A few months ago, the same two women put out an appeal on the Internet for some “appropriate” care to be found for Alex, and he was shown lying on a hospital bed, restrained by his wrists and ankles to the bed (very unusual, especially for minors), naked except for a sheet which covered his genitals and part of his chest, putting some object on a stick into his mouth or playing with a tablet computer. In March, he was discharged from the hospital when a benefactor put up the money for him to be transferred to an unnamed facility and on 8th May, it was reported on the “Help Support Alex Spourdalakis” Facebook page that he was “doing very well and [was] receiving the medical treatment that he needs”. On the 27th, however, the same page reported that he was back in hospital, back in bed in restraints, and showed Andrew Wakefield claiming that he was going to be sent to a long-term pyschiatric facility in the next 72 hours unless “the autism community” found a better place for him where he could “complete the treatment” and “be on the necessary diet”. When people asked why he was back in the hospital when he had been doing well, they received no satisfactory explanation. Equally without explanation, he was discharged back to his mother’s care and the next that was heard was that he had been found dead on 10th June.

There have been a number of blogs reporting that his mother was heavily invested in the “autism biomed” industry represented by Wakefield and by the Age of Autism website. They promote expensive and elaborate methods to “cure” autism which include chelation and bleach enemas, although it is not clear if either of these methods had been used on Alex (the theory behind the former is that autism is caused by heavy metal poisoning from vaccines, and chelation is indeed indicated for heavy metal poisoning, but the quantities involved are much higher and taken in more recently than in treating autism which is supposedly caused by vaccines). The so-called support group must answer as to why Alex had to be returned to hospital in May and why he was discharged. There is much that they are not telling us, particularly as they solicited money to pay for Alex’s care and treatment. I expect that Loyola hospital and the Illinois social services will have much to answer for, as to why the former allowed his discharge (twice) and why the latter did not intervene when he was being abused so obviously and publicly. The excuse that he was big and strong and needed restraint does not stand up to the most superficial scrutiny either — he was quite large, but you can tell with one look that he was flabby.

There have been a number of incidents in many countries where parents have killed disabled children and presented various excuses such as that they were in pain and that killing them put them out of their misery. In this case, there are a lot of people saying that Alex is now in heaven and his suffering (i.e. his autism) is over. A similar case happened in Illinois in 2006 in which a 3-year-old girl with autism, Katie McCarron, was murdered by her mother Karen, and there was the usual outpouring of excuses that it was “understandable” or was the result of a “lack of services”: in fact, as her grandfather said, she enjoyed life, was surrounded by love (she lived with her grandparents and not her mother) and enjoyed things that other children, and particularly other little girls, enjoyed. There have been other cases where this was touted as an excuse both by the murderer and by ill-informed people in the media and blogosphere defending them, when their doctors believed otherwise: Tracy Latimer in Canada and Tom Inglis in the UK are well-known examples. Various explanations are suggested: that someone is ashamed of being the parent of a disabled child, is weary of looking after them, or cannot comprehend that a life affected by severe disability or pain is worth living, perhaps because they do not know anybody who lives with these things.

I do not doubt that some parents are under pressure and snap, but this family had access to an awful lot of help, and chose murder instead, and planned it over a week or more. A lot of people are only too ready to identify with the feelings of parents, when there is more obvious suffering on display here — a confused boy, in pain, strapped to a hospital bed, moved from pillar to post, and finally murdered by the two women who were supposed to be caring for him. It may be that they were let down by the health, education and social service systems, but it seems the biggest failure of these services was to leave Alex with those two women. They had access to so much help, but chose murder instead.

The above bit of EDL apologism by Charles Moore appeared in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, and it also contains a dig at Tell MAMA, the formerly state-funded body that monitored anti-Muslim attacks (hence the acronym) and an attempt to stir up fresh outrage over the murder of Lee Rigby four weeks or so ago, claiming it has died down and people are focussing on a backlash against Muslims which he claims is exaggerated. The fact that it has prompted a resurgence of a formerly moribund violent street gang as well as at least three arson attacks on Muslim properties, one of them burned to the ground, is no exaggeration.

Moore claims he is not defending the EDL, but then goes on to do just that:

A trap is set here, inviting those of us who reject such statements, to defend the EDL. I do not. While not, in its stated ideology, a racist organisation like the BNP, the EDL has an air of menace. It must feel particularly unpleasant for Muslims when its supporters hit the streets. But the EDL is merely reactive. It does not – officially at least – support violence. It is the instinctive reaction of elements of an indigenous working class which rightly perceives itself marginalised by authority, whereas Muslim groups are subsidised and excused by it.

