The impending 10th anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings finds British Muslims facing the prospect of being a demonized community forever on trial. It can be small consolation to them that Muslims in other Western societies are similarly beleaguered.
The other day Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a much-publicized speech on extremism. Alleging that some of them “quietly condone” the barbarities of Daesh, he exhorted British Muslims to redouble their efforts to identify extremists. It was not the first time that Cameron addressed the UK Muslim community in the manner of a stern headmaster. It was not the first time either that the Conservative Muslim peer, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, greeted his comments with barely concealed outrage, insisting that most Muslims are already doing their utmost to combat extremism and that the prime minister should be championing them, not making speeches likely only to demoralize them.
One might wonder why Cameron chose to speak not on British soil among his own people but at a conference on western security in Slovakia. The dispiriting truth is that a decade after the London bombings political discussion of radicalization remains narrowly fixated on the issue of security, with scant acknowledgement that it is a scourge whose roots are many and various.
At a recent meeting in London, the Norwegian diplomat and sociologist, Terje Rod-Larsen, pondered the parallels between the appeal of Daesh and the appeal once exercised by Soviet Communism. The parallel is not exact: The number of westerners who defected to the Soviet Union was a fraction of the number who are throwing in their lot with Daesh. Nor did those defectors have a conspicuous ethno-religious profile. Nevertheless there is a certain sense of history repeating itself. Now, as in the mid-20th century, western society is in turmoil, with many fearing for the future and seeking desperate remedies for problems of purpose and identity. And now as then, paranoia is rampant. Where in the past western hysteria raged about “Reds under the bed,” today it rages about Muslims suspected of scheming to overthrow democracy and establish an Islamic “tyranny.”
It may be that radicalization is part of a wider crisis, a malaise of modernity that includes killing sprees by disturbed young Americans. The trouble is that in a time of heightened tensions, with opinion furiously polarized, frank discussion of social pathology is seldom welcome. Increasingly, any suggestion that the West is implicated in the rise of Islamist militancy is liable to be excoriated as appeasement of evil. Before he came to power David Cameron described Britain as a “broken society.”
Now, responding to what many want to hear, he is more prone to speak of Britain as a great country. In the UK, as elsewhere, there is a closing of ranks and a closing of minds. Even inside the reputedly “progressive” Labour Party some believe that the party was defeated in the recent UK general election because it failed to appear sufficiently patriotic.
Samuel Johnson’s jibe that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” is much quoted. What is certain is that it does little to promote understanding and can all too easily shade into nationalism, an unthinking belief in “my country right or wrong.”
It is ironic perhaps that even as he admonishes Muslims to be good British citizens, David Cameron is demanding the release of the interminably delayed Chilcot report into the Iraq war which may underline that the UK political establishment is not without responsibility for the grim turn that events have taken. The expectation is that the report will have damning things to say about former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior British figures who endorsed a military intervention based on manipulated intelligence and now seen as an act of catastrophic folly.
The Iraq war is not the sole cause of radicalization — but neither is it irrelevant to the issue. Publication of the Chilcot report could help to bring closure to a toxic episode that has done more than a little to spawn the anger and alienation out of which radicalization may spring.
