Anyone who thinks the witch-hunt against the Muslim Council of Britain is an isolated case should take a look at what’s happening over on the other side of the Atlantic, where the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been subjected to a hostile right-wing campaign along almost identical lines.

The fact that CAIR has roundly denounced terrorist atrocities in the US and Britain is dismissed by its critics, who shift the argument onto the issue of the CAIR leaders’ position on the Palestinian resistance. They then go on to argue that the government should sideline a broad-based, mainstream, representative body like CAIR and concentrate instead on dialogue with “real moderates”, comprising individuals and groups who have hardly any influence at all within Muslim communities but have the “right” line on the Israel/Palestine question.

You have to ask – whose interests does this campaign against CAIR serve, those of American people or those of the Sharon government?

See, for example, Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe, 18 August 2005