War balls

Rod Liddle scorns the government’s belief that white grannies are as likely to be terrorists as young Asian men At times like this you look for clarity of purpose from your government. And what you get, instead, is Hazel Blears. This is what our junior Home Office minister had to say on the Today programme about police stop-and-search operations. Should Muslims be targeted, she was asked by the presenter, Carolyn Quinn.

‘I have never, ever endorsed that,’ said Ms Blears. ‘I don’t think you should be ruling out anybody in terms of how you exercise stop-and-search powers. You can equally have white people who could be the subject of intelligence you have got. So I don’t think it’s right simply to target groups.’ It was pretty early in the morning and I didn’t entirely trust that I was hearing things right. She couldn’t really be that stupid, could she? So I dragged myself out of bed, sat down next to the radio and turned the volume up. On she went.

‘Just picking people up on the basis that they are Muslim is never going to get the results that we want,’ she added. And later she insisted that when preparing to stop and search people, the police ‘should not discriminate’.

It’s an interesting approach to policing, isn’t it, the ‘no discrimination’ approach? The previous day, the boss of the British Transport Police had taken a very different approach — what we might call the ‘common sense’ approach. He suggested that his officers would be less likely to stop and search an 80-year-old white woman with a handbag than a young Muslim with a rucksack with wires sticking out of it. Presumably, now, he’ll have to rethink his policy.

Looked at from the outside, you might assume Blears is but a rogue cannon, a troubled individual perhaps only one step away from the booby hatch, such is the patent idiocy of her statements. But if you follow her government’s line of reasoning, with its politically correct cant and its tangled mess of internal contradictions and doublethink, then Hazel’s position is entirely consistent. Bonkers and potentially dangerous, perhaps — but consistent. The imperatives Hazel Blears has now placed before the police are the logical consequence of a series of mistaken assumptions made by the government both before and after 7/7 — and which seem to have been swallowed whole by the televisual media as well.

1. Islam has nothing to do with the bombings in London.

According to the Blairs — Tony and his pet rozzer, Sir Ian — the bombings were carried out by mere ‘criminals’ and had nothing to do with Islam, a remark Ms Blears echoed on Tuesday while addressing Muslim leaders in Oldham. Well, yes, to the first bit. But to disavow any link with Islam is clearly barmy. It is akin to suggesting that the IRA bombings had nothing to do with the cause of Irish republicanism, or that the Baader-Meinhof gang’s violence was nothing to do with their loathing of capitalism. The bombers are Islamists; had they been Methodists or Zoroastrians or Scientologists they would not have carried out the bombings. They have a disaffection for our way of life and for our foreign policy which is predicated upon their reading of the teachings of Mohammed. Al-Qa’eda’s interpretation of Islam may not find accord with that triptych of Koranic scholars, the Blairs and Hazel Blears, but it is an interpretation nonetheless — and, to my mind, a valid one. Islam was the motor which drove the bombers to Liverpool Street and Edgware Road, content in the belief that they would achieve the status of martyrs: why deny this when it is so clearly the case?

2. The Muslim community is moderate; it abhors violence. The trouble comes from a tiny handful of extremists.

Another shibboleth uttered as a matter of course at the end of every news report about the bombings and repeated, ad infinitum, by our government politicians.

