The Foreign Office ought to be serving Britain, not radical Islam

On Tuesday, three days before the anniversary of the 7/7 atrocities, the Prime Minister spoke simply and well to the Commons: 'If we want to defeat extremism, we have got to defeat its ideas and we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West.'

As we are fighting a battle of ideas between democracy and totalitarian religion as much as a military campaign, this was an obvious truth, albeit one that could do with greater repetition.

'I am probably not the person to go into the Muslim community,' he continued with realistic modesty. 'It's better that we mobilise the Islamic community itself to do this.' And again, his belief that the majority of Britain's Muslims don't want Islamist terror was no more than a statement of the obvious. A poll in the Times last week included the alarming finding that one in 10 British Muslims regarded the murderers of 7 July as 'martyrs', but also reported that 56 per cent said the government has not done enough to combat extremism, compared with 49 per cent of the general population.

The prudent as well as the principled position is to prefer those who don't support 'martyrs' to those who do; to show solidarity with those who support democratic values rather than those who don't. How hard a choice is that for a British government?

An easy enough decision for Tony Blair to make, it turns out, but a surprisingly difficult one for his unmanageable Foreign Office. This week will generate a lot of publicity for the longest and most revealing series of leaks from a government department I've seen in my career. For months, Martin Bright, the political editor of the New Statesman, has been receiving confidential Foreign Office documents almost daily with his morning post.

On Friday at 7.30pm, Channel 4 will screen a documentary by Bright, Who Speaks for Muslims, which shows how the Foreign Office views the Islamist far right as potential allies.

To accompany the programme, the Policy Exchange think-tank will publish 'When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: the British State's Flirtation with Radical Islamism', a pamphlet stuffed with enough state secrets to induce coronary arrests in previously healthy MI5 officers.

They describe the FO's attempts to woo the Arab Muslim Brotherhood, whose closest allies in Britain are the Muslim Association of Britain, and its south Asian counterpart, Jamaat-e-Islami, whose supporters are at the top of the Muslim Council of Britain. The mandarins reason that these groups are not part of al-Qaeda, which is true; that they are growing in power, which is regrettably true as well; and that they are composed of reasonable men with whom Britain can do business, which is palpable nonsense.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an imperialist movement that wants to establish a Muslim empire in which laws will come from an early medieval holy book rather than the parliaments elected by mortal men and women. It is sexist because its clerics justify the beating and circumcision of women. It is homophobic because it justifies the execution of homosexuals. And it is psychopathic because it justifies the murders of apostates, any Jew in Israel and any British or American soldier in Iraq.

Angus McKee, of the FO's Middle East and North Africa desk, thinks this gruesome record should be rewarded with large amounts of British taxpayers' money.'Given that Islamist groups are often less corrupt than the generality of the societies in which they operate,' he wrote, 'consideration might be given to channelling aid resources through them, so long as sufficient transparency is achievable.'

And since January 2006, the FO has been engaging with the Muslim Brotherhood abroad while providing free passes for its clerics at home.

Mockbul Ali, its Islamic issues adviser, whom Labour ministers treat with excessive deference, recommends that the brotherhood's favourite theologian, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, should be admitted to Britain, despite his sympathy for the judicial murder of homosexuals and free-thinkers. When Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, an MP in Bangladesh who preaches violent hatred against the West and Hindus, wanted to come to talk to British Muslims, Ali described him as a 'mainstream' figure.

He isn't, he's a fantastically controversial figure among British Bengalis. Bright interviews Bengali leaders who regard him as a malign extremist and cannot understand why the Foreign Office wants him to preach Islamist radicalism to their children.

Nor can a few clear voices in Whitehall. Sir Derek Plumbly, the British ambassador to Egypt and the only diplomat to emerge with credit from the affair, noted that there is no reason to expect that the Muslim Brotherhood will moderate its views because Britain appeases it. His masters confused 'engaging with the Islamic world' with 'engaging with Islamism', and ignored the policies of the Islamist far right as they did it.

In doing so, they abandoned all the Muslims in Britain and the Islamic world who believe in the very values of 'democracy, freedom of expression, respect for human rights' Her Majesty's government is meant to uphold.

Pots and kettles, Telegraph style

'Record pay rises for BBC chiefs as jobs axed,' shrieked yesterday's Telegraph. And, indeed, the combination is a scandal, although BBC executives still earn less than their counterparts in rival media organisations. Rightly so, in my view. To be at the top of the BBC is a privilege because it is an integral part of the national culture.

The Telegraph used to be, too. Readers of all political persuasions once read it because its news pages were second to none. Under the ownership of the strange Barclay twins, who live in Howard Hughes-like seclusion on a tiny island in the English Channel, news reporters have been axed and more cuts are imminent.

The Barclays are worth £650m. If they are so concerned about fair shares for all, perhaps they should spend a portion of their fortune on retaining the staff who can stop their paper becoming a laughing stock.

Furthermore

A gamble too far on Wilberforce

John Prescott says that there was nothing improper about his stays with Philip Anschutz, the would-be London casino operator. At no point did the billionaire described by Fortune magazine as 'the greediest executive in America' demand a licence to pocket the money of gambling addicts as his reward for taking the Millennium Dome off New Labour's hands.

On the contrary, he and the Deputy Prime Minister filled their evenings with learned discussions about the life and work of William Wilberforce (1759-1833).

Their attempt at an explanation is not necessarily as outrageous as it sounds. Wilberforce's campaign to end the Atlantic slave trade makes him the greatest son of John Prescott's Hull constituency. Evangelical Christianity fuelled his detestation of human bondage, and Anschutz is an evangelical Christian who is funding the Narnia films in the hope that they will be a 'catalyst in the moral and spiritual transformation of the United States'.

The problem is that if they are telling the truth, they must know that Wilberforce's Christian principles made him abhor gambling. It promotes 'covetousness' which is 'idolatry', as St Paul said in his Letter to the Corinthians. It makes players worship chance rather than God and, as Jesus said: 'No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.'

Wilberforce and his followers compared the enslavement of gambling addicts and their families to the slave trade. So strong was their detestation that, after the first success in the fight to end slavery, Wilberforce said to his fellow evangelical Henry Thornton: 'Well, Henry, what shall we abolish next?'

'The lottery, I think,' Thornton replied.