12 JULY 2008, Page 26

A pariah writes

Sir: I dealt for 30 years with hundreds of Muslims, at first in Mr Doyle’s organisation, so I am not ‘ignorant’ of Islam (as he claims, Letters, 5 July), which seeks to conquer this world, not the next, politically. If he disagrees, he should consult Islam’s most ‘moderate’ authorities like Yusuf Qaradawi, all of whom boast that (as Doyle writes I noted), ‘Islam... is trying to take over the globe.’ As one could not be a Muslim absent this goal, the distinction Ms McCartney draws between ‘fundamentalist’ and moderate Muslims is absurd: history shows what all Muslims endorse. As I wrote: ‘After his [Mohammed’s] death in 632, Muslim armies poured out of the Arabian peninsula... and, unprovoked, attacked its neighbours.’ Doyle writes that the Crusaders who sought to get these lands back for the local Christians had no right to be there. So what right had the invaders to be there? His organisation says that the Palestinian residue of this Muslim invasion is the ‘rightful owner’ of Israel. So why deny my claim that the Copts, say, in situ for millennia before the Islamic holocaust, are the ‘rightful owners’ of their homelands?

By denying my assertion that all Muslims regard themselves as Arabs, meanwhile, Doyle forgets that Islam offers salvation only to those who take on the identity of Allah’s ‘chosen people’. McCartney, meanwhile, chops my words to give them a virulent flavour, but even so, I wonder who would disagree with them now that events have vindicated me?

Anyway, I thank Rod Liddle for his support (Liddle Britain, 28 June). There are rich pickings for those who recycle sugary nonsense about Islam, pain for those who voice a truth obvious to all. Four years on, I remain blacklisted and unemployed. Would one of The Spectator’s kind readers give me a job?

Harry Cummins

Address withheld