Andy McCarthy has an excellent piece today on Blair’s predictably dishonest and disingenuous response to the London attacks. Andy won’t be surprised to see that the Daily Telegraph today has details of yet another of the, um, moderates with whom the UK government has been chatting:
“Mr Thomson wrote a book in 1994 in which he said Freemasons and Jews controlled the governments of Europe and America and described the claim that six million Jews died in the Holocaust as a ‘big lie’.”
A British government spokesman is quoted by the Telegraph as saying, “We talk to a lot of people, including many whose views we do not necessarily agree with.”
Necessarily?
Now, in the battle for UK Muslims’ hearts and minds, the British government is inevitably going to have to talk to some people with very unpleasant views, but it’s difficult to avoid the impression that, in playing the game in the way that he is, Blair is going to end up entrenching the extremists as legimitate representatives of ‘their’ people. Only a cynic would say that the prime minister is doing this as a way to recover the Muslim votes he lost at the last election.
But then I’m a cynic.