“Attitudes about how to deal with radical Islam are now shifting so quickly within Whitehall that it is hard to keep up. The detailed announcement from Ruth Kelly, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, on how she will spend £5m on grass-roots hearts and minds projects is a genuine break with the recent past, when ministers preferred to fund self-appointed national representatives of Islam such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB)….

“In July of last year, I wrote a controversial pamphlet published by the think-tank Policy Exchange in which I exposed the extent to which the British government and the Foreign Office in particular had made a compact with radical Islam. In the Middle East, this constituted a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, which works towards an Islamic state through the democratic process; at home this was largely expressed by the Labour government’s long-standing relationship with the Muslim Council of Britain.

“Leaked Foreign Office documents showed that officials and ministers had adopted a policy of what one diplomat described as ‘engagement for its own sake’ with ostensibly moderate Islamist groups in an attempt to counter the influence of more extreme organisations. This policy had also been allowed to seep into domestic policy, over which the Foreign Office had, until recently, an extraordinary degree of influence. Using a series of articles in this magazine and a documentary on Channel 4, I argued for a change in policy to broaden the scope of the dialogue.

“The influence of Ruth Kelly has been hugely significant in this respect.”

Martin Bright in the New Statesman, 9 April 2007

David Aaronovitch explains why the West has a moral obligation to attack Muslim countries in order to bring them the benefits of western civilisation:

“A month ago I was invited to speak at an all-day event on ‘The Clash of Civilisations’ organised by the eccentric half of Ken Livingstone’s personality. Its purpose, as far as I could work out, was to promote cultural relativism by suggesting that anything that looked like telling foreigners what to do was some kind of mad imperialism. So we shouldn’t seek to export democracy, because it wouldn’t work and maybe they didn’t want it anyway, and it would end in a bloodbath or profits for Western companies, whichever you thought was worse….

“Others have argued, more extremely, that in some Islamist cultures women aren’t yearning for the right to education, or to be treated by (male) doctors, or to be anything except shut up in their father’s or husband’s houses…. The Western idea of freedom isn’t everything.

“I am well aware that nothing of the above argument makes what has happened in Iraq the less appalling. Hating the occupiers I could cope with, but I didn’t remotely foresee the insanity – the bloody aimlessness – of blowing up students or day-labourers, with Allah knows what long-term objective in mind. And we in the West can take from that experience the lesson of being careful in the way we intervene, of course. But not – not – that you shouldn’t do it. Not that there shouldn’t be moral foreign policies. Not that we think that democracy, basic human rights or liberty are relative values.”

Times, 27 February 2007

For a critique of Aaronovitch’s article – “for Dave, it appears that the Iranians are dumb chattels, sitting around in leg irons and only capable of being liberated by a passing dashing British warship” – see
Aaronovitch Watch, 27 February 2007