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We are not traitors in your midst

19 August 2006

Yahya Birt — son of John, the former BBC director-general — says that those who choose Islam are not the modern-day equivalent of Soviet moles such as Anthony Blunt

Converts to Islam are now under the microscope. Middle England is in a moral panic at the news that a white middle-class boy from High Wycombe, the son of a Conservative party constituency worker, has been arrested in connection with what might have been our own 9/11. The explanations reached for 7/7, about social unrest or cultural clashes between Muslim elders and youth, clearly don’t apply.

In the past, the temptation might have been to explain away conversion to Islam as a manifestation of social or personal discontent: an escape from personal problems, maybe, a decision to embrace the latest form of Third Worldism, a rebellion against liberal parents from the 1960s generation.

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