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That is surely why—at least in part—the British authorities were so shocked by the emergence in July 2005 of Muslim Britons who turned themselves into human bombs against other Britons. They knew well enough—how could they not have known?—that some young British Muslims were being recruited for the jihad. But they clung nevertheless to the last vestige of their self-delusion, that such British jihadis might go and blow up places abroad but they would not turn on Britain because they would not bite the hand that had so generously fed them. It was the same assumption of the covenant of security that had allowed so many jihadi ideologues to remain at liberty in Britain. It was cynical, opportunistic—and lethally wrong. Yet the very same mistakes are being made even now. There are still people in the political and security establishment who believe that Britain is not an ideological target of the jihad and that the only reason terrorism has erupted on its shores is because of Britain’s support for America’s “war on terrorism.” The bitter national divisions over the war in Iraq and the anti-Americanism that has swept the country ever since 9/11 are reflected within not just political circles but the intelligence world, too.
David Blunkett candidly admits that it has taken him a long time to comprehend the real nature of the threat. “We just didn’t understand that they [the Islamists] were not just anti-Western but on a different plane altogether and this is still not widely understood in the UK,” he said. “We can be as nice as pie to them but that’s not the issue. They are on a mission that has taken them outside anything we can say, a mission to destroy completely our way of life.” Even now, he said, the British authorities were failing to ask themselves what had so captured the minds of young men from Yorkshire that they would turn themselves into human bombs. “Because they think it’s ‘just a few extremists, ’ they are continuing to track the threat of big spectacular attacks, looking for example at transfers of materials for bombs, whereas what they should be looking at is what’s going on inside people’s heads.”34
The extreme difficulty that Britain is having in dealing with the religious dimension of Islamist terrorism is illustrated by the behavior of the police. True, they have raised their game ever since 9/11 shocked them into realizing the threat facing Britain—notwithstanding the grievous error made after the London bombings, when the Metropolitan Police shot dead an innocent Brazilian wrongly suspected of being a suicide bomber—and have reportedly had a number of successes in thwarting terrorist plots. But the challenge posed by Islamist terrorism has placed them in a dilemma they have been unable to resolve.
The first line of defense against terrorist attack is the police. But the British police have become a symbol of a society that has lost its way. Britain has been progressively crippled by a “victim culture,” in which minority groups effectively use moral blackmail against the majority on the grounds of its alleged oppressive behavior. Ever since a watershed case in the 1990s, when the police were branded “institutionally racist” following the bungled investigation into the murder of a black student in south London, they have been paralyzed by the fear of giving offense to any minority group and being tarred with the lethal charge of prejudice.
The anathema that was pronounced upon them of “institutional racism” delivered a near-terminal blow to an institution that was already on the ropes. A succession of corruption scandals and miscarriage-of-justice cases back in the 1970s and 1980s had profoundly undermined police self-confidence; and this was exacerbated by the reaction of successive governments, which tied them up in red tape and official directives. As a result, police professionalism took a dive and one high-profile criminal investigation after another became mired in incompetence.
In this lowered state, the charge of racism had a shattering effect. From being the thin blue line against disorder, the police now transformed themselves into the coercive arm of state-enforced virtue. Instead of preventing offenses being committed, they now gave priority to preventing offense being given. Displaying an obsession with minority rights, they devoted disproportionate time and resources to prioritizing the agendas of the fullest possible range of self-designated victim groups such as gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, disabled people, Gypsies, women and of course ethnic minorities, and training themselves to do nothing that could conceivably give offense to any such group.
A proper concern to be respectful to cultural differences thus turned into the wholesale adoption by the police of victim-culture mentality, the pursuit of radical grievances against the majority population. So great was the grip of this mindset that officers’ freedom of maneuver was often hampered by the fear that if they inadvertently offended a victim group, they would find themselves on a disciplinary charge accused of discrimination.
This was dramatically illustrated when Britain’s leading police officer, the Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair, was himself rebuked by an employment tribunal for “hanging his own officers out to dry” to prove his antiracist credentials. The tribunal found that he had racially discriminated against three white officers who were disciplined after alleged racist remarks at a training day, in which one of them had referred to Muslim headwear as “tea cozies,” mispronounced Shi’ites as “shitties” and said he felt sorry for Muslims who fasted during Ramadan. The disciplining of the officers had been grossly disproportionate. Yet Sir Ian responded to this finding against himself by declaring that he was “unrepentant,” repeating that the remarks were “Islamophobic” and declaring that the Met had to “embrace diversity.”35
As this case indicated, Muslim sensitivities were uppermost in police minds. The charge of “Islamophobia” was one that the police would go to almost any lengths to avoid. This near-pathological sensitivity was heightened still further by the government’s instruction, first after 9/11 and then again after the London bombings of 2005, to avoid doing anything to alienate Britain’s Muslims, in accordance with government strategy to bring the bulk of them on board. But since Muslims tend to be alienated by any action that suggests there is anything wrong with their community or their religion, this meant the police had to deny the nature of Islamist terrorism altogether.
