“The case of PC Amjad Farooq shows how, despite all the fuss since 9/11, we don’t have a yardstick against which to judge radical Islam. After six weeks with the Diplomatic Protection Group, Special Branch revoked his counter-terrorism clearance. Its vetters found that he sent his children to a mosque that the police suspected ‘radical’ Islamist groups had infiltrated….
“If the mosque where Farooq’s children were sent to study the Koran really was a centre of extremism its worshippers would believe in the subjugation of women, the death penalty for homosexuals and Muslims who abandon their religion, Adolf Hitler’s conspiracy theories about the Jews and the replacement of democracy with tyranny. In short, they would be parroting a large part of the agenda of white fascists. Yet it is the height of bad taste to point this out in polite society….
“The best way to keep the peace is to do what many still can’t do: admit the Islamist far Right exists and isolate it. If you pretend that sensible measures against it are an attack on all Muslims, you will only give aid and comfort to those least deserving of it.”
Nick Cohen in the Evening Standard, 8 November 2006
Perhaps PC Farooq should be grateful that Cohen isn’t calling for him to delivered into the hands of some foreign dictatorship and tortured.
PC Farooq shows our Islamic blind spot
By Nick Cohen
Evening Standard, 8 November 2006
THE case of PC Amjad Farooq shows how, despite all the fuss since 9/11, we don’t have a yardstick against which to judge radical Islam. Farooq was a firearms officer trained to protect Tony Blair and visiting dignitaries from would-be assassins. After six weeks with the Diplomatic Protection Group, Special Branch revoked his counter-terrorism clearance.
Its vetters found that he sent his children to a mosque that the police suspected “radical” Islamist groups had infiltrated.
Farooq is suing the Met and denies any links with extremist groups. We’ll have to see what happens at his industrial tribunal hearing, but my guess is that it will do little to clear up the muddled thinking that surrounds extreme groups or support for them.
Most people are clear about the nature of the white far Right. BNP members are banned from the prison service and the police regulations state that an officer cannot undertake “any activity which is likely to interfere with the impartial discharge of his or her duties”. As having a racist hatred of black or Asian Londoners clearly would affect how an officer behaved, supporting neo-fascist politics and membership of the police are incompatible.
What about religion, though? The Met made a dangerous concession during the war between Israel and Hezbollah when it agreed with a Muslim officer’s request to be moved from guarding the Israeli embassy in Kensington. Public servants can’t be allowed to pick and choose which duties they perform, otherwise we would have Labour-supporting firemen refusing to put out a blaze at a Conservative club.
If the mosque where Farooq’s children were sent to study the Koran really was a centre of extremism its worshippers would believe in the subjugation of women, the death penalty for homosexuals and Muslims who abandon their religion, Adolf Hitler’s conspiracy theories about the Jews and the replacement of democracy with tyranny. In short, they would be parroting a large part of the agenda of white fascists.
Yet it is the height of bad taste to point this out in polite society. The BBC’s Spooks reflects the blindness of what we used to call the establishment by refusing to acknowledge that radical Islam really exists. Whenever the Corporation’s version of MI5 runs into what looks like an Islamist terror group, it turns out to be a front organisation for scheming Jews or born-again Christians.
Farooq’s lawyer, Lawrence Davies, was no better when he said that his client’s case proved that “any Muslim or Muslim-looking person or sympathiser best take cover”. He may be defending an innocent man, but Davies should have stuck to saying his client was a law-abiding citizen with no sympathy for extremism.
The best way to keep the peace is to do what many still can’t do: admit the Islamist far Right exists and isolate it. If you pretend that sensible measures against it are an attack on all Muslims, you will only give aid and comfort to those least deserving of it.