Denial is a river in London

Tuesday, 29th January 2008

It will be a shame if David Cameron’s flip-flop over Derek Conway obscures the speech he was flagged up as making today (not yet on line, it seems) about dealing with Islamist extremism. Quite rightly, he deplored the government’s decision to allow into the country Islamist demagogues who support mass murder and preach hatred and incitement:

We are making the same mistakes again – allowing people to enter our country to spout hate. People like Ibrahim Moussawi, head of Hezbollah’s viciously anti-Semitic TV station, Al-Manar. Despite Pauline-Neville Jones asking the Home Secretary to refuse his entry to this country, he was allowed to speak in Manchester in December…and has been invited on a speaking tour of five British cities from the end of next month.

Not to mention Yusuf al Qaradawi, the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is being allowed in for medical treatment:

This is a man who, incidentally, Mayor Ken Livingstone calls the best hope for progress in Islam. He has been banned from the USA since 1999. He is opposed to secularism and who believes that the penalty for homosexuality is death. And he has defended the use of terrorism in Israel and Iraq. Despite this, news reports say that it’s been recommended to the Government that he be given permission to enter the country.
… The Home Secretary can exclude entry on the grounds of national security or that someone’s presence would not be conducive to the public good. And we’ve got a Prime Minister who says has ‘no toleration for preachers of hate who call for violence, who call for murder’ and that he wants to ‘isolate Islamic extremists who… seek to manipulate and divide our society’. So what is the Government waiting for?

A good question. The fact is, as I have said on numerous occasions, the British government’s policy towards Islamist extremism is to obdurately fail to get the point at all times. It comes to something when Pakistan’s President Musharraf, whose own record in the fight to defend civilisation is, shall we say, a little chequered, skewers Britain’s lamentable lack of a proper counter-terrorism policy:

‘We have adopted a five-point strategy. You need to adopt a similar strategy to curb this kind of tendency in youngsters, who tend to become terrorists, because merely getting hold of them and punishing them legally does not solve the problem or get to the root of the problem,’ he said.
He listed the five elements of Pakistan's counter-terrorist strategy: curbing the propagation of extremism in mosques; restricting the publication of extremist literature; banning extremist organisations; stopping the teaching of militant Islam in schools; and bringing madrasas (religious schools) into the mainstream.

He singled out the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. ‘We have banned them in Pakistan, yet we are blamed [and they say] we are doing nothing,’ he complained. ‘You haven't banned them yet. So why blame us?’ British officials say there is no evidence that Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain is involved in terrorism. A Downing Street source said: ‘We need to find the balance between freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and the need to prevent violence.’

Yup, just makes Musharraf’s point for him. Same old, same old from a Downing Street in denial, even now.