How UK taxpayers are still funding the Mozlem extremists

Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is still being paid to groups linked to Islamist extremism, more than a year after David Cameron vowed to outlaw the practice.

Despite Mr Cameron’s pledge to stop bankrolling undesirable organisations, accounts published in recent weeks reveal that many bodies closely linked to extremism continued to enjoy substantial public funding in 2011 Photo: Getty Images

By Andrew Gilligan

03 Mar 2012

People associated with one “extremist” group whose grant was terminated after the Prime Minister’s pledge are now being used to induct new staff into the Government’s own Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT), the Home Office division responsible for directing Britain’s anti-terror efforts. Only last week the same individuals were awarded thousands of pounds of fresh public funding.

Meanwhile, the Civil Service has solicited “fast-stream” recruits for the top ranks in Whitehall from a group which has hosted numerous extremists and terrorist supporters, including the al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was linked to a number of international plots before his death last year.

Another body linked to the extremist sect Hizb ut-Tahrir, the public funding of which Mr Cameron condemned as long ago as 2009, is still receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money, to educate primary-age children in Hizb ut-Tahrir ideology.

“The situation is pretty serious,” said Haras Rafique, director of the Centri anti-extremism think-tank, which works closely with government. “It is one thing making political statements, but change only happens when you implement it and that change doesn’t seem to have happened.”

At a keynote speech in Munich (...) 13 months ago, the Prime Minister promised to “turn the page” on the “failed policy” which saw Whitehall engage with and fund “peaceful” Islamist groups in the hope that they could divert people away from terrorism. “This is like turning to a right-wing fascist party to fight a violent white supremacist movement,” Mr Cameron said.

Read the rest here. Andrew Gilligan is one of only a few MSM journalists in the UK to report on these things.