Islamists can’t be allowed freedom of speech

The arrival of Sara Khan as counter-extremism tsar is a sign that the Government will be less tolerant

In Gloucester last week I fell into conversation with an elder from a local mosque who was touring the West Country talking to Muslim communities. He was doing so, he explained, because the congregation in his mosque felt they had to address the “lies and propaganda” – his words, not mine – coming from extremist Islamist groups active in this country. This was, he felt, both corrupting the younger generation’s understanding of Islam and encouraging them to radicalisation. It was, he said, his duty as a Muslim to redress this.

My travelling friend would have welcomed the announcement yesterday that Sara Khan is to be the new Commissioner for Countering Extremism. Ms Khan has a record of helping people like him. She wants her commission “to build a Britain that defends our country while demonstrating zero tolerance to those who promote hate and seek to divide us”. In her excellent book The Battle for British Islam she points out in particular how extremist Islamic groups infiltrate our schools and universities.

It is therefore disappointing, if unsurprising, that her appointment has been derided by some as antiislamic. Critics on social media claim she has been hired to run an “Islamophobic authoritarian thought policing commission”. Harun Khan, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said she was “simply a creation of and mouthpiece for the Home Office”.

Yet by appointing Ms Khan we are beginning to see evidence of what seems like a welcome strengthening of the Government’s resolve not to listen to groups like these. Politicians may just now realise that when they are insulted as being anti-islamic, what is actually meant is that they are threatening that corrupted form of Islam which serves their accusers’ own interests (and which so upset my friend from Gloucester).

Last year ended with the Government taking other positive steps. Boris Johnson said in December that the time had come to get tough with extremist Islamist organisations and singled out the Muslim Brotherhood. “It is all too clear,” the Foreign Secretary said, “that Muslim Brotherhood parties are willing to turn a blind eye to terrorism or to condone it.”

Then the Government proscribed two Shia groups which had been terrorising The Gulf – Saraya al-ashtar and Saraya al-mukhtar. This was very welcome news to ex-soldiers like me as affiliates of these groups had spent many months trying, and often succeeding, in killing us in Iraq. We have long wondered why they could effectively run themselves from London, taking advantage of our generous interpretation of charitable status, while their friends were firing Iranian-made rockets at us.

The Government has made a brave and sensible appointment in Ms Khan. It is one more step in consolidating what both retired generals like me and concerned Muslim elders in Gloucester hope is a growing determination to confront not just violent extremism but extremism in the round; extremism which, if unchecked, will lead people to violence.

There is still some way to go; it did not help that Sam Gyimah, the universities minister, made a point this week of saying that he would not ban Hizb ut-tahrir from speaking at universities. This is a pity as Hizb ut-tahrir is a very nasty organisation which promotes an Islamic state not unlike that which Daesh has just inflicted on its wretched victims in Syria and Iraq.

The next step must now be to follow the Foreign Secretary’s advice and proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood and its Uk-based affiliates. There is little point in our Armed Forces and security services fighting at such cost over the past decades to contain Islamist extremism when we permit its embodiment to operate so freely in the UK. We are prepared to die to defend freedom of speech in this country – but we will die if we confuse that freedom with allowing extremism and hatred to continue unchecked.