The event was held at the “7/7” memorial site in Hyde Park — what must be one of the ugliest memorials, consisting of 52 steel pillars representing those who died. Survivors and their families laid flowers by the pillars, and a wreath was laid in the name of Cameron, who as already stated was not there personally. The government claims that they did not hold any kind of official event because survivors and their families had said that “after five years, they no longer look to government to lead the commemorations. They prefer to remember their loved ones in their own way”. However, the father of one of the dead called it “disappointing” and a woman who lost her leg at Aldgate said that a group she belongs to had contacted the Department for Culture, Media and Support to ask what they were planning to do and was told “they were not prepared to do anything because there will be plenty of anniversaries”.

Clearly, the mood has changed somewhat; it seems that the new government isn’t willing to claim the mess of the old one as its own, even though they actually supported both the Afghan and the Iraq war. Perhaps they suppose that getting rid of New Labour marks some sort of fresh start, but some of the worst aspects of how the attack affected the atmosphere in the UK could be seen in the Tory-associated press and think tanks. It hasn’t been the Daily Mirror, for the most part (as dreadful a paper as it’s become since the departure of Piers Morgan), which has spread the inflammatory stories about this and that concession being made to Muslims at others’ expense, which often prove to be wholly or partly untruthful.

We saw another of them yesterday: a swimming pool whose windows had been obscured with translucent film because, supposedly, Muslims had complained that people could see them in a state of semi-undress from outside. However, according to the Daily Mirror, most, as opposed to all, of the complaints came from Muslims according to a local council official. The blog Tabloid Watch exposed the story, which originated with a small number of complaints which got reported in the local media and were repeated in the stories in the national press, along with quotes from a spokesman for the “Taxpayers’ Alliance” who seemed not to have been to the affected swimming pool (the TPA did not respond to enquiries as to whether he had been). The point is that the majority’s needs appeared to have been sacrificed to an unworthy minority, when in fact the number of complaints about the film on the windows had been tiny.

There was story after story about Muslims receiving “special treatment” and the general attitude seemed (and to some extent still seems) as though Muslims weren’t worthy of decent treatment, let alone special treatment. Besides the “special treatment” front-page outrage stories, we’ve seen the front-page rants against niqabi women, the “insiders” with disparaging things to say about Muslims and what Muslims say when in each other’s company, several of whose stories didn’t add up and at least one of whom was proved to be a liar. We’ve had the think-tank “exposés” based on inaccurate information supplied by people with an axe to grind, and we had the lengthy, defamatory articles in the Telegraph and Spectator, in the latter case by writers hired by Boris Johnson, now mayor of London. None of it was entirely new (the ravings of Harry “Will” Cummins in the Sunday Telegraph appeared a year before the bombings) but it certainly escalated, and it appeared that Muslims were fair game.

Labour responded weakly with a “religious hatred” law, ostensibly an extension of the existing race-hate law to religious groups, but it was watered down by abusive or insulting words being removed as criteria, leaving only threatening ones. Surely, the criteria should be whether the claim is true or not: a generalisation about a whole group based on a small group from among them, or where more than one group is involved but only one is mentioned in a story, or other important facts are played down or an unverifiable claim is presented prominently as fact, and the effect of the story is to attract hostility to a particular group, it should surely meet the criteria for religious hatred and some sort of sanction should apply, and if the guilty party is a newspaper, the sanction should include suspending their circulation.

Perhaps the reason nobody really wants to commemorate the bombings is that people realise that British culture gained nothing much positive from it; in fact, it caused an awful lot of bitterness as various groups attacked others on certain blogs and in newspaper articles for supposedly using “root causes” to justify acts of terrorism. It brought about no significant political change, and when an innocent person was gunned down by police on the Tube two weeks and a day later, not a single person even lost their job. All in all, given the poisonous effect it had on the culture, no good can really come of reminding people of it again, so leaving the ceremony to the families was probably the best idea.

I wrote about my day that day here; there is an article on the subject on MuslimMatters today and a review by Peter Oborne of a new book on the effect of the bombings on the Muslim community here.

So there will never be justice, but there can be the other thing so badly wanted and needed by the victims; the truth to be told, and the best way for that to happen - for the complex picture of what was known, by whom and when, what decisions were made, such as deciding not to prioritise the men who became the 7/7 bombers as investigative targets and so on - is to have an independent inquiry.

