The Radicals Redefining Extremism

On November 9th, former government Counter-Extremism Commissioner, and Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience, Dame Sara Khan, released a report alleging Britain “faces a chronic risk of democratic decline due to the spread of extremist narratives and conspiracies, growing societal threats and declining social cohesion”. Such allegations sounded serious, until it was discovered that leftist activist group HOPE Not Hate commissioned the research, on behalf of criminal justice think-tank Crest Insights. The following day, another report alleged GB News was guilty of “almost obsessive” coverage of Islam: mentioning words associated with Muslims 17,000 times across two years. This mendacious document was written by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which you may not know is owned by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). It prompted Labour MP Naz Shah to demand Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to instruct regulatory body Ofcom to “take action”. Shah is infamous for retweeting “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.”

As I documented last month, Islamist and leftist groups have, for decades, influenced the civil service, received government grants, and infiltrated government departments. This resulted in the Home Office’s counter-extremism program Prevent letting Islamic terrorists, like Sir David Amess MP’s murderer Abi Harbi Ali slip through the net; while they myopically monitored fans of Douglas Murray as “right-wing extremists”. If we examine these two new reports, we can see the risk of history repeating itself, by allowing extremists to once again redefine what “Extremism” means, to fit their own political agendas.

Let’s examine Sara Khan’s work first. The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Khan was appointed to the Home Office’s Tackling Extremism and Radicalisation Working Group in 2005, following the 7/7 Bombings. She then launched Inspire, an anti-extremism Muslim charity, in 2008; and wrote The Battle for British Islam: Reclaiming Muslim Identity from Extremism in 2016. She was nominated for an honors by government Ministers, and awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2022.

In 2014, Khan was supported in her #MakingAStand campaign by then-Home Secretary Theresa May. While Prime Minister, Mrs. May went on to appoint Sara Khan as the government’s first Counter-Extremism Commissioner, working under then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd. It should not surprise us that this was Khan’s career trajectory: in a 2015 government document, titled “Prevent Strategy: Local delivery best practice catalogue”, the Home Office referred Khan’s #MakingAStand the campaign as a “RICU Product”. It was launched with the support of the UK government, and a portion of RICU’s £12-23 million annual budget. At the time, Sara Khan’s sister, Sabina Khan, was the deputy head of RICU.

You may recognize the image May and Khan are posing with: it was published on the front page of The Sun newspaper on October 8th, 2014, after British aid worker Alan Henning was beheaded on video by ISIS.

But the image was not produced for this occasion. It had been prefabricated by Breakthrough Media, a communications company with connections to the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism at the UK Home Office, and held in reserves to counteract negative perceptions of Islam in the event of an Islamist terror attack, to “promote the true face of Islam among vulnerable UK communities”. Emails procured by freedom of information access requests show RICU monitored online responses to the front page, calling it “our product”.

Sara Khan received criticism for her 2018 appointment: a hundred Muslim activist groups signed a petition demanding her resignation. Baroness Warsi, former chairwoman of the Conservative Party, said it was “a deeply disturbing appointment”, and that “Sara is sadly seen by many as simply a creation of and mouthpiece for the Home Office.” This is confusing, as Warsi’s own chief of staff, Richard Chalk, was running RICU at the time — with Khan’s sister, Sabrina, working as his deputy head. Khan responded, saying, “This idea that I am a creation of the Home Office is just frankly ridiculous.” However, given the consistent sponsorship of her campaigns by RICU, there is reason to be skeptical of her claim.

Khan remained in the role, and was appointed by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson as the government’s Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience in March, 2021. She helped co-author then-Communities Secretary Michael Gove’s definition of “Extremism” in March, 2024 — which she has urged the new Labour government to adopt in this week’s report. Alongside this, Khan published a review of “Threats to Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience”. Dr. Rakib Ehsan criticized Khan for making the glaring omission of race-Marxist group Black Lives Matter in her report, given their protests in 2020 and amplification of Critical Race Theory were a pernicious source of social division.

