Star Comment: Our duty to stamp out extremism

One of the young men filmed in an Isis propaganda video urging other young Muslims to join in international jihad told his father he attended a meeting in Shrewsbury.

There are "Explore Islam" meetings at Shrewsbury College, but the leader of Shrewsbury's Muslim community says that this young man never attended one.

John Mustafa is understandably angered by the reports that Nasser Muthana attended a seminar last year. He says he would certainly know if he had done – but he hadn't, and the event is for college students only.

The inference may be, then, that this Isis fighter from Cardiff was covering his tracks and misleading his family. We know from the film that he is now in Syria.

Shrewsbury, and John Mustafa, have found themselves dragged in to the controversy.

"I am so angry inside that he has used our name in this way when it is so far from who we are or what we do. We are a community group and we are British. We are not terrorists. We do not work against people and we teach our boys and girls to live by British culture in this country," says Mr Mustafa.

They are wise and moderate words. No reasonable person would see Shrewsbury as a hotbed of extremism and a breeding ground for terrorists.

However, there is no cause for any comforting feeling in Shrewsbury or Shropshire generally that it is somehow immune from the scourge of extremism.

Britain is having to get used to the unpleasant reality that it is now a de facto exporter of terrorism and that young men here have been radicalised to such an extent, and by influences and forces which must at least to some extent be fostered here, that they feel impelled to travel abroad to fight for what they perceive to be their noble cause.

It used to be the IRA which was the great danger, and Shropshire suffered directly from that with terrorist crimes in this county.

Just as it would have been bizarre to smear Roman Catholics due to the ghastly crimes of the IRA, so it would be entirely wrong to think these driven but deluded young men are at all representative of British Muslims.

Yet somehow while living in this country they have been infected with an extreme ideology which British society now has a collective responsibility to defuse and discourage.