An inquiry independent of the government and the security services and the police, with the power to compel and cross examine witnesses, go through evidence in detail, and write a report and recommendations which will be acted upon and so, we hope, save lives and spare suffering in future. This is what we have asked for, for over three years now. We have been prevented from having one because of the legal processes - the trials that have followed 7/7, as a result of which some men have been jailed for planning terror offences and others have been acquitted. Now those trials are completed, we are still waiting.

The families still wait for inquests - unsure still when they will happen and whether they will be held in secret or not - under the terms of the Coroners and Justice Bill legislation.

The survivors and families wait - along with the British public - for the ISC report, to see if this time it answers our questions about what was known about the bombers before they struck. And all of us wait, not for justice, nor for ‘closure’ - this is not therapy, this is thankless hard and sad work, especially today, when it is my wedding anniversary and I have cancelled the celebrations to go and talk about this yet again on the news and Newsnight - but I wait, we wait for the truth to finally be told, in the hope that, one day soon, it will.

A significant point she makes is that the 2005 bombers were not, as politicians claimed at the time, “clean skins” — Siddique Khan in particular was well-known to the security services, was close to people who were plotting to let off a fertiliser bomb, had been taped talking about jihad (presumably, not just in theory — otherwise he would have been by no means alone in this) and had perpetrated a £20,000 fraud against the Jewsons building supplies company. Of course, it’s next to impossible to be a “clean skin” by the time you get to let off a bomb, as you will no doubt have been mixing with people known to the authorities if they are doing their job properly, but the idea that terrorists could come out of nowhere — that any Muslim could be a terrorist — obviously contributes to the air of suspicion against Muslims in general.

Time magazine was interviewing a friend of Shehzad Tanweer, the Aldgate tube bomber, outside King Kebab in the centre of what it described as “the rundown Beeston area of Leeds”. Nearby, the Washington Post (its verdict: “a hard-luck neighbourhood”) had found a local shopkeeper who knew the Tanweer family well. Meanwhile, the Boston Globe was a few minutes away in Holbeck, hearing about the Tavistock Square bus bomber Halib Hussain’s startling change from beer-drinking girl-chaser to bearded, devout Muslim. Along each terrace of red-brick houses in south Leeds, reporters moved door-to-door. TV satellite trucks and a spaghetti of cables seemed to be around every corner. This was in the days following the 7/7 attacks in London, but by the end of the month CNN’s senior London bureau correspondent, Nic Robertson - questioned by a studio audience in Washington for the network’s On The Story slot - said that the people of Leeds did not know how to talk about what had happened. “They didn’t want to implicate themselves and their community by explaining things. They were quite withdrawn.” Their sudden withdrawal was more a reaction to a couple of weeks of relentless onslaught. A similar backlash was reported in Dunblane, and also in Liverpool after Hillsborough. In Yorkshire, when the world’s print and broadcast media finally moved on, the local Asian newspapers were left trying to combat interview fatigue and - worryingly - a sudden distrust of journalists. … [One local reporter] found a “crazed media cavalry” elbowing each other outside one house, “trying to get old photographs, trying to get things out of people they didn’t want to give”. After a while, she says, many locals were not coming out of their houses. They were frightened a reporter would grab them on the way to the corner shop. In nearby Dewsbury and its sister town, Batley, Awaaz (printed in English, Urdu and Gujarati) reported that the international media was “ransacking” the community for information. And many of the big names - the New York Times, CNN, Fox News - were asking Awaaz for help in obtaining that information.

Free registration required, but a highly interesting article.

The Guardian recently carried two related depressing stories about the Muslim community here and terrorism. The first was that, according to some survey carried out by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, British Muslims had more negative views about their non-Muslim fellow citizens than do Muslims in Europe and more likely to believe conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks (PDF of survey results here, press release here). The second had to do with the circle surrounding two of the four men who carried out the July bombings last year: their non-Muslim computer technician tried to alert the authorities to the nature of the materials he was putting out on their behalf, but it appears nobody paid him any attention (as you might expect, Melanie Phillips has already picked up on this story and is using it as part of her anti-multicultural diatribe; for anyone who thought she had gone quiet over the past week, she has simply changed blogging tools and her new diary is here). (More: Opinionated Voice, Harry’s Place.)

