Protect Impressionable Minds

The first item on last night's Newsnight was a "report" from a "right-leaning think tank" called "the Centre for Social Cohesion". That "Centre" is not a think tank. It is a person. Specifically, it is Douglas Murray, a neoconservative poster boy who is too rich to need to work, and who pretends to direct this "Centre" in order to give himself some sort of byline for media purposes.

Anyway, this "report" was about the earth-shattering pressence on the public library bookshelves of Tower Hamlets of works by figures such as Abu Ala Maududi, Syed Qutb and Muhammad bin Adbul al-Wahhab. There, you see, they might be read by common people. Understandably, Newsnight was as outraged as Douglas Murray ... sorry, I mean as outraged as "the Centre for Social Cohesion".

There followed a studio discussion featuring the Sufi Muslim Council, on which body see here and here. Of course, neoconservatism's close links to "militant Islam" (the only kind that there can ever be) extend not only to Maududi's Pakistan, to Qutb's Egypt and to al-Wahhab's Saudi Arabia, but also to the Sufi Chechens, to the Sufi Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, and to Turkey's ruling AKP, with its enormous Sufi electorate.

As to the question of whether those who advocate and practise separatism and dual civil loyalties should be stocked by our public libraries, if not, then we should introduce an immediate blanket ban on anything by any of the original signatories to the Project for the New American Century: Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, the convicted felon I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, and the cast-iron crook Paul Wolfowitz.

Also, anything by the Patrons of The Henry Jackson Society: Hubertus Hoffmann, Bruce P. Jackson, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Vytautas Landsbergis, Clifford May, Michael McFaul, Joshua Muravchik, Richard Perle, Jack Sheehan, Elbegdorj Tsakhia, Michael Stürmer, and James Woolsey.

One could add others, of course: Max Shachtman, Leo Strauss, Ayn Rand, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, David Frum, Irwin Stelzer, and so forth.

All in all, an impressive list of people whose writings (if any - I am not suggesting that, say, Jeb Bush or Dan Quayle has ever written any "book", "essay" or "paper" properly so called) certainly have no place in our public libraries. For that matter, there is a strong case that, at least until the reintroduction of National Service, such works should also be kept as far away as possible from normal-aged undergraduates.

As should those of a number of our ostensible compatriots, advocates and practitioners of separatism and of dual (or even triple) civil loyalty: Oliver Kamm, Stephen Pollard, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Melanie Phillips (mostly), Christopher Hitchens, his mini-me John Lloyd, Johann Hari, Michael Gove, Tony Blair, and others. Including, of course, Douglas Murray.