Censoring the unsayable

In her Spectator blog, Melanie Phillips takes issue with a new study which claims that negative portrayals of Muslims in the British media are leading to a growth in hate crime:

The view that Islamists who, for tactical reasons alone, oppose al Qaeda are not a threat to Britain -- and should indeed be treated as allies against al Qaeda -- is one of the most lethal mistakes that has been made by the British counter-terror world.  One example of such egregious establishment wrong-headedness that I cite in Londonistan is in fact one of the authors of this report, Robert Lambert. A former officer in the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terror Command, who until 2008 ran the Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit, Lambert told a conference organised by the Danish police that terrorism could not be fought by contact with moderate Muslims but through partnerships with the Salafists (radical Islamists) – two of whom were at one stage at least actually officers in his own police department. I wrote:

Lambert believed that this would enable the police to understand the way extremists thought before they committed any acts of terror. But it surely goes without saying that a Salafist officer, who is committed to the overthrow of the west and its replacement by an Islamic society, poses a security risk of the first order. For a police counter-terrorism specialist to be promoting this situation beggars belief.

Now Lambert has co-authored this study which claims that identifying such Islamists as extremists is to incite attacks upon British Muslims. But just look at the organisation behind this study, the European Muslim Research Centre. On its advisory board sit Anas Altikriti of the Muslim Association of Britain, which supports Hamas, and Mohamed Abdul Bari of the Muslim Council of Britain, which supports the Islamisation of Britain and which has a number of Islamist affiliates.  The study also says it drew its information from, amongst others, the Muslim Safety Forum, Islamic Human Rights Commission, Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) UK, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies and the Muslim Council of Britain – all of which are Islamist fronts.