As a Muslim who has harboured more than a few conspiracy theories myself, I’d like to make the point that what should be of concern is not that Muslims are unwilling to believe the official story about such events, which has been used to justify destructive actions in the Muslim world and impingements on Muslim civil liberties at home, and more willing to believe that they were government or intelligence service set-ups, but that some Muslims are more willing to believe stupid and fantastic conspiracy theories than reasonable ones. With regard to 9/11, a number of Muslims I met insisted that the attacks on the World Trade Centre were carried out using remote-controlled drone aircraft and missiles and that the real planes had somehow been diverted and sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic. There was even a book published which claimed that the collapse of the towers was caused by some sort of truck bomb, despite the obvious evidence of the planes crashing into the towers, in front of thousands of witnesses, and the fact that they collapsed from the top, not the bottom. This chimes with the tendency of some Islamophobic writers to disregard reports of the excellent characters of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and the Sahaba, and substitute imaginings, one of the most common being that the battle of Badr was no more than a raid on a Meccan caravan.

A more reasonable thesis involved people carrying out these attacks on behalf of people they thought were al-Qa’ida but were actually agents provocateurs, and given the fact of intelligence agencies circulating in the community and entrapping Muslims into terrorist plots (see last entry) and then telling the police, who can blame anyone for suspecting that such an agent might have instigated a real terrorist attack if his masters had desired to carry one out? I mentioned this particular theory to one brother (a middle-aged man of Carribean origin) who clung to the “drone theory”; he told me that it was part of imaan (faith) not to believe what the kufaar (non-believers) say about Muslims. And it is the nature of Muslims not to believe such things about other Muslims without evidence, and this is in effect what Muslims were being asked to do in the aftermath of 9/11. Some Muslims did believe that it was simply an al-Qa’ida conspiracy, and others (like me) have come to do so since, now that there is more evidence that it was just that.

The Tel Aviv pizza parlour bombing in 2003 and the July 2005 attacks also produced their fair share of conspiracy theories. The theories surrounding the Tel Aviv incident were based on the fact that one of the two perpetrators, Asif Hanif, was known not to have been involved in “radical Islamist” groups when in the UK; indeed, he was known to despise them. Of course he had contacts with them; they were all over the place and any active Muslim would have met a few Muhajiroun in his or her time. The fact is that Asif Hanif regularly attended the sort of gatherings which anyone of a “Salafi-jihadi” tendency would not have been able to sit through. I have spoken to others who knew of the events surrounding the two men’s departure from Damascus, who told me that one of them borrowed money before leaving. Most Muslims would not dream of borrowing money with the intention never to pay it back. The only explanation I can think of for Asif’s apparent conversion from Sufi-oriented mainstream Islam to Hamas is that it happened in Damascus, possibly by watching reports of the Palestinian situation on local TV. But until I saw on TV the notorious “sicko” video the two men made, I fully believed they had been set up.

Like a lot of such surveys, this one has a piddlingly small figure of people quoted: the total number of those polled in the UK is 902, of which 412 are Muslims, polled by telephone during April 2006. (The figure for the UK is on page 39 of the PDF download of the survey results.) There are strange inconsistencies in the results: for example, 71% of British Muslims said they felt favourable towards Christians (pp43-44), and strangely only 65% of British Muslims said they felt favourable towards Arabs (p46). Where does that come from? The survey did not ask Muslims if they were favourable towards Westerners, or the general population. It did say that, while a majority of British people, and British Muslims, thought relations “between Muslims around the world and people in Western countries such as the United States and Europe” were generally bad (a little over 60% in both cases), 48% of the British people surveyed, and only 11% of the Muslims, blamed westerners - not a surprise at all, because they may well have been thinking of politicians rather than ordinary people, a distinction the survey does not appear to make (p47). Surprisingly, 59% of the British Muslims thought that democracy would work well in Muslim countries (60% of the British surveyed thought the same; p46). Of the factors the Muslims blamed for the lack of prosperity in Muslim countries, 27% blamed lack of education and 37% blamed government corruption; 17%, a lesser number than I would have imagined, blamed American or western policy (p48). They also asked what characteristics Muslims and non-Muslims in various countries associated with each other (pp51-57); a majority of non-Muslims in all the western countries mentioned did not associate respect for women with Muslims, but 57% of the non-Muslims in Nigeria did (p57). I wonder what that says about the culture there, given that the country is commonly associated with Shari’a hard-luck cases involving women pregnant out of wedlock.

