Run, Saira!

Last night's This Week, a programme the BBC does its best to keep hidden away from prying viewers (there is no website, for example, uniquely among BBC current affairs programming) in case any of them should observe that, for 45 minutes a week, BBC editorial policy doesn't reign supreme, handed its Take of the Week slot over to Saira Khan, the self-described "British Asian Muslim" businesswoman who was runner up on The Apprentice last year and of whom, consequently, I had never heard. With passion, vigour, incision and robust insight, she articulated the case for moderate Muslims (those figures conspicuous by their absence that I referred to in my last post) to make known their disgust and their horror at the iniquities being perpetuated in the name of their faith. Naturally, it being This Week, seventeen people were watching; inevitably, Kahn having had the nerve to show up on TV, without feeling intimidated or browbeaten into covering her face or hair, and to expose the insecurity, the hypocrisy and the thuggery at the heart of Islamic fundamentalism, she will soon be the subject of a fatwa issued by some cavebound blockhead like Anjem Choudary, inexplicably given a platform many times larger than his poisonous, insular, misogynist vitriol warranted on Newsnight on Monday. We need many more like her, on better-promoted programmes, particularly if in the name of lurid sensationalism the press are going to continue to ignore what ranks among the sagest advice ever offered by Margaret Thatcher: deny terrorists the "oxygen of publicity" and their message will suffocate.