Well said Nick. I think our only hope lies in the general population, where those without the benefit of a liberal academic education still retain the ability to recognise violent and repressive fundamentalist attitudes. They understand what Trojan Horse is all about, what Rotherham tells us about the state of the country and who ISIS are. They don't like it, and in increasing numbers they are saying so. I look forward to seeing mass protests against Islamization spreading across the country as they are beginning to do in Germany. Until now, the beardies have had a free run; let's see what happens when they meet a bit of resistance.

Whilst it might be conforting to position Islamic extremism as a "far right" ideology. To do so only muddies already murky waters. For too long the left have been allowed to deny their own totalitarian tendencies. To label islamism or political Islam as fascism, which it rightly is, yet claim that it has an ideological affinity to the right is an example of lack of intellectual honesty that so plagues those on the left. Facism is a product of the left. It is the embodiment of the primacy of the State over the individual. As much as the left like to invert reality the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) had the word "socialist" in it for a reason. The left long ago abandoned one of the fundamental principles of Liberal thought, that of truth. If the left is ever to regain its legitimacy, as you claim to desire, perhaps you could start with that.

In todays Guardian Will Self makes a valiant attempt to understand (or complicate) the totalitarian Islamic State scumbags. He shuffles Baudrillard`s hyper-real and simulacra into his deck of cards. As an advocate of the Situationist International he fails to mention the 1967 situationist solution for all muslims: Burn Your Own Koran In A Public Space. No More Mosques is also a solution. Banning Islamic ideology from politics (for the same reasons Nazi ideology is banned)is another solution. A slow learning Left and Right is ripe for islamification. While Qatar buys huge chunks of London the islamo-jihadists plot more butchery and murder of it`s people. Islam is 100% taqiyya. Bargain of the sharia sales this week- christian slave girls for £7.

I enjoyed the article as it attempts to address the conundrum of how old style Liberals become completely illiberal when it comes to Islam. I do have a problem with this term "liberal muslim", as a bit of an oxymoron. How can you be "liberal" and still follow the dictates of the Koran? You cannot do the latter and be the former. The argument that such a muslim only follows the nicey nicey, fluffy bunny bits in the book doesn't wash with the local Iman. I also disagree with mentioning the UKIP in the same sentence as BNP, if for no other reason than to do so is to suggest that 16% (recent polls predict) of voters at the next election are racist white supremacists.

Islam is a RELIGION They are all like this (NOte: Communism is a clssic religion ) Whay is anyone surprised at all, is beyond me. One should also remember that the islamic calendar is 622 years behind christianity's - and that puts islamic culture right at the equivalent of the beginning of maximum strife & brutality - think after the initial crusades & just before the inquisition & factional religious wars.

Well written, Mr Cohen! Since right-wing ideologue Frankie Fukuyama proclaimed “The End of History” in 1989 – and since the “end of the Cold War” in 1992 – many on the ‘Left’ have been suffering from a sort of PTSD prompted by the apparent consigning of any form of liberal thought to the trash-can of history. Some, of course, have simply turned their coats inside out and joined the world’s Conservatives, while others have grasped like drowning swimmers onto the ‘shiny’ of post-modernist cultural relativism (the view that, as Johann Hari once wrote, “the world is carved up among ‘cultures,’ and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be ‘respectful.’ You can criticize Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different from you”). Add to this a notion of anti-imperialism that is so badly defined that it is meaningless – including the misguided belief that islamism is *always* bred in poverty –and a fair serving of “European guilt” and we have a situation where we must hold our tongues or sit on our hands and excuse barbarities because “we’re not allowed to preach to ‘the Natives’ and tell them how to live their lives.” No wonder the ‘Left’ is something of a joke in most of the world. It is not racist to defend equality or tolerance or social, economic or juridical rights for all. What *is* racist is to deny people the same rights and freedoms because they were raised in a “different culture.” And to say that people *choose* to live in a society where they must wear a mobile black tent to go out in public or where they can be stoned to death for love or have their throats opened for talking to a man to whom they are not related is an *insult* of the highest order – people live in such circumstances because those in power in those ‘societies’ (usually men) *benefit* from these shenanigans and convince their ‘societies’ that their imaginary friends have sanctioned it. Nor is it “arrogant Western cultural imperialism,” or “neo-colonialism” – much less “Western decadence” – to wish to share those rights and freedoms with every human being on the planet. Yes, they arose in the context of the *European* Enlightenment and the capitalism that spawned it, but – just as capitalism was a huge step forward over slaveholding and feudalism – they can become the common currency of the human race and be used to create world-historic advances in human well-being. To reject these ideas just because they first emerged in Europe is a particularly short-sighted form of nativism – any revolutionary worth the name doesn’t care that Marx was German, Trotsky a Russian Jew, Stalin Georgian or Mao Chinese, but only whether their ideas will be useful. Moreover, before those on the ‘Left’ enthuse on how ‘progressive’ it is to support islamism against imperialism, they should take thought for the fact that islamism is a *creation* of imperialism. The British were happy to encourage islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia to stalemate Imperial Russian expansion in the nineteenth century, then in the Middle East in WWI to frustrate the Turks, and again in Central Asia in the wake of the Russian Revolution. After the First World War, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded under British auspices to counter Egyptian nationalism, and this rationale was inherited by the US after WWII, when ‘nationalism’ was equated with ‘communism’ (1) and islamist movements – from the anti-Soviet mujahidin in Afghanistan, to ‘al-Qaida’ and IS – have become the weapons-of-choice for Washington to further its agenda of global conquest ... and are, moreover, invaluable in scaring the population of the ‘Homeland’ into giving up their freedoms in exchange for a bogus “national security.” Those who would be called ‘progressive’ should be willing to oppose reaction *wherever* it raises its head, and as happily speak and act against the christian right as against the islamic one. (1) John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, wrote, “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us”(

Imagine that: liberals let in millions of Third-Worlders flood into First World nations and it goes wrong everywhere, from the UK and Sweden to Australia and France. If only those liberals had listened to Nick Cohen's warnings about the insanity of allowing mass immigration from the Third World, particularly by Muslims.

A very good expression of the troubles that afflict us. I've been a traditional, working class union member and labour supporter for my whole adult life. On the last five years I've come to see that the left no longer has anything for me, or for those I care about. The right, while abhorrent as a principle, now seems more relevant than the blinkered, idiotic left who are merely pushing an agenda of racism. I've had enough of it all. Just as so many of my peers have. This article gives me hope that the left may one day be relevant to me again.

This soundbite you love about 'number of Muslims in the British army vs number of Muslims in ISIS' sounds bad, but it's meaningless. For instance there are more or less the same amount of Jews as Muslims in the British army. What does this 'stat' actually prove? Have you asked 'your colleague Shiraz Maher' about how awful it is that there aren't more Jews in the British army? That's before we get to one of the pretty clear reasons why more Muslims haven't enlisted - because British Muslims have had a tendency to disapprove of recent UK military ventures - and with good reason. I know you and Maher still think the Iraq war was a good idea, and that bombing Libya has made the place so much better, but you're in a tiny minority.

People aren't scared of being called racist if they criticise Islam. They are scared of being attacked and killed.