It is wonderful to see how well the British Olympic team is doing in Beijing.
However, here is a different side to the story - Even under the spotlight, repression continues
Feel free to contribute to the blog following the article :)
As UN Envoy Ibrahim Gambari begins his current visit to Burma today, it is important to remind him that 2,000 prisoners of conscience remain behind bars. According to the Burma Campaign UK today, prisoners live in 8 by 12 foot cells, and are currently experiencing a worsening of conditions - the denial of medical treatment, food supplies from families and exercise periods.
Gambari should give the regime a deadline, as I called for in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend: release the political prisoners, before Ban Ki-moon visits Burma, or face the consequences: universal arms embargo, targeted financial sanctions, a credentials challenge at the UN, and a referral to the International Criminal Court.
As Wai Hnin, a campaigner with the Burma Campaign UK and herself the daughter of a prominent political prisoner, says:
The United Nations Security Council has said the political prisoners should be released, and Gambari and Ban Ki-Moon must make that happen. We have had 20 years of envoys going back and forth with nothing to show for it. It is time they delivered concrete results.
The cover story in Prospect Magazine is very interesting - worth reading. Edward Luttwak argues that:
The received wisdom is that President Bush has been a foreign policy disaster, and that America is threatened by the rise of Asia. Both claims are wrong—Bush has successfully rolled back jihadism, and the US will benefit from Asian growth
He concludes that Bush is "A Truman for our Times".
By going to Georgia, David Cameron has shown three things. First, he has the right values. He is quoted in today's Sunday Telegraph as saying:
I think it's important that the world's oldest democracy must stand with one of the newest when it's been illegally invaded by another country
This builds on William Hague's repeated pledges to place "human rights at the very heart of foreign policy". I am delighted that Cameron has taken such a stand.
Second, David Cameron has shown statesmanship. He looks more and more like the next Prime Minister as each day goes by. His various overseas visits - whether to the Arctic, Rwanda, Afghanistan, India, Beijing, Washington, DC or now Georgia - increase his understanding of the world stage, and demonstrate a recognition that to be a serious government-in-waiting, we need to grapple not only with our domestic challenges, but also the world's problems. Global poverty, oppression and conflict cannot be disentangled from domestic issues - world affairs affect our national security.
And third, he has shown just how shabby the current Government has become. The fact that Gordon Brown has been so focused on his internal warfare with his own Foreign Secretary that he has failed to do anything meaningful - or even say very much - about Georgia is astonishing. As Cameron becomes more statesmanlike by the day, Brown's stature - once high - is diminishing by the moment.
Oh all right, I admit it - I like Barack Obama too! For months I have been resisting the urge, not because I ever disliked him (who could?), but because I am always instinctively suspicious of bandwagons. But his recent world tour, and reading his book The Audacity of Hope, have certainly impressed me. I'll return in a moment to his book and why I like it.
However, the question the American electorate need to ask themselves is what are they voting for? A President, a commander-in-chief - or a dinner-party companion? If it is the latter, then in my mind there's no competition. Barack Obama is precisely the sort of person I'd like to have dinner with. It could be a formal dinner, or a summer barbecue. Either way, he is intelligent, interesting, has a fascinating background and experience of the world beyond Chicago, and is good-natured and charming. With my interest in the world, and especially Asia, I find his background growing up in Indonesia, the son of a Kenyan father, fascinating. He enriches life and politics. His opponent, John McCain, shares some of those characteristics - his Vietnam war-hero status is well-known - but is not so much a person I'd enjoy spending time with. Whereas Obama would put me at ease, McCain gives me the feeling that I'd be on edge all the time, unsure of whether he'd explode with fury at some ill-judged remark or perceived slight I might make. The stories of McCain's temper are legion. He may well be fascinating and inspiring, but he also seems a bit prickly - not an ideal dinner-party compasion.
But for commander-in-chief?
