The Islamic Republic of Dewsbury – Danny Lockwood

by Esmerelda Weatherwax (May 2012)

This isn’t a book review. It’s a recommendation. What it describes is worse than what has happened to Whitechapel and Walthamstow. It’s what awaits West Ham.

It’s The Islamic Republic of Dewsbury by Danny Lockwood.

Danny Lockwood is the proprietor and sometimes editor of The Press, an independent newspaper in Dewsbury Yorkshire. He has a column there which he writes as ‘Ed Lines’. Much of what he reports does not go down well with local Muslims to the extent that he has been threatened and demonstrated about, not to mention a court case between him and former MP Shahid Malik.

Dewsbury, or more specifically the area within Dewsbury called Savile Town, is known nationally as, first, the home of three of the four suicide bombers who murdered 52 people in London in July 2005 and second for being the current United Kingdom HQ of Tablighi Jamaat and the site of their Markazi Mosque. As we know Tablighi Jamaat control many mosques including the Abbeymills site in West Ham where they want to build the so called mega-mosque, which will then be their national Headquarters, if not their European Headquarters.

Dewsbury and Savile Town are also of personal interest to me as my husband lived there for two periods during his childhood and things his father told us of those times are relevant.

The title of the book speaks for itself; it details the islamification of those Yorkshire towns and villages starting from Savile Town and spreading out to encompass most of Dewsbury itself. Savile Town is an estate built in the 19^th century between the River Calder and the railway line on land owned by the Savile family.

Lockwood dates the takeover to a specific date, the 24^th June 1989. That was at the time of the furore over Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. On that day copies of the book were being burnt in Bradford and the BNP held a rally in Dewsbury. This was countered by the Black Workers Group who mustered the Muslim youths of Savile Town and a riot broke out. The police contained the angry Muslims and started to move the mob back across the Savile bridge over the River Calder into Savile Town. Before them was a bastion of traditional white Englishness, the Scarborough pub. 

The landlord described the scene. He looked out. All the Asian shops were suddenly shuttered. Their cars, which he allowed them to park in the pub car park, were gone; only a car belonging to a lunchtime customer at the pub remained. A sea of people was advancing down Savile Road towards him. He locked the doors of the pub but they broke the doors down and, unable to break the shatterproof glass pushed in the entire window frames. The customers fled upstairs while the downstairs of the pub was completely smashed. They feared that the building would be set alight with them inside. Outside the car in the car park was a write-off. Eventually the police arrived and the rioters left.

Although the pub was cleared up and reopened for business very quickly, it was never the same. The landlord moved on but died young, the pub “limped on like a festering sore on the side of the Muslim enclave” until the brewery sold it cheaply and it became flats. In the fallout after the riot 70 arrests were made, 59 of them Muslim and the Kirklees Black Workers group assisted by the usual white Marxists took up their cause. The police officer in charge of the arrests was retired shortly after. The Muslim community had begun to flex their muscles and realise their potential power.

A large part of the book is made up of the internal politics of the Dewsbury area. Lockwood doesn’t use the word “taqyyia” but if you want to see some practical examples those chapters are full of them. I won’t describe his relationship with former MP Shahid Malik (of the notorious ‘there should be 20 Muslim MPs in Parliament and Insh’allah very shortly we’ll see that’ speech) which resulted in a defamation trial.

He also had a run in with Baroness Warsi, “sweet, smiling, witty Sayeeda”, as he calls her. He tells how she sat next to one of his staff in the hairdressers wondering aloud whether to accept the political courtship of the Labour Party or the Conservatives. Both parties could see the value of an articulate educated and ambitious Muslim woman. Her history in the ‘human rights’ field suggested she was left wing, but the Conservatives offered immediate local career openings.

One story I cannot resist repeating. HSBC bank sponsored an Eid celebration for 2000 people organised by Shahid Malik. Warsi wangled invitations for her family from the bank. As she tried to enter the main hall Shahid Malik told her that no women were allowed in the hall and that she should join the other women downstairs. She defied him and walked into the hall which may have ultimately cost her votes. Her choice has served her well. She lost in the 2005 election but gained a life peerage 2 years later.

