France last week deported an imam after footage emerged of him appearing to preach hate. Mahjoub Mahjoubi, who has lived in France since 1986 and has fathered five children, was put on a plane to his native Tunisia less than 12 hours after he was arrested in his home town of Bagnols-sur-Ceze in the south of France. ‘We will not let people get away with anything,’ declared Gerald Darmanin.

The consequence of Britain’s institutional appeasement is now being seen on streets, in parliament and in council meetings across the country

The Interior Minister attributed the imam’s expulsion to the recent immigration law, proof in other words, that this is a government that will not tolerate Islamic extremism. According to Le Monde, however, Mahjoubi’s rhetoric had contravened existing laws as it constituted ‘acts of explicit and deliberate incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence against a specific person or group of people’.

The official expulsion order described how recent sermons by Mahjoubi encouraged discrimination against women and Jews (whom he described as ‘the enemy’, according to the order) and France and the West in general. He is accused of calling for ‘the destruction of western society’ and of sharing a video in which he described the ‘tricolour’ – as the French flag is known – as ‘satanic’ and of ‘no value with Allah’ (Mahjoubi, who denies any wrongdoing, later said sorry if he had caused offence and said the flag remarks were a ‘slip of the tongue’).

Mahjoubi is the latest in a lengthening list of imams who have been banished from France in recent years for allegedly expressing views antithetical to the Republic’s. In 2012 the Tunisian Mohamed Hammami was expelled for rhetoric very similar to Mahjoubi’s. Others followed under the presidency of Francois Hollande’s Socialist government, and Emmanuel Macron has continued the practice, deporting Doudi Abdelhadi in 2018, Mmadi Ahamada in 2022 and Hassan Iquioussen last year.

Abdelhadi was from Algeria, Ahamada from the Comoros and Iquioussen’s family hailed from Morocco. This fact, according to Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, one of France’s leading experts on Islamic extremism, underlines how widespread the threat is. Bergeaud-Blackler is an academic who has written extensively about the Muslim Brotherhood and as a result requires round-the-clock police protection. She said of Mahjoubi: ‘What he’s saying is commonplace. It’s what you hear everywhere in the mosques. In fact, it’s the thinking of the [Muslim] Brotherhood, which considers that the only nation worth having is the Islamic nation’.

Deporting radical preachers is the first step in the battle against Islamist extremists, explained Bergeaud-Blackler, but their ideology is harder to expel, particularly when three decades of complacency have allowed it to grow deep roots across Europe.

In Germany the problem is often with imams of Turkish origin. In 2017 German police raided the homes of four imams suspected of spying for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and last December the German government announced it will no longer allow imams from Turkey to preach in its mosques.

Belgium has deported a few Imams over the years, including in 2022 Mohamed Toujgani, described by the government as ‘the most influential preacher in Belgium’. For many years he had preached in a mosque in Molenbeek, the Brussels suburb where an Islamist terror cell planned the attack in Paris in 2015 that killed 130.

Toujgani’s virulent anti-Semitism was well-known – he was on record as calling for the ‘burning of Jews’ as far back as 2009 – but it took more than a decade before his hatred was expelled.

The extremism within some British mosques was first exposed in January 2007 by a meticulous Channel Four documentary, Undercover Mosques. Secret recordings inside mosques in London and the Midlands revealed Imams preaching misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism and contempt for British democracy.

Rather than prosecuting the Imams, however, West Midlands police and the Crown Prosecution Service went after the documentary makers for distorting the words of the imams and taking them out of context.

It was a fruitless attempt to defame the documentary makers, and in 2008 Channel Four won a public apology and six figure libel settlement from West Midlands Police and the CPS.

Nonetheless, it was another example of the British establishment’s unwillingness to confront Islamic extremism. This cowardice was first seen in 1989 during the Satanic Verses controversy. Rather than offer their unequivocal support to Salman Rushdie, the likes of Geoffrey Howe, then Foreign Secretary, and Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, criticised him for offending the Muslim world.

Tony Blair’s New Labour were just as spineless but arguably no politician has been as weak in tackling the scourge of Islamic extremism as Theresa May. She was Home Secretary in 2015 when Islamists slaughtered the staff of Charlie Hebdo and later in the year massacred 130 Parisians. On both occasions she told the House of Commons that ‘the attacks have nothing to do with Islam’.

Two years later it was Britain’s turn to be terrorised by Islamists with a series of outrages that left dozens dead. May, by now Prime Minister, declared that Britain had shown ‘too much tolerance of extremism in our country’ and the time had come to have ‘embarrassing conversations’.

This never happened. As the Jewish Chronicle reported last year, British taxpayers continue to fund mosques where anti-Semitism is preached despite promises from the government that action will be taken. This hatred has intensified since Hamas’s attack on Israel in October.

The consequence of Britain’s institutional appeasement is now being seen on streets, in parliament and in council meetings across the country. ‘The democratic process is under attack from screaming thugs all over the UK,’ tweeted Florence Bergeaud-Blackler last week. ‘The British people are very worried… they are waking up. Will they dare utter the word “Islamism”? Still, much of the British political class remains in a state of denial about the threat to British democracy.