If you fight fire with fire, you'll get burned

Nick Cohen has a fantastic post at Harry’s Place, questioning why Demos was happy to participate in an event at Islam Expo organised by the British Muslim Initiatives. Here’s the key section of his argument:

“Demos says it is slyly using one brand of Islamism to fight another. Will Demos employ the same cunning plan against the white far right? Given that the BNP, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat, does not specifically advocate communal violence, but merely, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat, is at the beginning of a continuum whose terminus is psychopathic hatred, surely Demos should attend BNP rallies and host BNP debates. After all, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat, the BNP has a constituency in Britain.

My tentative guess, however, is that Demos wouldn’t go near the BNP. When it comes to whites it has the sense to understand that you don’t defeat one form of malignant ideology by promoting another. For the sake of the white working class above all else, you take on all those who would manipulate and exploit it.

Why, then, doesn’t Demos treat brown-skinned British citizens with the same consideration? Does it ever stop to think what it is doing to them?”