But what, exactly, do we mean by extreme and what do we mean by moderate? There was a row, a little while ago, over the planned visit to this country of the ‘renowned Muslim cleric’ Sheik Yusuf alQaradawi. Lots of people were angry that Mr al-Qaradawi was on his way here because of his supposedly ‘extreme’ views. ‘Destroy the usurper Jews!’ he has howled in the past. He supports the Muslim government in Sudan, described homosexuality as an ‘abominable practice’ and sanctioned the death penalty or flogging for those who care to partake of its pleasures. He suggested that the tsunami which struck Asia at Christmas was ‘deserved punishment’ from Allah because the countries afflicted were ‘centres of immorality, decadence and perversion’. (He’ll be referring to those infamous Banda Aceh fleshpots, then.) The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has stoically defended the man as a ‘moderate’ — and, the depressing thing is, Ken is right. Within the world of Islam, al-Qaradawi is indeed a moderate, a man who holds out the metaphorical olive branch to the West and has condemned the atrocities of 9/11 and 7/7. He’s even a moderate on the thorny issue of the chastisement of errant women — you can smack them about a bit, he has ordained, but you shouldn’t use a stick. The learned Dr Iqbal Sacranie is a leading British moderate Muslim. He’s so moderate he was actually knighted for being unequivocally, agreeably moderate. But what, actually, are his views? He is on record as saying this about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie: ‘Death, perhaps, is too easy for him.’ In 1996 he attacked the British Board of Deputies for objecting to a meeting planned in Britain to be addressed by another renowned Islamic moderate, Osama bin Laden. You shouldn’t diss Islamic scholars, an angry Iqbal lectured the Jews, so let Ossie in. And then there’s the faintly ludicrous Inayat Bunglawala, an implacably moderate spokesman for the very moderate Muslim Council of Britain. ‘The creation of Israel was a terrible mistake,’ he once glumly announced. One could go on and on. Within the world of Islam, these people are indeed moderate but not as we know the term, Jim. Muslims in Britain are opposed to suicide bombers? No, they’re not. Not all of them, at least, by a long shot. The last opinion poll suggested half of them supported such actions against the state of Israel. I don’t have the figures for their views on what should happen to apostates, homosexuals and uppity, errant women.

3. The fact that the 7/7 bombings were carried out by British-born Muslims is a grave shock.

The nationality of the bombers was, according to two newspapers and all of our government’s politicians, ‘the nightmare scenario’. It came, apparently, as a bolt from the blue. Well it would do, wouldn’t it, if you’re gullible enough to swallow statements 1) and 2) above? Together with the platitudinous, meaningless suffix that Islam is a ‘peaceful’ religion. (Compared to what, by the way? Not compared to Buddhism or Shinto or Hinduism or Humanism. And scarcely compared even to Christianity.) I suspect that most people in the country were not the least bit surprised that the bombers came from Leeds rather than Rabat. One man certainly wasn’t surprised: he said, in a pub meeting last year, surreptitiously recorded by the BBC, that Britain would soon suffer a terrorist atrocity carried out by homegrown British Muslim terrorists. And for those words, he was arrested for inciting racial hatred: his name, Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP. What a strange court case that will turn out to be — excellent publicity, one way or another, for the BNP, leastways.

4. The war against Iraq had nothing to do with the bombings in London.

An interesting one, this. According to everybody who supported the war against Iraq, it had nothing to do with the bombings — they would have occurred anyway. According to virtually all of those who opposed the war, the bombings were a direct consequence of it. Neither position is true. The war against Iraq made it more likely that we would be a target for terrorism, but that surely does not mean that the war against Iraq was de facto wrong. It is a non sequitur. One can oppose the war, as I did, for perfectly valid reasons; but ad hoc terrorist attacks upon Britain should not be one of them, unless you are an amoral coward. But by the same token it is ludicrous to suggest that the war did not influence alQa’eda’s choice of target.

And there we are. If you swallow the obviously mistaken propositions 1 and 2, then it makes it more likely that you will argue for the police to be ‘non-discriminatory’ when they carry out their stop-andsearch operations. And if you swallow 1 and 2, then proposition 3 will indeed be a grave shock to you.

Of course, most British Muslims abhorred the events of 7/7. So too, by the way, did those Islamist ‘extremists’ Hizb utTahrir. Equally, police trying to stop us being blown to pieces should target suspicious-looking Muslims rather than frisking white bourgeois grannies. They’ll have more luck, by my reckoning. And in the long term we should attempt to counter the central tenets of Islam, the ideology, the motor behind the bombings. That does not mean persecuting individuals whom the government and the Muslim Council of Britain consider ‘extreme’; it means leaving the individuals alone and concentrating on the disaffection with our way of life which, to a greater or lesser extent, is shared by the Muslim majority in the UK — and beyond. Outside the Tube station platforms, it is a simple battle of ideas.