This is not the only instance of Khan’s research lacking citations and scrutiny. In this new Crest Insights report, Khan claims that:

• 73% of 16-24 year olds have encountered hateful, violent, extremist, or terrorist content on social media
• 45% of young men having a positive view of misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate
• 30% of 45-54 year olds believe it to be true the numbers of deaths from coronavirus was being deliberately reduced or hidden by the authorities
• 29% of people believed in the ‘great reset’, a conspiracy to impose a totalitarian world government during the Covid-19 pandemic
• 34% of those who primarily consumed news through traditional media believed in the Great Replacement Theory. This rose to 55% for those who obtained their news from Telegram.
• 10% of people shared the views of people who engaged in violent disorder and rioting during the summer and had sympathy for the use of violence against refugees
• 8% believe violent protest outside refugee accommodation was justified
• The UK had the highest levels of polarization between the political left and right in 2017-2022, outside the United States
• 45% of people say regardless of the political party in power they almost never trust the government to put the nation’s interests first, up from 23% in 2020
• Only 41% of people believe people living in their neighborhood can be trusted
• Out of 28 countries the UK is the least-trusting country in the world at 39%, having fallen from 43% in 2023. The UK also has the lowest level of trust in the media.
• The percentage of people who view Muslims has having “completely different” values has increased from 38% to 44% following the Southport violence
• 80% of British Jews feel less safe in Britain than before the October 7 attacks
• 43% of people chose “declining” and another 25% choose “weak” as words to describe modern Britain

Given HOPE Not Hate commissioned and framed the questions for these surveys, we should be skeptical as to the veracity of this data. Sara Khan has had a longstanding working relationship with HOPE Not Hate: in 2017, they featured an article from Khan in their State of Hate report, and their founder, Nick Lowles, joined the May government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group, with Khan appointed commissioner. HOPE Not Hate also made news this year after Lowles spread multiple admitted hoaxes online: including claims that Muslim women were being acid-attacked by “Far Right” rioters after the Southport massacre. This was cited by members of a Muslim militia, and shared by Labour Josh Fenton-Glynn MP — who retracted when Middlesbrough police said there was no evidence to support Lowles’ claim. Questions were also raised about the legality of HOPE Not Hate operative Harry Shukman using a fake passport to pose as alias “Christopher Charles Morton” during their documentary Undercover: Exposing the Far Right.

HOPE Not Hate’s Head of Intelligence, Matthew Collins, was a former member of neo-Nazi organisations including the British National Party and Combat 18, before joining the British Communist Party. At an event in 2013, Collins was filmed saying “Comrades, brothers and sisters, HopeNotHate.co.uk, you are our Red Army!”, standing in front of a Soviet Flag. As mentioned in one of my previous essays, Stalin’s Red Army were responsible for the rape and murder of thousands of civilians in Germany and Poland during the Second World War. Given his trading in one brand of genocidal socialism for another, I don’t think Collins is a good judge of what constitutes “Extremism”. Furthermore, if any organization had employed a member of the British Union of Fascists, HOPE Not Hate would be quick to condemn them as a Nazi-sympathizing outfit. Therefore, I don’t think it’s wise for the government, or those seeking to stamp out extremism, to work with communist-sympathizing outfits either. But clearly, having relied on them for survey data, and cited their definitions 22 times in the report, Sara Khan does think it acceptable to let HOPE Not Hate dictate who is and isn’t an “extremist”.

Khan also cites the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) twice in footnotes. The CCDH was founded by Keir Starmer’s new Downing Street Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney. Journalists Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi published documents in October, suggesting the CCDH met and conspired with Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar’s team to “Kill Musk’s Twitter”. On 16 August, CCDH also met with members of the UK Home Office, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Ofcom, and the counterterrorism internet referral unit at the Metropolitan Police to demand “emergency powers” be granted in order to police “misinformation online”. In November, the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government demanded that CCDH hand over:

“All records, notes, and other documents of interactions between or among CCDH and the Executive Branch referring or relating to “killing” or taking adverse action against Elon Musk’s X social media platform (formerly Twitter).”

“All communications and documents between or among CCDH, the Executive Branch, or third parties, including social media companies, relating to the identification of groups, accounts, channels, or posts for moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction, or reduced circulation.”

So, if Khan is listing dangers to democracy, citing the CCDH while it is being investigated for interfering with the First Amendment rights of American citizens during a contentious Presidential election seems unwise.

While Khan worked at the Home Office, HOPE Not Hate received grants of £50,000 and £141,380 in 2019-2020 to “brief multiple departments… on emerging trends in UK hate”. HOPE Not Hate also received payments of £240,000 (2022/2023), £275,000 (2019/2020), and £60,000 (2015/2016) from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation — a total of £585,000 over eight years. Between 2020 and 2023, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation received £1.36 million in government grants. These grants were part of the Foundation’s Migration Fund, established to create “a UK network of young migrant leaders”, and a “network of leaders and organisations within towns who will respond to local needs and pressure points and share learning to enable rapid response to provocative elements”. So, HOPE Not Hate were paid to mobilize protests in British towns and cities to quell public outrage about immigration and multiculturalism.

