Undergraduates at Cambridge at the height of the Cold War scare were sometimes approached by Secret Service agents in the hope of help in tracking down fellow-travelling dons.
The difficulty then, of course, was that lots of the dons were closet or open Marxists, whose lectures and tutorials plugged an anti-Western line, but that did not necessarily mean that they were members of the Communist party or, still less, that they were dangerous subversives working for the Soviet Union.
Indeed, a Marxist don doing his best to convince undergraduates of the evils of capitalism and imperialism might well turn out to have been a Second World War hero and about as English as the proverbial oak tree.
Of course today's Muslim clerics are different. They wear exotic clothes, instead of tweed jackets and brown brogues, and instead of preaching
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Peregrine Worsthorne  |
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The Government’s call for lecturers to monitor Muslim students is reminiscent of the Cold War
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anti-liberal Marxism - a secular creed - as the antidote to capitalism and imperialism, preach their anti-liberal Mohammedanism - a religious faith.
But just as the preachers of Marxism did not necessarily turn out to be pro-Soviet traitors and spies, neither do these Muslim clerics necessarily turn out to be suicide-bombing terrorists. Some do and some don't, and it is almost impossible to tell the difference.
In the Cold War, the powers-that-be gave up the attempt. The line was too thin to draw legally. What is more, the Marxist critique was thought to be a necessary evil. So instead of locking up that preacher of militant Marxism, Eric Hobsbawm, he was allowed, during the Cold War, not only to propagate his deplorable creed but, once it was over, mirabile dictu, he was actually given the Order of Merit! That was the mad British way, and long may it remain so. 
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