posted by Damozel |
Nick or our (eventual) new contributing author, Mr. Rumcove, really ought to be covering this---they're both English--but well, they're not going to, the slackers. Nick is working on his novel and Steven is off regaling himself in York. Since they're not, I'm going to. I will do the best I can. Since I don't really know enough to give an opinion on most of the issues, I'm just going to point out the relevant developments; anyone better qualified is welcome to comment.
So, anyway, on Saturday Britain's new security minister, former navy chief Admiral Sir Alan West, says that the British are facing a 15 year battle against Islamist terrorists. (The Telegraph; BBC News) I am not sure if he used those exact words, since he rejects the phrase "war on terror," which the Brits stopped using 10 days ago, when Tony Blair left office. (The Telegraph). Admiral West: said, ""I hate that expression. When I first heard it - I think it came over from the States - I though it was totally the wrong thing. It's not like a war in that sense at all. It demeans the value of a war and it demeans the value of a lot of things."" (The Telegraph). Hey, many of us in "the States" object to it as well and for the same reason. Blame the Bush Administration and all who sail in it, but please don't tar all of us Yanks with the same feather (as we like to say here), please!
Admiral West told the Brits that the overall danger facing the
country, from both home-grown and foreign
terrorists, was at its greatest ever level and that a new approach was
badly needed to tackle it. He said that the terrorists "have
severely damaged one of
the world's great religions - the one they purport to support." The
terrorists, he said, are a "disparate core" of racists and bigots. (The Telegraph)
Admiral West also warned that the traditional British aversion to snitchers and snitching
can't apply to the struggle against terrorism.. Specifically, he said:
"Britishness does not normally involve snitching or talking about someone.
"I'm afraid, in this situation, anyone who's got any information should say something because the people we are talking about are trying to destroy our entire way of life." (BBC News)
He urged people to be "a little bit un-British" by "snitching" and telling the authorities of any threats. (The Telegraph) Again, he didn't add, "especially British Muslims," and he didn't have to, because British Muslims on the second anniversary of the Tube bombings seized the moment and took a stand on their own.
In addition to hating the phrase "war on terror," Admiral West wants the British to stop talking about "the Muslim community". He has a lot of Muslim friends, he says, and they think of themselves as British first, Muslim second, he says. (BBC News) Hmmm. If the goal, or rather one goal, is to get the help of Muslims in the UK to to assist the rest of the nation in the---struggle? I'll go with "struggle"---against terrorism, homegrown and foreign, then it seems to me that a proud and empowered Muslim community is precisely what is needed.
Furthermore, an individual of any nation can belong
to any number of communities. I, for example, belong to the
communities of moderate Democrats, liberals, Floridians, progressive
Christians, Americans married to British expats, and people who
regularly read The Washington Post. They're not mutually
exclusive. So despite Admiral West's dislike of the phrase, I am going
to carry on referring to "the Muslim community" in this note because.
Besides, some non-Muslim Brits lately appear to be saying that to combat
terrorism in the UK, it's precisely this community's help that's
required. Here's an example from The Telegraph:
The Government's research suggests that British Muslims feel alienated from official attempts to combat terrorism when terrorists are identified as exclusively "Muslim".
That, as Gordon Brown and Sir Alan have recognised, could be a reason for Government officials not to refer to "Islamic terrorists" or "Muslim terrorism".
It is important, however, for no one in authority to be fooled by the change in language: the reality is that the threat comes from a perverted version of Islam. It is not Hindus or Buddhists or Polish immigrants to Britain who are trying to plant bombs here: it is men who claim to be Muslims.
For that reason, one of Sir Alan's main tasks, as he well recognises, is to persuade Britain's Muslims to take a leading role in the struggle to expose the terrorists for what they are: not "martyrs" or "servants of God" but vicious and brutal mass killers.
Some of the spokesmen for Britain's Muslims have seemed reluctant to endorse the message that, whether new arrivals or settled citizens, residents in Britain have a duty to accept the values of tolerance, individual liberty and the separation of religion from politics that define our society...Muslim leaders are in a unique position to take steps to ensure that the radicals who recruit youngsters outside their mosques are harried relentlessly and constantly challenged. Murderous fanaticism needs to be exposed as the perversion of Islamic thinking that it is, not allowed to flourish as a result of a policy of neglect..(The Telegraph)
And, as the letter notes, Muslims this week have already begun to respond.