Yesterday’s Guardian carried an article about how the computer expert who worked with, and produced videos for, a group including two of the men who were involved in the July 2005 London bombings. The article by Ed Vulliamy is here, and an interview with him is here. No doubt a lot of people will develop 20-20 hindsight over this, but taped lectures with a violent content by such people as Abdullah Faisal were well known well before 9/11, never mind July 2005. A common feature of the content of Faisal’s tapes and the attitudes Gilbertson heard was the tendency to consider other Muslims as non-Muslims: Gilberson talks of Muhammad Siddique Khan having to be “re-converted”, while Faisal insisted that anyone who disagreed with him on some preacher being a kafir was himself a kafir. Why the intelligence services lost the information Gilbertson provided for them I can’t speculate, but the fact that it was not direct evidence that an act of terrorism was being plotted, and that the people involved were willing to trust a non-Muslim to put their propaganda together for them, spring to mind. The fact that two of the people involved had their computers seized by the police suggests that the authorities were not entirely looking the other way.

Rachel from north London: This is an insult

The rumours have been flying around London. As ever, the Evening Standard passed judgement on the man, calling him a “bomber” (dead men can’t sue), which no doubt sold many papers to people who then got the “suspected” bit in the small print. In a particular restaurant I went to, I heard it from someone who thought he knew what he was talking about that the staff had been tipped off and that the police had got their man. Then we hear that he was thought not to have a bomb, and now we know they got the wrong man.

Well, you can never be too careful, can you? I mean, never mind a bomb, the guy might have been carrying a table leg.

In the wake of a second set of terrorist attempts on London, the rhetoric of pulling-together and Blitz spirit have given way to the suggestions that a crackdown on civil liberties might be inevitable and justified. A classic example of this is the twaddle in the Daily Mail today. Stop and search in the streets and on the Underground, police road blocks, snooping, increased detention powers … oh, and don’t even think of listening to the anti-racist crowd. Never mind treading on the toes of ethnic minorities or invading their “family sanctums”. This is the war on terror.

I actually went back to the bookshop to get a picture of the guy who wrote the piece in the Daily Mail. He seemed to be a middle-aged white man, which means he has no excuse for not knowing why stop-and-search became unpopular with the so-called race industry and why it was abandoned: it was used in a malicious and racist way by police and ended up causing a riot - along with the shooting of an innocent black woman which left her paralysed for life. Harrassing people in the street because of their ethnicity, or because they drive a car too flash for their apparent station in the world, is just wrong.

Who is going to be “under siege” here anyway? Eight small bombs, only four of which actually explode, is not a siege. People who cannot go out to do their lawful business without being hassled by the police (perhaps more than once per journey, rather than once every few months as is currently the case) are the ones who will feel under siege. Of course, people will usually consent to having their bags searched by the police, as long as the police are courteous, and do not betray malice, hostility or racism.

The problem is when you startle people, and then assume that their lack of co-operation constitutes guilt. People from third-world countries, or from ethnic minorities with a history of suffering police harrassment, are much less likely to trust the police than middle-class people who might perceive the police as on their side and out there to protect them. In Northern Ireland, I remember very clearly an incident of a man who was shot dead in the street by the army after refusing to stop when ordered to; this man had suffered prolonged harrassment from the army. (Cases of this happening to deaf people are not unknown either.)

One of the first things Tony Blair said in his speech after the 7th July bombings was that we would not let them change us, but the imposition of something like martial law, with a shoot-to-kill policy in the streets, would be doing just that. Londoners might get on the tubes as normal after a bombing - after all, you have to get where you’re going, don’t you? But the story would be different if this country starts looking like a locked-down military dictatorship and the people who are supposed to be protecting us from the terrorists end up shooting us in the streets themselves. Terrorists, unlike the police, don’t get the benefit of the doubt when they kill people.

Geras’ article seeks to debunk attempts to give a “root cause” for the London attacks, usually in the form of British participation in the Iraq war. Like an awful lot of the belligerent anti-appeasement literature on the internet, Geras resorts to a mixture of slanders and guilt-trips. The slander, in this case, lies in using the term “apologists”, as if suggesting a root cause, or some way by which we as a society have contributed to the situation in which we now find ourselves, is the same thing as justifying the actions.

It’s important to point out that pro-war dialectic has been characterised by rancour and character assassination. The day after Geras published his piece on so-called apologists, David T at Harry’s Place published an article on so-called “quislings”, “traitors” and “deliberate fellow travellers of theocratic fascist politics”, a “key example” being Seumas Milne of the Guardian who had written a piece accusing Tony Blair of putting his people in danger by participating in two US-led wars in the Muslim world.

The vitriolic tone of the Harry’s Place article echoes earlier fanatical pro-war writing such as Eric S Raymond’s infamous “Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto”. The manifesto alleges that “the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil”. Like Geras, Raymond confuses the society targeted by the attacks with the actual victims, a much smaller group consisting of those killed or injured, and their families, and others directly affected. I have not seen any attempt to attach blame to this group of people.

