Failing to root out extremism

Is it any surprise that British mosques are, on the whole, not rooting out extremism when 97 per cent of imams (Muslim mojo men) weren’t born in the UK? Not only that, but – according to a report from the Quilliam Foundation, as reported on the BBC news website – the lecture before Friday prayers in nearly half of British mosques isn’t in English.

Nearly half have no women’s facilities, either.

The Quilliam Foundation’s director, Maajid Nawaz, tells the BBC that the findings show mosques lack the “resilience to challenge Islamist extremists”.

The statistics, he says, are “deeply disturbing”, and he has warned that extremism could not be tackled while imams were “physically in Britain, but psychologically in Pakistan or Bangladesh”.

Easy. Let’s stop them from being physically in Britain and ensure that they are entirely in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Let’s do more than allow the media to do the odd story and then forget about it. Shouldn’t there be a campaign to root out extremist preachers and send them packing, thus sending a message to others who want to try doing the same?

It’s amazing how we can bar Geert Wilders from coming to the UK to show a film that exposes extreme Muslim thinking within the religion’s “holy book”.

We can bar the nutcases of the dysfunctional Phelps clan – of Topeka in Kansas – from this country when they want to wave a few placards outside a showing of the anti-homophobia play The Laramie Project, when even many gay people and liberal-leaning blogs such as this one are against such a ban, believing that free speech should be played out on a level playing field.

But we can’t root out genuinely dangerous, demented, lunatic preachers of the sort we saw on Channel 4’s Undercover Mosque. Need we remind ourselves of that now famous documentary, which found evidence of extremist preaching among hate-filled, rabid preachers?

We blogged on it here, and then again when we discovered that West Midlands Police’s Political Correctness Rapid-Response Unit, having tried to prosecute the makers, found themselves having to grovel in abject apology because they’d got it wrong. Oh, how we did rub our hands!

You can see some of that Undercover Mosque programme by clicking on the link below. This gives part of it. It’s a YouTube clip and, as usual with YouTube, you can go to the site and find several videos relating to the programme with a simple search.