This was why, on the day that four Islamist suicide bombers blew themselves and more than fifty London commuters to bits, the Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Brian Paddick, stood before the television cameras and made the noteworthy comment: “As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.”36
He amplified this by saying that while the bombers may have been Muslim the crime was not Islamic because Islam forbade the taking of innocent life. That may well be so; but across the world, hundreds of thousands of innocent lives have been ended by terrorists who are doing so under the banner of Islam, find justification in Islam for their deeds and are told by Islamic religious authorities that such actions are a religious duty. At a stroke, therefore, this senior British policeman had denied not only the nature of the atrocity on British soil but the whole basis of the war against the West.
This was not a rogue comment. For the British police say they do not use the phrase “Islamic terrorism” or even “Islamist terrorism.” They use other phrases instead, such as “international terrorism.” They say that it is as misleading to talk about Islamic terrorists as it would be to refer to the IRA as Catholic terrorists. But this comparison reveals a major category confusion. True, the IRA were Catholics and their adversaries were Protestants. But their cause was not Catholicism. It was a united Ireland. They did not want to impose the authority of the Pope upon Britain. They wanted their own authority over Ireland. There is simply no comparison to the agenda of the Islamists who want to defeat the West in the name of Islam, impose Sharia law and re-establish the medieval caliphate throughout the world. That is a religious war, a jihad transposed from the seventh century to today. And that is what the police and much of the British establishment are desperate to deny.
Six months before the London bombs, the Metropolitan Police commissioner,
Sir Ian Blair, said: “There is nothing wrong with being an Islamic fundamentalist.” When the journalist interviewing him suggested that the family of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was killed for questioning Islamic attitudes to women, might beg to differ on that one, Sir Ian replied, “There were lots of fundamentalist Muslims who didn’t shoot him. . . . Look at Jerry Springer [the stage show Jerry Springer: The Opera]. Christian fundamentalists objected very strongly but they didn’t shoot the producer. And nor do 99.9 percent of Muslims want the sort of extremism that leads to violence. They know the consequences of terrorists claiming to be Muslim, so our job is to help. Bridges will be built.”37
Here was another major confusion. Certainly, not all religious fundamentalists are terrorists. But it all depends what the “fundamental” truths of the religion are. The New Testament does not advocate the killing of the unfaithful. The Koran does. This does not mean that all Muslims—or, indeed, all “fundamentalist” Muslims—believe that they must do so. Plenty of them find enough succor from the peace-promoting, spiritual content of their religious texts. But it does mean that others can and do find a religious authority in those texts for holy war. Sir Ian’s argument is a bit like saying that since not all smokers develop cancer, it follows that cancer cannot be caused by smoking. What bedevils this subject is the equally illogical belief that talking about Islamist terrorism implies that all Muslims support terror. Clearly, they do not. But some do; the interpretation of the religious authority they cite may be a matter for theological dispute but its roots in the religion are real, and it is dangerously deluded to pretend otherwise.
The key to Sir Ian’s attitude almost certainly lies in his declaration: “Bridges will be built.” The strategy is to win over the majority of British Muslims; so the police are bending over backwards to show sympathy for them and respect for their religion. In Nottingham, the police handed out green ribbons after the London bombings to express solidarity with Muslims, who, according to the chief constable, were on the receiving end of Islamophobic attacks.38 And guidelines for the Bedfordshire force say that when officers raid Muslim homes they should remove their shoes, not use dogs and not mount predawn raids because at that hour people might be “spiritually busy.”39
The belief is that the police can defeat the terrorists only if the community that harbors them takes the side of the police instead. But if that community is itself in deep denial and refuses to accept that the terrorism is rooted in its own religious ideology, the police will not only fail to get the cooperation they need but will also neuter their own efforts.
So it has proved. Opposition by the police forced the government to abandon part of the antiterrorism policy it brought forward after the London bombings. Senior officers claimed that the proposed power to close down extremist mosques could send the “wrong message” to Muslims and lead to the police missing out on vital intelligence. They also opposed the proposal to outlaw the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir on the grounds that since it was “against violence,” driving it underground was wrong.40 Once again, the police displayed a dismaying failure to grasp the particular nature of Islamist terrorism and the way it derives its energy—and recruits—from indoctrination along a continuum of religious extremism.
