Smash hit

There is another disagreeable ambiguity when some spokesmen link terror to British foreign policy. Anas Altikriti, the director of the Islam Expo (now taking place at Alexandra Palace in north London), wrote last week: “We will not stand for our country and people being terrorised nor will we stand for our government terrorising any other peoples.” That is presumably a reference to Iraq and Afghanistan. What does “will not stand for” mean?

Even Dr Taj Hargey, chairman of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, a brave opponent of the fundamentalists who argues that the Koran does not authorise violence, calls on Britain to reappraise its foreign policy. In many Muslim minds, apparently, terrorism in Britain has to be understood (even if not condoned) as a reaction to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The chronology undermines that argument. The allied invasion of Afghanistan was a response to the terrorist murder of nearly 3,000 civilians in New York and Washington. No serious figure denies that Al-Qaeda organised the crime from its bases in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Iraq is a more controversial case. It has become a mess. But relatively few Iraqis died when we invaded and overthrew their genocidal dictator. The vast majority of Muslims who have been killed since have been murdered by other Muslims — by Al-Qaeda, by Sunni and Shi’ite extremists or by Saddam Hussein loyalists. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq and a Sunni, urged death to Shi’ites whom he described as poisonous snakes and atheists. Al-Qaeda is determined to destroy the West, but in the short term most of its victims will be Muslims in any place where it can topple their government to replace it with a regime as repressive and homicidal as the Taliban’s was.

Many British people object to Blair’s foreign policy. But only Muslim suicide bombers claim it as a justification for murder. In Tanweer’s videotape released last week he links his crime to Afghanistan and Iraq. But just in case anyone is tempted to think that Britain could avoid terrorism by withdrawing from those countries, Tanweer also calls on us to end our military and financial links with America and Israel. The United States was attacked in 2001 not because it had invaded another country (except to save Muslim lives in Bosnia), but because it is rampantly secular and supports Israel’s right to exist.

If the drifting apart of the Muslim and non-Muslim communities in Britain has increased the danger of terror, it follows that reconciliation and integration would make us safer. I do not mean what I write here to exacerbate the divisions in any way. Rather I believe that we can move closer if we are more honest about what is happening. Mayhem is being unleashed globally in the name of Islam. There is no point denying it, especially since most of those butchered have been Muslim. The British state is not the problem but part of the solution. A tolerant society can survive only if it bands together to suppress intolerance because we are all victims of that intolerance.

Every Briton must join in that effort, no ifs, no buts and no excuses.

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