PETER Mullen (Echo, Jan 6) highlights the threat from “home grown” terrorism, but omits to mention that there was no such threat until Tony Blair led this country into the disastrous attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq – attacks which Mr Mullen enthusiastically supported at the time, though he now admits that the war in Afghanistan is “a senseless waste of our soldiers’ lives”.

Fringe groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and Islam4UK should not be banned unless they break the law. The real danger is not from publicity-seeking buffoons, but from those who plot acts of violence in secret.

Many terrorist conspiracies have been thwarted since the London Tube bombings, and those involved have been brought to trial and imprisoned.

Others have been convicted of inciting murder or racial hatred.

That is the way to deal with terrorism and extremism. To go further, as Mr Mullen advocates, and imprison or deport people who have not been convicted of any crime, risks punishing innocent people and handing the “jihadists”

a useful recruiting tool.

The “backlash” to which Mr Mullen refers already happens, in the form of attacks on innocent Muslims and their mosques. His attempt to excuse this as an understandable reaction from “an outraged population” is disgraceful.

Pete Winstanley, Durham.