Continue reading "Commander-in-Chief or Dinner Party Companion" »
A couple of weeks ago I received news from my contacts in Pakistan, that two Pakistani Christian girls - aged 13 and 10 - had been abducted by Islamist extremists, forcibly converted to Islam, probably raped, and forcibly married. The girls' parents sought help from the local police, who refused to act. The local MP was protecting the kidnappers. The parents took it to court, and a lower court ruling awarded custody of the girls to the kidnappers, on the basis that the girls were now Muslims and could not live with their Christian parents. Thankfully, earlier this week we saw some small progress - a high court ruled that their conversion was not voluntary, and that they should be placed in a government safe-house. But the court also prohibited them from having contact with either their abductors (good) or their parents (why?). Full story here.
All this came just after I finished reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book Infidel. I believe it is another "absolutely must read" book. I think you should read the book in full, so I will just provide two extracts to give you a taste - in the hope that you will delve deeper. Writing about honour killings, Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali - who was given asylum in the Netherlands and became a Dutch MP - was constantly challenged by politically-correct Europeans to back up her arguments with evidence - but could never get anyone in Government to gather the facts. She continues:
Even Amnesty International didn't keep statistics on how many women around the world were victims of honor killings. They could tell you how many men were imprisoned and tortured, but they couldn't keep tabs on the number of women flogged in public for fornication, or executed for adultery. That wasn't their subject.
In the piece on David Cameron in the Sunday Times magazine last Sunday, the following paragraph leaped out at me:
Cameron does not think the experience in Iraq should put us off intervention – after all, he voted in favour of the war even if he might prefer to forget that now. “Yes, we should be a liberal democracy that believes in the spread of human rights and democracy. Blair’s problem was he was a liberal interventionist without a handbrake.
I agree - and I agree with pretty much everything else in the article.
Daniel Hannan MEP is an intelligent person, and he writes well. Often he says things about the EU that most politicians do not have the courage to say. But sometimes he goes too far, expresses things in unnecessarily inflammatory ways, gets into trouble - and occasionally, says some things that are astonishingly stupid. His recent article, headlined The International Criminal Court is a threat to democracy, was not simply ill-timed and ill-judged, it was extraordinarily absurd.
First, let me emphasise that you will not find anyone more pro-American than me. I have lived in Washington, DC and visit the US regularly. Having just returned from another visit to Washington, DC, where I had meetings with people in the State Department and Congress concerning various international human rights issues, I am convinced that no government has shown more commitment to the promotion of human rights and democracy than the US. The Czechs, the Dutch and the Scandinavians do some very good things, Canada occasionally pops up, and the UK sporadically gets into gear, with a bit of pushing from Parliament and activists - but I have not met as many officials, staff and elected politicians with the commitment to the values of human rights and democracy as I have in Washington, DC. The US is far from perfect, and there have been some shocking inconsistencies, but overall it sets an example for human rights and democracy promotion which our FCO could learn from. So, I am a strong friend of the US.
Second, I do understand why - especially in the climate of anti-Americanism in which we leave - the US is nervous about the possibility of cranks misusing the ICC to bring war crimes charges against President Bush or other US leaders. And I understand why people like Hannan may be sceptical.
That said, to suggest, as Hannan did, that the prosecution of Sudan's leader Omar al-Bashir - a major step forward which few expected - is "a fearful blow" against national sovereignty, a "threat to democracy" and an act which makes "the world a darker and more dangerous place" is the height of irrational hysteria. Hannan says that "indicting him [Bashir] amounts to a declaration of war". Well, I don't know if that is correct - when we prosecute murderers in this country, are we declaring "war" on all their family, neighbours and friends? And even if it is, should we seriously just look away when genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes take place?
The Bashir case sets a precedent upon which we should build, not seek to derail and destroy. There is now an increased prospect of bringing Robert Mugabe, and the Burmese Generals, to the ICC. Surely, we should be thinking - when the ICC review takes place next year - how can we put in place safeguards to ensure that the institution, and other universal jurisdictional mechanisms, are used for what they are intended - to bring mass murderers, war criminals and the perpetrators of crimes against humanity and genocide - to justice, and not misused and twisted by anti-American or anti-British elements? We should focus on improving these mechanisms in a way which would reassure US concerns, and enable the US to play its rightful lead role in such an institution. Hannan's hysteria - and the absence of a rational reasoned argument in his article - does him no favours. I would recommend people read Lord Alton's recent remarks in the House of Lords, in contrast to Hannan's outburst.
