Offending Muslims News Today

the eastern city of chittagong. now on bbc news, political thinking with nick robinson. hello and welcome to political thinking. the queen has expressed her hope that her platinum jubilee celebrations will focus on what brings us together, on what unites us, not what divides us. my guest on the programme has had to spend much of her career worrying about exactly the opposite, about extremism and how to counter it. she is dame sara khan. herjob now is the governments independent adviser...

on what unites us, not what divides us. my guest on the programme has had to spend much of her career worrying about exactly the opposite, about extremism and how to counter it. she is dame sara khan. herjob now is the governments independent adviser for social cohesion and resilience. before that, she was the countrys first counter—extremism commissioner. born and raised in bradford to pakistani parents, she once said, "there is something going horribly wrong with the muslim communi...

Who suggest that the only type of racism and discrimination is at an institutional level, or who say, for example, that the government is engaged in state—sponsored islamophobia. that type of language, that type of narrative, i think, is totally destructive for young muslims in this country. you are, in effect, helping to create a wedge between young muslims and the british state, in effect. i think that is totally unacceptable. so i am very aware of discrimination, i have experienced anti—m...

"i, as a muslim woman, can give you the confidence "about how you can talk about islamism "if you need to and do not have to run scared of it?" to be honest, ifeel like i have been doing that for a lot of my life, actually! because i think there is a genuine fear, a lack of confidence, a lack of understanding. i mean, you know, when i was at the commission i remember —— meeting councillors — i will not say from which area but in this area, there was clearly a problem of both far—right an...

Got to be where we are honest about these discussions and we challenge discrimination wherever it is coming from. i sense that underlying what you are saying is even a view that there isnt a thing called the muslim community, that in a sense it is a patronising phrase, the idea that so many people have the same views. definitely, the people i find who tend to use that phrase are either the islamists on the far right or politicians for their own political or ideological agenda and i think we have...

Policy of disengagement. i want to get to the essence of this. is this really an argument about who speaks up for the muslim community or communities, plural, or is there a fundamental debate about whether there is, in inverted commas, and i do stress in inverted commas, a muslim problem, as was captured in the title of your book, reclaiming muslim identity from extremism? and i think when she made that comment, to be honest ijust found it really bizarre and strange, because she had never actual...

Against the threat of islamist extremism in the area and how it is radicalising young muslims they just cannot talk about it. they felt somehow they were going to be offending muslims, somehow it was being racist and islamophobic, and i thought you were not doing a service to muslims in the country if you think that. 66% of muslims in this country believe that more needs to be done to tackle islamist extremists, where 66% of muslims would refer people to prevent, you not talking about the threat...

You have turkish muslims, you have yemeni muslims, you have from all backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, class, education, everything, and the idea that everyone thinks the same is just complete nonsense. as a classic example, the mcb as you mentioned, they constantly said that the muslim community has rejected prevent. now, when there was an independent piece of research done by crest, they shared that actually 56% of british muslims had never even heard of prevent, and when there was a neu...

What this comment has been trying to do is to try and deal with what they would see as kind of sweeping condemnation of societies institutionally racist, something they think is a mistake. is that in essence why you wind some people up? because they think you are happy and successful as proud of your country and you do not share their anger with it, their sense that there is something fundamentally wrong and fundamentally racist about the structures of the country they are living in? no, i do sh...

Extremism for fear of fear of offending muslims. surely if muslims are the first to say this is nothing to do with us, they also would be standing side-by-side with those who are able to name this threat and isolated from mainstream muslim communities. we have this problem that we are, for various reasons for fear of racism, political correctness, we are unable to even name and isolate and then challenge the threat. then we have a separate problem, which is if we cant name something, we simply d...