Anyone who was following the blog scene after the 2005 London bombings will remember many people saying that the “root cause” of Muslim terrorism was western foreign policy, in particular British participation in the Afghan and Iraq wars in the case of that particular incident, and the right and the so-called “decent Left” (the pro-western and, in particular, pro-Israel left, which overlooked the faults of their allies on the Right) reacting with disgust, in one case comparing it to blaming rape victims for wearing short skirts. This is exactly the logic Moore is deploying here with the EDL: effectively reducing their level of blame because they are merely “reacting” to what others do. He ignores the fact that it contains a large number of people with violent criminal records, the fact that it grew out of groups of football hooligans, and the fact that violence frequently features in EDL demonstrations; he absolves them because they are from the “indigenous working class”, a common excuse made by the Right for working-class and ex-working-class racism. The thinking is always that we must give into the demands of this sector (or rather, of the newspapers they read) or else the BNP will benefit at the polls or the EDL will cause more mayhem. The same thinking never factors into responses to extremism from Muslims.

In fact, just because they do not have degrees and may work in manual jobs (though not all), they are no less responsible for their actions than Muslim terrorists who may have reacted to western armed forces invading and bombing a Muslim country and firing radioactive munitions around by letting off four bombs in London in 2005. The only people cleared of moral or legal responsibility for their choices are those with cognitive disabilities, which if they lead to them running around in gangs and terrorising football supporters or members of a religious minority, should lead to them being institutionalised. As I have said here before, they were founded in response to a tiny demonstration that was reported out of proportion by the press, continued to hold their menacing demonstrations in response to nothing, and have progressed to more violence as a result of a murder by two misguided individuals last month in Woolwich. They feed off the press: a steady diet of propaganda about “now Muslims are demanding this …”, of Muslims getting special treatment, of polls revealing pro-terrorist or pro-Shari’ah sentiment, and of the ravings of Omar Bakri and Anjum Choudary who represent only a tiny and dwindling group, but somehow always make front-page news. And despite the First Amendment not being part of British law, the idea of draining this particular swamp never occurs to anyone.

The “backlash” following Woolwich may not have been an orgy of violence, but there has certainly been more violence than had been seen at any time before, and the existence of the EDL (which was not around in 2005, let alone 2001) surely has much to do with it. Sure, Tommy Robinson or one of his associates may (and I stress may) not have ordered the burnings of the Grimsby and Muswell Hill mosques and the Chislehurst Islamic school, but the EDL’s presence and behaviour makes violence more acceptable whenever there is provocation. I have also heard reports from personal friends that harassment has got worse, even in places with no significant EDL presence, and the usual victims are lone Muslim women in hijab, even if they are with children. The usual culprits, my friend told me, are groups of young men but sometimes women. As with an earlier comment I heard about Islamophobia being “minor”, this is something only a man could say (street harassment is something a lot of women deal with regularly; some men regard women’s bodies as public property, however modestly, or otherwise, they are dressed).

Moore complains that the outrage over the stabbing seems to be dying away in less than a month since the stabbing. Perhaps the reason is that one person died in a targeted stabbing, which has been the fate of quite a few young men in south London (and elsewhere) over the past few years. The outrage for them isn’t permanent, either, although it did lead to stiffer sentences for street stabbings and shootings. Nobody else was killed, as they were in previous terrorist attacks; it was not an attack aimed at the general public. He also attacks Baroness Warsi for speaking at a conference for the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), because of its Islamist links, and ridicules Malcolm Grant, president of University College London (and chairman of NHS England) for supposedly “resist[ing] the suggestion that he should prevent such extremism on his premises” when someone who used to run the Islamic society at his college several years ago went on to try and bomb a plane — as if anyone knew he would do that at the time. It is, of course, his job if he knows it is going on, but crystal balls are not known for their utility in the fight against terrorism and gazing into the future is not part of his job description.

That the media were mindful of avoiding a backlash against the Muslim community shows some commitment to responsible journalism. That the three buildings attacked had nothing to do with the group that was most closely linked to the two men who stabbed Lee Rigby demonstrated that they were motivated by hatred for Muslims, not extremists or that group. For the media not to talk about the threat of violence to Muslims from a known violent gang would have been seen by some as a green light and by others as complicity. The murder was horrific, but that it is the only successful operation by Muslim extremists in the UK in nearly eight years, and caused less than a fiftieth of the loss of life the last one did, show that “the extremism in our midst”, as Moore calls it, is a small and dwindling tendency and that its dangers are largely contained. They have not yet reached the stage, as the IRA did in 1997, of having to resort to hoaxes rather than actual bombings or killings, but they are getting there. There is no use in crying “remember Lee Rigby!” regularly for months or years after the killing: the cause that inspired his murder is dying. Right now, the easiest way to make sure it goes on dying is to make sure there are no senseless reprisals for his murder.

