Asghar Bukhari

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Asghar Bukhari is one a founding member and Chief Executive of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), which describes itself as Britain's largest Muslim civil rights group. He has a BSc degree in Information Technology from the University of Leicester and has worked as a Design Consultant and freelance journalist.

He has said that he believes that it is his duty as a Muslim to be politically active, "I don’t see religion as a set of rituals. What’s the point of a god that says just pray, fast. No, God surely is there to make man better and man can hardly be better when so much oppression is going on around the world and man is not doing anything about it^[1]. He became politically active in a Muslim context during the Salman Rushdie affair. He reports that he sprayed the local library with spray paint because they had a copy of the The Satanic Verses. He says that at the time he supported the fatwa to kill Rushdie, "I felt that, yeah, if Ayatollah Khomeini is saying kill him, kill him"^[1].

Bukhari is credited with increasing British Muslim's political involvement in the UK electoral system^[2]. He was critical of Muslim extremism in the context of the 7 July 2005 London bombings and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy^[3], however he has agreed with statements supporting suicide bombing in Israel ^[4].

Bukhari has been a supporter of the convicted Holocaust denier David Irving^[5], sending him a £60 check and a letter headed with a quote from John Locke, 'All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to stand idle,' and in an email told him, 'You may feel like you are on your own but rest assured many people are with you in your fight for the Truth.' He offered to send Irving Paul Findley's book, They Dare to Speak Out, saying, the author ' suffered like you in trying to expose certain falsehoods perpetrated by the Jews', and said that he, "asked many Muslim websites to create links to your own and ask for donations.^[5]. Bukari later said that he felt that Irving was, "being smeared for nothing more then being anti-Zionist" and that the, "pro-Israeli lobby often accuse[s] people of anti-Semitism. He said he felt that Holocaust denial was wrong, but that it should not be a legal offense. ^[5]

Asghar Bukhari's claim that he did not know that Irving was a Holocaust denier was met with much skepticism. Irving had since the 1980s established a reputation dismissing any role the Nazi’s had with the holocaust.

In 1988, Irving, testified for the defence at Canadian-based Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel's trial. During the trial, Irving repeated and defended his claim from his book, Hitler's War, that until October 1943, Adolf Hitler knew nothing about the actual implementation of the Final Solution. He also expressed his evolving belief that the Final Solution involved "atrocities," not systematic murder. He further added "I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors." ^[6]