A group called VoteSmart set up a website linked to the Muslim Council of Britain that asked, “Will your MP support Muslim issues in the next Parliament,” and rated them on a variety of issues from plus five to minus five.15
Some Labour MPs were the targets of gross intimidation by Muslims who decided they were not acting in Muslim interests and accordingly organized campaigns to unseat them. Lorna Fitzsimons, for example, the Labour MP for the northern town of Rochdale, lost her seat to the Liberal Democrats after the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK) sponsored hundreds of leaflets that wrongly claimed she was Jewish and called on residents to vote against her. One leaflet said: “Lorna Fitzsimons is an ardent Zionist and a member of the most powerful anti-Muslim lobby in the world, the Israel lobby.” Told that she was not Jewish, MPACUK issued a statement apologizing for any “offence” caused.16
Mike Gapes, MP for the east London suburb of Ilford South, told the House of Commons how Muslim groups were trying to unseat him because he was an officer of the Parliamentary Labour Friends of Israel and supported both a two-state solution in the Middle East and the government’s antiterrorist legislation. After being harangued and harassed in the street with taunts of “Racist,” “Murderer” and “How many children have you killed today?” he was sent a distorted digest of his views by Inayat Bunglawala, the public affairs officer of the Muslim Council of Britain and his constituent, with the implied threat that this would be used to persuade Ilford’s Muslims not to vote for him.
Following this, leaflets were distributed with the heading “Mike Gapes: No Friend of the Muslims” and stating among other things: “Note there are 300,000 Jews in Britain but over 2 million Muslims in Britain. The Jewish community has over 20 declared MPs while the Muslims have only one MP.” A further batch of leaflets included a photograph of an Israeli tank and a Palestinian boy throwing a stone at it, along with other, similarly inflammatory pictures. The wording said: “Getting rid of Mike Gapes will send a massive shock wave throughout the pro-Israel lobby and make it clear that Muslims are not to be trifled with.”17
Gapes was interviewed by Faisal Bodi for the BBC Radio program The World Tonight. Unknown to Gapes, as he subsequently told the Commons, Bodi was a Hamas supporter who had previously written an article published in the Guardian stating that Israel had no right to exist. The Bodi item transmitted by the BBC show allowed Gapes’s opponents to state without challenge that he was an “Islamophobe” and “a proven enemy of Muslims.” Following complaints, the BBC decided not to use Bodi again; after which he wrote a two-page attack published in the Guardian, singling out Gapes for having gotten Bodi “banned” by the BBC.18
In 2003, the government’s pusillanimity in the face of such intimidation claimed a ministerial scalp. Denis MacShane, then a junior Foreign Office minister, accused British Muslims of failing to do enough to counter extremism and suggested that some were aggravating terrorism by showing understanding for the politics of terror. “It is time for the elected and community leaders of British Muslims to make a choice,” he said. “It is the British way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests, or it is the way of the terrorists against [whom] the whole democratic world is now uniting.”19
MacShane’s comments enraged Muslims in his northern constituency of Rotherham and were criticized as “an outrage and extremely disgraceful” by Anas al-Tikriti of the Muslim Association of Britain.20 But what finished him was being hung out to dry by the Labour government of which he was a member. Having been made to grovel to both the MCB and the MAB, he was then stripped of his ministerial post. The reason for this shameful capitulation almost certainly did not lie in Rotherham but in Blackburn, where the foreign secretary was struggling with a Muslim bloc formed from his own Muslim activists. MacShane was the bone that Straw threw them to save his own political skin.
The extent to which a panicky Labour government was going to appease the Muslim bloc was laid bare in an article published in The Muslim Weekly a few months before the 2005 general election. In this another minister, Mike O’Brien, pleaded for votes by boasting of the lengths to which the government had gone to accede to British Muslim demands. Two weeks after the Muslim Council of Britain had asked for a new law banning religious discrimination, he said, Tony Blair promised he would provide it. “It was,” wrote O’Brien, “a major victory for the Muslim community in Britain.”21
This was the proposed law against incitement to religious hatred, which provoked widespread opposition because of fears that it would criminalize legitimate comments about religion. In February 2006, it was defeated in Parliament by a combination of rebellion in Labour’s ranks and tactical incompetence by the government. But a law that had the power to shut down necessary debate about Islam, and potentially put Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, secularists and others in the dock for speaking the truth, had been introduced to buy Muslim votes. The price to be paid for invading Iraq, in other words, was to have been Britain’s freedom of speech.
Even worse, O’Brien appeared to be openly pandering to Muslim anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice. He wrote: “The reality is that the only way a Palestinian state will be created is if Israel is prepared to concede land it currently occupies on the West Bank and Gaza. Whether we in Britain like it or not, the reality of the modern world is that only the Americans can influence Israel. And it seems only Tony Blair has any influence with the Americans.”22 With these words, O’Brien lent the British government’s authority to the prejudice that the Middle East impasse was Israel’s fault. He made no mention of the need to stop Arab and Muslim terror as a precondition to peace and a Palestinian state. Instead, he tried to turn Blair’s support for Bush on its head by claiming that only Blair was worth the Muslims’ vote because only Blair could put pressure on the Americans to bring Israel to heel.
