The London Blasts: Media Review

ONE MONTH ON

DAY 37: 13 August 2005

SNIPPETS

HT SOURCES OF SUPPORT

One of the measures in the Blair 12 Step plan for recovery from tolerance is the banning of the nonviolent (but extremist) party Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). The Financial Times magazine decided before the ban was proposed to assess the 'performance' of the HT leadership at a public meeting.

The head of the party in Britain, a 28-year-old IT consultant named Jalaluddin Patel, addressed 1,000 Muslims in central London, just a week before Tony Blair's call to ban the party.

He was dull, apparently.

FT reporter Will Sullivan commented, 'His voice is practised but uninspiring... Perhaps he is tempering his words for the half-dozen news cameras present. Certainly there is little of the anti-Semitic and anti-American venom that has made the group so famous. Within a few minutes, people are surreptitiously glancing at their watches.'

Later, in the question and answer session, Mr Patel 'rattles off a list of American offences: dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the My Lai massacre, the battle for Falluja. "If terrorism is the slaughter of civilians for political ends, then Bush and Blair are the greatest terrorists in the world," he says, triggering his first murmurs of support all day.' (page 8)

An indicator of the sources of support for groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir.

(Incidentally, Mr Patel also delivered a condemnation of the London bombings, 'saying that Islamic principles prohibit the targeting of civilians "regardless of the amount of provocation".')

The editor's letter in the FT magazine noted that 'by banning organisations, you often inspire them and win them more recruits... We would do better to let them talk, watch them, and arrest anyone who does something other than talk rubbish. We already have many laws to allow us to do that.' (page 5)

SACRED PRINCIPLES

A letter in the FT itself praises an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a previous edition of the magazine. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Somali-Dutch MP who collaborated with filmmaker Theo van Gogh to make a short film about domestic abuse in the Muslim community, in which verses from the Qur'an were projected onto naked women's bodies. Theo van Gogh was subsequently killed in a horrific manner by a Dutch Muslim, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali now lives under very heavy security.

The letter in the FT comments on Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

'Her observations about Muslim immigrants living in the Netherlands underscore the need for a crucial consensus among citizens of free societies - that the principles of women's rights, secular law and freedom of individual expression are sacrosanct and must never be compromised for the sake of promoting a distorted vision of multiculturalism.'

Immigrants who do not support these core values should be 'denied the privilege of living and working within our borders'.

It's not easy to see how these particular values are selected as the three highest values. (For example, why only women's rights? what about rights for gay men and lesbians?)

Nevertheless, taking the list as the cornerstone of Western civilization for the sake of argument, what are we to make of the fact that it is not Muslim immigrants who are posing the most serious threat to, for example, 'freedom of individual expression' in the UK.

Tony Blair's proposed laws are aimed precisely at eroding 'freedom of individual expression'.

If he was an immigrant, then he should be denied the privilege of living and working here, according to letter-writer Elizabeth Dunn of Naples, Florida.

Michael Howard, leader of the Conservative Opposition, is a second-generation immigrant. He supports this attack on free speech also. Under the Dunn proposals, he might well be at risk also.

What is extraordinary is the collapse of articulate support for basic freedoms and human rights.

A letter in the Independent sums up much of the current mood. James C Akley writes (also from the United States):

'I can understand the reluctance to deport people who face torture in their home countries. However, when it comes to extremists, I would rather risk that they might face torture, instead of my friends and neighbours face death and explosions on their way to and from work. I am not saying I support torture, but the safety of citizens should be the Government's first concern.'

The whole point of the Blair proposals, however, and of the Belmarsh detention system before it, is that they are targeted against men (and perhaps one day women) against whom there is insuffient evidence to lay a criminal charge.

If there was evidence that these ten men were about to concoct 'deaths and explosions', they would be arrested and tried for their crimes.

They are being detained, and may be deported, not for what they have done, but for what they have said, for what they believe.

Therefore, it is hard to see how the personal safety of James Akley's friends and neighbours has been improved by the detention of these men.

LONDONISTAN

In fact, a strong case can be made that the personal safety of Mr Akley's friends and neighbours has been eroded enormously the new proposals.

