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Quilliam Foundation

Thank you, Mr Dobbin. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) on initiating the debate. We all know that the backdrop to it is the very serious terrorist threat that we face. That is not a myth; it is not something that has been made up. In the London underground bombings, 52 people were killed. Since then there has been the plot to blow up airliners, which resulted in the liquid restrictions on aeroplanes; we have had the shoe bomber, Richard Reid; and we have had the Christmas day attack on the Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit involving Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. There have also been other incidents—some that we know about and probably some that we do not know about. To combat terrorism, we of course need security forces to catch and punish those responsible but, as other hon. Members have said, we must also confront and challenge the ideology that feeds such acts. Quilliam is critical in that fight. It cannot all be done by Government and Government agencies. As other hon. Members have said, this is an ideological struggle that must take place within the Islamic community itself. I have had less direct ministerial involvement in this issue than my colleagues, but of course our political interests are not confined purely to our ministerial experience. However, one issue in which I did have some ministerial involvement was extremism on university campuses. I commend Quilliam for the work and research that it has done on extremism on campuses, which is growing. One of Quilliam's founders, Ed Husain, outlines very well in his book the expertise with which Islamic extremists use the liberal values of those who run our colleges and universities to propagate what they want to do and put the university or college authorities on the defensive. As we have all agreed, Quilliam is an important organisation. It is important because it is unequivocal in its condemnation of terrorism. It challenges the ideology that feeds it. It condemns suicide bombings; it does not make excuses for them. It takes on arguments perpetrated by the apologists for terrorism. Quilliam is also important in another sense. It challenges the notion, sometimes spread by non-Muslims as well as Muslims, that the terrorist problem is all our fault—the conceited notion, ultimately, that the west is so all-powerful that it is responsible, either through its foreign policy decisions or through other means, for encouraging terrorism. Quilliam challenges that, too, so it provides a service well beyond the argument that currently takes place within the Islamic community.