The Sky News Sunday Live programme this weekend featured a revealing encounter between Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation and Jonathan Githens-Mazer of the European Muslim Research Centre, on the subject of Quilliam’s recently-leaked witch-hunting “briefing” against mainstream British Muslim organisations. Jonathan Githens-Mazer accurately nails Quilliam’s contempt for evidence and logic, and rightly argues that the organisation’s primary concern is with guaranteeing its continued receipt of large sums of taxpayers’ money. But there are some other aspects of Maajid Nawaz’s characteristically weaselly performance that need to be challenged.

Particularly disgraceful is Nawaz’s statement that the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park “has recently been accused in parliament by one of its former trustees Khalid Mahmood MP as having hosted Abdulmutallab the Christmas day bomber and Anwar al-Awlaki the Al Qaeda theoretician”. What Nawaz omits to mention is that Khalid Mahmood’s charge against the NLCM was based on a ridiculous US radio report which informed its listeners that Whitechapel Road is in “the Finsbury Park district of London”, confused the NLCM with the East London Mosque and claimed that Abdulmutallab had met al-Awlaki at the NLCM at a time when al-Awlaki was in fact in prison in Yemen.

Here two explanations suggest themselves. Either Nawaz was aware of this, and sought to suggest to Sky viewers that the NLCM was associated with Abdulmutallab and al-Awlaki even though he knew the charge was nonsense. If so, this only reinforces the argument repeatedly put forward on this website that the government should immediately withdraw all state financial support from the Quilliam Foundation. Or, alternatively, Nawaz was genuinely ignorant of the fact that Khalid Mahmood’s accusation against the NLCM was without foundation. In which case, perhaps Nawaz and his Quilliam co-director Ed Husain might consider diverting some of the lavish public funding they currently spend on plush offices, sharp suits and hiring expensive libel lawyers in an attempt to silence their critics, and use the money instead to employ some competent researchers.

And while we’re on the subject of Quilliam’s source of finance, it’s also worth dealing with Nawaz’s claim that “funding that we got from a certain Kuwaiti foundation was cut when we criticised suicide bombings inside Israel”. In reality, Quilliam’s Kuwaiti backers appear to have withdrawn financial support after Ed Husain publicly backed a shameful decision by the then Labour government to ban Yusuf al-Qaradawi from entering the UK. And you can understand why the Kuwaiti foundation took that decision. To anyone in the Middle East it must have appeared incomprehensible that a self-styled “counter-extremism think-tank” should have lined up against a leading voice of moderation in the Muslim world.

Finally, Nawaz asserts that “we’ve opposed banning Hizb ut-Tahrir” and to back up that claim says that he was “quoted by the former Prime Minister in parliament as opposing banning non-violent Islamists”. The reference is to a House of Commons debate in November 2007 in which Gordon Brown did indeed cite Nawaz’s opposition to the illegalisation of HT.

However, while Nawaz has always said he is against a ban on HT, Ed Husain has repeatedly argued in favour of one. He did so in his book The Islamist and has since repeated the call in even more unequivocal terms. Writing in the Daily Telegraph in February 2007, for example, Husain complained:

“Today, in our midst, Hizb ut-Tahrir calls for an expansionist, violent, totalitarian Islamist state – and we continue to ignore it. There is no quick fix to the problem of home-grown terrorism, but banning Hizb ut-Tahrir would be an excellent first step, sending a strong signal to aspiring terrorists that Britain has not changed the rules of game. We no longer play that game.”

But then, as Jonathan Githens-Mazer points out, evidence and logic are of little concern to the directors of the Quilliam Foundation.

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