On Saturday, Muslim leaders from all over Britain met to discuss ways they can work together to undermine terrorism. (The Independent) One particular concern was young Muslims and the radical groups that try to recruit them. (BBC News) According to the BBC, a recent survey has led Muslim leaders to doubt whether UK imams are really prepared for this task. (BBC News) The survey, carried out by the University of Chester showed that there has been "a rapid influx of imams" from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who have "limited ability in English, and rudimentary professional qualifications by Western standards." (BBC News) Although half of UK Muslims were born in Britain, nine out of ten imams are foreign; and 70% of them came to the UK "in the last decade." (BBC News) More than half of them use Urdu in their sermons. (BBC News) Most of them were educated in the Indian subcontinent in traditional seminaries. (BBC News) Evidently, UK mosques prefer imams from their ancestral countries.(BBC News)
The author of the survey, Professor Ron Greaves, said that few of these imams have updated their academic and professional skills. "The [imams] are medieval, and provide learning by rote of the Koran, and other religious texts... By their very nature they weren't designed for a 21st Century secular democracy like Britain, where Islam is a minority religion. Imams educated in them tend to see Islam as good, and everything else as bad."(BBC News)
The BBC notes that this week, Ajmal Masroor, an imam at Wightman Road Mosque in London, preached a sermon----"a counterblast to terrorism that came straight out of the Koran"---on the injustice of terrorism. According to BBC, he interprets Islam in a manner "suited to a modern, Western, secular, and multicultural democracy." (BBC News)
Elsewhere, UK Muslims of all ages are taking a stand against extremism. The Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain declared on Wednesday that it is the "Islamic duty" of the faithful to eliminate extremism. (The Independent) According to The Independent, Muhammad Abdul Bari Bari said: :
Those who seek to deliberately kill or main innocent people are the enemies of all of us....It is our Islamic duty not only to utterly and totally condemn such evil actions, but to provide all the necessary support to prevent such atrocities from taking place. There is no cause whatsoever that could possibly justify such barbarity. Those who engage in such murderous actions and those that provide support for them are the enemies of all, Muslims and non-Muslims, and they stand against our shared values in the UK. (The Independent)
The Independent characterized his speech as "a direct challenge to fundamentalists." (The Independent)
Muslims from all over the UK met this weekend to discuss ways to "undermine and defeat the terrorists who seek to attack us" (The Independent). Over 200 imams, community activists, and police representatives met to discuss ways to combat terrorism. Inayat Bunglewala of the Muslim Council of Britain, who spoke to the media afterwards, said that a key point of agreement was that there is an Islamic duty for Muslims to cooperate with the police "to ensure the safety of British citizens---Muslims and non-Muslims."(BBC News) Commander Simon Foy of the Metropolitan police, who also attended the meeting, said that the police have a duty to do their own work rather than adopting a heavy-handed approach. (BBC News)
Outside the meeting, some protesters accused the attendees of being "bootlickers" and "lackeys" for agreeing to work with the police. (BBC News) Muhammed Shafiq from the Ramadan Foundation said that it was exactly such young men that they needed to reach. (BBC News) "We've got to keep on engaging with these people, trying to convince them that their path is the wrong path....Our path is the mainstream of Islam. Islam totally condemns violence - it's forbidden in Islam...."(BBC News) The meeting ended with a statement condemning violence and enjoining Muslims to cooperate with the police in order to protect civilian lives.
But one point on which the meeting agreed on is that Britain's current foreign policy is fueling extremism, regardless of what the Government wants to believe.(BBC News)
Meanwhile, in Glasgow, 1500 people took part in a rally organized by Scottish Muslims protesting terror. (BBC News) Mosques and Islamic Groups organized the "Scotland United Against Terror." (BBC News) The protest was "doubly significant," organizers say, since it was held on the second anniversary of the London Tube bombings.(BBC News)
Osama Saeed, one of the organizers of the Scottish Muslims, said that he is "staggered" by the support they have been getting from around the world.
We thought on a local level we'd get together and do this to allow the grassroots to display their anger at the attacks, little realizing nothing like this had ever been done before anywhere else before. The eyes of the world will be on a Scotland sending out the message that all our communities are united against terrorism.The Muslim community have called this event, but what's touching is how the rest of the country has responded to us. (BBC News)
I'm assuming that most Brits would see this as a positive development, but there are other and more complicated matters that they may have to address. At The Independent,
Ismail Patel, a spokesperson for the British Muslim initiative,
discusses some common concerns of Muslims and non-Muslims and of
Muslims exclusively. In the article, Patel points out that the primary
purpose of terrorism is " sow seeds of doubt and division in our
society; and augment differences between British Muslims and the rest
of society"; the carnage, Patel says, is really a secondary aim. (The Independent)
British Muslims welcome the different approach of Prime Minister Brown
which---in contrast to Blair's---did not make British Muslims feel
blamed as a community. (The Independent)
Patel urges the Brown government to avoid the mistakes of the Blair government, which "isolated and castigated" Muslims who used democratic and peaceful means to protest its foreign policy. (The Independent) British Muslims need to be free to "debate and disagree with" the establishment. "Under Tony Blair, the Muslim community found itself walking a tightrope. If they accused government policies of being responsible for radicalising some Muslims, they were labelled extremist and marginalised. And if they curried favour with the establishment, the youth deserted them." (The Independent) According to Patel, the best weapons against the scourge of extremism are "sustainable community-based projects with local Muslims and a just ethical foreign policy." (The Independent)
All those involved can but try. Here's wishing all parties success in their common goal.
BRITISH BLOGS ON THE ISSUE? Here are four interesting responses.
At Pickled Politics, Sunny notes that the conservative Muslim Forum, Islamic Relief, the Islamic Society of Britain and Muslim Doctors and Dentists Association all support a media campaign called "Not in Our Name" designed to advertise attempts by extremists to link terrorism to the teaching of Islam. The post links to Muslims for Britain, their website.