What I want to concentrate on is not the specific Dewsbury politics (Paki politics as Shahid Malik described it – no-one else could use that phrase) but the things Lockwood describes which make sense of what I have noticed elsewhere. Things that are happening in towns and cities all over England. In Dewsbury the protagonists are Pakistani Muslims, in Whitechapel Bengali Muslims, in Walthamstow a mix but the principles are not dissimilar.

For example the cash businesses. In Dewsbury the heavy woollen industry has been succeeded by bed manufacturing. Sayeeda Warsi’s father, Safdar Hussein (a friend of disgraced life peer Lord Ahmed) made his fortune in that useful and legal trade. Others make large sums of money in the illegal drug trade. Hence the proliferation of cash businesses, more takeway shops in a town than the number of curries sold in that town on any one night. But takings are paid in and who can prove that these relatively small sums, which quickly mount up, are not the proceeds of a half dozen tandoori chickens and a lamb korma?

But there is more. They don’t want to pay tax either. A businessman described a particular scam he knew of to Lockwood one night. Lockwood has no proof but the man was convincing with the details which obviously are not repeated in the book.

A ‘businessman’ goes to his bank and withdraws £100,000 cash. The bank don’t object; they have been accustomed to transactions according to sharia law, ie no interest, no credit, no western usury. The notes are carried out of the country and stashed away abroad. The businessman returns to the bank with another £100,000 cash and pays it back in. Sadly his sharia transaction fell through.

So many purchases of houses, often from elderly people who are desperate to leave because they are the last of the original inhabitants left on that street, are made by cash.

At the time my husband’s family lived in Savile Town they worshiped at St Mary’s Church. The church closed in the 60s, the stained glass and war memorial were removed to the mother church in Thornhill Lees and I am informed that the site is now flats. My late father-in-law remembered an excellent cricket club and sports facilities and wondered what had become of them. Danny Lockwood describes the days when the home of Dewsbury Cricket Club hosted County matches. That makes it holy ground to a Yorkshireman. The sports ground included pitches for hockey, football, rugby and bowls. The cricket pavilion and stands burnt down during the 1980s. The ladies hockey team suffered abuse and attacks even during matches. The police advised that their presence was provocative and they found other premises.

The rugby team were more stubborn. Vandalism became normal. The pitch would be littered with broken glass which had to be cleared before every match. Pieces of jagged metal would be deliberately embedded in the turf, in particular around the try lines where players would slide across the grass. The police encouraged them to find other premises and eventually they did so.

The playing fields were held in trust for the people of Savile Town by the trustees of the Savile estate. When one trustee died the others decided that they could kill two birds with one stone. Offload the responsibility of unused playing fields and make friends for the Tory party in the Muslim community. They decided to give the playing fields to the ‘Muslim Community’ by a sale for the nominal sum of £1. In their ignorance they decided that the organisers of the largest and most prominent mosque would be the right people. So Tablighi Jamaat became the proud owners of what had been in its prime the finest Cricket ground in West Yorkshire. This upset the indigenous white inhabitants who had been pushed out of their playing fields, and many of the local Muslims who did not attend the Markazi Mosque. Its influence was not so all pervading in Dewsbury at that time.

To quote directly “Even after 30 years in the town the shadowy figures who run the Markazi don’t do ‘public’ and they have certainly never done ‘gratitude’ in any form I have witnessed. There isn’t and never has been any attempt or desire to engage with the wider community outside the Markazi walls – not here in Dewsbury or nationally . . . They certainly don’t do ‘thank-yous’. “

He describes the difficulty of even taking a photograph of the building. Google street view succeeded where he was wary. Like their building in West Ham the atmosphere is not welcoming.

He describes an event which took place in June 1994 which makes sense of something I witnessed in West Ham in either 1992 or 1993. I took the many tents which appeared all over the (contaminated) site to be part of an Eid celebration. I now believe it was an Ijtema, or pilgrimage, but can find no confirmation of this on line.

