Ban Muslim Brotherhood: UK General

london — A former senior British military commander, Lt-Gen Sir Barney White-Spunner, on Friday called upon the British government to declare the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates in the United Kingdom illegal.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, White-Spunner recalled that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had said last month that the time had come to get tough with extremist organisations.

“It is all too clear,” he quoted Johnson as saying, “that Muslim Brotherhood parties are willing to turn a blind eye to terrorism or to condone it”.

Welcoming this week’s announcement by the British government that it had appointed a new Commissioner for Countering Extremism, Sara Khan, WhiteSpunner, a former senior commander in Afghanistan and Iraq, noted that Khan had said that she wanted her Commission “to build a Britain that defends our country while demonstrating zero tolerance to those who promote hate and seek to divide us”.

“The next step,” White-Spunner said, “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 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”. — Wam