Welcome mat removed for 16

LONDON - Islamist preachers, white supremacists, a radio shock- jock, an Arab terrorist and two anti-gay evangelists are just some of the people to have been banned from entering Britain recently.

In a bid to regain the initiative after weeks of negative publicity and fears that anti-immigration parties will sweep the board at the forthcoming European elections, the Home Office took the unprecedented step of "naming and shaming" 16 individuals who were barred between November and March.

Most of those on the list are foreign Muslim preachers whom the Home Office believes would incite hatred or glorify terrorism if they were allowed in. But the list also includes a number of white supremacists, homophobic preachers and an anti-Arab Jewish militant. Two Slav supremacists on the list have been in a Russian jail since October 2007.

Under a new law introduced in 2005, Britain is able to pre-emptively ban anyone who promotes hatred, terrorism or serious criminal activity.

Those on the list include American talk-radio host Michael Savage, who broadcasts from San Francisco and has called the Koran a "book of hate"; preacher Fred Phelps, who leads a church in Topeka, Kansas, has picketed the funerals of Aids victims and claimed the deaths of US soldiers are a punishment for tolerance of homosexuality, and Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.

Safwat Hijazi, an Egyptian cleric who preaches on a hardline Arabic television station; Wagdy Ghoneim, an Islamic scholar expelled from the US in 2004 for alleged terrorist links; Nasr Javed, a Kashmiri separatist believed to be a member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group and Amir Siddique, a preacher at an Islamist mosque in Islamabad, have been banned.

- INDEPENDENT, AP