If I’m asked about 7/7, I — a Yorkshire lad — will respond first by giving an out-clause to being labelled a terrorist lover. I think what happened in London was a sad day and not the way to express your political anger.
Then there’s the “but”. If, as police announced on July 12, four men (at least three from Yorkshire) blew themselves up in the name of Islam, then please let us do ourselves a favour and not act shocked.
Shocked would be to imply that we were unaware of the danger, when in fact London’s Metropolitan police commissioner warned us last year that an attack was inevitable.
Shocked would be to suggest we didn’t appreciate that when Fallujah was flattened, the people were not forgotten. About 2 749 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. To discover the cost of “liberating” Iraqis you need to multiply that figure by eight, and still you will fall short of the estimate of 22 787 civilian Iraqi casualties to date. But it’s not cool to say this, now that London’s skyline is plumed grey.
Shocked would also be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own. The argument that this was an essentially United States-led war does not pass muster. In the Muslim world, the pond that divides Britain and America is a shallow one. And the same cry — why punish us? — is often heard from Iraqi mothers as the “collateral damage” increases daily.
Shocked would be to say that we don’t understand how, in Yorkshire, men given all the liberties they could have wished for, could do this.
The Muslim community is no monolithic whole. Yet there are some common features. Second and third-generation Muslims are without the don’t-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. Which is why the young get angry with that breed of Muslim who remains silent.
Earlier this year I attended a mosque in Leeds for Friday prayers. It was in the month of Ramadan, when Islamic fervour is at its most impassioned, yet in the sermon, to a crowd of hundreds — many of whom were from Iraq — Fallujah was not referred to once.
I prayed my Eid prayer in a mosque in Sheffield and, though most there were angry about events in Iraq, the imam chose not to mention Fallujah either. We “youngsters” — some now in our 40s — had seen it before. This was deliberate silence, in case the boat rocked.
Perhaps now is the time to be honest with each other and to stop labelling the enemy with simplistic terms such as “young”, “underprivileged”, “undereducated” and perhaps even “fringe”. The don’t-rock-the-boat attitude of elders doesn’t mean the agitation wanes; it means it builds till it can be contained no more. — Â