Posted on 07/03/2006 9:41:36 AM PDT by aculeus
On 14 July 2005 the Times published a photograph of a thoughtful young man at work in a Yorkshire classroom. Mohammad Sidique Khan was pictured, purse-lipped and neatly bearded, in the school where he was employed as a teaching mentor. Khan’s CV was one of which any parent might be proud. The son of a foundry worker who had emigrated from Pakistan, Khan was born in Leeds, where he succeeded at school and went on to univer-sity. Happily married, and a regular worshipper at his local mosque, Khan’s work seemed designed to allow others to enjoy the British dream. His professional life was dedicated to helping the children of recent immigrants make the most of the opportunities open to them in the United Kingdom.
That life ended, however, at 8.50 a.m. on 7 July 2005, when Mohammad Sidique Khan detonated an explosive device on the Circle Line train heading west out of Edgware Road station. Khan and three others — Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Husain and Jermaine Lindsay — blew themselves up that morning in the first successful suicide bombing attack in the British Isles; 52 people were killed and more than 700 injured.
In the year since then our public conversation has, unsurprisingly, been dominated by questions of security and identity. But what has been most striking about the conversation is how quickly it has become diverted into an interrogation of those who seek, however imperfectly, to defend us rather than an examination of what moves those who threaten us. The question of whether or not the Metropolitan Police’s principal anti-terrorist officer should or should not receive a CBE has occupied more airtime than the question of what ideology motivates mass murderers.
The Metropolitan Police are under scrutiny as never before, following the tragic death of Jean Charles de Menezes and the botched raid in Forest Gate. But while those protesting against the Forest Gate raid chose to show solidarity with the grieving de Menezes family by sporting Brazilian football shirts bearing the dead man’s name, how many of the names of the 52 who died on 7 July 2005 have been given anything like the same prominence? The least we owe those who died that day is a serious commitment to understand what drove their killers, and a determination to tackle the ideology which guided deliberately murderous minds.
Nowhere has moral clarity been more lacking in British state policy over the last ten to 15 years than in our approach to the Islamist threat. Three particular errors have characterised our mistaken approach.
The first error has been the willingness to extend a ‘covenant of security’ to known Islamist activists within the UK.
The second error has been the determined minimisation of the Islamist terror threat. Instead of recognising the scale of the challenge mounted by political Islam, the British state persisted for years in believing that those who posed a direct danger to the country were a tiny renegade minority with no important connection to a broader ideological network.
The third error has been the failure to scrutinise, monitor or check the actions, funding and operation of those committed to spreading the Islamist gospel within Britain.
All three errors are interconnected. They spring from a basic failure of political intelligence, the inability properly to conceptualise the threat we face.
The men who wrought such devastation last July were not foreign fighters prosecuting a struggle of national liberation against a colonial overlord. They had been born, nurtured and supported by Britain and its institutions. They were not desperately poor and voiceless outsiders, Franz Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’ driven to violence because no other option lay open to them to secure justice. They had enjoyed the freedoms and opportunities of the West, holding down respected jobs and living lives of relative comfort. And they were not psychopaths, or empty nihilists who found in violence an end in itself. As they themselves made clear, they saw their violence serving a cause and a purpose higher than themselves. As Khan himself proclaimed, in a videotape broadcast after his death, ‘We are at war and I am a soldier.’
[snip]
This is an edited extract from Celsius 7/7 published this week by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The author is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath and a Times columnist.
The PC types will sharpen the knives used to behead us. Profiling is a good, life saving tool.
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