More detail on the SPLC’s blacklisting of Maajid Nawaz.

Their report cited the Guardian in this passage:

But major elements of his story have been disputed by former friends, members of his family, fellow jihadists and journalists, and the evidence suggests that Nawaz is far more interested in self-promotion and money than in any particular ideological dispute. He told several different versions of his story, emphasizing that he was deradicalized while in Egypt — even though he in fact continued his Islamist agitation for months after returning. After starting the Quilliam Foundation, which he describes as an anti-extremism think tank, Nawaz sent a secret list to a top British security official that accused “peaceful Muslim groups, politicians, a television channel and a Scotland Yard unit of sharing the ideology of terrorists,” according to The Guardian.

They didn’t include the link to the Guardian article, so here it is: List sent to terror chief aligns peaceful Muslim groups with terrorist ideology, by Vikram Dodd, August 4, 2010. It’s a terrible article. Peak Guardian, as Helen Dale remarked to me this morning. It implies writhing horrors, but totally fails to demonstrate them.

It begins:

A secret list prepared for a top British security official accuses peaceful Muslim groups, politicians, a television channel and a Scotland Yard unit of sharing the ideology of terrorists.

That sets the tone. The implication is that peaceful Muslim groups can’t possibly share the ideology of terrorists, but of course that implication is nonsense. There are non-violent Islamists and violent Islamists. Of course there are. But the Guardian and the BBC spent years and decades either ignoring or failing to grasp that fact, which is why the BBC called in the Muslim Council of Britain for every single story it ever did about Islam in the UK, while ignoring the existence of Maryam Namazie and everyone like her.

More from the article:

The document sent to Farr is entitled “Preventing terrorism; where next for Britain?” It lists alleged extremist sympathisers, including the Muslim Council of Britain, the main umbrella group in Britain for Islamic organisations. It also claims that a Scotland Yard counter-terrorism squad called the Muslim Contact Unit is dominated by extremist ideology.

Now let’s remind ourselves of what Nick Cohen said about the Muslim Contact Unit:

I asked the SPLC’s Mark Potok, ‘one of the country’s leading experts on the world of extremism,’ according to its website,  if he was Muslim himself. ‘No.’ Was he happy, then, branding a liberal Muslim ‘an anti-Muslim extremist?’ Well, Potok said, the head of Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit had accused Nawaz of  ‘demonising a whole range of groups that have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism,’ and that was good enough for him.

I tried to explain that the then head of the Muslim Contact Unit was Bob Lambert, one of the most notorious agent provocateurs British policing has produced. He stole the identity of a dead boy and infiltrated left groups. Pretending to be one of them, he got an activist pregnant then vanished from his partner and child’s lives. He had a shadowy part in the ‘McLibel’ case, which led to two environmental activists being persecuted for years in the courts, and is under investigation for allegedly smearing the campaign for justice for the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. There are reasonable grounds for suspecting that, when Lambert attacked Nawaz, he was trying to ingratiate himself with Islamists as he had tried to ingratiate himself with leftists.

Did Mark Potok, ‘one of the country’s leading experts on the world of extremism’ if you please, know he was relying on the word of a stool pigeon? ‘I don’t know the details.’ Would the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is after all meant to defend the Stephen Lawrences of the world, reconsider its condemnation of Nawaz? With the braggart self-confidence of a liberal Donald Trump, Potok was not about to let facts change his mind. ‘No,’ he replied.

So there it is – the SPLC trusts Bob Lambert but not Maajid Nawaz.

Back to the Guardian article:

Other groups include the Muslim Safety Forum, which works with the police to improve community relations, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and even the Islam Channel, which provides television programmes for Muslims on satellite.

Why “even”? How is it impossible that the Islam channel is Islamist?

The briefing document says: “The ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics.

“These are a selection of the various groups and institutions active in the UK which are broadly sympathetic to Islamism. Whilst only a small proportion will agree with al-Qaida’s tactics, many will agree with their overall goal of creating a single ‘Islamic state’ which would bring together all Muslims around the world under a single government and then impose on them a single interpretation of sharia as state law.”

The document adds that if local or central government engages with such groups “it risks empowering proponents of the ideology, if not the methodology, that is behind terrorism”.

Vikram Dodd wholly fails to explain how any of this is false or even unlikely.

Also listed in the document are the Muslim Association of Britain, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, the Cordoba Foundation, and Muslim Welfare House, based in north London, which was instrumental in forcing the extremist cleric Abu Hamza out of the Finsbury Park mosque where he preached.

The Finsbury Park mosque, now under new management, is also declared extremist, as are Birmingham Central mosque and the East London mosque.

Politicians described as “Islamist backed” include Salma Yaqoob, who stood for the Respect party in Birmingham, and the former MP George Galloway.

And? And nothing. There’s nothing to demonstrate or even hint that any of it is wrong.

Peak Guardian indeed – and this is one of the SPLC’s sources for that hit report.