As if all this weren’t bad enough, O’Brien then implied heavily that Muslims should not vote for Michael Howard, the Conservative opposition leader at the time, because he was a Jew. He wrote:Ask yourself, what will Michael Howard do for British Muslims? Will his foreign policy aim to help Palestine? Will he promote legislation to protect you from religious hatred and discrimination? Will he give you the choice of sending your children to a faith school? Will he stand up for the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab? Will he really fight for Turkey, a Muslim country, to join the EU? These are not academic questions. Remember, the last thing we want is to vote in anger and repent at leisure as Michael Howard, with a big smile on his face, walks through the door of No 10.23
O’Brien denied pandering to anti-Jewish prejudice, claiming that he was not attacking Howard personally but as leader of the Conservative party. But in fact the Conservatives, who called this attack “despicable,” said they actually supported most of the policies he listed. Small wonder that Mohammad Sawalah, the deputy head of the Muslim League in Britain, gloated: “Such Muslim campaigns have actually paid off and scared away the Zionist lobby and the extremist right—wing.”24
The Labour party, in short, had been taken captive by the constituency for whose votes it was groveling.
There was, however, an even deeper problem than crude electoral politics that was preventing Britain from facing up to Islamist extremism even after the London bombings. This was a profound reluctance among the official class—the senior civil servants who run the country and the intelligence world that guards it—to acknowledge the true nature of the threat. Crucially, these officials appeared incapable of recognizing that behind the terror lay an ideology whose grip extended far beyond those who were actually engaged in terrorism. They did not grasp that this had created a hysterical communal fervor made up of grievance, victimization and paranoia in the holy cause of defending God against the infidels, which was swelling the sea in which terrorism swam.
Instead, they thought al-Qaeda was a protest movement. An unprecedentedly dangerous one, certainly, but a protest movement nevertheless, inspired by certain discrete grievances around the wor
ld. The idea that those grievances were all linked by an ideology that had made them into grievances in the first place was simply denied. “We don’t know what these people actually want,” they said. But wasn’t it clear that al-Qaeda wanted to Islamize the world? Not so, they said, it was all very incoherent beyond wanting to restore the medieval Islamic caliphate. But there was no threat to Britain or America as such, no intention to Islamize those countries or destroy Western civilization; just a set of specific geopolitical grievances over which America and Britain were being attacked because they were on the wrong side. Whatever this was, it was not a religious war.25
Such arguments revealed a lethal ignorance at the very heart of the British political and security establishment. These were the people who ran Britain, who were responsible for its security and provided the analysis that underpinned its whole strategy for combating Islamist extremism. Yet in saying that this terrorism was all about specific grievances, they failed to look more deeply into the motivation to purify the world of non-Islamic tendencies. To deny that these were all fundamentally religious conflicts was to reveal an astounding misreading of those conflicts.
And to say that al-Qaeda had never expressed a desire to Islamize the non-Muslim world simply wasn’t true. In his “Letter to the American People” in 2002, for example, after a long litany of global grievances Osama bin Laden announced what he wanted of the West: “The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.” This was at the very top of his list of demands. Straight after that came this:The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you. . . . We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest. We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.26
There was much more in this vein. It was only a long way down this diatribe against the Western way of life and his demand that the West embrace instead the principles of Islam that he arrived at the demand to stop supporting Israel, Kashmir and so forth, and to get out of “Muslim lands.”
By focusing on the geopolitical grievances, therefore, the British were mistaking the satellites for the sun. Despite their avowals that this was a completely new phenomenon, they seemed to be still trapped in the Northern Ireland mindset. This was not surprising, since so many of them had forged their careers in the crucible of Northern Ireland’s bloody terrorist war against the British state. That really was a discrete geopolitical grievance. Although it was fought out between Catholic republicans and Protestant nationalists, this was not a religious but a political war. The aim of Irish republicanism was not to Catholicize Britain—or even the six counties of Northern Ireland—but to unify Ireland by ending British “colonial” rule over the north.
This was completely different from Islamism, which aimed to spread Islam to a world that had either departed from or never embraced its precepts. What Britain was now facing, therefore, was a war prosecuted in the name of religion. But the British simply refused point-blank to accept this. They were terrified that if they did so, they would be effectively demonizing an entire community. Yet this did not follow at all. Islamism is a particular interpretation of authentic Islamic principles. This does not mean that all Muslims subscribe to this interpretation; indeed, many do not, which is why the greatest number of victims of Islamist oppression have been Muslims. Many British Muslims repudiate Islamism and themselves need to be defended against this life-denying ideology. But this in turn does not mean that the ideology is not rooted in the religion. If the Islamist nature of the terrorism is denied, it is not understood; and a country cannot defend itself or its citizens, Muslim as well as non-Muslim, against a phenomenon that it refuses to understand or even name.