For starters, the better “art” is painted when a train is still for long periods (or on static buildings). Putting a CCTV in a station will not make a difference there because a train is not stopped for long enough to do serious art. What stops the more artful graffiti is better security at depots, not just CCTV but fences and alarms. The graffiti in London was attacked as a matter of policy some years ago and CCTV is only one aspect of this. It was attacked because it’s unsightly, because it costs the council money and time to clean it off (and even more if it’s scratched into the windows or paintwork) and because much of it is not “art” at all but gang tags, and the same people who spray gang tags on trains also do it in schools, including primary schools; they also use catapults to smash windows, and they steal. In some places, they do far more.

A year or so ago, I had a brief discussion with a particularly clueless Australian feminist named Ginny Brown (who I had come across in my ME activism, but is linked to the same clique of radical feminists who put the RadFem conferences on), after I answered an article by Cathy Brennan putting the murder of Trayvon Martin down to “male violence” rather than racism. When I mentioned that the police have guns because criminals have them, she responded:

As one example, when pushed to consider ‘the weapons males choose’, Smith immediately identified with the US police force. Not with an oppressed social sector fighting back, much less with a nationally oppressed people fighting for independence. He immediately associated himself with an authority force. This is part of how this macho culture works; it socialises males to see themselves as dominant and aligned with those in power, to like that idea, and to work to perpetuate that status.

The reality is that gangs are not “fighting back” against oppression but are in fact oppressors. A few of them may have emerged out of a need for self-defence by a community, or may sell themselves to that community on that basis, but in reality they are conformist entities that terrorise the communities they claim to be serving. Rather than conform to the norms of society generally, people are expected to conform to the gang’s demands and codes and they are often no less oppressive than any other power’s codes and often much more so. This is true of outright criminal gangs that exist in poor parts of western cities as well as many self-styled liberation movements such as the IRA or “Shining Path”, and self-styled “defence” groups such as the Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. It’s also true of communities where there is an “outlaw” mentality, where authority is regarded with suspicion (often with some justification) but the more powerful people in the community (particularly an institution, such as a boarding school or a prison) exploit this to maintain their own power, punishing “grasses” or “snitches” with summary beatings, or worse, even if the matter reported on was a serious assault or other criminal matter.

Tagging is how these thugs show the rest of us they are there, and intimidate members of other gangs (or people from districts associated with them, whether they want to be or not). It is basically tom-cat territory-marking. It may give a city “edge” for middle-class people like Laurie Penny who want occasional walks on the wild side and don’t have to live with those people on a day-to-day basis, but for anyone else, it’s just a blight. Of course, getting rid of graffiti will not get rid of the gangs, but let’s not pretend it’s art or that it represents freedom or fighting oppression. It is merely the calling card of another type of oppressor, and it is no surprise that people would rather not be confronted with it every time they go about their business or travel round their own city.

This is a petition to proscribe the English Defence League. This will not force the EDL out of existence, of course, but it will mean no more of their demonstrations and the public violence that always accompany them. It will mean displaying signs of belonging to the EDL, such as shouting slogans associated with it and wearing their T-shirts, will become a crime. It will likely mean that successor groups are banned as well if they are deemed to be the EDL rebranded, as has been the case with al-Muhajiroun. As with al-Muhajiroun, their reach will be greatly reduced and will have to go underground if they are to operate at all; any violent operations will be put down to “gangs of thugs” with “EDL links”, and it will not be mistaken for a lawful popular movement.

If you are in the UK I urge you to sign this petition. If enough people sign it, it may be debated in Parliament.

The reasoning behind giving her any sentence at all is quite ludicrous. The tweet could not have had a “huge impact”; although reports say she had 600 followers (until she deleted her Twitter and Facebook accounts shortly afterwards), it is quite likely that the “outrage” was worked up by some busybody or some EDL type who retweeted her original tweet to a bunch of his friends, and the show of “offence” was from them. Even if it was just ordinary members of the public, a few dozen people offended does not constitute a general outrage. Most people on the Internet never heard of it. I did not, until I read these reports this morning, and I did not see anyone discussing it. On this as with many similar previous cases, judges have confused a few dozen (or even few hundred) angry people on Twitter, or press reporting, with public outrage. In each case, the majority of people who got “outraged” would not have seen the original post unless someone else showed it to them, an act which nobody ever seems to be held accountable for. The people who replied would likely have included several non-followers, and therefore have been public (possibly including the messages threatening to rape the original poster); it is also significant that it was none of these people who brought the comment to the police’s attention.

