Over to the Islamist Extreme Right, again

Nick Cohen surveys the continuing rehabilitation of the Islamist extreme-right by the Labour Party. The depressing phenomenon of pandering to “faith groups” has been legitimised at the cost of suppressing liberalising voices within the Muslim community. In practice, this turns out to be nothing more than a strategy, by John Denham and friends, to re-empower the same old gang of non-representative Islamist dinosaurs, religious supremacists, alleged war criminals, homophobes and pathological anti-semites unfamiliar with the concept of freedom of expression that make up the MCB and its core support group.

Last Sunday, John Denham, the communities secretary, announced: “Anyone wanting to build a more progressive society would ignore the powerful role of faith at their peril. We should continually seek ways of encouraging and enhancing the contribution faith communities make on the central issues of our time.”

As the week wore on, it became clear what type of “faith communities” Labour wanted to put at the centre of its “progressive society”. Denham is forcing out of his department Azhar Ali, an adviser from the heart of the Labour movement (he was once the Labour leader of Pendle council). Ali’s crime was that he opposed Islamism while advising Tony Blair, Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears.

After Daud Abdullah, the deputy general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, signed a declaration advocating attacks on the Royal Navy if Gordon Brown sent ships to impose an arms blockade on Gaza, Ali told his comrades to cut all links. He might have said that a centre-left party should never have had links with the MCB in the first place. It contains supporters of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood and the south Asian Jamaat-e-Islami. Arab liberals know the Brotherhood to be the enemy of every enlightened value they hold, while their Bangladeshi equivalents regard Jamaat in the same way Observer readers regard the BNP, only worse because Jamaat murderers collaborated in the Pakistani army’s crimes during the Bangladeshi war of independence.

That brief moment of principled politics is over. There’s talk of the government giving the MCB’s Sir Iqbal “death perhaps is a bit too easy for Salman Rushdie” Sacranie a peerage. Meanwhile, ministers are about to cut financial support for Sufi Muslims who, like the majority of Britain’s Muslims, Sunni or Shia, are not represented by the MCB.

The fix is in and Islamists are all over Whitehall again. Denham is entertaining Inayat Bunglawala of the MCB, who gave a taste of the “progressive” policies Labour is encouraging when he wrote an article defending Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a preacher who recommends wife-beating, genital mutilation of girls and the murder of apostates and homosexuals. Earlier this year, the sheikh said of Adolf Hitler’s massacre’s of the Jews: “This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”

The most important challenge facing community-cohesion is to build capacities to oppose the twin threats of religious and racial extremism in the UK, posed by the extreme-right tendencies of Islamism and the BNP. And here we find ourselves in a situation where the Islamists are, once again, being built up to be the unelected interface to the British Muslim community, in a 21st-century reprise of the Millet System. What a pitiful state of affairs.