BARONESS WARSI, the former Conservative Party chairman, was mired in controversy last night after being billed to share a platform with two imams accused of extremism.

Baroness Warsi is due to speak at a fund-raising dinner in Manchester on April 3 alongside Yasir Qadhi and Abu Eesa Niamatullah.

Mr Qadhi, an academic at an American university, once described the Holocaust as a hoax and false propaganda. He later apologised, saying he had mistaken a Holocaust denial website for an academic authority.

Mr Niamatullah, a Manchester-based preacher, has been filmed saying of the “children of Israel… look at the way they massacre. They blow up babies as if it’s a computer game. They’ve no humanity, no morality, no ethics”.

Baroness Warsi insisted she was not aware that the two men were due to speak at the same event. “I have been assured I am the only speaker,” she said. When presented with the leaflet with the men listed on it, she said: “No idea [why that is]. I don’t know either of them.”

But she added: “My view as always is that you should engage as widely as possible and you should speak at events with organisations whose views you agree with and those you don’t.”

Mike Freer, the Tory MP for Finchley and Golders Green, said: “She is perfectly entitled to her own views on the Middle East, but to share a platform with people with views that are extremist shows a lack of judgment.”

The row comes as the Government faces claims it has failed to do enough to tackle extremism. As disclosed by The Sunday Telegraph last week, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was forced to shelve rules giving power to ministers to ban extremist speakers on university campuses. Instead Mrs May will have to make do with a speech tomorrow on the challenges of tackling extremism in society. doubt, is why the Electoral Commission has made Mend an “official partner” in registering Muslim voters for the coming campaign; why at least 10 Labour and Tory MPs joined the launch of Mend’s “Muslim manifesto” in the Commons earlier this month; and why even Lynton Crosby, the Conservative campaign director, addressed a Mend fringe meeting at last year’s Tory conference.

Mend also holds events with police chiefs, gets funding from the EU and is a “key partner” in the Hacked Off campaign for state-backed controls on the press. The truth, however, is that these distinguished bodies and people have been conned. Both Mend and YouElect are clever fronts to win political access and influence for Islamists holding extreme and antidemocratic views.

When not giving reassuring interviews, Mr Rashid is a director of the London-based Muslim Research and Development Foundation, the think tank of one of Britain’s most notorious hate preachers, Haitham al-Haddad, an

Baroness Warsi will appear at a Mend event featuring Abu Eesa Niamatullah, an extremist preacher

extremist cleric and Sharia judge from east London.

Haddad describes democracy as “filthy”, regards music as a “prohibited and fake message of love and peace”, states that Jews and Christians are the “enemies of Allah” who will “all go to hellfire” and advises Muslims not to “integrate…as simple as that”.

On March 6, Mr Rashid spoke at a rally organised by Cage, the pro-terrorist lobby group which had the week before provoked outrage by describing Mohammed Emwazi, “Jihadi John”, as a “kind and gentle” man who had been “radicalised by MI5”. He described Cage as “the leaders in our community – we are all Cage, and we stand with them in all their endeavours”. Ismail Patel, the director of YouElect, is also spokesman for the British Muslim Initiative, closely linked to Hamas, the terrorist group which wants to destroy Israel, and the Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to replace secular democratic government with a caliphate under Islamic law.

Then there is Mend. It, too, has defended Cage, accusing the media of trying to discredit the group after the “Jihadi John” episode. It, too, has links to Haddad, who, despite his views on democracy, has appeared in a Mend video urging Muslims to vote. He has said in the past that voting may be permissible to return a Muslim majority government in “50 years, something like this” as a prelude to “Islam spreading all over the world”.

Mend is next month launching an election tour, to “reinforce the importance of electoral participation” and encourage Muslims to go to the ballot box. A star speaker at five of the six events listed will be Abu Eesa Niamatullah, another British extremist who opposes democracy.

In a YouTube talk seen by The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Niamatullah attacked “the inherent weakness of democracy” because “it’s all down to the masses, to the people, to decide what is right and what is wrong”. Mr Niamatullah said that the people of Britain were “animals… there is very little difference between our behaviour and the behaviour of dogs or animals and that’s why Sharia is so noble”. In his view, it is “the Creator [who] is the one who should decide what the laws should be”.

Mr Niamatullah, also known as Abu Eesa, from Manchester, is a full-time preacher and an instructor for the Al-Maghrib Institute, whose dean of academic affairs, Yasir Qadhi, will appear at the same Mend events. Mr Qadhi has previously claimed the Holocaust was a hoax, although he now says he believes it did happen and has repudiated his views.

On April 3 in Manchester, one of the speakers booked to appear alongside Mr Niamatullah is Baroness Warsi, the former Tory chairman and the first Muslim woman to sit in Cabinet. Let us hope she has not read his views on women in the workplace from the “Prophetic Guidance” website. “I am an absolute extremist in this issue in that I don’t have any time for the opposing arguments,” he wrote.

“Women should not be in the workplace whatsoever. Full stop. I simply can’t imagine how we will safeguard our Islamic identity in the future and build strong Muslim communities in the West with women wanting to go out and becoming employed in the

The flyer for the election tour event next month

hell that it is out there.” There is no suggestion that Baroness Warsi endorses such extremist views.

Even carrying money in your pocket is “entirely unacceptable from a fiqhi [Islamic law] point of view”, according to Mr Niamatullah since there are “pictures of a non-mahram [forbidden] woman” – the Queen – on the banknotes, though he has “regretfully” conceded that this particular rule must be broken if daily life is to remain possible.

Baroness Warsi claimed last night that she was not appearing with anybody else at the Manchester event, although Mend’s own website lists her and Mr Niamatullah as speakers. Flyers for the event naming the pair have been circu- lating online for weeks. Other avowed Mend democrats include Azad Ali, the group’s head of community development and engagement, who has written of his “love” for Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda recruiter; said that the Mumbai attacks were “not terrorism”; justified the killing of British troops and stated that “democracy, if it means at the expense of not implementing the Sharia, of course nobody agrees with that”.

Mend itself is a rebranding of a group called Engage, or iEngage, which was removed as secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia in 2011 after The Sunday Telegraph revealed its links with extremism. The name change appears to have been enough to fool many MPs and official bodies.

Mend also appears dramatically better funded than in its Engage days, doubling its claimed number of staff and hiring regional co-ordinators across England.

Much of Mend’s money may come from the proceeds of tax avoidance. Sufyan Ismail, its chief executive, is a Lancashire businessman with reported assets of £65million who earned his fortune by creating one of the country’s biggest tax avoidance consultancies, OneE Group, described as a “specialist advisory unit for high net worth entrepreneurs, footballers and celebrities”. OneE specialises in what its website called “income sheltering solutions” and “profit extraction” techniques, often through its offshore subsidiary in Cyprus. In an adaptation of the HMRC slogan “tax doesn’t have to be taxing”, OneE’s tag-line was that for its clients “tax doesn’t have to be”. Mend is based in OneE’s London office.

Mr Ismail, who lives in a leafy lane near Bolton, has been able to kill two birds with one stone, depriving the infidel British state of tens of millions in revenue while making himself extremely rich. As well as advising others how to avoid tax, OneE’s accounts