The images were tragically familiar, evocative of the carnage in New York, Bali, Madrid, Riyadh and Casablanca — the bodies of the victims dug out from under the rubble, bloodied survivors carted away on stretchers, dazed onlookers unable to absorb the horror of it all, and a deeply unsettled metropolis dealt a heavy blow that was meant to bring about its psychological unraveling.
London was dealt such a blow last week. Terrorism had come to the British capital — terrorism whose perpetrators are yet to be identified — but it failed to sow the kind of mass anxiety and social breakdown the terrorists had hoped for. Really, it didn’t take long for Londoners, these resourceful urbanites with a long tradition behind them of standing firm in the face of violence, to resume their lives, riding their buses again, heading on to their jobs, walking their kids to school and going about their business.
That cowardly act then — and what other word would you use to describe such an assault on innocent civilians? — failed to achieve the warped goals it was intended to pursue. Instead, it succeeded only in triggering a backlash against Muslims living in Britain.
With its long-entrenched traditions of civil liberties, tolerance for political dissent and respect for human rights, Britain has acted, over the last four decades or so, as a magnet for political refugees, asylum-seekers and militant activists escaping repression in their own countries.
There are roughly two million Muslims living in Britain — around four percent of the population — a diverse community in terms of its ethnic, cultural, linguistic, national, ideological and class origins. Most of its members come from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, with around 30 percent hailing from North Africa and the Middle East. It is estimated that those amongst them who support extremist causes are a minority, around 15,000.
Still, that’s 15,000 extremists too many, extremists who take advantage of Britain’s liberal laws of free speech to sow hatred among young Muslims, feeding on their sense of alienation and discontent.
Leaders of these folks, often self-styled sheikhs, have used mosques to preach what in effect is un-Islamic rhetoric to their followers.
Take one such cleric, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who in his sermons has called for a jihad against Britain and last December warned that the country, along with others in Western Europe, should expect a “9-11, day after day after day.” And he did that brazenly, from the pulpit of his mosque in the London neighborhood of Finsbury Park, where Zacariah Mousaoui, the only man charged in the US in the Sept.11 attacks, and Richard Reid, the convicted shoe-bomber, “prayed.”
And how ironic it is when you consider that Omar is a political refugee who pleaded for and was given asylum 19 years by the very country whose demise he is calling for and who currently lives off its welfare system. Abu Hamza Al-Masri, the former leader of the mosque, who is now in custody, had openly preached violence, and that it was allowed for Muslims to attack non-Muslims and “wring their necks.”
This is vulgar talk that is mockingly remote from Islam and a degradation of the Message of its Prophet (peace be upon him).
In an interview with an ordinary Muslim shopkeeper in London last Saturday, a few blocks from the bombed Edgeware Road subway station, a New York Times reporter was told: “We are living in an age that is simply unnatural. Is there anywhere in Islam that says you have to kill? Nowhere does it say you can take somebody’s right to live. And yet they do this in the name of Islam.”
The banality of these militants’ ideology — and evil is banal, as Hannah Arendt had shown us a long time ago — like the Leninist ideology of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” highlights its failure to produce those charities of the imagination that revere the sanctity of human life, including the lives of those Peoples of the Book other than one’s own.
That kind of ideology, confused, pre-emptory and contradictory, represents the code of the bully, the fascist who seeks to impose upon the fragile plurality of human nature and conduct an artificial ideal of repressive conformity. It tyrannizes through contempt of man, and exalts nihilistic violence as a vehicle of self-expression.
Fascism in Europe and Communism in the Soviet Union, before being dishonored by their crimes, were actually seen in their time as a ray of hope, drawing into their orbit not only the masses but many intellectuals as well. In like manner, this kind of free-lance ideology cannot outlive its failures, excesses and transgressions.
In the interim, however, it will succeed in creating an undercurrent of resentment against and suspicion of hard working, law-abiding, God-fearing Muslims living in Western societies.
Yes, the backlash is on its way.
Last March, when the British Parliament debated a bill that would have allowed the authorities to impose tough controls on suspected militants, many of the lawmakers objected, saying it would erode civil liberties. The legislative measure is still pending. After the bombings in London, which have come to be known as 7-7, its chance of passing have now improved considerably.
And in the United States the tragedy has already altered the debate over the Patriot Act, which the House earlier had voted to strip of a provision making it easier for investigators to pursue suspected terrorists, including obtaining records from libraries and bookstores. The bombings could force a rethinking of that move by conservatives on the Hill.
The rethinking process has already begun. “The London attacks, like the train bombings last year in Madrid, required a high degree of coordination and detail, suggesting a plot planned well in advance,” editorialized the Washington Times, the capital’s conservative paper. “And yet here we are arguing whether to dismantle key provisions in the Patriot Act. Our hope is that 7-7 will return Washington to the focus it had following Sept. 11. If they can hit them there, they can hit us here.”
Oh, what have these criminals wrought!
