The grand assemblage of Muslim MPs, members of the House of Lords (peers) and leaders of 38 key United Kingdom groups who signed an open letter to British Prime Minister Tony Blair last weekend are almost certainly right. British foreign policy has helped foment murderous extremism among British Muslims.
The London bombings a year ago might not have happened had Labour taken the French stand. If Blair and his Cabinet had never hitched Britain to United States President George W Bush’s war chariot it is unlikely that al-Qaeda-inspired terror cells would plan mass murder from British airports. Before, Islamist terror was focused on faraway countries — Indonesia, the Philippines, Algeria, Somalia, Russia — and the twin towers. If we had only kept our heads down, terror’s hot breath might have passed over us.
Every minister denying this truth sounds absurd — but makes the wrong point altogether. The point is that a democratically elected government’s foreign policy cannot be moulded by threats from murdering religious maniacs. There are 1 001 good reasons why we should never have supported the war in Iraq. But the one, truly bad, reason would have been fear of terrorism.
Those signing the letter steer perilously close to suggesting the government had it coming. The Muslim leaders wrote: ”The debacle of Iraq and now the failure to do more to secure an end to the attacks on civilians in the Middle East not only increases the risk to ordinary people in that region, it is also ammunition to extremists.”
They urge the prime minister to ”change our [UK] foreign policy to show the world that we value the lives of civilians wherever they live and whatever their religion. Such a move would make us safer.” Maybe it would, but there can’t be many, pro- or anti-war, who think sparing us from threats by God-blinded killers should be the number-one priority in foreign policy.
As it is, Blair will leave office earlier than he would have done, forever branded by his great Bush/Iraq error. That is what happens in democracies — vengeance the democratic way.
Intellectually, these Muslim leaders are subtly accepting a notion that Muslim anger is different to other citizens’ anger. Why? Because globally Muslims feel there is a Western crusade against them. True, Bush’s ”war on terror” language encourages that paranoid delusion, but these moderate leaders should be doing their best to challenge the myth.
It goes with the selective amnesia that forgets about the Kosovo Muslims Blair and Bill Clinton saved from genocide. It goes with a distorted memory of the Taliban as anything other than ruthless despots to their people and unprovoked originators of terror against the rest of the world. As for Iraq, invasion was misguided, but selective Islamic memory forgets that Saddam Hussein murdered Muslims.
In the great disaster of Blair’s foreign policy, the irony is that most Britons would agree with the Muslim leaders’ critique, both on Iraq and Lebanon. But that does not lead to any ”understanding”, let alone appeasement, of terrorists. What is their cause? It is not a viable Palestinian state (though that would help). It is not better rights in Britain to jobs and respect (that would help). It is not to bring democracy to corrupt Middle Eastern governments propped up by the West (democracy is a Western abomination). Their cause is to impose a fantasy caliphate across some mystically united Muslim world — even as conflict between rival Islamic sects in Iraq kills thousands more Muslims than infidel invaders.
However, standing by and watching the killing of so many civilians in Lebanon and the destruction of the one nascent pro-Western democracy in the region has been more than many in the British Labour party can stand. The call for a return of parliament is an empty gesture. As sidekick without influence on US policy, Britain has no useful role to play.
Mistrust of the government now reaches the point where the first response from many quarters to the news of the terror arrests was disbelief. The Internet hummed with theories that this was all a plot to deflect attention from Lebanon. Remember the ricin plot that wasn’t and the weapons of mass destruction that weren’t? Security services are inept, as the fiasco of the arrest and subsequent release of two brothers in Forest Gate, east London, and the death of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, shot and killed by anti-terrorist police officers in London last year, prove.
It is impossible to know yet how close to success a plan to destroy nine airliners may have been. But the notion of the state ever eager to stifle our rights for its own sinister ends is running deep across the political spectrum. Faced with sudden threats, of course the state makes mistakes: who hasn’t imagined the moment when the police had to decide whether to pull the trigger on a potential subway train bomber?
But some preventive measures were obvious many years ago, as report after report said communities forced in on themselves needed help to open up. Trevor Phillips, chairperson of the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality, was the first to say, bravely, that multiculturalism is a bad idea if it means separate development; now is the time to open up cultural-isolation zones.
A new commission on integration and cohesion, launching this month, will be worthless unless its first recommendation is to end religious and ethnic segregation in schools. That means no Church of England or Catholic schools, no Muslim or Jewish schools. There must be no toleration either for lazy local school allocations that allow 90% of children to be Muslims in one state school while other schools nearby are mainly white. Housing must follow suit, offering better to both white and ethnic-minority families, luring them into new, mixed communities that are too good to refuse. All that takes a long time — but it should begin today. — Â