Threats to rape are quite common whenever a woman expresses an opinion that offends some men. A threat (public or private) to rape is greatly more offensive and threatening than a joke about a dead man (unless the man is someone you know), so I hope (although I accept it’s highly unlikely, as the police took the easy option and charged the victim) that the police are going after who posted these threats. Perhaps, however, a public threat to rape a woman isn’t that offensive when it’s a Muslim who has said something nasty about one of “Our Boys”, but it shows that there is no consistency in what is and what is not tolerated in public speech. A few years ago I complained to the BBC when a comedian, in a pre-recorded show, made a joke about the possibility of a named famous individual being raped in prison, and was told that they had to accommodate all tastes in comedy. Perhaps I should have gone to the police (although I’m sure there would have been policemen watching), and as it was distributed over iPlayer, it surely constitutes an electronic message (much as slander becomes libel when it is printed).

This follows a trend of the law being used to punish people for exposing adults to sentiments that, if expressed to a child in the playground, the latter would be told to “just ignore it”. These include, for example, an incident where a football fan made a joke on video about the Munich air crash in 1958, in which several Manchester United players were killed. The idea that Manchester United fans now could be seriously offended by jokes about players that died before they (or in some cases their parents) were born is ridiculous, and if true, says more about the character of football than about the seriousness of this “offence”. It’s one thing to charge someone with “malicious communication” for maliciously posting on a memorial page for someone who died of cancer, set up by their friends; it’s quite another when they joke about famous people who died more than 50 years ago.

Quite apart from the gross infringement of freedom of speech that these laws represent, and the lily-livered approach to public order, there is a huge amount of inconsistency: the things that are shouted at demonstrations, particularly by the EDL as a matter of course, and said in theatres or on TV far outweigh the offence in a tweet by one little-known student. Meanwhile, in an incident which many Muslims remember very well, a white middle-class man who made an explicit threat to blow up an airport was convicted of sending a malicious electronic message, but his conviction was quashed last year; the contrast is obvious and quite sickening. If an offensive statement is made with a clear view to provoking a disturbance or when someone deliberately harasses a grieving family with offensive remarks about their recently deceased relative, there are grounds for prosecution or at least legal action to make sure they desist. A tasteless remark about a news event that annoys a few dozen people on the internet that heard it second-hand should not constitute grounds for prosecution, let alone imprisonment. It is hugely disproportionate, and more in line with third-world countries where “insulting the military” and other such acts are criminalised than with most developed countries in the so-called free world.

Last night a mosque in Muswell Hill, north London, was firebombed and the letters “EDL” were spray-painted onto the burned-out remains. Who exactly might have done this is still being investigated, and the fact that the EDL’s initials were sprayed on it doesn’t mean it was them, as opposed to a sympathiser. The mosque is next to houses, which meant that lives could have been endangered even if nobody was in the building, and is also very close to a primary school.

My experience with the Bravanese community (which originates from Brava or Baraawe in southern Somalia) is that they are far removed from extremism: they are traditional Sufi-type Muslims who have held out against the spread of “salafism” in the Somali community, let alone jihadi extremism. This is not to say that no Bravanese Muslim has ever become an extremist (although the killers of Lee Rigby were not even Somali and were not from that area), but it is highly unlikely that extremist ideas were being preached there. It is likely that the common denominator was race: most Somalis are black, like the two men of Nigerian origin who committed the Woolwich murder.

It’s pretty insulting to refer to the institutions of Islam in the UK as a swamp. It’s also rather reminiscent of how military dictators talk of suppressing organised threats to their regimes or the lifestyles of their supporters (e.g. trade unions). Saddam Hussain literally drained the marshland homes of one section of his country’s population that opposed his rule. The fact is that the extremist presence in British mosques has declined considerably since 9/11 because the government decided they were no longer willing to tolerate the embarrassment, and perhaps realised that the “covenant of security” was not taken as seriously as they thought. London is a well-known centre of Arab business and media, and was a base for a number of Arab dissidents in the 1980s and 90s and this included some extremist Saudis; many of these have been arrested or are under UN restrictions. As already explained, al-Muhajiroun are banned, their reach is considerably reduced, their ideology (or at least the one they openly displayed) has changed, and Muslims have increasingly realised that they are media-dependent and do not care for other Muslims.

