GALHA letter to The Daily Telegraph

And this letter was sent to The Telegraph...

Dear Letters Editor,

I find Ken Livingstone's continued defence of the Muslim cleric, Dr Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, as a moderate Muslim (Telegraph 14 September 2005) in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, quite extraordinary, and to say that Al-Quaradawi is not responsible for his own words on the website (IslamOnline), which he oversees, is ludicrous.

Mr Livingstone, who still claims to be a staunch defender of gay rights, has said that he doesn't go along with Al-Qaradawi's position on homosexuality. Then in his document Why the Mayor of London will maintain dialogues with all of London's faiths and communities, he claims that Al-Qaradawi "has explicitly opposed repression of homosexuals".

How on earth does this square with the cleric's Qur'an-based website statements which describe "the sexual deviation known as homosexuality" as "a corruption of man's sexuality", and defend the dire punishments for it exacted in Muslim countries as maintaining "the purity of the Islamic society and to keep it clean of perverted elements."?

Yours faithfully,

George Broadhead

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ADDED BY Brett Lock: I've done an analysis of yesterday and today's Telegraph pieces on my own Lock&Load blog.