On Monday, Channel 4's Dispatches programme was devoted to the 7/7 bombings, asking, 'Why Bomb London?'

The thesis of the programme was that the events of 7/7 and 21/7 were the result of a lax British policy of granting asylum to Middle Eastern extremists, creating 'Londonistan', a hub for planning operations, recruiting militants and so on.

Curiously, this conclusion was undermined by the evidence at the core of the programme.

For example, in the case of Abu Qatada, currently in detention as one of the ten deportees-in-waiting, the programme revealed that British intelligence assessed the preacher and concluded he was an asset rather than a danger. They believed he would use his influence to keep hotheads off the streets of London.

A document was displayed on the screen, headed "Special Immigration Appeals Commission", quoting the evidence of one intelligence officer who had interviewed Abu Qatada several times: 'I fully expected him to use that influence, wherever he could, to control the hotheads and ensure terrorism remained off the streets of London and throughout the United Kingdom'.

No evidence was presented that this expectation was not realised.

Turning to the current issue of Prospect magazine, this contains an interview with Hassan Butt, formerly of Hizb ut-Tahrir and of al-Muhajiroun (he split from them for being insufficiently militant). Mr Butt explained why Britain had been immune from attacks (apart from the Qur'anic 'covenant of security' which binds Muslims seeking protection in a non-Muslim state):

'It would be unwise to carry out military operations here. It would harm a lot of people. Britain is a very liberal country in comparison to America where Muslims don't have many rights. This is the type of country where you do have a lot more rights. Now with Afghanistan gone, Muslims don't really have a place where they can come back to and regroup, have time to think and relax without the authorities breathing down your neck.' (page 20)

'A bomb in Britain would be strategically damaging to Muslims here. Immigration is lax in Britain - you know as well as I that London has more radical Muslims than anywhere in the Muslim world. A bomb would jeopardise everyone's position. There has got to be a place we can come.'
Q: 'You mean that different groups have agreed not to attack Britain for strategic reasons?'
HB: 'Oh yeah, definitely.' (page 23)

Hassan Butt speculated (prophetically): 'If someone was to attack Britain, they would be a completely and utterly loose cannon. It would be someone who wasn't involved in the network.... I mean the jihad network.' (page 23)

This does indeed seem to be the case, as we noted in an earlier Media Review, and as is reported on the front page of the Independent today.

Returning to Channel 4's Dispatches programme, the "Londonistan=7/7" argument was rebutted by Dominique Thomas, the author of the book Londonistan:

'The UK has become a target for radical Islamists for two reasons. The first factor is the British government's change of attitude after 11 September: arrests, a change in legislation, a suppression of propaganda. This was considered the first act of aggression. The second factor is British military involvement alongside the US in Iraq. This was considered the second act of aggression. A clear act of war. The fact that Britain is militarily involved against a Muslim country exposes it to becoming a definitive target.'

In other words, Britain was not attacked when it permitted asylum and freedom of expression and association, but it started to become a target when it started to repress asylum seekers.

Of course, the other factor was the move from "passive oppression" in foreign policy to "active oppression" (see the Young Muslims and Extremism report).

On this topic, Dispatches talked to Dr Saad al-Fagih, a Saudi dissident now living in London, and head of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia:

'The war in Iraq did two things. First, it increased the reasons to sympathise with al Qaeda causes, it increased those reasons to ten folds. And second, to give bin Laden the most effective and secure and powerful base - a replacement for what he lost in Afghanistan.'

Reporter Deborah Davies at one point says of young Muslim extremism: 'The driving force is not social deprivation, it's global politics'. She notes that earlier Dispatches programmes exposed the wide availability of violent videos in militant circles: 'These kind of videos are emotional and powerful, stirring up a real anger at the suffering of Muslims worldwide.'

Despite expert witness and Dispatches' own analysis/evidence, the programme concludes that, 'there's been a decade of government policy which allowed extremists here to pour out their message of hate. And we've witnessed the result.'

The indications are rather that it was not 'messages of hate', but the reality of Muslim suffering, which led to these 'results'. The indications are that the 'jihadi network' of foreign extremists actually restrained attacks in the UK - for strategic and self-interested reasons.

JNV welcomes feedback.