There is a persistent claim that the reason behind acts like Woolwich is “the ideology”, yet this ideology is the preserve of a diminishing hard core of activists and fighters and it is off-putting to many other Muslims, as is the behaviour of its adherents when they achieve power anywhere. Much the same is true of Muslim support for the Iranian regime, which burgeoned in the 1980s when it appeared to be the only régime which stood up to the USA and implemented a sort-of Islamic state. These days, they are an irrelevance, their main mouthpiece, the Muslim Parliament, having switched to a pro-western position (certainly the EU sanctions on Iran related to the nuclear weapons issue makes it more difficult for them to fund religious organisations here, but their influence had diminished long before then). The ideology (and the theology attached to it) are alien to most British Muslims, and it is quite possible that some are driven to these groups by anger at western foreign policy and join in spite of the ideology rather than because of it. It may have been the motivating factor behind major al-Qa’ida operations such as the east African embassy bombings, 9/11 and the Madrid bombings; others, including the 2005 bombings and the recent Woolwich murder, may have been motivated by anger and disaffection, something the “drain the swamp” mentality refuses to consider.

It is quite disgusting to claim that the EDL poses less of a threat in 2013 than Islamist extremism which was connected to no successful operations in the UK between July 2005 and May 2013 — and that was not a bombing or the destruction of a building, but a stabbing — while the EDL has been a source of public disorder on a regular basis since its foundation in 2009, and while nobody has been killed as yet, it cannot be ruled out that a violent incident involving them will result in someone being killed or injured in the future. While the EDL are not linked to any political party as yet, the far right has been on the march in other parts of Europe and some of the groups that have gained popularity have militias and thug groups attached to them that also actively menace minorities, such as the Roma in Hungary. Most people go about their business freely and do not worry about terrorists as they travel to work; nobody can do this when the EDL hold one of their demonstrations, especially not Muslims, and there are signs that they embrace racism against other groups as well. So they may well be a lesser threat than the Islamists, but that’s only if you only consider the threat they pose to whites, not to the minorities they threaten. The snide remark about their intelligence represents the real “comforting distraction”: we pretend that these are boneheaded apes rather than men who all went to school, can all read and write (even if they do not bother to spell properly when on Facebook), some of whom have jobs and even businesses (like their leader), and choose to engage in street violence. They make no less of a deliberate choice than the Muslims who bomb or stab soldiers, and the same is true of other whites who fall into racism as a result of reading hysterical and bigoted stories in the tabloids. The only difference between the two groups’ choices is who suffers.

Finally, Taj Hargey again waded into this discussion last week, this time with a sympathetic interview in the Oxford Times in which he claims that two “misguided Muslims — significantly opportunistic converts to Islam — have heaped opprobrium upon observant Muslims”, before spelling out his agenda for an “authentic Qur’anic” version of Islam, in which he goes further than he has before (perhaps without realising it) by alleging:

The most egregious non-Qur’anic symbols of these twisted doctrines include face-masks, headscarves, beards, pyjama-like robes, etc.

Headscarves are not “non-Qur’anic” but fulfil this Qur’anic verse which commands that women “draw their veils over their chests” (or necklines in another translation), the type of veil referred to being a head veil or khimaar. This cannot be fulfilled, of course, without wearing a head cover in the first place. The particular type of headcovering differs from place to place, but headscarves are not “egregious” or “non-Qur’anic”. The other things mentioned are also normative Islamic practices (and beards are hardly limited to Muslim men) and have nothing to do with extremism, so it makes clear the fact that his opposition is to Islam per se, to mainstream Islam, not to extremism. He also makes a host of slurs against the entirety of Islamic scholarship, dismissing it as “priestly fatwahs — dodgy religious rulings from a wretched clergy”. His “solution” to the problem of extremism in Islam seems to be to destroy mainstream Islam altogether and replace it with his “authentic” version, when the real Muslims will not allow this to happen. Let’s be clear: this man claims to speak for Islam, to tell the world what Islam really is, but he speaks of a manufactured 20th-century religion that has a few thousand followers worldwide; as for the real thing, he hates it. A recent commentator asked me why I condemn apologists rather than terrorists: the answer is that I have nothing to answer for as regards terrorism, while this man’s “apologism” is of no relevance as it is for something we do not believe in.

