Has the government banned another ‘extremist preacher’?

Writing on his Telegraph blog Andrew Gilligan reports, under the headline “Labour-linked extremist ‘banned from UK'”, that Qazi Hussain Ahmad the former president of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan has had his visa revoked.

You don’t have to be an admirer of Jamaat-e-Islami to recognise that Ahmad is a mainstream political figure in Pakistan. He was the parliamentary leader of the MMA alliance that won 11% of the vote in the 2002 elections to the National Assembly.

Given Gilligan’s notoriously light-minded attitude to factual evidence, anything he writes has to be taken with a pinch of salt. However, after the exclusion of Zakir Naik, I wouldn’t put anything past the present government.