In Dewsbury, a town of 55,000 people another 50,000 (or so, no one really knows) appeared almost overnight. As if by magic. And no one outside the Muslim community, not even a newspaper editor with his ear to the ground, knew they were coming. All the open space was covered with canvas, homes were thrown open, all criticism of the call to prayer at 4am was dismissed as racism. The main road in and out was blocked and with the river to one side and the railway line to the other Savile Town was sealed. District nurses with patients to see couldn’t get in but Muslim GPs set up their own clinics and their weekend of overtime and the prescriptions they wrote for all and sundry cost Kirklees NHS £10,000.

Lockwood is of the opinion that if the 1989 riot was the turning point for Muslim youths expressing themselves by physical violence then the Ijtema of 1994 was the maturing of a united and aggressive Islamic front against authority.

Danny Lockwood was born and brought up in Dewsbury. He worked as a journalist and other careers in several parts of England and abroad. After a period with Johnson Press who publish several local papers he set up The Press (and League Weekly a rugby paper – his great love) which is a free newspaper, financed by advertising. This makes the regular call by Muslims offended by his reporting for people not to buy the paper rather silly. I wish The Press website had a proper archive. Even if you can locate previous reports of, for example, the Dewsbury bus being stoned as it passed through Savile Town, it isn’t always possible to put a date to the incident. That’s a minor point.  In one chapter he lists crimes or stories of absurdities from 2002 to 2009 which involve the Muslims community.

Another chapter is devoted to the horrifying attack on local man Lee Massey by a group of illegal Iraqi Kurds. He mentions the closing of each pub and church and the Islamic institution which replaced it. The White Hart Inn is now the home of Dewsbury’s Sharia court the Islamic Institute of Great Britain. The Gladstone Liberal club is now the Islamic Tarbiyah Academy.

Danny Lockwood has nothing but criticism in his book for the BNP (but some sympathy for decent people who have voted for them or even joined them in desperation). However he has been accused of being a member on several occasions, most recently by Hope not Hate after the publication of The Islamic Republic of Dewsbury. Sam King wrote a blog post entitled ‘When a Journalist turns Rogue’ and called him a ‘washed up bigot’. This despite him conforming to the National Union of Journalist rules to always describe the BNP and EDL in an unfavourable light. To be in bad odour with Hope not Hate, is however, to be in good, indeed the very best, company.

He has no time for the EDL either. I don’t know why, unless it’s the age old contempt of the rugby player for the football player. He has noticed all the abuses associated with  much of the Muslim way of life, what he now needs to do is realise that most of these are not cultural and peculiar to Pakistan, but are universal in the Muslim world and are attributable to Islam. He seems to be moving some way towards this with his recognition of the universal state of Muslim victimhood and that what is the truth one day, is not necessarily the same truth the next day.

There is a bit where he ponders for his time as a court reporter why men plead not guilty to crimes that they had no possible defence for. All he can imagine is that they feel that as they are not British they are incapable of breaking  British law. A friend told him that if they plead innocent within their understanding of the offence the can return to their community with their heads held high, having been stitched up by the English legal system. He is very close. I wonder if the trial of the Muslim men in Rochdale blaming the under-age girls they raped for being ‘prostitutes’ racists and liars has helped him since with his thoughts?

He must be finding it hard to throw off the teachings of Common Purpose. Many people are very suspicious of Common Purpose. Ostensibly it is, according to its website, ‘a not-for-profit organisation that brings together people from a wide range of backgrounds to help them become more effective leaders in society’. However many believe that it is a tool to spread and indoctrinate the kind of Marxist, liberal, political correctness that has undermined western society such that Islam has been able to become the threat to our way of life and traditions that it is. He is not a member any longer as he breached a confidence under the Chatham House rules, an act which still fills him with shame.

He has the facts. They are in his book. They shriek for his blood outside Kirklees Police Station regularly. I recommend that you read his book to see how stealth jihad has spread into our towns and cities. I recommend that Mr Lockwood reads some Bat Ye’or, or Global Jihad by Patrick Sookhdeo so that he can see the reasons behind the facts he so bravely reports.

Lifting the lid on over 20 years of Cultural Revolution available from The Press here.

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