Cleric announces bounty on heads of Tarek Fatah, Subhash Chandra

BAREILLY: On Monday, Bareilly-based religious organisation All India Faizan-e-Madina Council announced a bounty of Rs 10,786 on the head of Islamic scholar and journalist Tarek Fatah, a Canadian national originally from Pakistan. The organisation has alleged that Fatah’s programme telecast on a private news channel was “anti-Muslim” and he, being the anchor of the programme ‘Fatah ka Fatwa’, had hurt Muslim sentiments.AIFMC head Moeen Siddiqui Noori also announced a bounty of Rs 5 lakh on the head of the channel’s owner Subhash Chandra.
This is not the first time that Noori has announced such bounty against people who have allegedly hurt Muslim sentiments. Islamic scholar and president of Ittehad-e Millat Council, Maulana Tauqeer Raza, said he considered it only a kind of gimmick. “Noori has no credibility among Muslims and he is the only follower of his so-called organisation. He has been in jail for such craziness in the past. This time too, just for sake of grabbing headlines, he has made this kind of statement.”
Noori admitted to TOI that he had been arrested in 2013 after announcing a bounty on BJP leader Subramanian Swami’s head. “Yes I was arrested but was freed after being lodged in jail for a few days. I have no regrets about that.”
On being asked whether he was not afraid to take the law into his own hands by making such announcements, Noori said, “What Fatah is doing is also illegal, but neither does our government take action against him nor does the court send him to jail. So when the law has got deaf ears, I came forward to teach a lesson to such people.”
“On Sunday night I was watching the show when Fatah started to provoke Islam in his usual style. It reached a culmination point when he said that preaching the ‘khutba’ before the Namaz-e Jumma (Friday mass prayer) is an anti-Islamic exercise and that it is nowhere mentioned to do so. But the fact is that prophet Mohammed himself used to preach ‘khutba’ during Friday prayers.”
Noori also termed Fatah an “agent of Israel” who did everything to belittle Muslims. Noori claimed that he had contested in 2014 general election from Bareilly and got 16,000 votes. However, the Election Commission site does not show his name in the contestants’ list.