David Cameron's recent speech in Glasgow, on the broken society and the "responsibility agenda", has been greeted as one of the defining speeches of his leadership - and rightly so. The following extracts are the words which especially struck a cord with me. Firstly, on our purpose in politics:
Our mission is to repair our broken society - to heal the wounds of poverty, crime, social disorder and deprivation that are steadily making this country a grim and joyless place to live for far too many people.
"Because while our society is broken today, it is not broken for ever. We can and will repair it. We can and will bring hope and aspiration to places where there is resignation and despair.
I hope every single Conservative candidate, party worker, activist and member will seize on this objective as our mission.
But as part of tackling poverty, crime and deprivation, as part of compassionate conservatism, we need clarity, which may require at times a hard edge - expressed here:
"I think the time has come for me to speak out about something that has been troubling me for a long time. I have not found the words to say it sensitively. And then I realised, that is the whole point.
"We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people's feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgemental, we have failed to say what needs to be said. We have seen a decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification.
"Instead we prefer moral neutrality, a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong behaviour. Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more.
"Of course as soon as a politician says this there is a clamour - "but what about all of you?" And let me say now, yes, we are human, flawed and frequently screw up.
"Our relationships crack up, our marriages break down, we fail as parents and as citizens just like everyone else. But if the result of this is a stultifying silence about things that really matter, we re-double the failure. Refusing to use these words - right and wrong - means a denial of personal responsibility and the concept of a moral choice.
"We talk about people being "at risk of obesity" instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise. We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it's as if these things - obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction - are purely external events like a plague or bad weather.
"Of course, circumstances - where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school, and the choices your parents make - have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices that people make.
"There is a danger of becoming quite literally a de-moralised society, where nobody will tell the truth anymore about what is good and bad, right and wrong. That is why children are growing up without boundaries, thinking they can do as they please, and why no adult will intervene to stop them - including, often, their parents. If we are going to get any where near solving some of these problems, that has to stop.
I could not agree more. If you have not read his speech in full, you must.
THis year marks not only the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - but also the tenth anniversary of the US International Religious Freedom Act.
The International Religious Freedom Act, passed by Congress in 1998, mandated the US State Department to create Office of International Religious Freedom, an Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, and publish an annual report on religious freedom around the world. It recognised that religious freedom is a vital human right and an essential component of democracy - and as such, a crucial dimension to foreign policy. The Act also created a US Commission on International Religious Freedom, to monitor the record of the State Department.
The Conservative Party Human Rights Commission has proposed the establishment of some similar mechanisms - adapted for the British system - on general human rights including specifically religious freedom, in the FCO. The current FCO Freedom of Religion Panel meets infrequently and sporadically, and the Human Rights and Governance Group is tiny, under-resourced and marginalised. The Minister responsible for human rights, Lord Malloch Brown, also has responsibility for a large number of other areas, not least Asia, Africa, the Commonwealth, the UN, NATO, the G8 and 'global issues' ...! We think it is time we instituted an FCO equivalent of the US State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Labour and Human Rights (known as 'DRL'), with thematic areas such as trafficking and religious freedom within it ... see our annual reports on our website.
The US Congress has passed a resolution marking the tenth anniversary of the IRF Act. The resolution reminds us that the Act "establishes" religious freedom as "a top priority in United States foreign policy", and notes that according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, there is a strong correlation between religious freedom and respect for human freedom. The resolution states:
Whereas research published by the Pew Forum indicates that other human rights are negatively affected when religious freedom is not protected, and when religious participation is protected equitably for people of all beliefs in societies throughout the world, human freedom increases and conflict decreases
The resolution also notes that 40% of the world's population live in countries described as "partly free"; a third live in countries categorised as "unfree", and ten years on from the passing of the IRF Act, "the right to religious freedom remains under increasing assault in many countries around the world". It goes on to detail some examples.
President Bush's speech marking the 10th anniversary of this legislation is also worth reading.
An article in a recent issue of The Spectator, by Irfan al-Alawi and Stephen Schwarz, claims that a survey shows most British Muslims do not want sharia. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice ought to read it - available here.
