Daniel Johnson offers his take on the Forest Gate police raid for the benefit of US readers:
“At a press conference on Tuesday, the two Muslim suspects [sic] were flanked by ‘civil liberties heavyweights’. They included Gareth Pierce, a left-wing lawyer who also represents Guantánamo detainees and sundry other extremists, and Asad Rehman, a former sidekick to George Galloway (founder of the Respect Party) and self-appointed spokesman for every anti-Western, anti-war, anti-capitalist cause. Looking slightly out of place among the shaven-headed, bushy-bearded Islamists was Canon Ann Easter, a dean of the Church of England. Canon Easter had turned her church into a television studio for the benefit of this leftist-Islamist media circus. Somehow, it does not surprise me that the local mosque had declined to do this. The Islamists disapprove of women priests, but they presumably see in Canon Easter what Lenin called a ‘useful idiot’ who can reassure the infidels. Unfortunately, Canon Easter is by no means untypical. England’s established church has a deplorable record of ‘internalizing the hatred of the West that defines the shared universe of radical Islamism and the revolutionary left’, as Melanie Phillips puts it in her book Londonistan.”