The Tory leader David Cameron says in today’s Observer, after his stunt spending two days with a Muslim family in Birmingham, that the term ‘Islamic’ or ‘Islamist’ terrorism is a form of ‘racism or soft bigotry’ and that those who employ such terms

help do the terrorist ideologues’ work for them, confirming to many impressionable young Muslim men that to be a ‘good Muslim’, you have to support their evil campaign.

I have to say I can’t quite follow the precise logic here, but I get the general drift. On Planet Cameron, the phrases ‘Islamic’ or ‘Islamist’ terrorism are to be expunged from the lexicon. I wonder therefore whether Cameron would denounce the British Muslim Ed Husain for ‘soft bigotry’ over his book ‘The Islamist’?

I have already commented here on Husain’s courage, based on the extracts from his book which were published in the press. I have now read the book itself, and the extracts don’t convey half its power. In 286 simply devastating pages, it tells you all you need to know about why British Muslims are being radicalised, how it is being done — and the lethal stupidity of those who squawk that it is all because of Iraq or Islamophobia, or that to talk about Islamist terrorism is ‘soft bigotry’.

Husain describes how as a child he was brought up in a tradition of pacific, spiritual Islam. He describes how, despite enduring episodes of racial prejudice, he was accepted and nurtured by Britain and loved it as his country. The story of how he then became radicalised to the jihad is eye-opening. He was first introduced to Islamism — the belief that Islam ordains taking political control of a country, an idea that was previously unknown to him — by the non-Muslim religious education teacher at Stepney Green school, who in an act of well-meaning but desperate ignorance gave him a book about Islam which was written by an Islamist radical.

He describes the takeover of the East London mosque by the radicals of Jamaat-e-Islami, the intimidation that took place at Tower Hamlets college which gave in to Islamist demands for special treatment, and his introduction to Hizb ut Tahrir by a Muslim convert called David, with Bosnia being the key issue that called them to jihad. It is his description of HuT, the power and influence it wields on campus and its recruitment of untold thousands of young British Muslims to holy war, which should sound the loudest of alarm bells. For the British government refuses to ban HuT (which is proscribed in many countries) on the grounds that it is not connected to violence. Yet Husain, who during the 1990s became the HuT leader at Tower Hamlets college, shows in terrifying detail just what a deadly delusion that is and what lethal damage it has done.

He describes how HuT, whose appeal lies in its combination of intellectualism and charisma, flattened Muslim opposition and radicalised one hitherto moderate Muslim organisation after another. As Husain describes it, HuT appears to have been the most significant force behind the radicalisation of countless young British Muslims, who were sent to university to get an education but returned as fully-fledged jihadi zealots. HuT manipulated Muslim grievance and resentment to boiling point by cynically blaming every Muslim problem, from terrorism to poor community relations, on British foreign policy — a piece of manipulation which has been swallowed and regurgitated in turn by the credulous British media and intelligentsia. It was the media which swelled HuT’s recruitment by giving them huge and uncritical publicity. But what HuT was doing was inciting Muslims to violent revolution. It was Hut which recruited Britain’s first suicide bomber, Asif Hanif, who blew up Mike’s Place bar in Tel Aviv in 2003 and who had attended HuT meetings when a maths undergraduate at King’s College London. Husain observes:

What is beyond doubt is that he was introduced to radical ideas by the Hizb as an undergraduate and later developed those ideas to the point where he planned to die for Hamas.

Husain records how dumbfounded he was that HuT was never stopped by the college authorities. But the official line has always been that HuT was never associated with violence. Over and over again, Husain demolishes this myth, only to record despairingly how HuT still has not been banned despite the fact that its incitement to violence goes on, with calls upon God to ‘destroy the kuffar’, threats to kill future Muslim leaders who oppose the coming caliph, or the statement by a prominent HuT member that ‘some people in Britain should be bombing Washington DC’.

In response to the devastating picture of it that is painted by this book, HuT last week issued a statement distancing itself from its activities under the leadership of Omar Bakri Mohamed, the period about which Husain chiefly writes, and claiming to be involved in ‘constructive engagement’ with British political life. But we learn from Husain’s book that one of HuT’s main weapons is systematic deception. It trains its members to deny the truth, using the religious justification for deceiving the enemies of Islam. When its activities led to the appalling murder of a Nigerian Christian student in Tower Hamlets college, HuT put out press releases stating falsely that it had never operated on the campus.

…the Hizb leadership issued a condemnation of what had happened, saying it was a non-violent party. This myth was swallowed by investigators who never really understood the seriousness of the Hizb’s form of violence. Even today, a primary reason for western failure in the War on Terror is this same cause: an innate inability to understand the Islamist psyche.

Husain asks himself whether HuT has really moderated itself as it claims. He concludes that it is trying to appear moderate in order to gain acceptance within a Muslim community now under enormous pressure to sideline extremists — because, chillingly,

Britain remains vital to the Hizb, for it gives the group access to the global media and provides a fertile recruiting ground at mosques and universities.

Husain records how his eyes were progressively opened to HuT’s violence and lack of spirituality. Tellingly, and frankly, he records how difficult it was for him truly to renounce Islamism because, even after he thought he had left it all behind him, he still had assumptions that he thought were normal and therefore moderate but which were actually anything but. Particularly interesting to those who have long identified the supposedly moderate Muslim Council of Britain as a nest of Islamists is his account of how Inayat Bunglawala, the MCB’s political officer, took him to meetings of the Islamic Society of Britain, which was anything but moderate and whose teachers were Hamas and Brotherhood ideologues who imparted a deep and powerful hatred of Israel and the Jews.

Neither Inayat nor myself questioned any of this. Jew-bashing was an acceptable part of the Islamist curriculum, though not necessarily accepted throughout the ISB.

And every week, says Husain, Bunglawala took him to such sessions of

…Koran recitation, religious discussion, antisemitism and good food.

We may draw three principal lessons from this book. 1) The recruitment to Islamist extremism and terror of large numbers of British Muslims long predated 9/11 let alone Iraq. 2) The British political and media class is criminally negligent and worse in their appeasement and indulgence of HuT and Islamist extremism. Those politicians who refuse to ban it and those newspapers and broadcasters which promote HuT and its ilk have blood on their hands. Those like David Cameron or the British police who refuse to use the term ‘Islamist terrorism’ are doing far more than merely sanitising the language; they are actively conniving in the lie that enables this horror to replicate itself.

And 3), Husain shows that Islam and Islamism are two different things: that it is perfectly possible to be a Muslim who derives spiritual solace from the faith in a way that threatens no-one — and that it is essential to distinguish such Muslims from Islamists and protect the former, along with all of us, from the latter. Muslims like Husain need our support, encouragement and protection. David Cameron’s words instead take the ground from under his feet. ‘The Islamist’ should be sent to every politician at Westminster, put on the desk of every counter-intelligence officer and thrust under the supercilious nose of every journalist who maunders on about ‘Islamophobia’ and the alleged right-wing conspiracy that identifies Islamist terrorism solely to promote bigotry and sow needless fears to sanitise the crimes of the evil Bush and Blair.

If you want to know why the civilised world is losing the battle against the Islamists, read this book.