'Grab them by the balls' urges hard-man Ed

Following in the footsteps of his fellow ‘ex-Islamist’ Shiraz Maher, Ed Husain from the Home Office and Foreign Office funded outfit, the Quilliam Foundation, pens a comment piece for the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph in which he too tries to link the tiny group of Luton protestors to Muslims in the UK.

Husain sees the protests as:

‘Symptoms of failed Muslim leadership, a timid civil society and a British Government that, three years after the July 7 bombings, is still unsure how best to proceed.’

Apart from the fact that Husain advocates no Muslim leadership whatsoever, preferring government to treat Muslims as individuals only, one would think staging protests was a mark not of timidity, but of strength, in a civil society.

The protestors behaved ignominiously without doubt, but there’s no mistaking the right to protest in a democracy.

Husain writes:

‘It came as no surprise when the CIA warned President Obama last month that the greatest immediate threat to US homeland security was from militant Islamists in Britain with ties to Pakistan. British troops in Afghanistan have reported Britain-based technical support for Taliban operations.’

Which is ironic in the extreme given that he has often written articles seeking to minimise the impact that the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan have had on radicalisation at home. No surprise then that he does not qualify his comment nor offer an explanation as to why this ‘greatest immediate threat’ now exists.

Such foolish nonsense is to be expected out of the mouth of a ‘think tank’ co director who argues that ‘It [Government] should disregard the findings of focus groups…’

Is this a disclosure of the methodological rigour applied in reports produced by the Quilliam Foundation itself?

Perhaps most amusing is Husain’s misguided mention of Nixon’s chief counsel, Charles Colson (“If you grab them by the balls, the hearts and minds will follow”). We wonder if Husain is familiar with the Watergate scandal and its lessons on the importance of checks and balances in checking the excesses of the Executive in a democracy, or is his quote, attributed to the chief counsel of an American president derided for having brought his presidency into disrepute because of his megalomania, a Freudian slip?