy.
Based in Birmingham, the charity acknowledged that their Facebook posts were “inappropriate and unacceptable”. Its board of trustees will stand down and an “entirely new board” will be elected they announced.
It is the second time in a month that the IRW, an aid organisation has faced scrutiny over incendiary comments by a trustee. The posts, in Arabic, were exposed by Lorenzo Vidino, a leading academic on Islamism in the West.
Social media posts by a director of IRW had also glorified terrorist attacks on Israel and showed the former American president Barack Obama in clothing branded with the Star of David.
Heshmat Khalifa had previously resigned his IRW directorship last month after his antisemitic posts in which he called Israelis the “grandchildren of monkeys and pigs” and Egypt’s president a “pimp son of the Jews” was revealed. He was also forced to step down as the director of an international endowment fund with a £7 million portfolio that is wholly controlled by the charity. His place on its board was taken by another IRW trustee and director, Almoutaz Tayara.
But personal posts on Facebook account of Dr Tayara, also described the leaders of the militant Palestinian organisation, Hamas, as “great men” who responded to the “divine and holy call of the Muslim Brotherhood”. Hamas’s military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades, has been designated by the UK and the EU as a proscribed terrorist organisation since 2001.
Dr Tayara had written, “The al-Qassem heroes did not graduate from the military academies of the UK and the US, unlike the rulers and royals of the Arab world who, there, were nurtured on cowardice and allegiance to the foreigners — the UK and the US.” The Charity Commission, which began investigating IRW last month after Mr Khalifa’s posts were revealed, said last night that it had “requested an urgent meeting with the incoming board” to discuss the latest allegations.
