Conflicts Forum

Think-tank founded in 2004 which 'aims to open a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world.'

Neocon criticism

Conflicts Forum's call for a dialogue with Islamism has aroused the opposition of neoconservatives. In April 2005, Melanie Phillips asked: "who exactly is currently responsible for the potentially lethal activities of the ‘former’ British MI6 officer Alistair Crooke?"

When director Alistair Crooke called for a dialogue with Hamas in the pages of Prospect magazine in June 2006, he was denounced in the next issue as a product "of late-imperial British defeatism: an era when the main issue was the terms on which to exit the colonies," by Dean Godson of Policy Exchange.

Godson wrote:

Is Crooke a maverick? Or does he reflect a strand of thinking in the western intelligence services—the PC spook? One high-ranking ex-colleague of Crooke from MI6 emphasises that his views are not representative, and he has been out on a limb since he went on secondment to the EU in 1997. And yet he does not exist in a complete vacuum. For the post-imperial intelligence services are light years removed in values from their officer-class predecessors, so effectively lampooned in Christopher Andrew's Secret Service. Unlike the old guard, few serving officers axiomatically believe in the superiority of the British or even western way of life. Indeed, Paddy Ashdown noted in one of his diaries after addressing new MI6 entrants that he doubted there was a single Tory among them.

Directors

• Alistair Crooke
• Mark Perry

Board of Advisors

• Lord Alderdice
• Geoffrey Aronson
• Milt Bearden
• Moazzam Begg
• Aisling Byrne
• Rupert Chetwynd
• Tom Clark
• Juliet Crawley Peck
• Graham Fuller
• Abbas Al Janabi
• Bobby Muller
• Ismail Patel
• Gabrielle Rifkind
• Dr Azzam Tamimi
• Paul Woodward

Consultant

• Minal Patel

Website

http://conflictsforum.org