Tony Blair must wish he were George Bush. While both
administrations wage war on terrorism, the terrorist weed choking
London is much harder to stamp out because it’s growing in British
soil.
Our fastest-growing religion is Islam but here the numbers
aren’t a security concern, as a commitment to Islam hasn’t
overwhelmed a strong attachment to America itself. Score another
victory for the cultural melting pot. By contrast, the U.K.
embraced government-subsidized multiculturalism and is paying a
very dear price, indeed.
British asylum laws provide a safe haven to those persecuted for
their beliefs elsewhere. For London, the tangible downside of
serving as a political oasis is that many radical Islamic clerics
took refuge in the city’s mosques, hence “Londonistan.” Funded by
the British welfare state, these clerics preach violent jihadism to
a stratum of young, second-generation British Muslim men alienated
both from mainstream society and the British Muslim
establishment.
Today, Blair is caught between a fundamentalist rock and a
fascist hard place. How does he act without provoking the Muslim
fanatics or the white racists, or both?
Seven in ten Britons want their government to exclude or deport
from the U.K. those foreign Muslims who incite hatred, according to
an ICM poll for the Guardian newspaper. Blair is keen to
comply with public opinion, but he’s hamstrung by the U.K.’s
embrace of supranational political bodies. Judges have interpreted
the U.N. Convention on Refugees in such a way as to deny the
British government the right to refuse admission to, or to revoke
refugee status from, those who conspire against their host
country.
Nor will Blair gain redress through the E.U. The European
Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into British law seven
years ago, confers on people the right not to be returned to
countries where they may face persecution. Therefore, Blair finds
himself in the ridiculous position of pleading with an assortment
of authoritarian regimes to guarantee the safety of those dangerous
people that the U.K. seeks to deport.
The radical clerics are highly effective proselytizers for their
cause. Before the first London bombings, British intelligence
services estimated that one percent of Britain’s 1.6 million
Muslims either support or are involved in terrorism. Can there
really be 16,000 potential Muslim terrorists in the U.K.? No, but a
significant number are prepared to act against their own country.
The U.K. government says 3,000 British Muslims have returned home
from al Qaeda training camps.
A new survey of British Muslims for London’s Daily
Telegraph newspaper finds that six percent — 100,000 people
— believe the London bombings were fully justified. One in four
British Muslims, while not condoning the London attacks, sympathize
with the feelings and motives of those who carried them out.
Furthermore, nearly one in five British Muslims feels little or no
loyalty at all to the U.K., and a third of British Muslims believe
that Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims
should seek to bring it to an end.
This segment of a mainly peaceful and productive immigrant
population hasn’t escaped the attention of those political actors
whose traditional antipathy toward blacks is being transferred to
the largely unassimilated Muslim community. The far-right British
National Party is trying to exploit the home-grown terrorist threat
by calling for immigration controls and distributing literature
using a photograph of the bombed London bus with the caption,
“Maybe it’s time to start listening to the BNP.”
Today’s xenophobic right is more than a nuisance because it’s
fishing in an increasingly well-stocked pond of grievances. Before
7/7 working-class whites living in heavily Muslim parts of London,
and in cities such as Bradford, Leeds, and Luton, voiced the
complaint that, on their streets at least, one sees far more burqas
than Bobbies. A pervasive cultural apartheid encourages a majority
of surveyed whites to believe Muslims are more loyal to fellow
Muslims outside of the U.K. than to their fellow Britons.
Some extreme right-wing groups have even joined forces with
well-organized soccer hooligans in a coordinated campaign to exact
physical revenge upon the Muslim community. British police have
recorded over 1,200 suspected anti-Muslim incidents in the past
three weeks. Last Friday, for example, a Muslim-owned store in a
Leeds suburb was set ablaze and the police evacuated one of
London’s largest mosques following a bomb threat.
Since July 7, the Blair government’s response has been
surprisingly measured. Yet, both the police and Blair’s
conservative opponents, firmly backed by public opinion, tug in the
direction of sacrificing additional freedoms for the illusion of
certain security.
Among Londoners, fear and frustration are starting to replace
stoicism as the most common responses to their new reality. Callers
to British talk radio reflect a growing populist sentiment that’s
both anti-civil liberties and anti-immigrant. If, in the coming
days, Blair’s actions appear insufficient against domestic terror,
his countrymen’s legendary stiff upper lip may yet turn into an
ugly, authoritarian-minded scowl.