Worse still, this conceptual failure to understand the link between ideology and terrorism drove the police to seek assistance from the people of whom they should be most wary. They regularly met the Islamic Human Rights Commission to discuss safety in Muslim communities, even though its official adviser was the key al-Qaeda fixer Mohammed al-Massari.41 At various conferences to discuss the terrorist threat, senior police officers declared their respect for the Muslim Brotherhood and its mouthpiece in Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain, despite its extremist views and support for terrorism in Iraq and Israel. This enraged secular Muslims who were present, who protested that by cozying up to such extremists the police were betraying the Muslim community.42 And a government adviser revealed that the Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit had commented favorably on Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi because, it said, he had “a positive community impact in the fight against al-Qaeda propaganda in the UK.”43 This was the same Sheikh Qaradawi who called suicide bombing in Israel and Iraq a religious duty and who, in a speech to an Islamic conference in Ohio in 1995, had said: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through dawah [proselytism].”44
In response to all of which, the British security establishment has its eyes firmly shut as it sleepwalks into collusion with the enemy it should be fighting.
· CHAPTER FOUR ·
THE MULTICULTURAL PARALYSIS
Dewsbury is a small town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, one of the many northern English mill towns that saw an influx of Asians to work in the textile mills in the latter decades of the last century. In 1987, it became the site of a bitter battle when the parents of twenty-six white children refused to send them to an overwhelmingly Muslim state-run primary school, and taught them instead in a room above a public house.
The parents did this because they wanted their children to be given Christian education, to be taught to a high standard especially in English, and to avoid what they saw as prejudice by teachers who were thought to be privileging Asian and Muslim culture. The school to which their children were being directed pursued instead the “multifaith” approach in accordance with government policy laid down a couple of years earlier, that schools should educate children in the values shared between cultures and to appreciate cultural diversity.1
Contrary to assurances from local officials who said they were committed to equality for all cultures, the parents discovered that local education policy aimed to counter a “Eurocentric” syllabus on the grounds that this was racist. They also discovered that ostensibly Christian acts of worship at the school were actually a multifaith mishmash, since priority was being given to “building bridges” between the Muslim and Christian communities. To this end, the chairman of the school’s governors (who was a parish priest) seemed to be saying that Christianity and the Bible were “divisive and antisocial.” 2 Needless to say, the parents were denounced by progressive opinion as “racists.”
Eighteen years later, Dewsbury woke up to the fact that it had been the home town for a while of Mohammed Sidique Khan, the apparent leader of the July 7 suicide bombers. The Tablighi Jamaat mosque in Dewsbury was said to be a driving force for Islamist extremism. As reporters crawled over the town, they discovered that Mufti Zubair Dudha, who taught children, teenagers and young adults at the local Tarbiyah Academy and who had condemned suicide bombings, nevertheless was revealed to have written in support of physical jihad against the West, and to have taught his students that “the enemies of Allah” had schemed “to poison the thinking and minds of [Muslim] youth and to plant the spirit of unsteadiness and moral depravity in their lives.”3
These snapshots over time of one British town illustrate a trend that has transformed the whole of British life during the past four decades—one which has drastically weakened it from within to the threat from without. That trend is multiculturalism, the doctrine that is now the orthodoxy throughout all the institutions of British public life. Put at its simplest, it holds that Britain is now made up of many cultures that are all equal and therefore have to be treated in an identical fashion, and that any attempt to impose the majority culture over those of minorities is by definition racist.
This doctrine was a complete break from the earlier tradition of assimilating immigrants, which itself arose from Britain’s once robust sense of and pride in its national culture and history. The break occurred because a series of developments shattered Britain’s confidence in its own integrity and, deeper still, its very sense of what the nation was.
Britain’s demographic profile is radically changing. Since 2001, the number of Britons who are emigrating has shot up from 50,000 to 120,000 per year. Under the triple pressures of a continuing inflow from the Indian subcontinen
t, the loss of control over asylum and an undiscussed government decision to encourage immigration on the grounds that it is good for the economy, Britain now has a net inflow of approximately 220,000 immigrants per year—four times the rate between 1985 and 1995. The government puts the net immigration figure rather lower, at 145,000 per year. On the basis even of this more modest statistic, Britain’s population of about sixty million will rise over the next three decades by some six or seven million—and 83 percent of that new growth will come from immigration, most of that probably from the third world.4 If these trends persist, therefore, by the end of this century Britain’s population make-up will be unrecognizable.
Until about forty years ago, British society had been relatively homogeneous. True, the nation had originally been forged from waves of invasion by Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans; but for around one thousand years, its demographic profile remained remarkably stable. Such immigrations that occurred during that time, such as by the Irish, the Huguenots or the Jews from eastern Europe, were on a very small scale. During that period, British national identity centered upon a set of traditions, laws and customs arising out of its Christian heritage. This strong majoritarian culture meant that minorities were expected to fit in. They were treated with varying degrees of tolerance —and sometimes rank intolerance—but the rules of the modern settlement were clearly understood by both majority and minorities. The minorities were free to practice their religion, customs and culture in private, but where these conflicted with the law of the land or its fundamental traditions, the majoritarian culture would hold sway.