You might have thought that Inayat Bunglawala’s Muslims4UK campaign against yesterday’s (cancelled) al-Muhajiroun demonstration in central London would have gained almost unanimous support outside the ranks of Anjem Choudary’s tiny gang of idiots.

But no. Mad Melanie Phillips has been joined by Edmund (“the BNP don’t really hate Muslims“) Standing in condemning Inayat’s initiative as a cunning manoeuvre to cover up his extremist views and misrepresent himself as a moderate.

Standing writes: “Bunglawala’s ‘anti-extremist’ drive managed to drum up support largely from extremists: Bob Pitt, an extreme left-winger, and MPAC, an organisation which refuses to condemn Jihadists and whose spokesman actively promotes them. Moderate? Pull the other one!”

In fairness to MPACUK and myself, I think Standing should amend his post to include a denuciation of that well-known pro-Islamist extremist Ed Husain too.

A civil servant who has condemned ministers for helping to fuel the “slaughter” of Arabs in the Middle East is advising Britain’s most senior prosecutor on Islamic extremism.

Azad Ali, a Treasury official who has used his internet blog to praise the spiritual leader of Al-Qaeda, sits on a Whitehall counterterrorism panel that provides advice to Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions (DPP).

Ali was investigated earlier this year over his controversial views on the Iraq war and was forced to deny that he sympathised with the killing of British troops. He got into trouble with his Treasury bosses after using his blog to deny that last November’s Mumbai attacks, which claimed 173 lives, were an act of terrorism.

Sunday Times, 1 November 2009

This is no more than a rerun of the witch-hunt of Azad Ali that took place earlier this year, and features the same blatant misrepresentations of Azad’s views. The Sunday Times also fails to make it clear that, although this lying campaign led to Azad’s suspension from his civil service job, an inquiry cleared and reinstated him.

We recently reported on Inayat Bunglawala’s launch of Muslims4Uk and its planned counter-demonstration against al-Muhajiroun this Saturday. Mad Melanie Phillips is not impressed, though. According to Mel, Inayat is carrying out a cunning manoeuvre (on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, apparently) designed to misrepresent himself as supporting “a multi-faith, multicultural democracy where people are free to practise their faith or not to if they so choose”. Mel is having none of it: “Bunglawala is surely the mirror image of Nick Griffin in hisattempt to reposition the BNP as a non-racist party – and about as plausible.”

Yes, really. According to the increasingly crazed Spittoon blog, the former editor of Q-News should be removed from her position in the PVE-funded Radical Middle Way, because she works as a journalist and presenter for Press TV.

The Spittoon declares that “it is manifestly insane that an Iranian government employee, especially one who works for Tehran’s main English language propaganda outlet and who compares British soldiers to fascist storm-troopers, should be involved in running the UK’s most lavishly-funded counter-extremism programme”.