Muslim Brotherhood

The Tax Payer’s Alliance (TPA) has released figures today on every local authority that has received Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) funding and what organisations have benefited from it.  The PVE fund has so far given out £12 million in tax payer money to projects aimed at preventing radicalisation.

In my first fortnightly column for New York’s Hudson Institute, I describe how the current conflict in Somalia can be framed as a struggle between the two predominant strains of Islamism.  It is also reproduced below, in full.

Yet another hit has been put out on a vocal critic of Islamism.  Sayyid al-Qimni is a leading Egyptian secular intellectual who has written scathingly about the dangerous and intolerant ideology of Islamism.  He has been particularly critical of some sections of al-Azhar University, which he accuses of trying to drag Islam ‘back to the Middle Ages’, and the Muslim Brotherhood.  In 2007, he delivered a heroic performance on al-Jazeera where he bemoaned the lack of liberal democracy in the Arab World, and described how Arabs are suffering under both military dictatorships and Islamist theocracies.  Now he, like many of those before him who have challenged the backwardness, fascism and violence of Islamism, has found himself the subject of death threats from the bullies who represent this ideology.