At National Review Online, Niles Gardiner has a piece on Britain’s Conservative Muslim Forum and their appallingly extremist “security” recommendations (noted last week at LGF): Conservatives for Terror?

As Britain fights a global war alongside the United States and other key allies against Islamic terrorism and its state sponsors, it is hard to believe that elements within the British Conservative Party are actually working to undermine it. The world’s oldest political party, once led by Winston Churchill, recently established an official body called the Conservative Muslim Forum (CMF), appointed with the aim of providing “the Conservative Party and the UK with a voice which represents the overwhelmingly moderate majority of British Muslims.” Its statements and policy positions are however fundamentally at odds with Britain’s approach to combating the threat posed by Islamic terrorist organizations as well as dangerous rogue regimes, and are distinctly lacking in moderation.

The CMF is headed by Lord Mohamed Sheikh, who was made a life peer in 2006 and is the Chairman of the “Conservative Ethnic Diversity Panel.” Lord Sheikh has been an outspoken critic of Israel, and claims that Israeli actions in Lebanon as well as British involvement in the war in Iraq are responsible for the radicalization of young Muslims in the U.K.

The Conservative Muslim Forum recently unveiled a strikingly frank policy document, first reported by the London Daily Telegraph, that projects a worldview that is thoroughly divorced from traditional British conservatism, and openly appeases Islamic radicalism as well as the Iranian regime. The paper is a response to the Conservative party’s National and International Security Policy Group report released in July.

It condemns Britain’s s traditional support for Israel, opposes the banning of fundamentalist Muslim preachers from entering the U.K., sympathizes with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, rejects any association between militant Islam and terrorism, and calls for a significant rewrite of the British history syllabus in schools. The Forum also defends the standing in the Muslim community of the highly controversial Islamic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric based in Qatar, who has been dubbed the “Theologian of Terror.”

The CMF document is a massive embarrassment for the Conservative party at a time when it has regained momentum in the polls, and is mounting a credible challenge to the Labour-led government of Gordon Brown. It is an Achilles heel that, if not challenged and strenuously rejected by the party’s leadership, will seriously undermine the Conservatives’ credibility as a government in waiting.