Joseph Loconte's latest article, co-written with Don Eberly, is published in the online journal Provocations, and is well worth reading. It draws on Eberly's new book, The Rise of Global Civil Society, which describes how grassroots, citizen-led movements are tackling poverty and promoting democratic values around the world. Read it here.
Following the debate on Britishness, the House of Lords had a hugely stimulating and important debate on the Rule of Law, introduced by Baroness Park of Monmouth. Much of the debate focused on Sharia law - and the worry, emphasised by several speakers, that - in Baroness Park's words - "we are tacitly accepting a parallel legal structure". Far from being anti-Muslim, actually expressing concerns about Sharia is in the interests of Muslims, especially women, who may not be in a position to speak up for themselves. As Lady Park said: "Muslim women who are British citizens are being deprived of their rights - property rights for example. Women marrying in the mosque, a ceremony which is not a civil contract, forfeit their claim to compensation in a divorce."
Several speakers highlighted the issue of young British school girls of, say, Pakistani origin being taken from school at the age of 12, by their families, and sent to Pakistan to marry. "This is being done with the connivance of the schools on the grounds - as I was told when I visited a school in Bradford - that the council believes we must respect the culture of the Muslim community," said Baroness Park.
On 19 June, two important debates were held in the House of Lords, which I would recommend reading. The first, which I will focus on in this post, was introduced by Lord Taylor of Warwick and focused on Britishness.
Lord Taylor gave a superb opening speech, full of humour and personal experience, and concluded with the excellent remark: "Being British is about shaking hands, not fists". Among the many other excellent contributions was Baroness Cox's, in which she said:
... we have a very precious heritage of Britishness: constitutionally, rooted in Magna Carta and the principle of equality before the law for all; culturally, with the rich tapestry of our heritage of literature, art, music and architecture; and ethically, with the historic values of our Judeo-Christian heritage, encouraging the growth of ethically-based institutions in areas such as the professions, trade guilds and the charitable organisations serving this country and abroad.
I am no prude, nor am I Victorian. I had always thought my views on morality were moderate - more conservative than some, but not extreme. I have always been sensibly pro-life - and pro-life in its broadest sense. I believe in a culture of life and human dignity.
For those reasons, I read this report, headlined Rise in teen abortions prompts calls for reform of sex education, in The Times on 20 June, with immense and almost indescribable sadness. Half of pregnancies among girls under 18, The Times reports, end in abortions. Children as young as five may be given sex education. Possibly even more disturbing, according to an article on the same page headlined 'The ones I worry about are those who have the baby', is the fact that girls as young as 12 are getting pregnant - and having abortions. John Parsons, a Lambeth gynaecologist, says he has lost track of the number of abortions he has carried out among 12 year-olds. In the space of one day, he carried out nine terminations - "normal", he says.
And then, it gets worse, with Caitlin Moran's piece headlined These girls deserve our gratitude for avoiding the worse option. She is almost correct when she writes:
Let's face it, the rise in teenage abortion is not the scandalous statistic here. It is, ultimately, the teenage pregnancies that are the problem. Why are these pregnancies occurring?
This will infuriate some of the "hug-a-bureaucrat" bloggers on this site, but I am going to say it anyway. There are several elephants in the room at the moment that we don't like to talk about. One is radical Islamism (the political agenda, as distinct from the religion of Islam which has many interpretations, some of which entirely peaceful and law-abiding and decent). I have written about that several times on this site. But another elephant in the room is the UN. And with both the rise of radical Islamism, and the disfunctional uselessness of the UN, if we continue to ignore them out of political correctness, one day both these elephants-in-the-room with either sit on us and squash us, or pick us up by the trunk and smash us against a wall. The first will do so aggressively; the latter unwittingly. Best to address the elephants now before their tusks grow too big.
It is the second elephant, the UN, that I concentrate on today. Ban Ki-moon is a limp figure who fails to inspire any confidence at all. At least with Kofi Annan one had some reassurance that he cared. Ban Ki-moon is becoming a joke. But to be fair, Ban Ki-moon is not the key problem. The UN is only as good as the sum of its parts. And China, Russia, the Asian nations and the African nations have for too long been at best pathetic and at worst complicit with some of the world's worst tyrannies: Burma, Zimbabwe and Sudan in particular. The crisis in Zimbabwe shows this clearly. The crisis in Burma last month was an almost identical echo of the same plight. The Spectator sums it all up very well in an editorial this week.