This seems to be an example of the “learning from your mistakes” fallacy in action: if something bad happens (like a child going missing) then things have to change to make sure the same cannot happen again; it cannot be considered that really things were being done right, that maybe an unlikely set of circumstances happened and that this was just a tragedy. They insist that there are “implications” to the fact that an incident like Woolwich can happen, but they do not spell out what these implications are and the “implications” of a single attack linked to a movement which is dying and which last caused any damage in this country eight years ago must be pretty limited. The majority of the active extremists are off the streets or dead; a few prominent ones remain in plain sight, and the community at large do not know where the others are. A few alligators do not a swamp make, and most of us would be glad to see the back of the alligators (the few of them that remain) but any attack on the general Muslim community would be entirely unjustified. The state knows better than us who they are, and where they are.

John Carr of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety said: ‘If these images were not available on the internet then men like Hazell and Bridger might not go on to kill.

‘We cannot blame the internet for these people but it has opened pathways that lead them on to violent pornography and paedophile material.’

This is a fairly good example of the “do something” mentality. Mark Bridger had previous convictions for violent offences, including an attack on his former landlord and an attempted armed robbery in south London, but he had no previous convictions for sexual offences and there is no suggestion that he abused the children he came into contact with while working as a lifeguard, or any of his own six children. There had been no way to catch him previously and nobody had any indication that he was a sex offender; the worst people knew about him is that he was a serial liar and fantasist who lied about and exaggerated his past, claiming to have been in the army and the fire brigade (when, in fact, he dropped out of the fire service while in training because of his arrest over the armed robbery). There is nothing anyone could have done to arrest him before he decided to kidnap and murder April Jones, so they turn to how the Internet stoked his fantasies and might have turned him into a killer.

The problem is that Google has neither the ability nor the authority to make sure that nobody has access to underage or abusive pornography. They do have a system called SafeSearch which filters out content judged to be inappropriate unless it’s switched off; however, ‘inappropriate’ simply means unsuitable for children and possibly offensive to others, not necessarily illegal. While it hosts content through Blogger, Picasa, Google Plus and other services, and (like other social media sites) has procedures for removing illegal content, it is impossible for it to filter out all searches for illegal content without blocking some innocent material, as well as searches carried out for academic or journalistic reasons, particularly in countries where that might be perfectly legal (it’s an American company, and free speech is protected there, and attempts to ban abusive pornography have in the recent past been struck down on free speech grounds), as well as by law enforcement. It can no more protect us entirely from abusive pornography than it can from spam; it can only weed out what it finds. It is up to the police to find the source of this material and close it down.

It is also not simple for them to electronically detect child and abuse pornography, because the basic distinctions that we make every day are very difficult to programme into a computer, because computers work on the basis of very basic yes/no tests. An algorithm to tell a clothed man from a clothed woman, for example, would end up being very long indeed and quite possibly error-prone, because are many details that could appear in both, or could appear more commonly in one but occasionally in the other. The same is true of telling an innocent act (or footage thereof) from an abusive one, particularly if tell-tale signs such as the use of knives or guns are absent, and a skilled operator could produce material in which the abused victims do not look (at least, not to a computer trained to look for particular signs) as if they are being abused, for example, because they have been given alcohol or drugs beforehand, off camera.

Google, despite being the world’s biggest search engine, despite owning a number of major social media services and despite being the principal author of the software that runs on many modern smartphones, is not the world internet authority. Neither, for that matter, is Microsoft. Just because the police did not catch Mark Bridger in time (perhaps because he did not download enough child abuse images to attract the attention of the police, who do monitor these things), we should not be thrashing around looking for someone to blame other than Mark Bridger. As George Monbiot, who lives in the area where April Jones was murdered, wrote in the Guardian today, “there are no lessons to be learned here, except that there lives among us a very small number of people who are capable of almost anything”.

To be clear, Anjem Choudary is not Gerry Adams and al-Muhajiroun is not Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein are a political party and it has had members of Parliament for decades, and the broadcasting ban of the 1980s covered representatives of political parties linked to terrorist organisations when they were talking about the ‘struggle’. (It did not cover them talking about other issues, such as housing or education.) Broadcasters used actors to voice their words to circumvent the ban because they deemed it important to hear what the representative of a large section of Northern Ireland’s Catholic population had to say. The ban did not, of course, affect the press which can only ever relay someone’s words in writing. Anjem Choudary’s organisation is tiny, it is not conclusively linked to any known terrorist organisation (even if a number of convicted terrorists have rubbed shoulders with them at one point or another) and they represent nobody but themselves.

