Michael, here’s more by the author of that Policy Exchange piece:

” I am being feted by the right. As the political editor of the New Statesman and usually written off by conservative thinkers as a dangerous, pinko liberal, this is a novel and rather awkward position in which to find myself. Two weeks ago, Channel 4 screened a programme I presented concerning Whitehall’s love affair with radical Islam. It was based on a stream of Foreign Office leaks first published in The Observer and the New Statesman which showed that mandarins were prepared to open lines of communication with organisations such Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, the right-wing plaudits for my work keep coming in, not just in this country but from America, too, where none other than David Frum, the neoconservative Bush adviser credited with coining ‘axis of evil’, has begun quoting my work approvingly. Neocon journal American Thinker ran a 2,500-word analysis of my findings. While any attention is always welcome, these offers of solidarity are also a challenge…It is depressing that so few on the left have been prepared to engage with the issue of the Foreign Office appeasement of radical Islam except to minimise its significance. In contrast, the responses on the right have been largely measured. Moore, for instance, fitted the Foreign Office’s search for radical figures it could do business with, such as Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual head, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, into a wider historical perspective. In the 1930s, we adopted a similar strategy with the Mufti of Jerusalem to ‘deliver’ Muslim opinion. The Mufti went on to support the Nazis…Meanwhile, the Foreign Office seems determined to press ahead with courting radical Islamists. Just this month, the British government paid for Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend a conference in Turkey to discuss the future of European Islam. At home, it funded two Islamist youth organisations, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies and Young Muslim Organisation, to help run a roadshow of Muslim scholars to tour the country. Fosis and YMO, while condemning violence, are ideological allies of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami. It is ironic that conservative thinkers categorise these organisations accurately as part of an Islamist extreme right, while many on the left continue, wrongly, to see them as part of some wider international Muslim liberation movement. While this situation remains, there is no shame for those on the left opposed to the rise of radical Islam to build alliances with conservatives prepared to call fascism by its real name.”

The comments section is, um, illuminating.