Remember the 70s stereotype of the Citizen Smith type school boy revolutionary? Everybody was a Fascist, the park keeper, the headmaster, the Tories, business people.

Step forward Nick Cohen; Ba’athist secularists- Arab Fascists, Sunni radicals-Islamo-Nazis, Shia revolutionaries-the incarnation of Hitler, China and Putin’s Russia-not Islamic but Fascists and dangerous foreigners all the same.

This complex world is a simple place for Nick Cohen, any event, movement, conflict or ideology can just be explained by comparing it to Europe in the 30s. Whether Tory grandees, liberals or socialists, anyone who believes the West should step back and take a sober long term view of this changing world is a Chamberlain type appeaser.

I suspect Cohen is a former student Trot, who has read his Theory of Permenant Revolution and adapted it to indulge the Blair regime’s Gladstonian liberal imperialism, on its Neo-Con mission to bring civilisation to Johnny Foreigner.

I agree with your comments on the Expo more widely. I suspect many who came wouldn’t have realised the political affiliation of the organizers, because they didn’t make much difference either way. As I’ve written on my own blog, the timing of launching the libel action against this blog was doubly self defeating because they had actually got some critical voices for the debates, Bright, Murray (and had asked Nick Cohen) – because the debates would have been better if those people had been involved. The Friday night debate on media was interesting because Andrew Gilligan gave a good counter point argument. I’m not a Londoner so never read him in the Standard but came away from that debate with a higher opinion of him than I had previously – and perhaps unfairly – held.

What was and is clear is the “credibility gap” that exists in relation to Islamism. It seems clear that there Islamist political parties which appear to be moderate: the Turkish AKP, the Moroccan PJD and, yes, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. However, none of these have been permitted untrammelled political power since there are far too many vested interests in these countries, and too much fear of religious repression, for anyone to know whether moderate Islamism can work in practice.

My instinct is that Islamism -paradoxically- is becoming an increasingly non-violent movement. People have seen the excesses of the GIA in Algeria, the jihadist groups in Egypt and AQ, and they are turning against it. Did you know that support for Al-Qaeda has dropped massively in Pakistan during the last twelve months? An entirely theoretical jihad is fine until they start car-bombing your own country.

You have to understand that while many Muslims in this country support Hezbollah and Hamas as what they perceive to be, rightly or wrongly, legitimate resistance organisations (hence the flags on sale at the IHRC stall), this does not extend to other organisations. Islamism as an idea has changed and is changing – and IslamExpo was a great opportunity to come and listen to some of these issues being debated. Well done Demos and Catherine Fieschi. I only wish Martin Bright and Douglas Murray had attended to give an alternative viewpoint.

While commenters at ‘Harry’s Place’ have started to see through the ‘multiculturalism’ of Demos, and can see the threatening intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood, the British ‘left’ is still inclined to be unreasoningly hostile to such anti -Jihad sites, as ‘Jihadwatch’, which supports several ex-Muslims, such as Ibn Warraq:
http://www.jihadwatch.org

While warmly appreciating Nick Cohen’s campaign against what he sees as a ‘Left-Islamist’ nexus (I call it a ‘Left-Islam’ nexus), I think that he has illusions about ‘Muslim Socialists’, which to me is an oxymoron.

Yeah, I mean he could have devoted his time to doing something more productive. Like completing his PhD.

You suggest that the true nature of IslamExpo is hidden, what if they aren’t the only ones ? If you make that assumption a lot of your questions are easily answered.

Dear oh dear Milne seems to have really lost it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/17/islam.race

Well, let’s see. The BNP run an event called the Red, White and Blue Festival and Demos is surely interested in the recent popularity of the far right in Labour constituencies. I’m sure Nick Griffin would be eager to get a call from Demos.

Funny thing was, getting back to your question I’m not sure how many from the ethnic minorities you were interested in targetting were there? It felt very ‘London’ – quite Arab, quite middle class – less South Asian. That might not be true amongst the public visiting – perhaps my impression was wrong – and they had 30 000 or something through the doors, but it definitely was the case with the organisers. I was talking to another West Midlander and both of us had noted how, unlike, say the Brum Muslim community the whole event was.