Furthermore, it is not their appearances on the TV that are damaging, but their appearances in the press, which have on a number of occasions been made into front-page news which is out of all proportion to their size and importance. Rather like the notorious Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, they are media junkies who pull offensive stunts for the cameras and for the press, often at the expense of other Muslim organisations who were holding their own demonstration (such as one at the US embassy in 2007 or so) when al-Muhajiroun turned up with their banners and slogans and their ‘contribution’ was reported but the rest of the demonstration was not. The EDL appeared purely because of an al-Muhajiroun stunt in 2009 in Luton. Admittedly, this did not require media coverage for locals to know about it, but the word spread beyond Luton because of it, gave fuel to anger over a tiny incident involving about 20 people, and helped found a group of violent white racist extremists which persists to this day.

The comment about “exposing what they say when they’re not wearing a tie in the studio” is nonsense, because you can’t do that when they’re in a TV interview. However, the issue is not that their actions are ever exposed but that they are exposed in proportion to their importance, which is minimal. Both broadcasters and the press report on them as if they are an important strand in Muslim thinking rather than a small group, a rump of a once much bigger movement, which pulls offensive stunts and ruins other Muslims’ demonstrations. There would not be talk about censorship or broadcasting bans if the media had reported factually and honestly about their antics; their failure to do so has had serious consequences, not only for Muslims but for the police and anyone else the EDL’s hooligans choose to menace.

As al-Muhajiroun are a banned organisation, their members should be subjected to legal actions including injunctions not to appear at named demonstrations where their appearance could cause a disturbance (for whatever good this will do now that the EDL has arisen because of them). Rather than talk of banning “non-violent extremists”, almost certainly a cover for Hizbut-Tahrir (which has been conspicuously absent from the debate recently, but has been a focus of previous talk of such bans) and the Muslim Brotherhood, the EDL should be banned, as it is a violent organisation which actively menaces and intimidates a named minority but clearly includes open racists (who speak from the podium and their demonstration and receive applause) and which make people afraid to walk around their own city. No group should ever be able to do this in a free society and it should be stopped before somebody gets killed.

Hargey started by blaming the “three M’s of our community, the mullahs, the madrassahs and the mosques”, for giving a “drip-drip” message that “it’s us and them, it’s Muslims against kafirs, Muslims against unbelievers”, and that these two fanatics were obviously getting this message “from the mullahs” and “from all these extremist preachers” on the Internet. He claimed,

“We need to condemn all these mullahs because even here in Britain we have our local variants who spout the same nonsense, the same rubbish, about them and us, and only Muslims are going to Heaven and everyone else is going to Hell.”

Vine then mentioned people like Abu Hamza and Anjum Choudhary, who “may enjoy winding people up” but have a profound effect on their followers. Hargey said that Choudhary was “a mullah of a sort”, who went round claiming that there would never be peace or co-existence, only a “covenant of security which is a nonsense, it doesn’t exist in Islam”. He then claimed that it was “this sort of toxic nonsense that comes from the Wahhabis, the Salafis, from Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and we should stop this imported ideology coming here under the guise of the so-called mullahs who project this”. He then mentioned Yusuf al-Qaradawi (who isn’t a “salafi” at all, and neither is he Saudi; rather he is an Egyptian trained at al-Azhar and lives in Qatar, which has developed an entirely different culture from Saudi Arabia) and accused him of preaching co-existence with Christians but not with Jews, “and we do not need this kind of message in this multicultural, pluralistic society”.

As ever, Hargey’s claims are full of distortions. First, although extremists go to some mainstream mosques (some of them will refuse to attend Bareilawi mosques, but will attend any other), they do not get the inspiration to become extremist from the preachers there, but from other sources including people they meet and printed literature handed out at the mosque. Increasingly, the printed literature is replaced by online literature although this can easily be printed out and handed out. Mosque sermons are often about everyday, bread-and-butter religious topics such as basic moral teaching, religious doctrine, and faith topics such as the importance of fear and trust in God. The claim that it’s just a drip-drip of “stay away from the unbelievers, they are all going to Hell” is preposterous. Of course, nobody can go to every single mosque so if I can say I’ve heard the sermons at Croydon mosque or Kingston mosque and they are not like that, he can say I haven’t heard those at another mosque; the same if I have been to 10, he will tell me the 11th is as he describes.

