And it's nice to see them pointing out radical Islamic groups posing as moderate Islamic groups.
The programme was accompanied by a pamphlet I wrote for the centre-right 'Cameroon' think-tank, Policy Exchange, which identified an ongoing Foreign Office policy to develop links with Islamists abroad and in Britain. I argued that progressives on the left and right of British politics should view this with concern, especially in the domestic context, where mainstream voices were being kept from dialogue with government by groups ideologically linked to Islamists in the Middle East such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its south Asian equivalent, Jamaat-i-Islami. Chief among these is the Muslim Council of Britain, whose leadership has established sympathies for the Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Both the Brotherhood and the Jamaat believe in the creation of an Islamic state and the establishment of Sharia law.
I think the word he's looking for is appeasement.
He should have also pointed out the Muslim Association of Britain. Search my blog using MAB and MCB.
It is depressing that so few on the left have been prepared to engage with the issue of the Foreign Office appeasement of radical Islam except to minimise its significance.
Ahh, he found it.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Office seems determined to press ahead with courting radical Islamists. Just this month, the British government paid for Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend a conference in Turkey to discuss the future of European Islam. At home, it funded two Islamist youth organisations, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies and Young Muslim Organisation, to help run a roadshow of Muslim scholars to tour the country. Fosis and YMO, while condemning violence, are ideological allies of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami. It is ironic that conservative thinkers categorise these organisations accurately as part of an Islamist extreme right, while many on the left continue, wrongly, to see them as part of some wider international Muslim liberation movement.
You may recall that terror supporter Qaradawi is the good friend of London's mayor, Red Ken Livingstone.
Will the left wake up before it's too late?
UPDATE
Related report here.
In Britain we have a curious way of fighting terrorism. Blair has called for a war of ideas against fundamentalist ideology, yet the Foreign Office, the intelligence agencies and latterly the Home Office have connived to make London into Londonistan, home to suicide missions abroad and a missionary base for militancy.
Even after 7/7 Whitehall is still giving its ear to radical Islamists at the expense of the vast unradical majority; the security establishment hopes to co-opt “tractable” radical Islamists as it did Sinn Fein/IRA. These clerics don’t, yet, advocate suicide missions in Britain, but approve of them against Israel. Their prestige and influence among Muslims can only grow. If this really were a third world war then on the home front we would be losing.
It is and we are.
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