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| Post 7/7 : Is Legislation Enough? |
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By Dr Salman Ahmed
salman.ahmed@newcivilisation.com
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The London bombings of the 7th and 21st of July brought terror and fear to the streets of a major European capital. Sadly the threat of future attacks according to most experts and politicians remains high.James Hart,the City of London police commissioner, said that an attack on the financial centre of London was inevitable. The Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, said that it would be foolish to assume that there would not be a third attack in London. Furthermore, the Prime Minister when asked about the threat of such terrorism acknowledged that he could not tell for how long the threat would last.
The British government's response to this threat has been to propose a range of legislative measures that are at face value aimed at preventing further attacks.The Prime Minister Tony Blair, stated in his 5th of August speech that he wanted to extend the detention of suspects for up to ninety days, to expel foreign nationals who preached hatred, to create a new offence with respect to the glorification of a terrorist attack and that of indirect incitement, and also to extend the basis of proscription so that certain Islamic groups could be banned.
Arguably however the threat of young British Muslims carrying out further terrorist attacks is unlikely to be diminished by this approach. The root problem in this approach is to believe that solely legislation can be used to control the behaviour of those young Muslim men who may be intending to carry out a terrorist attack. It is unlikely that the proposed legislation if it had already been in existence would have prevented the attacks in July. If the families and friends of the 7th of July bombers were completely in the dark about their intentions, then it seems very difficult to imagine that the British security services would have been able to detect their plan and prevent their attack. Rather than focus on introducing further legislation and other security-based measures, the Government should focus on developing policies that persuade British Muslims to take a more constructive role in the society which would dissuade them from carrying out further attacks.
However, this requires the Government to make efforts to understand why many Muslims are angry and upset with the UK government, and why some individuals feel the need to undertake terrorist attacks on British society. To date, the Prime Minister and his spokesmen continue to insist that there is no link between the 7th of July bombers and the war in Iraq. We are repeatedly told the bombers hate us because of "our values and way of life" and there is no point examining why these British Muslims did what they did. Moreover, some media commentators claimed that any attempt to understand the motivation of these bombers was tantamount to justifying these attacks.
Given the number of "successful" and "failed" suicide bombings in London, and the fear that there are others preparing themselves, surely there must be some common thread that connects these young Muslim men together that could be identified and understood, rather than assume that these individuals are crazy, or mentally unstable. On the basis of determining these causal factors, the government could develop much more effective polices to dissuade individual Muslims from becoming suicide bombers or terrorists.
Almost certainly young Muslim men who carry out suicide attacks, such as those that were seen in London, see themselves engaged in a war against western nations such as Britain. Though they may have been born and brought up in Britain, they feel a bond of loyalty to other Muslims in the Islamic world that supersedes any loyalty they feel to the British society.Their perception of the situation in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is at odds with the reports of the British media and Government. They do not believe that the coalition forces are in the Muslim lands to bring democracy and freedom as described by the British media. Rather, in their perception, coalition forces are involved in an occupation similar to the Nazi occupation of France and Poland in the Second World War.The Muslim governments of Iraq and Afghanistan are like the Vichy government that the Nazis established in France established as a puppet government completely dependent on outside forces and run by traitors. The US with its allies such as Britain, are seen to desire control over Muslim land for their own purposes.
A major problem for the British government is that it is not only potential suicide bombers or terrorists who have this perception.There seems to be a common sentiment amongst Muslims that western nations such as Britain are unjust in their dealings with the Muslim world and that the British foreign policy is unjust to Muslims; that double standards are used in dealing with Muslim societies; and that little value is attached to the blood and lives of Muslim civilians.This perception is not limited to Muslims in Britain and nor is it restricted to Muslims more inclined towards Islam.
Over the last decade or two, news reporting of thousands of Palestinian deaths, the massacres of the Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, the wars that have been fought for the control of the Persian gulf, the thousands of civilians who died as a result of UN sanctions against Iraq, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the treatment of Muslim detainees in Guantanamo and Abu Graib, the destruction of Fallujah and other such events have led many Muslims to feel that the West is against them and their faith.This "radicalisation" of Muslim sentiment has accelerated as the new mediums of news information have come into existence such as the global satellite news TV channel 'Al Jazeera' and the Internet.
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