Geras compares attitudes like Milne’s and, in particular, George Galloway’s, with this scenario:

Just as if you were to hear from a distraught friend that her husband (or lover, mother, son) had just been murdered while walking in a ‘bad’ neighbourhood, and were to respond by saying how upset you were to hear it (or maybe even to give that part a miss) but that it was extremely foolish of the deceased to have been walking there on his or her own.

This is not an entirely valid comparison, because the actions of a common criminal or psychopath in a neighbourhood infested with such people are not motivated by any conviction, but most likely by greed or some perverted desire. The people who do this are individuals attacking individuals, and those individuals were the sole targets of the aggression.

In the case of terrorist attacks, the victims are the individuals killed or injured; the targets or potential victims are the society at which the attacks are aimed. In this case, we have been targeted because our leaders (and let’s be clear, whichever party was in power would have done the same) have involved us in two misguided adventures, disguised as do-gooding missions, in countries of which we as a society (and, as we now know, the said leaders) know little. It is, therefore, natural that we should debate whether we want to be put on the line for this. It is not the same as an uninvolved party lecturing the victim, or his or her family, about their foolishness in going to this or that area, which in any case is a right and proper, if foolish, thing to do. I have every right to walk through any council estate I like at any time of day or night. I don’t have the right to invade someone else’s country on a false pretext.

Later on in Geras’ entry, there appear more false parallels:

On account of the present situation in Zimbabwe, the government decides to halt all scheduled deportations of Zimbabweans who have been denied the right to remain in the UK. Some BNP thugs are made angry by this decision and they take out their anger by beating up a passer-by who happens to be an African immigrant. Can you imagine a single person of left or liberal outlook who would blame, or even partially blame, this act of violence on the government’s decision to halt the deportations, or who would urge us to consider sympathetically the root causes of the act? It wouldn’t happen, even though (ex hypothesi) the government decision is part of the causal chain leading to the violence in question. It wouldn’t happen because the anger of the thugs doesn’t begin to justify what they have done.

The comparison does not go because the “root causes” are completely different: the presence of a few hundred refugees arousing the anger of a tiny minority with a hostility to black people and other foreigners, as opposed to the bloody occupation of two countries by forces from countries with a history of aggression and imperialism. Second, the people who made the decision that made the thugs angry are not the people they attack: politicians, not African immigrants in the streets. Third, the presence of a small minority of African refugees does not result in any great hardship for the local people, as opposed to the presence of occupying troops in Iraq. Fourth, there is a moral imperative to offer sanctuary to people in demonstrable danger, and the UK is the natural place of refuge because of our self-chosen imperial links with that country. There was no moral imperative to invade Iraq, at least, no more than to invade Burma, North Korea or Zimbabwe, all of which have human rights records as bad as, or worse than, Saddam Hussain’s Iraq.

Geras then accuses the “root-causers” of being “selective in what they want us to ‘understand’”:

Did you ever hear a Jenny Tonge who empathizes with the Palestinian suicide bomber also understanding the worries of Israeli and other Jews - after the Holocaust, after the decades-long hostility of the Arab world to the State of Israel and the teaching of hatred there against Jews, after the acts of war against that state and the acts of terrorism against its citizens?

My answer: no, but I’ve come across Jewish commentators willing to excuse vastly more bloody Israeli actions than any of the so-called apologists, or for that matter Muslims living in this country even of a fundamentalist persuasion, have been willing to indulge Muslim terrorists for. These include the assassination of Shaikh Ahmed Yassin (by a bomb, not a rifle bullet, along with seven other people!) and the kidnapping of Mordechai Vanunu. The hatred taught against Jews in some Arab countries is matched by the hostility of many Zionists towards Arabs, particularly Jewish settlers in the occupied territories (many of them American Zionist fanatics). (The hostility they show to critics within their own community may be some indication of their hostility towards Arabs.)

At the end of the day, the Israelis (far more than we in the west) chose their present situation. Their antecedents chose to settle in Palestine during the British occupation, and to indulge in acts of terrorism against both the British and the local Arabs. Others chose to settle en masse there after the end of World War II (perish the thought that they might endure communism like everyone else in eastern Europe). Of course they would face hostility from the Arab inhabitants and their Arab neighbours. That’s what happens when you steal someone else’s country (regardless of whether you have the support of the five predominant imperial powers). The debate over the rights and wrongs of Palestinian resistance tactics does not detract from the reality of situation Israel has built for itself: people who occupy others’ land do not sleep peacefully, however well-armed they are.

