The extreme and manifest anger of British Muslims at Israel's military action in Gaza is unlikely to have displeased the Zionist lobby. Television images of Muslim fury on the streets of London are just what the Israeli PR machine ordered. After all, the Jewish state's whole objective is to convince the citizens of the Western democracies that Israel is spearheading a common struggle, heroically defending Western civilization against the menace of global jihadism.
"Look out" was the warning to Britain of Israel's aspirant next Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visited London the other week. "You are next".
In recent times, Israel has redoubled its efforts to persuade Western opinion that its war against Islamism is crucial to the survival of freedom. It is a message to which, in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings of 2005, more than a few Britons may well be susceptible. What is certain is that most British media coverage of the Gaza crisis has left the impression that Israel has been exposed to endless wanton rocket attacks launched by Hamas. Little attention has been paid to the broader background of the crisis, the fact that, in blatant defiance of international law, Israel has been operating a protracted and crippling economic blockade against Gaza, subjecting men, women and children to merciless collective punishment.
Least of all are British politicians given to discussing the wider background of the crisis. It is true that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has not endorsed Israel's military action in the manner of outgoing US President George W. Bush. Though a voluble supporter of Israel, Brown could hardly afford to do so even if he wanted to, since he is anxious not to alienate potential Muslim voters. The same applies to his chief political opponent, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, whose reticence about what is happening in Gaza has been astonishing. Belatedly, Israel's actions have been denounced by the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, but neither Brown nor Cameron, presiding as they do over parties greatly beholden to Zionist patronage, is ever likely to speak in such terms.
Their supine reaction over the shedding of Palestinian blood is contributing hugely to the radicalizing of British Muslim opinion, while threatening to poison relations between Muslims and Jews in particular and Muslims and non-Muslims in general. Muslims who have responded to official encouragement to identify themselves as moderates feel cheated. Even so strenuous an enemy of extremism as the self-confessed former Islamist, Ed Hussein, has voiced his outrage at the British government's failure to condemn unequivocally Israeli "atrocities". His articles on the Guardian's Comment is Free website have provoked a voluminous, furiously polarized response, with some deploring the way he has reacted to the crisis above all as a Muslim and even accusing him of dual loyalties.
All this is excellent news for the Zionist lobby, keen as it is to drive a massive wedge between Muslims and the wider British society. It may even be that Zionists welcome the fact that the far right British National Party, long notorious for its anti-Semitism, is now so consumed with hatred of Muslims as to be prepared to make common cause with Jews.
With the Gaza crisis in danger of exacerbating Muslim disaffection, along with perceptions that Muslims are the "enemy within", Britain urgently needs more balanced representation of Muslim attitudes and values. Those mainstream journalists who specialize in covering the British Muslim community are apt to focus almost exclusively on the reasons for fearing it. Witness the BBC reporter Richard Wilson, who has devoted much time and energy to investigating the growth of British jihadism and who believes that Britain has the worst problem of homegrown Islamic extremism of any Western country. While Wilson's warnings are needed, the question arises why he concentrates so single-mindedly on the Islamist threat. Invariably couched in portentous terms, his work is bound to entrench the suspicion of many Britons that their Muslim compatriots are not just different but extremely dangerous.
The preoccupation of the British political establishment and the British media with jihadism is in danger of eclipsing the larger story of Muslims in Britain. All the same, the story is being told - even if its tellers struggle to be heard. In his new book, "Young British Muslim Voices", the British scholar, Anshuman A. Mondal, profiles young Muslims from all social classes who - despite the vicious stereotyping with which they have to contend - are intensely morally alive and intellectually engaged.
Mondal supplies abundant testimony that British Muslims are pioneering fresh and imaginative ways to be British. He argues for a new concept of integration that it at once more pluralist and more precise. Instead of regarding it as a non-negotiable, one-way process - in which "they are expected to come closer to us" - integration, he believes, ought to be a "two way process, involving dialogue, give and take and mutual accommodation". The message of Young British Muslims is that, even if they abhor Anglo-American foreign policy and indulgent attitude toward Israel, most Muslims are as committed as anybody else to British democracy and the rule of law. What marks Mondal's interviewees out is their intellectual and moral energy, the fervor with which they are debating their destiny as Britons during a tim
The British media does well to broadcast the warnings of reporters like Richard Wilson. But why does it make so little effort to tell the other side of the story, the extent to which British Islam is a dynamic, evolving phenomenon that is helping to revitalize an old and jaded country? The unsavory truth is that demonizing Muslims is good for business.
And the British media, including the BBC, has never been more of business-oriented.
