Stop pandering to the Islamist extremists

Four suicide bombers on London's transport system is what it took to jolt Britain awake in 2005. Politicians of all parties turned a blind eye to the underworld from which suicidal terrorists emerge. Much has changed since 7/7. But not enough has happened to foster a real sense of belonging for all communities across Britain.

Extremists from all sides are on the rise. While conventional politicians conduct business as usual in Westminster, activist fascist politicians at street level have changed tack. The BNP appears in suits and increasingly focuses on Muslims, while Islamist extremists are busy embedding themselves among moderates to seem normal.

For fascism and racism are not the sole preserve of white people. A significant number of activist Muslims, better known as Islamists, are every bit as fascist as any far-Right party. By their own admission they oppose democracy, aim to create a dictatorial "caliphate" with an expansionist army, wish to destroy Israel and to subjugate normal Muslims to their harsh version of Islam.

Just as popes abused Christianity during the Crusades, some Muslim clerics today support suicide bombings in the name of Islam. Supporters of these clerics are more organised in London today than in any other city in Europe.

What has changed since 7/7 is the tactics and the public rhetoric of the extremists. Under pressure from Muslim activists, "Islamophobia" has become accepted as a phenomenon on a par with racism, as examined in tonight's Channel 4 documentary by political journalist Peter Oborne, for example.

Outside a few flashpoints where the BNP is at work, most Muslims would be hard-pressed to identify Islamophobia in their lives. Yet that is the charge every time the extremists press for new "rights" - over dress in the workplace, for example. If there is anti-Muslim sentiment, we Muslims have to ask what some of us have done to provoke such feelings in a country that is proudly multi-cultural. Islamist extremism might be a good starting point.

But the greatest shift since 7/7, for an array of groups that are offshoots of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, has been to embed themselves into the British and Muslim mainstream. I was once part of those movements - I know their psyche. And well-meaning liberals who would not share a platform, even for a debate, with a BNP supporter, are only too keen to be seen with Muslim versions of the BNP.

For example, this week, just days after the 7/7 anniversary, London's Olympia will see a massive, four-day event sponsored by the London Development Agency, a Ken Livingstone commitment to his friends. Called IslamExpo, the event seems ostensibly harmless and is sure to attract tens of thousands of young Muslims.

Journalists and academics, non-Muslim and Muslim, will speak at the event to lend it a veneer of respectability. But closer examination of the programme reveals something else. The most frequent speakers at this event are advocates of suicide bombing. The directors of Islam Expo Limited, as registered at Companies House, include well-known supporters of clerics who provide theological support for suicide bombers.

Azzam Tamimi, a director, has repeatedly expressed his belief that suicide bombings are martyrdom operations, and lead to paradise in the next life. Another director, Kathem Sawalha, was named as a co-conspirator in a 2003 indictment brought by US federal prosecutors in Chicago against Hamas activists in the US. According to the indictment, before Mr Sawalha moved to London in the early Nineties, he was a Hamas leader in the West Bank. Why are such men being allowed to organise and repeatedly address young Muslims in London?

Their endorsement of martyrdom operations in Tel Aviv makes it theologically possible to attack innocents in London and New York. The suicide bomber who seeks his place in paradise, as promised to him by clerics such as Yusuf al Qaradawi (hosted by Ken Livingstone), sees Brits and Israelis as one thing: kuffar, or infidel.

If you doubt my words, ask the innocent people at university campuses in Pakistan about how Islamists control - through violence and intimidation - their secular Muslim student opposition. Or ask those who live under the tyranny that is Hamas in Gaza. If you still want evidence, then read the writings of the founding father of Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, and digest his view of non-Muslims and Muslims as distinct races and peoples.

Islamists are a threat to Islam and Muslims. Before they started bombing Western cities, they started their campaign of terror by killing fellow Muslims in Egypt, inspired by the writings of Qutb and the repression practised by most Arab governments.

Mohammed Siddique Khan, the lead bomber behind 7/7, did not read Qutb. But those fanatical ideas of separation and superiority had gained a hold among many young Muslims - hence Khan's "martyrdom" video message, in which he said Britain was at war with "his people". Fellow Brits were not his people but an imagined "Muslim nation".

These ideas still loom large in London. Britain's central mosque in Regent's Park allows extremists from Hizb ut-Tahrir to hold public meetings every Saturday afternoon. A satellite television channel, calling itself the "Islam Channel", run by droves of Islamists, is beamed into young Muslim homes across Britain from London. And this week there's IslamExpo.

My challenge to extremist Islamists is this: if you're not peddling an ideology, Islamism, then declare yourselves normal Muslims and condemn suicide bombings, privately and publicly, disown clerics such as Qaradawi, and jettison Islamism. Accept that Britain is a secular country, not open to Islamisation. Why should ordinary Muslims have to pay the price for your political agenda?

Livingstone made a major mistake during his time as Mayor in pandering to these extremists - a position that seems to have come from believing ethnic and religious minorities were always right, no matter what. That kind of attitude helped create a victimhood mentality and the constant playing of community politics, rather than emphasis on individual citizenship.

Boris Johnson has a fresh mandate. He knows the organisers behind this week's event are those that cry Islamophobia. Will he co-opt them, appease or oppose them? His starting point could be to expose their Westophobia, and empower the right side in this battle of ideas.

* Ed Husain is co-director of the Quilliam Foundation, a Muslim think-tank, and author of The Islamist (Penguin, 2007).