Geras then trots out several more false comparisons about someone “triggering” someone else’s violence in some way, none of which have any application to the Iraq war or the terrorist attacks for the reasons already explained. The violence in the three situations Geras presents are examples of simply unprovoked and/or unjustified violence by individuals against individuals in reaction to trivial “provocation”. The object of all this is to demonstrate that contributing causally to violence against one does not equal moral responsibility for that violence, something nobody disagrees with even in the case of the victims of terrorism. People who seek to explain why these attacks happen do not waste their time condemning terrorism because it should go without saying. Putting bombs on the tube to kill innocent people, to say nothing of crashing aeroplanes into large buildings to kill thousands of innocent people, is wrong.

The problem is that people want us to disconnect our sufferings at the hands of terrorists with the sufferings our government’s actions cause overseas. At my school there was a bully whose modus operandi showed just such a disconnect: he would provoke someone into lashing out at him or in some way offending him, and then fly into a rage and beat that person up. On one occasion he required several people to hold him down after an incident of this kind. In our media, since 9/11 and since the London bombings, anyone suggesting that western aggressions against people in Muslim countries has the slightest role in provoking terrorist attacks against civilians here is greeted with sanctimonious outrage.

Of course it has nothing to do with the US-supported Israeli government’s curfews protecting a few hundred settlers by confining tens of thousands of locals to their homes for days on end on pain of instant death by shooting. Of course it has nothing to do with depleted uranium munitions which cause cancers which hospitals can’t treat because medication can’t be imported and the doctors are treating people in Dublin or Boston or Manchester. Of course it has nothing to do with the US air force bombing a wedding party because some local with an axe to grind told them it was a bunch of al-Qa’ida guys. No, they just hate our freedoms. They hate seeing our women not quite dressed up to their standards. They hate our music. They hate the fact that we can get rid of one bunch of useless politicians and replace them with another every five years or before, if they choose to allow us. And the canard which has got the most air time in the last month or so is “they all just want to establish a global caliphate”, which brushes under the carpet another important aspect of Muslim globalism: that of the ummah, a body which feels the pain when just one part is hurt.

And over the couple of weeks since the London bombings, these guys have been playing the media bias game as well - another favourite neo-con canard. So the BBC are loath to use the word terrorist, preferring to state the facts and call the bombers bombers. So the Guardian carries a lot of articles suggesting that our government might have laid us on the line by invading Iraq - never mind the fact that they carry pro-war articles and letters as well, including Geras’ extract and a sympathetic letter in today’s edition (the third down on the page, using the same “fellow traveller” accusation - wonder if this guy reads Harry’s Place?). Despite the paper’s generally liberal perspective, the paper has carried opinion pieces from both left and right, and pro-war voices have included some of the left-liberal press’s regular columnists. It is a mystery why they cannot argue their case without resorting to character assassinations and sanctimonious neo-conesque rhetoric. It’s ironic that there has been so much talk of unity in the wake of the London bombings - the rally I attended in Trafalgar Square was called “London United” - when the tone of debate in some quarters has been so rancourous. Of course they will not divide us with their bombs; that job has already been done by the Sept 11 hijackers.

As I approached Trafalgar Square, I noticed the huge numbers of people going away from the area! Of course, it was 6pm, and a lot of people would have been just out of work and wanted to get home. Perhaps some thought that the event would be somewhat sanctimonious and belligerent, but as I found, it was neither of these things.

As I later read on the news, the first speaker was the novelist and poet Ben Okri, but I arrived during Ken Livingtone’s own speech. Livingstone quoted something from Pericles, whom he named as the “first mayor” (of Athens), which was an oath that people should leave the city better than they found it. He also attacked people who talked of a clash of civilisations, either between the west and Islam or between it and China. He quoted the slogan China is using for its own Olympics in Beijing in three years’ time - “one world, one dream”, which I’m sure would not impress a lot of people, and promised that the injured and the families of the dead would have ringside seats at the 2012 Olympics.

They then had Trevor Phillips, a news presenter of Carribean origin (supposedly London’s favourite) who read Maya Angelou’s poem, “I’ll Rise”. I thought this rather inappropriate, because the poem is about people rising from slavery and oppression, not about a wealthy and powerful city which has taken a comparatively minor knock. London’s history isn’t exactly rooted in pain or shame unless you mean the events of 1665-6 or 1940-45. It’s generally had a reputation as a prosperous city (not that everyone shared in that prosperity) which was the command centre of the British empire, something you can see in its architecture.

