The interview that the head of the Muslim Council of Britain has given to The Daily Telegraph today is phenomenally unhelpful to the cause of community cohesion. Muhammad Abdul Bari throwing around analogies to Germany in the 1930s is only going to polarise the debate.
Yet, it is his response to the news that one in four Mosques are giving house room to hate literature, according to a recent report from Policy Exchange, that is most disappointing. Rather than condemning the literature outright, Dr Bari stonewalls:
If Dr Bari really wants to ease the air of “suspicion and unease” and prevent people’s minds from being “poisoned” he should take an unequivocal stand against this kind of literature and denounce it as unacceptable.“The bookshops are independent businesses,” he says. “We can’t just go in and tell them what to sell … I will see what books they keep, if they have one book which looks like it is inciting hatred, do they have counter books on the same shelf?”
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