This wasn’t the only questionable activity that Sara and Sabrina Khan preceded over at the Home Office. During their tenure, Prevent referrals for Islamist extremism fell to 22%, while “extreme right-wing” referrals rose to 25%, between March 2020 – 2021. This was despite 80% of Counter Terrorism Police’s live investigations being Islamist, and only 10% extreme right-wing. When pressed on the discrepancy, Prevent staff deflected and cited “wider psychological or social issues” as being greater contributing factors to terrorism, than any justification found in Islamic scripture.

William Shawcross, in his excoriating review of Prevent in 2023, explained that Islamist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir had campaigned against Prevent since 2008, accusing the government of attempting to “control over the Muslim community in Britain”, to bring about a “reformation of Islam” and to “ban Islamic ideas”. Shawcross stated that Hizb ut-Tahrir “set the tone for much of the campaign against Prevent ever since”. Hizb ut-Tahrir were proscribed in January 2024, making membership of, or support for, their group a criminal offence, after they called Hamas “heroes”, and for “Muslim armies” to wage “Jihad” against the West, at a demonstration following October 7th, 2023.

Despite this, in January 2024, at a Kings College London (KCL) course called “Issues in Countering Terrorism” for Home Office civil servants, a lecturer described Shawcross as “the type of person who would say all current counter-terrorism professionals are woke…He is of that ilk”. The same lecturer asked government employees:

“To what extent should Joe Rogan and Douglas Murray be suppressed? […] They have millions of followers. To de-platform them would cause issues […] so, society needs to find other ways to suppress them.”

One civil servant attending “argued Prevent is inherently racist because it focuses on Islamist extremism” — and then pointed and laughed at a jihadist in an ISIS recruitment video, saying “He used to go to my school! I know him!”

Perhaps this nameless civil servant belongs to the 700-member Home Office Islamic Network, which works to “promote the recruitment, retention and progression of Muslim staff in the Home Office” and “influence policymakers so that policy is more inclusive of Muslim needs”. A whistleblower described it as “an Islamic lobby group inside the Home Office [that] represents a serious threat to the Government’s aims in combating Islamic extremism and granting asylum to those fleeing Islamic countries over religious persecution”. This might help explain why RICU, last month, produced a report calling the predominantly-Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs, which abused thousands of girls in towns and cities across England, a “grievance narrative” fabricated by “right-wing extremists”. The report also cited “Claims of ‘two-tier’ policing” and believing “Western culture is under threat from mass migration” as examples of “extreme right-wing” views.

Although Sara Khan does not work in the Home Office anymore, RICU’s report has concordance with her own from this month. In an interview with The Guardian, Khan said:

“Politicians clearly have an important role in what they say and the language they use.

“If you are using language that talks about distrusting the police or attacking an ‘establishment’ in a certain way to whip up power or votes then you have to think about the long-term consequences of that.

“That’s contributing to this acceleration of decline of trust in our democracy and institutions and is going to cause serious, long-term decline. I am concerned that over recent years we’ve seen increasing numbers of politicians jump on the conspiracy theory bandwagon, spread disinformation online, or use inflammatory and divisive language. I won’t use names but people know who they are.”

Given the thumbnail of the article was a photo of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, it is obvious which partisan targets Khan has in mind. Reform UK should be alarmed that former government employees and the propaganda department of the Home Office are targeting their MPs for censorship by the government.

This reliance on HOPE Not Hate to provide the definitions of “extremist” beliefs, and for various “conspiracy theories”, has resulted in Khan’s understanding of them to seem woefully thin. For example, on page 32, she writes: “In recent years these include conspiracies around 5G technology, Cultural Marxism and the Great Replacement Theory.” On page 82, she provides definitions for these terms:

“Great Replacement Theory: an anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim theory stipulating that white European populations are being deliberately replaced at an ethnic and cultural level through mass migration and minority communities at the hands of the elites.”

“Cultural Marxism: A theory alleging that those subscribing to Far Left ideologies are embedded in cultural and political institutions, and are working to undermine Western culture. Often posits that Jewish people have disproportionate influence within cultural institutions.”

