Long before the execution of the US journalist, James Foley, by a presumed British militant, there was a growing perception of the UK as a pre-eminent breeding ground of extremism.
For years, French security services were incredulous that their British counterparts appeared relaxed about individuals they viewed with horror. Now the UK is acknowledging that its budding reputation as terror capital of the Western world may not be without justification. British news media endlessly report that hundreds of home-grown militants have enlisted as ISIL militants in Syria and Iraq and that many could return to terrorize their own country.
What undermines the possibility of a sober political response to British militancy is the fast approaching UK general election of May 2015. Concerned to project leadership, Prime Minister David Cameron pledges unstinting efforts to stop Muslims from going to Syria, Home Secretary Theresa May speaks of punitive sanctions against those believed to be even planning to visit the region and Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson — who, like May, nurses prime ministerial ambitions — demands new legislation according to which anyone traveling unofficially to the war areas can be charged with terrorism.
As they jostle for power, British politicians are in danger of seeking to outbid one another in their proclaimed determination to crack down on extremists. The prospect looms of a systematic assault on Muslim civil liberties that could alienate still further young Muslims who are exercised about what is happening in Syria, in the process reinforcing the very attitudes the British government is endeavoring to combat and hugely exacerbating the crisis of trust between the UK Muslim community and wider British society.
Lost in all this is any sense that Muslims are an integral part of British democracy who deserve to be engaged with on the basis of policies rooted in coherent and consistent principle. A year ago, the British government was itself poised to join the US in airstrikes in Syria with a view to toppling the regime of President Bashar Assad. Yet now it is mooting measures to prevent Muslims from going to Syria for any reason — and many who are hostile to Assad have gone there for humanitarian reasons. Scarcely less calculated to make Muslims feel that their beliefs and values are deemed of zero significance has been the British government’s mealy-mouthed response to Israel’s death-dealing rampage in Gaza. It was as a prominent British Muslim shocked by her government’s stance on Gaza that Baroness Sayeeda Warsi resigned as a Conservative Cabinet minister, warning that the Conservative Party could forfeit vital Muslim votes in the 2015 general election.
Public understanding of British Muslims is hardly helped by the dogmatic new consensus that “multiculturalism” has unfitted them for participation in democracy, breeding an isolationist mentality and contempt for British freedoms. The possibility that disaffection among young Muslims has more than a little to do with British foreign policy formulated with scant disregard for democratic sentiment among Muslims and non-Muslims alike is little short of a taboo subject. It is seldom remembered that before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, old hands in the UK Foreign Office counseled that as a post-imperial power with a burgeoning Muslim community, Britain’s rulers needed to be alive to the potentially unhappy domestic repercussions of waging pre-emptive war in a Muslim country. Similarly forgotten is how, in its zeal to support the aggressive interventionism of US President George W. Bush, the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair scorned this advice with patronizing references to the “camel corps,” meaning British diplomats prey to romantic fantasies about the Arab world.
Considering how things now stand in Iraq and the UK, one might wonder who the real fantasists have turned out to be. Yet notwithstanding its sorry consequences, past and present British politicians are far from frankly admitting that their country’s foreign policy posture in recent times has much to answer for; and there could yet be further British military intervention in the Middle East. Truth to tell, it is not multiculturalism that lies at the root of the UK’s security crisis. It is the lamentable survival among the British political class of imperialist impulses.
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