July 21, 2005

Using the Tube, especially in the mornings when I am in a rush to get to Chatham House or to other central locations, is not a pleasant affair and I avoid it most of the time. As The Economist rightly says this week, it is unreliable, crowded and smelly, and Londoners have no choice but to endure it. King's Cross, on the Piccadilly Line, is 5 stops after my station, and it is absolutely packed around 9 AM, when the bombs went off. I wasn't anywhere near the Tube on that day, and I could only imagine the horror.

My husband and I happened to be in Paris on July 7, and came back on the Eurostar a couple of days later to find many police officers scrutinizing passengers as we left the train. We saw a couple of people who were stopped for renewed passport checks, and I couldn't help but think that what was known in the US as "flying while Arab" is now turning into "traveling while Muslim" – based purely on perceptions of what a Muslim is supposed to look like. I fail to see how over a billion people could share physical attributes based solely on their religion and how this can help thwart terrorism, but I digress.

We could only speculate at that point, especially in the first few hours when British authorities were calmly feeding the unfolding story to the media, drop by drop. After all, the British government had been warning repeatedly that a terrorist attack on London was not a matter of if, but a matter of when. When it finally emerged, a few days later, that these were suicide bombers, and British-born ones to boot, the shock was even bigger than the shock of the attack. No border controls could have prevented this.

A lot is generally made about Britain's tolerance, its multi-culturalism, its position as a melting pot. (Another big idea, incidentally, is that the British - army included - are much better at reaching "hearts and minds" than the Americans; they certainly haven't been recently.) Well, that may be the case in some areas of London, but most people in the rest of Britain would probably beg to differ. The integration and tolerance so often praised, while certainly true on a legislative level, is not so evident in real life (especially in other areas, such as northern England), or so say many commentators. The fact that four young Britons would commit such atrocities has opened many cans of worms as condemnations poured in, but I think open discussion on these issues is not a peripheral matter.

The tolerance only goes so far, anyway. Already, a Pakistani man has been beaten to death in Nottingham, and several other crimes against Muslims have been reported (even against Sikhs, who seem to "look Muslim" to a number of ignorants). A number of Muslim associations are bending over backwards to try to explain that these terrorists had nothing to do with Islam – even after Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, rather patronizingly told them that they didn't need to apologize!

But today, Muslims and their leaders (whatever that is supposed to mean: Do all Muslims have "leaders"? What about non-Muslims?) are now told that condemnation is not enough, and that they must do something to stop the spreading of this terror. Interesting. There are certainly many clerics who should be publicly attacked and exposed – and that goes for every religion.

But to put the blame squarely on Muslims' shoulders really takes the biscuit. It was always the big powers (initially Britain, and then the US) which encouraged groups of a fundamentalist religious nature to fight their dirty wars for them. We all know how Osama Bin Laden was CIA-trained and funded as he and his Mujaheddin fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. Somehow, Washington then totally understood the legitimacy of resisting a foreign, illegal occupation (a struggle which was even glorified in a James Bond movie), and went out of its way to exploit religiosity to reach its goals. Somehow, Washington has since then forgotten that after the Soviets finally withdrew from Afghanistan, the resistance fighters stopped fighting there. Could it be that it was not necessarily simply an "evil ideology" that drove them to fight?

Had it not been for British manoeuvering and covert support, the Muslim Brotherhood probably wouldn't have had early successes in an Arab world that was mostly politically secular and excited about its new independence at various stages of the 20th century. And it was of course Israel that couldn't wait to foster cells which later developed into Hamas, because it really wanted to defeat the secular PLO with its inconvenient political and national agenda.

I think that Britain, the US and Israel understand the motivations of extremist Islamic groups a lot better than they let on. They know all too well that these terrorists are motivated by a lot more than an evil ideology (just like the IRA and ETA, to name but two).

In a sense, the reactions of Jose Maria Aznar's government after the March 11 2004 bombings in Madrid, and those of Tony Blair's government are not dissimilar. Both aimed at escaping links between the terror and their troops' presence in Iraq, the latter having been opposed and condemned by the near totality of the Spanish population, and by a significant portion of the British people. Aznar foolishly blamed ETA (whose modus operandi couldn't be more different) while Blair blamed the Islamic extremists who hate our values, hate our freedom – you know the refrain.

Has Islamic terrorism slowly pushed people to expose the emperor with no clothes? I think it's high time we all discussed the possible ramifications of all these factors, so that we can better fight the scourge of terrorism which affects us all. Seumas Milnes broaches the subject of Britain's less than angelic adventures abroad in an op-ed for The Guardian a week after the attacks, stating that it was "an insult to the dead to deny the link with Iraq." His contribution is a good starting point for the debate.

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