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Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/10/17/do1701.xml
Our Failure to Confront Radical Islam Is There for All to See
[Telegraph-UK] Denis MacShane - At long last, the debate on Islamism as politics, not Islam as religion, is out in the open. A fight-back is beginning to reclaim Britain from the grip of those who refuse to acknowledge the centrality of British values of tolerance, fair play, and parliamentary democratic freedoms - notably those of free speech and respect for all religions, but supremacy for none. The struggle is not between religion and secularism, nor between the West and Islam, and still less between Bush-Blair and the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents. It is the ideologization of religion that needs confronting. An all-party commission on anti-Semitism that I chaired reported recently. Our most worrying discovery was the complacency on many university campuses about harassment of Jewish students. Jew-baiting behavior that would have had the Left outraged in the 1930s is now actively encouraged by an unholy alliance of the hard Left and Islamist fundamentalists, and the odious anti-Semites who have infiltrated some lecturers' unions. The writer is Labour MP for Rotherham and worked at the Foreign Office as PPS and minister, 1997-2005.