Sinclair's Musings - pissing off all the right people since 2006

Well - it appears I've rather upset the MPAC. They don't link to my original fisk and have failed to respond to my charge that they are idiots who don't even know much about Islam itself let alone the wider world. Tony Sharp is also the target for some of their incoherent ire. Tony can handle himself but suffice to say that he is entirely correct that Policy Exchange's attempt to identify an extremist infiltration of British Islam does not constitute an attack on British Islam itself.

Let's go over their charges against my fisk:

"This level of ignorance is one thing but to step from that into the blatantly paranoid hysteria of some nut called Matthew Sinclair is another. The crazed lunatic, walking the streets of a major political party right now, actually claimed we were trying to ‘murder’ the 8 sufi ‘hate preachers,’ who were caught red handed forging receipts, by simply stating we wanted to know who they were!

If the Muslims have an extremist problem its nothing to the one going on within some segments of the conservative party! Or the one going on in this nuts head – now that’s extreme! He is not just a danger to the Muslims, the good standing of the conservative party but worse to himself. Any one who can read words to the effect of ‘let’s find these dodgy Sufi’s’ on a Muslim website, have a panic attack, have to change his underwear, and then start to dial 999 screaming ‘they are out to kill the Sufi’s’ to some poor police officer, is either on drugs or so out of his mind he should be sectioned!"

Lots of invective there. Very little argument - I certainly haven't even thought about calling the police, although I'd think about doing so for protection if I was one of the researchers - except that I shouldn't read their call to "find these dodgy Sufi's" to be an incitement to violence. The problem is that MPAC don't give any other reason why they want to know "every last detail" about these people.

If this happened in isolation it might be taken as innocent curiosity. That they called their attempt to find the researchers a "hunt" would raise some questions even then. However, they are calling for a "hunt" for researchers they accuse of trying "to destroy their own community" after a series of other frightening examples of extremists attacking people they perceive as critics of Islam. Soldiers in Windsor had their property damaged and been forced to move. Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are a couple of famous examples of people who have faced threats of death and attempted assasinations. Rushdie's Japanese translator and Theo van Gogh are famous examples of that threat being acted upon. There are many more examples out there. We cannot naively give the benefit of the doubt to people like MPAC when they go hunting their enemies.

There is a savage irony to their implication that I'm a coward. If I were easily scared I'd have kept quiet, they'd have silenced someone and infringed free speech. That's the existential challenge to our values that these people pose.