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January 12, 2010Radical Islam as New Left Protest
Commenting on the banning of UK Islamist group Islam4UK, the Daily Telegraph's Janet Daley observes:
The tactics of these fundamentalist organisations have more in common with the New Left protest groups of the 1960s and 70s than they do with moderate Islam: their strategy is to provoke the state into “revealing” its totalitarian imperatives by creating social disorder and gratuitous offence. Even their tendency to proliferate under different names – Islam4UK was already banned under its other incarnations of “al-Ghurabaa” and The Sacred Sect – are similar to the old Leftwing tradition of creating “front groups” to disguise their origins and make the movement seem more multi-faceted.
The New Left was quite a bit before my time so I can't pass much judgment on the accuracy of that analogy. My question is, from the standpoint of Western security, is it a good or bad thing if these groups borrow tactics from the radical left. After all, they didn't make that much headway, did they?
(AP Photos)
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