But neither of these definitions receive citations from sources which might give them a fairer hearing. For example, “Cultural Marxism” is a term which refers to writers such as Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, who transposed Marx’s critique of superstructures from economics to “cultural hegemony”. It also encompasses Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who urged fellow revolutionaries to abandon “wars of maneuver” (direct action tactics) for “wars of position”: an infiltration of offices of state, conducting what Rudi Dutschke would later call the “long march through the institutions”. This was cited as the inspiration by Kimberlé Crenshaw, creator of intersectionality, as the reason for formulating Critical Race Theory.

As Daily Wire host and author Michael Knowles documents in his book Speechless, the attempt to render the study of Cultural Marxism radioactive by labelling it a “conspiracy theory” was itself a conspiracy by left-wing academics, who didn’t want their forebears’ school of thought to be subject to public scrutiny. Given the large volume of academic work written about this discipline, it appears HOPE Not Hate are throwing up another smokescreen here to discredit their political opponents.

Nor is Cultural Marxism an antisemitic term. Jewish academics Eric Kaufmann and Yoram Hazony have used the term to criticize the aforementioned Frankfurt School theorists. Kaufmann as well as Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager have explained why secular Jews gravitate to left-wing politics. It would be absurd to call any of these men antisemitic.

Likewise, the term “Great Replacement” is used to accuse opponents of unfettered immigration as being antisemites. HOPE Not Hate attempted to smear me with this charge earlier this year. However, in the statement they referenced, I was reading straight from the works of Renaud Camus, who coined the term, to refute the idea that it was antisemitic. In 2012, Camus said:

“What I call the Great Replacement is the change of people, the substitution of one or several peoples for the people whose ancestral roots are there, whose history had for hundreds or thousands of years coincided with the territory in question. […] I might, speaking as I am before the France-Israel Association, appeal to an example that should finally convey my meaning: the Great Replacement is what would happen to Israel if, God forbid, we were to accede to the Palestinian demand for the so-called right of return. Under such conditions, could Israel remain a Jewish State, as one says?”

So the term was used in a lecture, delivered to a forum for French Jews, to argue in favor of Israel’s right to defend itself. Camus cited the 1791 influx of Jewish immigrants to France as an example of successful migration, made possible because of their genuine love of French culture. Furthermore, Camus said in his original speech, titled The Great Replacement, that:

“one hesitates to identify interest as the principal motor of re-placist ideology and its lies, for one cannot fail to also take into consideration all of the groups that nobly support, promote, and diffuse these deceitful dogmas against their own interest, often of the most imme-diate kind (and who are sometimes just beginning to regret it): Jews, women, homosexuals, secularists, champions of free thought and free expression, all cheerfully busy sawing off the branches on which they sit, alongside the heralds of “diversity,” who themselves do not perceive that they are in fact only making more of the same, always more of the same, the undifferentiated universal village…”

In this list of those most at risk from imported Islamism, Camus was referring to himself: a left-wing, gay atheist. Hardly your average attendant of the Unite the Right Rally at Charlottesville, in 2017. Camus is also often quoted by French Presidential hopeful Éric Zemmour — himself, ethnically Jewish — who Camus supported in the 2022 Election.

Khan also is alarmed by the fact that “Polling of 2,274 adults in the UK, found that 29% believed in the ‘great reset’, a conspiracy to impose a totalitarian world government during the Covid-19 pandemic”. Again, nowhere in her report does Khan cite the published works of the World Economic Forum, which call for a Great Reset: a public-private partnership of state and corporations, to achieve the social justice and climate activist goals of “Stakeholder Capitalism”. Nor does she cite documents like “Blueprint for a Digital Identity”, which consulted the European Union, the White House National Economic Council, and the UK and Australian cabinet offices, on building an “individual and corporate identity” linked to voting, paying taxes, healthcare records, and a digital currency. It is perfectly reasonable to object to policies proposed by the World Economic Forum and its members — such as Danish politician Ida Auken, who wrote the infamous article “Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better” which proposed the abolition of private property in an idyllic vision of the future. None of this is unreasonable, conspiratorial, or hard to find. The omission of these facts is inexcusable.

The fact that Khan includes none of this as context demonstrates her insufficient lack of reading into the topics she claims to be an expert on. Taking HOPE Not Hate’s word for it is not a sufficient evidentiary standard to label an individual or idea “extremist”.