I have just finished reading an excellent paper by a Turkish Muslim woman, Zeyno Baran from the Hudson Institute, on the rise of the Islamist group Hizb Ut-Tahrir. I think that the paper, Hizb Ut-Tahrir: Islam's Political Insurgency, is crucial reading for us all. It was published in December 2004, so I may be a bit behind the times in recommending it, but I believe it is still relevant, especially for those of us who are still trying to get to grips with the challenge of radical Islamism, and to support and encourage moderate, progressive Muslim democrats.
Rather than give you lots of opinion myself, let me provide a few extracts in the hope that you will read it in full and learn from it. Remember, Zeyno Baran is a Muslim herself, so her study of Hizb Ut-Tahrir should be taken especially seriously. In the Executive Summary, she writes:
So far, the main tools used against the terrorists have been the military, the intelligence agencies and the nation's law enforcement personnel .... Though such methods will reduce the ability of the terrorists ... they do not address the existential problems of the spread of an ideology that is fundamentally in contrast to the democratic capitalist system and the Western conception of freedom.
I have just finished reading the Centre for Social Cohesion's report Virtual Caliphate. I think this is vital reading for anyone who cares about liberal democracy and security. It gives valuable insights into the language used by extremists, and into the way they use the internet.
Equally important reading is a piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph - which claims that extremists are winning the battle for the hearts and minds of young British Muslims.
I begin this post by paying tribute to the brave people of Zimbabwe, who are trying to take a stand for freedom and democracy and against Mugabe's tyranny. In that context, I applaud Conservativehome's decision to devote today's blog to Zimbabwe.
Today's Times perhaps had the best coverage, and the best angle on Zimbabwe. The headline, War crimes warning to Mugabe as terror grows, caught my attention, as did the editorial. The Times and others are now arguing that evidence should be collected of Mugabe's crimes against humanity, and that if the situation does not change soon he should face prosecution in the International Criminal Court. A Western diplomat summed it up well by saying that Mugabe needs to understand he is only "minutes away" from an indictment in the ICC.
The crisis in Burma has slipped off the front pages of our media, five weeks after Cyclone Nargis - and now the ships anchored off the coast, ready with aid, have sailed away. Yet the suffering continues, as I have described most recently in The Cutting Edge News. Cyclone victims are now being forcibly evicted from shelters and forced to return home, even though they have no homes to go to. Some have been executed on Senior General Than Shwe's orders. Now, Burma's extraordinary regime has announced that the imprisoned democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi deserves to be flogged! The case for humanitarian intervention is overwhelming, especially as it had French backing, and it is one I have advocated multiple times, most recently in The Weekly Standard. I have also made the case in The Guardian's Commentisfree site, The Cutting Edge News and on this site. But the tragedy is, once again it slips from the headlines, falls off the agenda, and the world moves on - and the unfolding disaster continues.
In response to the many contributions, and valid questions and arguments posed in response to my earlier article, let me attempt the following answers. In doing so, however, let me emphasise two things. First, I am still very much a beginner on this complex issue of Islamism, and there is much that I have to learn. I am very very far from being an expert, and do not at all pretend to be one. I simply know what I have seen and read of the rise of Islamism in this country, and what I have learned from people first-hand who are far more authoritative than me. I also know what I have seen, as a human rights activist, of the effects of Islamism in Pakistan, one of the countries I specialise in, and from colleagues who focus on Nigeria, Sudan, Indonesia and elsewhere.
Second, I thought very long and very hard before engaging with this issue. My article is not the first I have written on this subject, but I only began to speak out last year. I was not exactly looking for another challenge to take on, as my international human rights work is more than full-time, and there is plenty to do on Burma, one of my major specialisms, alone. I could, like so many others, have opted for what seems the easier, more comfortable option in the short-term - to keep my head down, be politically correct, avoid controversy, and leave it to others to sort this one out. But the more I read and learnt, and the more I see first-hand in Pakistan, the more concerned I am. It was reading Ed Husain's book The Islamist, with his own first-hand accounts of Islamism, that made me realise finally that I had to engage.
