Civil Service guidance directed officials to website that likened homosexuality to ‘a scourge’

Mar 17, 2024 by Jill

by Edward Malnick, Telegraph:

The website also published an analysis that described Hamas’s Oct 7 terror attack as ‘good news’.

Civil service guidance directed officials to a website on which homosexuality is described as a “scourge” and “western modernity” likened to a “disease”, The Telegraph can disclose.

A document drawn up by the civil service’s Muslim Network and distributed to officials across Whitehall as “official” guidance cited Islam21c as a useful source of information.

The disclosure comes after the cross-government group, which represents and supports Muslim officials, was suspended by Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, on Friday, over meetings which featured anti-Semitic tropes.

The website also published an analysis of Hamas’s Oct 7 terror attack on Israelis, which stated that “the good news coming from the region makes us optimistic”.

The analysis was written by Haitham al-Haddad, a Saudi-born preacher whose views were described by Dame Sara Khan as “misogynistic, racist and homophobic”, in comments published on the official government website while she was counter-extremism commissioner in 2018.

Despite this, Islam21c was listed as one of several resources in a bibliography in the guidance distributed to officials, with a link to a page on the website offering advice on “what to do when not fasting”.

Other, uncontentious, resources in the same list included the BBC website and an online version of the Quran.
This weekend, the Cabinet Office said the document distributed to officials did not amount to “official civil service guidance”.

The network “was not aware of the content of this website and accepts it should never have linked to it”. The link was removed from the guidance this weekend.

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