“The Guardian newspaper is refusing to sack one of its staff reporters despite confirming that he is a member of one of Britain’s most extreme Islamist groups. Dilpazier Aslam, who has been allowed to report on the London bombings from Leeds and was also given space to write a column in last Wednesday’s edition of The Guardian, is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical world organisation which seeks to form a global Islamic state regulated by sharia law.”

Independent on Sunday, 17 July 2005

Shiv Malik takes up the witch-hunt against Dilpazier Aslam initiated by the Daily Ablution and Harry’s Place blogs.

Whatever criticisms might be made of Hizb (and there are many) it is an organisation that renounces violence and has condemned the London bombings, while Aslam’s Guardian piece (see here) was a useful contribution to the post-7/7 debate. Hopefully, the Guardian will remain firm and refuse to be pressured into sacking Dilpazier Aslam.

Shiv Malik, incidentally, is the author of a 2-page article on Hizb ut-Tahrir in the current issue of the New Statesman (see here). Commenting on Malik’s article, Yusuf Smith has written:

“A lot of this is dangerously inaccurate…. The days of HT causing trouble on British university campuses ended when Omar Bakri left; if some youths today find HT not radical enough, that is hardly their fault! There are worthwhile points made about how HT, and other political groups, recruit in an atmosphere in which the youth find the traditional religious teaching available irrelevant (sometimes because they do not speak the foreign language in which it is delivered), but HT is one of the less extreme of the groups guilty of this. They are a problem for us, not for the wider community. I fail to see why the current situation merits a two-page feature on HT of all groups.”

Or, for that matter, a campaign against a Guardian journalist.

Of course, the US Right has been quick to leap on this. See Little Green Footballs, 17 July 2005