They brought out a number of religious leaders, from all of the main religions practised in London, but of course Iqbal Sacranie had his own slot separate from them. Sacranie simply quoted a number of Qur’anic verses and hadeeths about the merit of human life and the enormity of taking it. As for the other religious leaders, they made their speeches in turn and I could not work out which was which as I was near the back, behind one of the huge bowls surrounding the fountains. I could tell the Hindu one, however, because he recited a mantra to Shiva.

There was also a speaker from the RMT (Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers’ Union), who spoke on behalf of all of the bus and tube drivers who had been affected by the bombings. The RMT is one of two main unions on the Underground, the other being ASLEF which is known to be less militant and strike-prone than the RMT. He mentioned the number of “union banners” in the square, which got me looking round for flags, of which there were hardly any. He also said something about how multicultural the Underground and its union is, which has me wondering if they have any of the like of that bigoted windbag I remember spouting off about “muzzos” in the Royal Mail canteen at Nine Elms when I worked there in 2001 or 2002.

They also had a load of people reciting poetry (perhaps they could have found a Muslim to read a qasida or naat?), all of which were introduced as “so and so, such and such a profession, and Londoner”, which included Jo Brand who started off what sounded like a sentimental speech and punctured it by calling Londoners “tough bastards”, which made everyone laugh. There were so many of them and around 7:30pm, I had to leave because I had an early work start yesterday and had to get something to eat. I could see a lot of white balloons, the obvious purpose of which was to release them into the sky. But I wasn’t around to see this.

All in all I found the event to be good-humoured and pleasant, although I wonder what the atmosphere will be like if there’s more of these kinds of attacks. I don’t remember these sorts of events being held after every IRA bombing. And at, or just after, the point where one of the religious speakers told us of the sanctity of human life, someone standing next to me blew the noxious fumes from her evil weed right into my face. Thanks a bunch.

(More coverage, with pictures, here at Londonist.)

After a few introductory paragraphs about the “Blitz spirit” etc., Moore has a go at Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick for their attempts to disassociate Islam from last week’s terrorist attacks on London. In one case he makes a false extension and in the other he mistakes rhetoric for literal meaning.

His assessment of Livingstone’s speech from Singapore:

They were not, he said, attacks “against the mighty and the powerful”, but against “working-class Londoners”. Would they have been all right, one wondered, if they had been against the mighty and powerful, or if they had cleverly found a way of killing only middle-class Londoners?

Well, he didn’t say that, did he? His point was that the bombing may have seemed to its perpetrators to be a protest against the G8 or the war in Iraq, but in fact killed only innocent people. It was all the worse for the killing of innocent people with no connection to either. In the case of Paddick’s assertion that “Islam and terrorism don’t go together,” the obvious meaning was that Islam does not support this kind of action. The fact that Muslims can do this sort of thing doesn’t change that.

Even his comparison with the Irish situation (most Irish were not IRA, but nearly all the IRA were Irish) does not fully apply. The IRA appealed to certain sections of northern-Irish society (and southern-Irish society, to a lesser extent) and had a support network. It was also known for maintaining control of its constituency by intimidation and murder. This isn’t the case with the al-Qa’ida type of terrorist.

There were places in London where extremist ideologies were openly preached, but in the last few years the groups have been disrupted, their leaders jailed and the mosque they controlled returned to those who originally ran it. Most mosques, on the other hand, are dominated by communities originating in India or Pakistan. In some cases, their constitutions restrict membership to one sect or school of thought, as if to prevent infiltration and the taking-over of the mosque by members of another group, and one of the groups has been accused of kufr (disbelief) by at least one of the extremist ideologues.

On top of which, there is an important fact which would in fact dissuade ordinary Muslims, whatever their opinions about foreign policy, from supporting these terrorists, namely that they seem to display no concern whatsoever for the interests of the Muslims. They do not choose targets commonly seen as hostile to Muslims; in fact, Muslims may indeed have been deliberately targeted in this latest attack. If Muslims were responsible for this, it is clear that their intention is not to free Palestine or Iraq or Muslims anywhere. Their intention is to rule the Muslims.

Moore next moves onto an attempt to use out-of-context verses from the Qur’an to demonstrate that the nature of Islam makes Muslims susceptible to violence:

In Sura No 8, for example, God is quoted as saying: “I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers!” This punishment comes to them for having “defied God and His apostle”. It seems reasonable to ask Muslims what this sort of remark means in the modern world.

