My book Londonistan, which spells out Britain’s state of denial over the Islamist threat to the west and the allied paralysis and confusion caused by multiculturalism, has struck many chords in America where people recognise similar dangerous cultural trends that are not being addressed. Many Americans, however, are still in the dark about what is going on in their own country. They are unaware, for example, that the attempts by radical Islamists to intimidate opponents and shut down debate in Britain—and the failure by public authorities to call them to account —are being replicated in the US. This article by Janet Levy records the attempt currently being made by American Islamists to pressurise Congresswoman Barbara Boxer, who rescinded an award made to the Council on American Islamic Relations (a representative organisation analogous to Britain’s Muslim Council of Britain and which, like the MCB, poses as moderate when it is anything but) when she discovered that CAIR was an extremist front. The situation described by Levy rings all too many bells here in the UK.

As British police arrest nine people in Birmingham on suspicion of yet another appalling terrorist plot, this time apparently to kidnap and possibly behead a British Muslim soldier, we have now started to make some slow progress in Britain towards enlightenment. A debate has started here about the pitfalls of multiculturalism, with the publication of a report by Policy Exchange. This shows that, while most Muslims havemoderate views, younger Muslims are much more extreme than their parents’ generation — which is particularly worrying since the proportion of young Muslims is so high with one third of this community under the age of 16. The report makes the crucial point, which I keep hammering home, that

the influence of Islamism is not just a security problem, but also a cultural problem…The appeal of radical Islam is more than an angry response to western foreign policy. It appears to reflect a more fundamental shift in cultural attitudes.

The report is also correct to blame multiculturalism for exacerbating this trend towards radicalism.

The emergence of a strong Muslim identity in Britain is, in part, a result of multicultural policies implemented since the 1980s, which have emphasised difference at the expense of shared national identity and divided people along ethnic, religious and cultural lines. Islamist groups have gained influence at local and national level by playing the politics of identity and demanding for Muslims the ‘right to be different’. The authorities and some Muslim groups have exaggerated the problem of Islamophobia, which has fuelled a sense of victimhood amongst some Muslims…In the era of multiculturalism diversity policies at local and national levels have encouraged different ethnic and religious groups to organise politically and fight their corner for extra resources. The competition emerging between groups – a sort of tribal thinking – has reinforced a wider feeling of social fragmentation, in which each group is encouraged to look after ‘their own’.

Very true. Where the report is weak, however, is in analysing what it merely alludes to — the religious element of Muslim extremism. It produces some alarming statistics —around one third of British Muslim respondents thought apostasy should be punishable by death and just under half thought that Muslim men in Britain should be able to have up to four wives; and 28 per cent wanted to live in Britain under sharia rather than English law, rising to 37 per cent of 16-24 year-olds. But the report suggests that the reason for such attitudes is a reaction against the decadence of British society, exacerbated by multiculturalism. While both are undoubtedly important factors, however, the key point is surely the fact that such people are espousing the highly politicised interpretation of their religion which is driving the jihad. And although the report rightly points out that al Qaeda is not a political movement because it preaches an extreme religious ideology which precludes all possibility of rational negotiation, and equally importantly also points out that many western commentators have accepted irrational or manipulative Muslim grievances without question, it fails to detail the extensive infrastructure of Islamist extremism in Britain in the networks of mosques, campus preachers, youth club workers, bookshops, charities, TV channels, newspapers and periodicals and internet sites all of which pump out the message of jihad.

A rather more robust analysis of the way in which jihadis have infiltrated British society was provided in a report — also published this week (what a week!) — by the Tories’ Policy Group on National and International Security. This also has many excellent things to say. It rightly sees the cultural jihad being waged upon Britain as a successor to Soviet communism and urges a similar approach to fight it (although the report reverts to establishment cravenness on other issues, such as its perception of the need to address British foreign policy as a ‘legitimate motivator of dissent).

Considerable pressures are being exerted on Muslims in Britain. Propagators in the UK of political Islam, which exploits a contested version of belief for political ends, are active and influential in Muslim communities. In some instances they seek to overthrow the institutions of democracy to institute a state governed by Sharia law. More campaign to obtain changes in, and special exemptions from, British law for all Muslims here irrespective of whether individual Muslims want this and against the principle that the law should apply equally to all British citizens. Though a few of these people are violent, a much greater number are willing to use the processes of democracy to change its character in fundamental ways. They are active in some mosques, though not exclusively there. Combined with the resentment most Muslims in this country feel about events in the Middle East, the conflict of loyalties which competing pressures can set up for ordinary Muslims makes it significantly harder than it would otherwise be for them to integrate.

…To secure our freedoms we have to do more than prevent terrorists wreaking destruction and sowing dissension. We need also to pay attention to the propagation in the UK of pernicious ideas by any group which avails itself of democratic freedoms in order to subvert democracy, as Soviet backed Communism once did. At present, there is no doubt that the principal such group is made up of some Muslim radicals who adopt this technique and, in the name of their version of their religion, seek also to deny the extension of democratic liberties to other Muslims in Britain. These people do not necessarily advocate violence as a way of gaining their ends. But they are enemies of the values this society stands for and which are shared by all other British Muslims.

Firmly in the report’s sights are — and it names them — the Muslim Council of Britain and the Federation of Islamic Student Societies, of which it observes:

On its website it claims that Muslims in Britain are persecuted, a manifest falsehood which can nonetheless exercise powerful influence over impressionable minds.

As the report says, the government has done harm in seeking often exclusive dialogue with such groups. Encouragingly, the Tory leader David Cameron made a robust speech this week attacking multiculturalism and Muslim extremists who he equated with the BNP, and subsequently supported the Policy Group report (although his article in the Observer the day before his speech was notably different in tone and content, thus causing us once again to wonder what David Cameron really thinks about anything, and whether we shall ever find out).

At same time as these encouraging developments, however, much of the British establishment is still going backwards.

The Government has failed to close down a Muslim school that was raided by anti-terror police, despite being advised by Ofsted to deregister it.

Counter-terrorist police are reviewing their stop and search powers, after complaints from Muslims that they felt ‘victimised’.

Commander Richard Gargini announced the plans in a speech to the Muslim Safety Forum at East London Mosque, in which he even accused British police forces of ‘bias’ against Muslims. At the same event Phil Woolas, the communities minister, accused the media of being skewed against Muslims.

A senior Muslim officer in the Met, Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei, has proposed that Muslims should be allowed to give tip-offs about terrorism to intermediaries at schools and mosques instead of talking to the police (that’s in addition to the police decision to share their intelligence with the community before conducting anti-terror raids).

And the Tory foreign affairs spokesman, William Hague, has said that a Tory government would abandon Tony Blair’s exclusive approach to the ‘special relationship’ with Washington and foster closer links with India, China and Japan instead, while breaking free from US domination by developing its own approach to the Middle East, partly by building closer relations with friendly nations in the region.

One step forward, two steps back?