A Perverse Habit

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

A year ago, four young British Muslims blew themselves and over 50 of their fellow countrymen to pieces, maiming hundreds more. Two weeks later, a similar group tried again. They failed only because their home-made bombs failed to detonate. The 7/7 London bombings changed everything. They changed Great Britain almost as profoundly as the far bloodier and more spectacular atrocities of 9/11 changed the United States.

This, remember, was not an attack by foreign terrorists. These suicide bombers were born and bred in Britain. The attacks forced Britons to admit that their United Kingdom was no longer united — that a large and growing proportion of the Muslim minority was living in a virtual state of war with British society.

Worse, the attack was predictable and had been predicted, but the government still seemed unprepared. And as more facts came out, the picture emerged of a nation and its officials in denial about the scale of the problem. The fact that there has been no repetition of the attacks does not mean that Britain has abandoned the disastrous policies that allowed London to become a major source of Islamist terrorism.

What has happened since 7/7? First, I take some satisfaction in what did not happen. Unlike the Spanish, the British did not change their government to appease the terrorists. Even if the London bombings, like those in Madrid, had taken place on the eve of last May’s general election, the nation would not have blamed the government. Tony Blair did not, like the Spanish and Italians, withdraw troops from Iraq, and he has reinforced the British presence in Afghanistan to meet the resurgent threat of the Taliban. British foreign policy is not dictated by Al-Qaeda — yet.

However, not one of the counter-terrorism measures that were announced by the Prime Minister in the immediate aftermath of the attacks has come into effect as he intended. One policy after another has been abandoned or emasculated due to the implacable resistance of an increasingly insubordinate Labor Party, liberal judges, and the House of Lords.

What about the Muslims themselves? One of Mr. Blair’s less bright ideas was to set up Muslim task forces to tackle extremism “head-on.” As might have been foreseen, these task forces were selected by the same Home Office officials who had been underestimating the threat posed by Islamists over the previous decade.

Among those appointed were Ahmad Thomson, a Muslim lawyer who was on record as stating that both Mr. Blair and President Bush were controlled by a “sinister” alliance of Jews and Freemasons. Another devotee of Zionist conspiracy theories was Inayat Bunglawala, the spokesman for the “moderate” Muslim Council of Britain, who thinks the British media is controlled by an “elite club” of Jews. Mr. Bunglawala has been an apologist for Mr. bin Laden and other terrorists. So has another task force member, Professor Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who sees Hamas and the Iraqi insurgents as “resistance” movements.

Not surprisingly, the Muslim task forces’ recommendations made Mr. Blair’s hair stand on end. They wanted him to replace Holocaust Memorial Day with a “Genocide Day” that would place Palestine on a par with Auschwitz. They blamed the Government for Islamist terrorism, which was apparently caused by discrimination, Islamophobia, and British foreign policy. They wanted more Islamic separatism in schools and for women, government-funded Muslim propaganda and a ban on the use of “Islamic” in connection with words such as “terrorism” or “extremism.”

This week a Labor legislator, Sadiq Khan, protested that the Government had only adopted three of the task forces’ proposals, and that “all these talented British Muslims” would now be disillusioned and alienated — in other words, more inclined to make excuses for terrorists. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the former Muslim Council leader, claimed that Mr. Blair’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into 7/7 was “alienating” Muslims. The truth is that many Muslims prefer to believe in conspiracy theories rather than admit any communal responsibility for terrorism.

Mr. Blair, grilled by a parliamentary committee for two hours on Tuesday, responded with exasperation: “I am not the person to go into the Muslim community and explain to them that this extreme view is not the true face of Islam. People [i.e. Muslims] should stand up and say, ‘You are wrong in your view about the West, you are wrong in your sense of grievance. The whole ideology is profoundly wrong.'”

Have Muslim attitudes changed in the past year? The latest polling evidence suggests that, if anything, their sense of grievance is growing. Some 13% of British Muslims see the 7/7 suicide bombers as “martyrs,” rising to 16% who justify attacks on “military” targets in Britain. More than a third (36%) see British values as a threat to Islam and degrading to women. Even higher percentages of Muslims want to live under Shariah rather than British law. Four fifths think the right of Muslim girls to wear Islamic dress, however impractical, should override school uniform policies.

Yet 65% of the same Muslims agree that they need to do more to integrate. Their community leaders have done nothing to make this happen. About half of all Muslim families are living on welfare benefits; a large proportion still have arranged marriages with relations in Pakistan or Bangladesh; and even third-generation Muslims are much poorer and less educated than their Hindu or Sikh peers.

The reaction to the death of a British Muslim soldier in Afghanistan this week was revealing. Newspapers such as the Times and Telegraph treated Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi as a hero, splashing his portrait on their front pages. But when his brother appeared on news programs, only his silhouette was shown, to protect him from his own community. The Muslim Council’s spokesman, the above-mentioned Mr. Bunglawala, would only say that, while the community opposed the war in which Cpl Hashmi had died (i.e. took the side of the Taliban), he “could not condemn Muslims who fought for the British Army” because “they have to follow orders.”

So the British have plenty to feel apprehensive about as they mark the first anniversary of 7/7. The fear of Islamist terror, while a necessary spur to action, also has a less desirable consequence: it is a driving force of both anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. A recent poll disclosed that America has never been held in such low esteem by the British before: three quarters think that Mr. Bush is a bad leader, almost as many that his talk of democracy is a cover for U.S. interests, 77% think America is not “a beacon of hope,” and 58% that it is an imperial power. Israel, too, is again in the firing line for its robust response to the kidnapping of a soldier by Islamist terrorists. This perverse British habit of blaming anybody other than Muslims for Islamist terrorism has the even more perverse result that we no longer know who our real friends are. But that is a subject for a future column.


The New York Sun

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