Alan West, the retired Admiral (pictured left) drafted in by Gordon Brown to be security minister, has an interview in The Sun today. The two things that will make headlines are his statements that dealing with the current threat will take thirty years or so and that the security services have foiled 12 major plots since 2000.
What should get more attention is his comments on the importance of English speaking Imams as they illustrate how the government has not yet fully grasped the essentially ideological nature of this struggle. West tells The Sun, “We need to go to the root of it. Having English-speaking Imams in this country is extremely important.
We are getting more and more Muslim youngsters who all speak English. Yet in some mosques, services given by radical Islamists are not in English.”
Now, English speaking Imams obviously sounds like a good idea. But as the newly released Policy Exchange report on hate literature in Mosques reveals the plurality of this material in Britain is actually in English. So while English-speaking Imams are a part of the solution they are by no means a cure-all.
The paramount issue is not what language the preacher is preaching in but what he is preaching. As the Policy Exchange report concludes, “Much of the offending material revealed in this report is in English and the belief that problems can be dealt with through the promotion of English is deeply misleading. It is indicative of a technocratic approach that fails to tackle the real difficulty: separatist ideology. Until those particular religio-political doctrines are challenged and defeated, little meaningful improvement can be achieved.”
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