Excerpt:
Over the last few months, I and others monitoring Islamism's influence inside the British state have started to believe that the tide is turning. Last week one of British Islamism's most important fellow-travellers, a man called Bob Lambert, appeared to confirm my view.
When Lambert was head of the Metropolitan Police's Muslim Contact Unit, he exemplified a view shared by some others in the security establishment: that we can anoint "good Islamists" and use them as a bulwark against the "bad Islamists."
The showpiece for this approach is the North London Central Mosque, also known as the Finsbury Park Mosque. The mosque, formerly home to Abu Hamza and a centre of terrorist recruitment, was closed after a police raid in 2003. On its reopening, in a deal brokered by Lambert, it was essentially gifted to an Islamist group, the Muslim Association of Britain. The new leadership were certainly more moderate than Abu Hamza – not terribly hard – but they have close links with another designated terrorist organisation, Hamas.