Mick Hartley

Elsewhere, in Europe and in Trump’s America, politicians and security services are waking up to the threat posed by Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. Not here, though. Dean Godson in the Spectator:

Britain’s security establishment has effectively decided that non-violent Islamism is not their problem. MI5’s public account of its work is revealing: its counter-terrorism pages name Daesh and al-Qaeda but make no mention of the Muslim Brotherhood, nor indeed of non-violent Islamism tout court.

Sections of the security system regards non-violent Islamists as “credible” bulwarks against the violent Islamists of al Qaeda and Isis; the best-known public exponent of this view was Bob Lambert, previously a leading light of the Metropolitan Police’s old Muslim Contact Unit, who was admired in his heyday at the highest levels of Thames House. Certainly, engagement with those non-violent Islamists comes at a price – but many in the Deep State regard that as a price worth paying. In the words of one security official, they constitute a kind of “Islamic Sinn Fein”, who can then persuade the putative hard men and women of violent Islamism not to take a walk on the wild side….

Where the State does act, it acts narrowly and on the cheap. For example, there is currently a dedicated police operation directed at Hamas in Britain; but despite the proscription of both the political and the armed wings of Hamas, this operation is accorded a low high priority – a casualty of the security establishment’s settled posture of dealing first with what then-MI5 Director General Jonathan Evans termed the “crocodiles closest to the boat” rather than more “upstream” ideological challenges.

That instinct is understandable. Finite resources should go to the most immediate threats to life. But it is also a false economy. The surging attacks on Jews – as at Heaton Park, or in Golders Green – did not emerge from nowhere. They are the “downstream” consequence of an ideological climate that has been allowed to fester, in which the Muslim Brotherhood and, no less importantly in this country, its sub-Continental cognates incubate the antisemitism that later erupts into violence. To ignore the upstream generation of a threat because it is not yet lapping over the boat is to guarantee a steady supply of further crocodiles.

Nowhere is British timidity clearer than in the simple act of saying out loud who is not welcome. In Denmark, the immigration service publishes a list of overseas clerics banned from the country; fifteen names appear on it, two of them from the UK.

Other countries are finally grasping the nettle. Not the UK though.