Treating Muslims like children, tyrants like revolutionaries, far-rightists like friends

I looked at the heckler at the Labour meeting and imagined his life in an instant. As a man of the 1968 generation there must have been sit-ins and marches, along with vicarious thrills at the triumphs of communists from Cambodia to Cuba. I guessed that with communism dead he would have no difficulty in endorsing the new threat to the status quo from the radical right. I wasn’t disappointed.

Only rich Iranians wanted democracy, he declared. The true voice of the masses, the tribune of the people we must attend to and negotiate with, was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

I have become so used to hearing leftists defending reactionaries I am no longer shocked. But my ‘68er surprised me with a form of bad faith I had never seen in the flesh before. Alongside me on the platform were three liberals from Muslim backgrounds: Ed Husain, who renounced the jihad lovers of Hizb ut-Tahrir and joined the Labour party; Shiv Malik, a secular left-wing journalist; and Rokhsana Fiaz, whose Change Institute works to diminish cultural tensions.

They shared the principles he professed to hold. But he looked through them. . .

- from Nick Cohen's latest, here. More about Nick here.