British libraries are funded by the UK taxpayer to educate and entertain the British public. Their range of books reflects the breadth of interests of the nation. However a number of public libraries in the UK stock substantial quantities of literature preaching violent jihad in the most heavily Muslim areas of the country.
Although this problem exists in numerous public libraries, in Waltham Forest, Birmingham and Blackburn, the following report mainly focuses on one such library service – that of Tower Hamlets in east London which has the largest Muslim population of any London borough. Tower Hamlets’ eight lending libraries contain several hundred books and audiotapes by radical Islamists, stocking the works and words of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, many senior Wahhabi clerics and even preachers who have been convicted in the UK of incitement to murder.