As is fairly well-known, there were a few mosques controlled by the extremists until about 2003, and a small number of preachers who hired out halls for Friday prayers, including Abdullah Faisal and Abu Qatada. However, most of these events no longer run as their leaders have left the country or are in prison, or both. Some of their tapes and writing are still available, but they still lack the reach they had when they were able to preach in person in the UK. In addition, there has been much discussion among Muslims since then and the appeal of these ideas, including conspiracy theories about 9/11, to mainstream Muslims has diminished somewhat.

The notion that disbelievers go to Hell is not a Wahhabi or Saudi import and neither is it related to extremism or terrorism. That is a complete red herring. The ideological foundation of extremism is essentially Salafi-jihadism or Combatant Salafism, which emerged out of the Afghan jihad of the 1980s (specifically the Arab element that participated in it), as well as offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the GIA in Algeria. These groups broadly coalesced around Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri in the 1990s and formed what has been described as “the international, travelling Salafi army”, which became known not only for extreme and violent attacks on any perceived enemy, Muslim or otherwise, but also for wrecking the efforts of other Muslims to build Islamic states, such as in Afghanistan and Chechnya, by using them as bases to launch attacks for their own ends. Muslims know very well that al-Qa’ida intended to rule Muslims, not serve them, and became aware that some of them (as in Algeria) were in fact government agents in fake beards. I have gained the impression that some Muslims also are willing to support the likes of the Taliban in a ‘far-off’ country like Afghanistan but less so when they encroach on a country they have relatives in and may aspire to move back to, such as Pakistan.

On both this issue and the issue of grooming, Hargey is feeding misconceptions of what an imam is and what he can do. He is not paid by the government or the local council; he is paid either by the local community or a charity, which often receives overseas (usually Gulf) funding, so outsiders have no right to expect them to issue sermons about what concerns them. An imam is not a military general who can give orders and expect them to be obeyed. He is not responsible for what the people who pray behind him do, unless he actually tells them to do it or tells them it is permissible when it is not. He is not a pope or an infallible spiritual leader whose word is religious (let alone secular) law. He is able to give advice and spiritual guidance but he cannot make his community do anything.

On both of these issues, it is inconceivable that a sermon, or several, would make a huge amount of difference. In the case of grooming, the men were part of a criminal subculture and if they attended mosques or had ever read the most basic book on Islam, they would have known that everything they did was wrong anyway. For an imam to give a sermon to the effect that Muslims shouldn’t regard non-Muslim women or women in skimpy dresses as trash, as Hargey might desire (and as if Muslims in general believe that anyway), would have made no difference, because their crimes were against young girls who they groomed from childhood, not adult women. As for the extremists, although they may attend a mosque for the Friday prayer, they may not believe what the imam says about what he is doing or the group he belongs to. They know that a lot of imams disapprove of them and their campaign, and do it anyway because they know the imam is from a different school of thought to them (or unable to speak out because of money, mosque committee politics, or some such constraint) and simply believe he is wrong. (That is not even counting the imams they will not pray behind.)

Muslim response to the Woolwich atrocity has been to condemn it outright, with the sole exception, to my knowledge, of the al-Muhajiroun remnants. That’s all they are able to do; they do not have the power to ‘root out’ extremists (as a Muslim I know said we should do on Facebook the other day), many of whom are already known to the security services and none of whom make their plans known to the Muslim community until they carry them out. We cannot run to the police every time we hear some guy come out with an “extreme” view or justify terrorism, or an imam voice an illiberal opinion during a sermon. In today’s Mail on Sunday, it was claimed that the government are setting up a new counter-extremism task force so as to stop extremists using “schools, colleges, prisons and mosques to spread their ‘poison’”, as well as holding mosque committees responsible for their choice of imams. It is noticeable which group is being exempt from responsibility for spreading this ‘poison’ and exaggerating the profile of the tiny group of extremists that still preaches in public: the press.

Blaming mosques, committees or “mullahs” is another way of blaming Muslims in general for the misdeeds of a handful, and I have to say that my non-Muslim friends on social media have been brilliant at avoiding this trap, but both politicians and the media want to score points and responsible policy and reporting does not achieve that — “bold” stances do. The fact is that they know where the extremists and the terrorist plotters are, and who they are, better than the community do. It’s not about an “us and them” attitude, it’s about the remnants of an organised campaign that occasionally manage flourishes of brutality (less frequently than they manage to get locked up). There’s no need for new snooping powers or banning groups that aren’t linked to terrorism but which they can accuse of “promoting division and hatred”, an easy cover for political repression, and not just against Muslims but against any political protests (anti-Apartheid campaigners in South Africa were commonly charged with “inflaming racial hatred”). This attack was not a “new front” but one of the last roars of a dying dinosaur.