The evidence is coming in: China is suspected of funding Gaza radicals in Britain

Subversion by hostile states is as old as the nation state itself, but since the Cold War Russia pioneered a comprehensive attempt to break Western societies from within. It located fault lines, aggravated them, turned citizen against citizen, and deliberately heighted differences on wedge issues. Israel and the Middle East were chief among them, even back in the Sixties and Seventies. What’s changed is that Russia now has company.

China, as today’s Telegraph front page reveals, is allegedly funding radical pro-Palestinian demonstrations — potentially a quarter of a million pounds to a single organisation. Iran is sowing discord through the IRGC, still not proscribed in Britain. The Muslim Brotherhood operates freely here, despite being banned across the Arab world, funded by Turkey and Qatar. Britain has become a playground for all of them.

Then there’s the Arabic bookshop selling Mein Kampf half a mile from a synagogue. This is unsurprising: modern Islamism took shape partly through radical Islam blending with Nazism, and today’s Islamist groups remain heavily inspired by Hitler. In Ed Husain’s 2021 book Among The Mosques, he visited a book shop in Blackburn selling copies of Sayyid Qutb’s poisonous writings. This is hardly new.

Propaganda and what to do about it: this is one of the great unexamined question of our times, and we continue to ignore it at our peril. I discuss on Talk TV.