The British establishment is unfortunately locked into just such a lethal state of denial. With very few exceptions, politicians, Whitehall officials, senior police and intelligence officers and academic experts have all failed to grasp a key fact. It is not only the terrorists who have a totally nonnegotiable agenda; they are fueled by an ideology that itself is nonnegotiable and forms a continuum that links peaceful, law-abiding but nevertheless intensely ideological Muslims at one end and murderous jihadists at the other. Transfixed by the artificial division it has erected between those who actively espouse violence and those who do not, the British establishment rejects the idea that the hatred of the Jews, Israel, America and the West that suffuses the utterances of the Muslim Brotherhood forms an ideological conveyor belt to the terrorism to which it gives rise.
The result of this institutionalized denial has been that the British government has settled upon a disastrously misguided strategy. Believing that Islamist terrorism is merely about grievances, it thinks it can appease Muslim rage in Britain by pandering to extremism. The head of the civil service, Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell, caused widespread astonishment when the Civil Service Islamic Society, of which he is patron, invited an extremist cleric, Sheikh Abu Yusuf, to address senior officials at a Whitehall function to mark Eid. Sheikh Yusuf had praised Muslims who shed blood in the cause of jihad and had made jokes about “Jew York, sorry, New York.”27 The invitation was abruptly canceled after it was exposed in the press.
But the government’s strategy of appeasement goes much deeper than such gestures. Dismissing the idea that this is a religious war and that ideology is its principal weapon, the government thinks it can prevent young Muslims from falling into the clutches of al-Qaeda by promoting nonviolent religious extremists. And so, far from regarding the Muslim Brothers as a seditious force imperiling the country, it is recruiting them into the heart of the establishment.
In 2004, leaked briefing papers from the apex of government laid this appeasement strategy bare. A paper sent by Sir Andrew Turnbull, who as cabinet secretary was head of the civil service, to John Gieve, who was the permanent secretary or top civil servant in the Home Office, revealed the government’s counterterrorism strategy, Operation Contest. The aim, it said, was “to prevent terrorism by tackling its underlying causes, to work together to resolve regional conflicts to support moderate Islam and reform, and to diminish support for terrorists by influencing relevant social and economic issues.”28
The problem was its definition of “underlying causes.” These did not include religious ideology. Instead, the paper identified British foreign policy and discrimination and poverty among British Muslims. So instead of challenging the grievance culture that lay at the root of Islamist extremism, the government chose to endorse it. Far from challenging the Muslim community to sort itself out, its questions were all as self-flagellatory as they were agonized. Was the government listening enough to Muslims? Was it communicating the right messages, both to and about Muslims? And even more ominously: “Foreign policy—should our stance (e.g. on MEPP [Middle East peace process] or Kashmir) be influenced more by these concerns?”29
In reply, John Gieve voiced the governing concern of British officials that extremism could not be confronted without the cooperation of British Muslims, and that this provided “added reason for tackling their ‘social exclusion.’ ”30 But what if they would not cooperate because the extremism was more widely and deeply seated than the government acknowledged? And what if their “social exclusion” had come about, not through any sin of omission or commission by the British state, but through their own wish to exclude themselves from it because they were hostile to its whole way of life?
None of this occurred to John Gieve. The Home Office program was based, he said, on dialogue with the police, engagement with young Muslims, combating “Islamophobia,” enlisting “MPs with large Muslim constituencies as partners in Government’s dialogue”—the very MPs, no doubt, who had been targeted for intimida
tion by Islamist radicals—and circulating to government departments “guidance on Muslim sensitivities and appropriate non-inflammatory terminology.”
Worse was to come in the accompanying paper Gieve sent to Turnbull written jointly by the Home Office and the Foreign Office, “Young Muslims and Extremism.”31 Not once did any of these officials suggest challenging the concept of a “truly globalised community,” the ummah, which sets up a conflict with the West. Nor did they confront the myths and prejudices at the core of Islamist extremism, the bigotry against the Jews, the demonization of Israel, the mischaracterization of the West as a conspiracy against Islam. They averred that “public challenges to Muslims to decide where their loyalties lie are counterproductive.” 32
Instead, the government would take on “Islamophobia” by combating “distorted public and media perceptions of Islam and Muslims” and collaborating with “moderate Muslim bodies,” amongst which it counted the Muslim Council of Britain. Even more dangerously, it suggested that the government should “encourage, assist and promote mainstream Muslim communication channels, i.e. radio stations, newspapers aimed at British Muslims, and television channels.”33 But Muslim newspapers and TV channels such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabbiya actively spread distortions about the West and provide a powerful emotional stimulus to the call to jihad.
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