Has Britain become a police state for Muslims? No, nowhere near. Just ask anyone who has lived in a real police state. Ask any mother whose son was taken in the middle of the night and disappeared without a trace. Ask any political prisoner who has been interrogated and tortured just for questioning the status quo. Ask any ordinary citizen who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and found himself in jail for years on end without trial, without any recourse to justice. That is living in a police state, not what is happening to Muslims in Britain today.
And yet it cannot be denied that Muslims today find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. The knee-jerk reactions of British Muslims to last week’s arrests in Birmingham show just how embattled many Muslims now feel. Within moments of the arrests, people were talking of conspiracy theories, elaborate plots and the demonization of Muslims. The idea that there could have been a genuine plot to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier was not even considered — and yet it is hardly far-fetched.
Lurid details of the alleged plot were leaked to the press prior to the arrests. So we know not only that the plot was to kidnap a Muslim soldier but that the aim was to film him being tortured and murdered and to then release the film on the Internet. We know too that a young soldier who recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq had agreed to be used as bait, allowing the investigators to mount an extensive surveillance operation. The terrorists are said to have compiled a list of the names and addresses of 25 British Muslims serving with the armed forces. They were about to strike. The police moved in and raided the addresses in Sparkbrook, a suburb of Birmingham, arresting nine people.
This plot takes terrorism in Britain two stages further. First it moves from bombing to kidnapping. Since terrorists copy each other, it is to be expected — and indeed it is usually the case — that what we see happening in one part of the world soon becomes part of the terrorist modus operandi elsewhere. Kidnappings are unfortunately common in terrorist warfare. In Iraq alone there are 30-40 abductions daily.
Second the target is a Muslim. As a newspaper headline shouted out: “Now Muslims are terror target!” Of course Muslims have been a target all along. Muslims have regularly been killed by Al-Qaeda and its imitators. But this takes it a step further. This plot aims to drive a wedge between Muslims. It is one more instance of the terrorists dividing the world into believers and apostates.
You don’t have to go far to see examples of this thinking. Abu Izzadeen — a so-called cleric who was arrested by the British police on Friday — was seen on tape calling Muslim soldiers apostates who deserve to be killed: “So those so-called enemies to Allah who join the British government because remember the British government, my dear Muslim brothers, are crusaders, crusaders come to kill and rape Muslims. Whoever joins them he who joins the British Army, he is a mortal kafir. And his only hokum is for his head to be removed.”
The alleged plot is both grizzly and terrifying; yet the response of many Muslims was denial.
That the police in Britain have lost credibility is clear. There are a number of reasons for this, the most obvious being the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 and the raids in Forest Gate a year later. The first planted an image that just looking like a terrorist was enough to get you killed. Here was an innocent man, not even Muslim or Arab or Asian but Brazillian, his dark skin, dark hair and eyes sufficient to fit the profile, sufficiently close to grainy CCTV footage for a policeman to falsely identify him as a potential suspect and set off a chain of events that led to the tragedy of his death. The fact that he was shot seven times in the head whilst being restrained only serving to add to both the tragedy of his death and the sense of insecurity and threat among Muslims in Britain.
The Forest Gate raid saw 250 police officers, dressed in protective suits and gas masks, descend on this London suburb in a raid reminiscent of a Hollywood action movie. The raid was triggered by intelligence that alleged a terrorist plot to use chemical weapons. Two brothers were arrested, one of whom was accidentally shot in the shoulder during the raid. Both were innocent, both were released without charge. No trace of chemical weapons was found. The police later apologized for the hurt caused but the damage was done. It reinforced an idea among Muslims that they were being persecuted.
This state of mind is best exemplified by the words of Mohammed Naseem, the chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, on hearing of the arrests last week. Not only was he certain that all of the men arrested were innocent but he believed that all of this was an elaborate plot by the British government to “strike terror in the hearts of Muslim people” and that the government was “pursuing a policy of maintaining a perception of threat to justify the draconian anti-terror laws they have been passing.” Of course the men arrested may well be innocent. As I write, five of them have been charged. We will have to wait until their trial to establish their guilt or innocence. But three others have been released without charge. One of them, Abu Bakr, called Britain a police state for Muslims. You can understand his anger. He spent a week in custody, unaware of why he had been arrested, barely questioned by the police and then only asked obscure questions that did not make any sense to him, before being released without charge.
Of course if Britain were a police state, he would not appear on the BBC to tell us of his ordeal, but that is not the point. What is of interest here is the genuine belief among so many Muslims that they are being unfairly targeted.
The police are aware of their lack of credibility among many Muslims and have been treading very carefully, anxious not to inflame community relations. They distributed 5,000 leaflets in Sparkbrook detailing the police operation and affirming that they were not targeting a particular community but pursuing a specific group of criminals. David Shaw, the assistant chief constable in charge of this investigation has also been at pains to stress the support the police have received from the Muslim community.
But this does not stop many Muslims believing they are being persecuted. As Abu Bakr put it on his release, terror laws “are designed specifically for Muslims.” And here lies the essence of the problem facing the police. How do you separate the racial component from the criminal threat? The terrorists exist. They happen to be Muslim. They happen to use an extreme brand of Islamic thinking to justify their actions. The terrorists have hijacked and sullied the name of Islam for their purposes. Is it any wonder that the civil liberties of Muslims have been among the first casualties?