“Alongside the promotion of the Great Replacement Theory, contemporary Far Right narratives on asylum seekers allude to them as ‘Muslim invaders’, with small boat crossings being characterised as an ‘invasion of fighting aged men’.”

I take umbrage to this personally, as I helped GB News break a story in August last year involving North African people-trafficking gangs posting videos of British women, filmed without their consent, often drunk and sometimes in states of undress, on Instagram — alongside videos of illegal migrants using their services to enter Europe. The Home Office were aware of these accounts before the story was reported by GB News, and had taken no action. In November this year, a 27-year-old man from Bradford was arrested on suspicion of voyeurism and harassment, in connection with several reports of women being followed, filmed, and harassed in Manchester City Centre. Given we have statements from government officials, Meta, and now an arrest related to this trend, it is bizarre for Khan to deny that an organized network of criminals, facilitating illegal migrants’ passage over the English channel, is putting women at risk.

Speaking of GB News: the report which alleged their coverage was an “unhinged presentation of Muslims” this week, was written by the Centre for Media Monitoring. The group is owned by the Muslim Council of Britain.

A 2015 report by the UK government stated that:

“In the 1990s the Muslim Brotherhood and their associates established public facing and apparently national organisations in the UK to promote their views. None were openly identified with the Muslim Brotherhood and membership of the Muslim Brotherhood remained (and still remains) a secret. But for some years the Muslim Brotherhood shaped the new Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), dominated the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and played an important role in establishing and then running the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).

The Muslim Brotherhood are most infamous as the founders of Hamas. Other recent terror activities, listed in a report by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in the 115th Congress, in 2018, include:

“The Brotherhood mourned the death of Osama bin Laden and its leaders developed teachings justifying revolutionary violence under sharia law. The Brotherhood has preached hatred towards Jews, denied the Holocaust, and called for Israel’s destruction. The Brotherhood has incited violence against Coptic Christians in Egypt amidst a wave of church bombings and other attacks by terrorist groups, including ISIS.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, perhaps the Brotherhood’s preeminent cleric, issued a fatwa legitimizing terrorist attacks against American troops in Iraq. And he’s also deemed the Holocaust to be a, quote, ‘‘punishment for Jews,’’ and expressed hope that another Holocaust would someday be carried out by his fellow Islamists.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie, has said that the organization’s goal is to establish a new Islamist caliphate, including the imposition of sharia law, which is the totalitarian Islamic legal code. […]

There’s no question that the Muslim Brotherhood affiliates are involved in terrorism. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller confirmed as much in testimony before Congress when he said that elements of the Brotherhood, both here and overseas, have supported terrorism.”

The Brotherhood also invented the term “Islamophobia”, as a means to silence critics of Islam, and their activities by proxy. Dr. Gilles Kepel alleged the Brotherhood devised the term to seek “symmetry” with antisemitism, and link opposition to Islam with the same objectionable views that produced Nazism and the Holocaust. Former Islamist, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad corroborated Kepel’s account, confirming that a meeting took place where members of a Muslim Brotherhood outfit, the International Institute for Islamic Thought, conspired to “emulate the homosexual activists who used the term ‘homophobia’ to silence critics”.

Since 2015, the MCB has maintained it has “no affiliation to the Muslim Brotherhood or any other foreign organisation”, and that it “rejects entirely the insinuation that it is either soft on terrorism or ‘have consistently opposed programmes by successive Governments to prevent terrorism’ as stated by the findings”. However, the MCB has been banned from engaging with Whitehall since its deputy director-general, Dr Daud Abdullah, signed the Istanbul Declaration in 2009. The declaration committed to “carry on with the jihad and resistance against the occupier until the liberation of all Palestine”, and was interpreted as calling for attacks on the British Royal Navy by stating “the sending of foreign warships into Muslim waters, claiming to control the borders and prevent the smuggling of arms to Gaza, [is] a declaration of war, [which] must be rejected and fought by all means and ways.” The MCB claims it “never endorsed the declaration” and “specifically reject any notion that we endorse an attack on the Royal Navy”. It did, however, under Abdullah, lead a six-year boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day — and called to “end to the violence in and around Gaza” on October 8th, without mentioning the murders and rapes committed by Hamas on October 7th.

Dame Sara Khan criticized the Muslim Council of Britain for its campaign against Prevent in 2015, saying:

“You can condemn extremism as much as you like, but the strategy the MCB has been using for the last 10 years has not dissuaded people – they are still being radicalised, probably more so now than before. It’s about taking a grassroots community approach and dealing with that issue. It’s like saying you can condemn knife crime as much as you like, but until you have a strategy that deals with it, it becomes pointless, a talking shop.”

