Two sides to every story

Mohammed Ansar's Guardian article on Quitting The English Defence League: When Tommy Met Mo makes for interesting reading once you've seen the documentary in question, for two reasons.

Firstly, Ansar claims that the aim was "to see if we could move Tommy on his views", with no recognition of the fact that it was also a journey for him, even if not to the same extent as for Robinson - no mention is made of the fact that some of Ansar's own dubious views were challenged by others during the course of the filming.

Secondly, the article glosses over Robinson's decision to bar Ansar from the press conference held with Quilliam's Maajid Nawaz at which he announced his exit from the EDL. Robinson's reasoning was to deliberately prevent Ansar from claiming credit for his conversion. While Ansar uses the article to speculate as to how genuine this conversion is, he nevertheless writes as though he's largely responsible for the change in thinking. That may be the case, but it's not how Robinson saw it.

So, while the balance of sympathy obviously still lies with Ansar, he does himself few favours by presenting such a subjective and smug report of events.