The next one's sort of twofer, in that it addresses the same blogger's thoughts on a blog from HuffPost. Also at Pickled Politics, Sunny discusses the blog by Ali Eteraz at The Huffington Post ("Media Reliance on Former Terrorists and Radicals is a Joke"). In it, he argues that reliance by the media (both left and right) on the publications of reformed terrorists as a source of "insight" in dealing with extremism is worst than useless. He feels that the factors that make a person a terrorist in the first place disqualify him from delivering anything but "one stop shop" solutions in the second.
What these former radicals and terrorists are not telling us that the "alternative discourse" to radicalism and terrorism existed among Muslim communities for a long, long time. Sometimes it took the form of Sufi groups such as those headed by Nuh Ha Mim Keller and TJ Winter, a lecturer in the UK. In other manifestations it took the form of progressive Muslims, such as the Muslim Canadian Congress and Progressive Muslim Union of North America.
For the most part, however, this alternative discourse took the form of every day Muslims, like those that play cricket for their nations, who do comedy, and set up magazines and websites discussing the precise theological issues that Hamid and Butt didn't know how to address once, and wish to be spokesmen for now. (Ali Eteraz; links in original)
The best they can give, he says "is limited and de-contextualized insight." Sunny thinks that they can provide some insights of value, e.g., by confirming that "foreign policy is not the main driver of terrorism, which is increasingly more obvious." New (and Older) Extremists.
At The Telegraph, political blogger Daniel Hannan says "'Terrorism is a middle class pursuit'. He thinks British leftists should drop "mulish insistence that terrorism is the product of poverty." He seems pretty exercised about it. His point seems to be that blaming terrorism (the homegrown sort, presumably) on poverty and alienation is a fallacy.
When pundits describe the Islamists as “mediaeval” they are 100 per cent wrong. Where mediaeval Islam was comparatively tolerant, this minimalist Wahhabi version is modernist, in the sense that it makes no concessions either to human frailty or to traditional practice. It attracts the kind of disaffected young man who, in different circumstances, might have turned other revolutionary creeds: Jacobinism, fascism, communism. To put it another way, Islamism is simply the latest in a long line of “isms” which purport to wipe the slate clean and start again.
The natural adherents of such doctrines are middle class youths with just enough education to be seeking an ideological validation of their violent impulses. Radical imams offer them such validation. The reason you feel so angry, they tell their charges, is not that there’s something wrong with you, but that there’s something wrong with everyone else. You see the truth, where others don’t. Your aggression is not a shameful emotion, but a noble one.
Maybe he is using the word "alienation" in some different sense from the way I understand it. Isn't a young person who feels the way he proposes "the natural adherents of such doctrines" feel by definition alienated?
Anyway, his point seems to be that extremism in Britain is about "narcissistic violence" rather than poverty/alienation and that these revolutionaries are no different from any others throughout history. To which this Yank can only respond, "And....?"
At I Wish I Knew, Dr, Weird, in a post called "Muslims March Against Terrorism" acknowledges the importance to non-Muslims of a clear refutation of the extremists' version of their religion.
[I]t underscores, in the wider public's mind, that there's a difference between "Muslim" and "terrorist". It's shocking that Muslim communities should have to make that distinction to the rest of us, and I think the reason it's taken so long for something like this to happen probably has a lot to do with moderate Muslims assuming that it's a given that they don't support (and are not) the extremists. Unfortunately, many people see the continuing silence (barring the odd statement by members of the Muslim Council of Great Britain) of the wider Muslim community as tacit approval of terrorist activities....
[T]he point is that as long as those loonies are shouting loudly that that religion demands they kill themselves and the rest of us in the name of Allah, then the moderate community has a responsibility to tell us (and the loonies)...that is demands no such thing. If people don't hear the opposing view, is is surprising that after a while, they start to believe what the extremists are telling them? And that's exactly what this march is; it's the larger Muslim community of Scotland standing up and saying "No. That's enough. This violence is wrong, it's anti-Islamic, we won't condone it, and it has to stop. Now." Make no mistake, this will drive a wedge between the moderate and extreme Muslim communities, but that's important too; by being seen to distance themselves from the fringe, the mainstream will be perceived as closer to the rest of us (which is where they've always been....) (Muslims March Against Terrorism)
QUOTED, CITED, OR LINKED
- Muslims march against terrorism (BBC News)
- Patrick Hennessey, Warning of 15-year fight against terror (The Telegraph)
- Muslims Have to Join this Battle (The Telegraph)
- UK Facing a "15 Year Terror Threat" (BBC News)
- "Islamic Duty" to Help UK Police (BBC News)
- Are UK's imams modern enough? (BBC News)
- Hundreds attend anti-terror rally (BBC News)
- Ismail Patel, Give us the freedom to Disagree with You (The Independent)
- Ben Russell, Muslim leader appeals to 'Islamic duty' of followers to prevent attacks (The Independent)
OTHER Buck Naked Politics POSTINGS
Damozel, The Threat of Terrorism in the UK (Buck Naked Politics)
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