In turn, the MCB criticized Khan’s appointment as the head of the Commission for Countering Extremism, in 2018. Despite the MCB’s alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Istanbul Declaration, and Hizb ut-Tahrir campaign against Prevent, they still boast that in 2010, two Cameron government Cabinet Ministers attended an MCB dinner; and in 2011, then-Attorney General Dominic Grieve MP was the Chief Guest at an MCB Awards Ceremony. Charity Interfaith, which had an MCB member on its board of trustees, received £3.8 million in taxpayer funds from the government between 2010 and 2023 — until it was closed for failing to condemn the attacks on October 7th. Conservative MP Nick Timothy revealed the MCB’s Charitable Foundation also received over three-quarters of recent funding from the government’s Department for Work and Pensions.

Charity Interfaith, which had an MCB member on its board of trustees, received £3.8 million in taxpayer funds from the government between 2010 and 2023 — until it was closed for failing to condemn the attacks on October 7th. Conservative MP Nick Timothy revealed the MCB’s Charitable Foundation also received over three-quarters of recent funding from the government’s Department for Work and Pensions.

The ban on engaging with the MCB was reiterated by then-Communities Secretary, now Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick MP, in 2023. However, the Ministry of Defence last year was found to be using the MCB to refer imams as chaplains for the British armed forces. A letter from the MoD in 2021 said:

“the MoD does have an arrangement to consult with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) in the appointment of imams to the armed services … [The] MCB is one of many endorsing authorities used by the MoD.”

A post on the MCB website on the 26th of July 2023 boasts that the first imam to receive a commission in the Royal Air Force had been “endorsed by the MCB”. Despite a ban on engagement, it appears well-situated activists within government departments continue to liaise with the MCB. None of these concerns were featured in Khan’s new report. In fact, the Muslim Council of Britain were not mentioned once in the report, despite having actual influence over public bodies.

The only conspiracy theory here is that the British government and media are guilty of prejudice against Muslims. To the contrary, millions in taxpayers’ cash has been spent on running positive PR campaigns on behalf of Islam. Counter-terrorism bodies have watered down their definitions of “Extremism”, due to lobbying efforts by the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut-Tahrir. Their attention has been redirected to the “Far Right” instead: a threat so phantom, they resorted to monitoring those reading Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as potential terrorists.

This will only get worse, if Khan’s recommendations — submitted to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper — are adopted. Khan requests Cooper:

“Establish a new centralised directorate inside Cabinet Office to deliver wholesale change in how Whitehall addresses the challenge of preventing democratic decline, strengthening social cohesion, building democratic and societal resilience and countering extremism and other related threats.”

and

“The development of a multi-agency partnership and referral mechanism similar to, but separate from Channel, aimed at under 18s who are vulnerable to extremist activity that falls below the terrorism threshold. This could be led on by the Department for Education, and instead of a securitised or policing approach, would instead take an educational approach”

Khan makes these requests with Andrew Tate in mind: expressing disdain that her polling found 45% of males aged 16-24 have a positive opinion of Tate. So, the government is being told to use the education system, and the Cabinet Office, to surveil the (however distasteful) lawful speech of individuals, upon the advice of an activist group which employs communists. This may be an exercise in manufacturing consent on behalf of what the state already wants to do: given Cooper announced her intent to use counter-terrorism resources to combat “Extreme misogyny” and the “radicalisation of young men online” by influencers like Tate. Curiously, Tate’s conversion to Islam is never mentioned in conjunction with his misogyny. Nonetheless, given the failure of Prevent to detect murderous Jihadists in recent years, we can’t help but feel that government resources would be better spent elsewhere.

Despite battles between factions, it appears that both left-wing and Islamist extremists have claimed victories in the battle to determine what is and isn’t extremist, and thereby monitored by the British government. Caught in the crossfire are the British public, and critics, like myself, who express reasonable concerns about the unpalatable views of Muslim radicals being accommodated by activists in the “impartial” civil service. HOPE Not Hate and the MCB are not credible experts on what constitutes extremism; and given the Home Office’s conduct under the Khan sisters’ leadership, neither are they. But until a member of the opposition parties takes notice, free speech remains under threat with the very real radicals who have purchase with the sitting Labour government.