Continue reading "Some answers to some of the questions posed about Islamism" »
Liberal democratic values are under increasing threat, at home and abroad, from radical Islamism. Yet many so-called ‘liberals’ – some deliberately, others unwittingly – are complicit with those seeking to destroy those values. Some are still asleep; some naively surrendered through ultra-political correctness; while others, such as London’s former Mayor Ken Livingstone and MP George Galloway, despite their prominent support for gay and women’s rights, have formed bizarre alliances with people who would stone adulterers, execute homosexuals and advocate suicide bombing. Now it is time for all who care about liberty and tolerance, on the left and the right in mainstream politics, to unite in the face of this challenge.
As part of the response, it is time to ask some tough questions. Inter-faith dialogue and multi-culturalism sound good in principle. But when they result, respectively, in concessions and tip-toeing around difficult or contentious issues, or treading on eggshells and ghetto-isation, they can be more harmful than helpful. A frank, honest, open dialogue, with Muslims is what is needed.
In 1529 and 1683, jihadi Muslim armies besieged Vienna, intent on conquering Europe. And now they are back again, some perhaps with the same objective. The voices of Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, Melanie Phillips, Douglas Murray, Michael Gove, Pope Benedict XVI and now, at long last, the Church of England should be heard.
The Church of England has often trod a hesitant path. Now the Church appears to have found its voice and rediscovered its convictions. Its report, Moral but no Compass, says Government ministers only pay "lip service" to Christianity, while listening "intently" to Muslims. Despite its work on the frontlines of society, the Church has been marginalised. Belatedly, it is speaking up.
The Church’s report follows the decision by a Muslim policeman in Birmingham to stop two Christian preachers from distributing Bible tracts, because they were in a "Muslim" area. That incident must surely give us pause for thought. Whatever the policeman’s intentions, it is an ominous sign. Bishop Nazir-Ali has warned that some some Muslim areas are becoming "no-go" places in Britain today. Are we being colonised without our realising it?
Continue reading "Are the Islamists the New Colonialists?" »
In the first edition of the excellent new magazine Standpoint, edited by Daniel Johnson, Michael Burleigh has written a superb article in which he claims "Britain is sleepwalking" into Islamism and the terrorist threat. Below are some extracts, which I have highlighted and I have really nothing to add to them. You can read the full article here. But some key extracts:
Many of the 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain, for example, still do not seem to fully appreciate the outrage that a finger-jabbing minority causes at home and abroad with each escalating demand for Islamist enclaves. Like perennial students, New Labour favours debate and dialogue, except when it involves matters of overriding concern to ordinary people, in which case Trevor Phillips is left to stick his head above the parapet. In dealing with the Muslim Council of Britain, the British Government unwittingly accepted as “community” interlocutors men who, in line with salafi-jihadi propaganda, blamed Islamist terrorism primarily on British foreign policy, while failing to condemn unequivocally suicide bombing outside the UK. Virtually nothing is being done to stem the flow of Wahabist money (and the attendant intolerant ideology) not only into mosques but university “Islamic studies” programmes, whose ideologically-slanted nature has been exposed in a report published last month by the Centre for Social Cohesion. The author, Anthony Glees, argues that pro-free speech arguments (and there is little free speech at all when it comes to Israel) are being used by the authorities to slip out of public responsibility towards taxpayers.
Writing in last Thursday's Guardian, Ziauddin Sardar claims that "to lionise former extremists feeds anti-Muslim prejudice". Former Islamists, he argues, "are part of the problem not part of the solution". His argument then descends into unwarrented abuse (albeit with more subtlety and sophistication than some other critics) towards the Quilliam Foundation, the new organisation launched last week by Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz (I wrote about it here) . He concludes with the punchy but wholly inappropriate analogy - "we cannot allow former lunatics to take over the asylum".
Sardar's argument is misleading. He has a point, that we should be engaging the millions of ordinary, moderate, peaceful British Muslims who have never dreamed of becoming involved in Islamism. But he goes too far in suggesting we do that instead of listening to groups like Quilliam and people like Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz. Surely, surely, we should do both?
Continue reading "Ignore the critics and take Quilliam seriously" »
Recent Comments