Well, the verse is clearly in the first person and therefore not an imperative. No doubt its context is an actual battle, and the difference between a battle and the bombing of a trainful of unsuspecting and non-hostile people should not need to be explained to anyone. Moore concedes that “similarly nasty dictums” are to be found in the Old Testament, but he believes that “it is surely significant that they are very much harder to find in the New Testament”. What does the New Testament say about war anyway? Not much in the way of legislation appears anywhere in the New Testament, the cause of an awful lot of the conflict which plagues the modern-day churches.

Moore seems to expect that Muslims embrace pacifism, something he displays no intention of advocating for his own race. He is displeased by the Muslim Council of Britain’s refusal to “condemn the killing of British troops in Iraq … in absolute terms”, which nobody can do, certainly no Muslim, because the British troops are an occupying force; they do not even have the dubious authority of the United Nations. If the attacks are by a terrorist organisation which wants to claim power in Iraq for itself to turn it into a socialist republic or an even more extreme variant of Saudi Arabia or Iran or to bring Saddam Hussain back, I would certainly oppose such actions (as well as all by the group concerned). But the fact is that being attacked is an occupational hazard for any occupying army.

He then resorts to a links-and-ties smear against Muhammad Abdul-Bari of East London Mosque, who welcomed the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca to the opening of the London Muslim Centre (the extension to the East London Mosque in Whitechapel). Sudais is reported to have delivered a sermon in Mecca a couple of years ago containing various derogatory remarks about Jews. It is quite possible that the mosque’s extension received Saudi assistance, which is the likely explanation for Sudais being invited to the opening. Sudais is a well-renowned Qu’ran reciter whose recitations can be bought on cassette or CD; it is likely that people enjoyed the opportunity to hear him recite in person.

As for his comments about Jews, the context of his sermon (such as what the Israeli government had been doing in the immediate period before) is missing, but he was most likely talking about the Israelis and their supporters. Arabs (I personally heard this for myself when in Egypt) refer to the Israelis as Bani Isra’il, the “children of Israel”, rather than by a phrase like Ahlu Ard Isra’il (the people of the land of Israel). This phrase does not, in itself, refer to Jews not of that lineage, or even to the land of Israel, but is commonly used for this purpose. “The Jews” is likewise used to refer to the state of Israel, is people, and its overseas support network. Saudi Arabia is nominally at enmity with Israel, although its contributions even when there were actual wars were limited. I agree that it’s not fitting sermon material, although one notes that MEMRI are not around to record what Israeli rabbis say about Arabs, and we are not told if and when these rabbis visit the UK.

Moore next brings up the wafflings of “Sheikh Dr Abdul-Qadir as-Sufi” in the Muslim Weekly. The Muslim Weekly is a thin volume which sells for 50p, whose editing standards have not always been very impressive. Abdul-Qadir, as Moore would have found out if he had done some very basic research, is a highly controversial character, at least among those who have even heard of him. His followers are nearly all converts, not Muslim immigrants or their descendents, and he lives in a part of Scotland which is extremely remote from any Muslim community. Some of his followers books (mostly translations of classical texts) are well-known, but Abdul-Qadir himself is a marginal figure. (The Qaradawi controversy has been dealt with before; I’m not going to rehash it here.)

Moore suggests two reasons why “many Muslim leaders appear unable or unwilling to break absolutely with the teachings that give cover to violence”: the fact that Islam is partly a political faith, and fear. The political aspects to Islam, he claims, are why “Muslim leaders find it very difficult to resist the hotheads who say that Sharia - the divine law - should be imposed wherever possible”. But the “hotheads” are not the people who say this; they are the people who make inflammatory and absurd claims and demands, who suggest that un-Islamic means (like blowing up trains and buses) are somehow justified by the ends, and condemn as “sell-outs” anyone with a conciliatory stance, even if this is only on a community relations level. Not renouncing an entire tranche of our religion is not the same thing as not being a hothead.

I should add, regarding Islam’s prohibition on non-Muslims residing permanently in the Arabian peninsula, that the region concerned is of limited value to non-Muslims. It is not fertile, and until the discovery of oil, the region was not rich; Alexander the Great famously abandoned his own attempt to conquer the territory.

Moore’s contention that Muslim leaders “cannot say very fierce things against the extremists” for fear of losing control over “their people”, or for fear of violence, is also baseless in my opinion. Numerous Muslim leaders have condemned all of the terrorist acts attributed to al-Qa’ida and similar groups without any disguise, and still walk the streets and turn up for the prayers they lead. These include acts the common people might have sympathised with (such as the bombings of US bases in Saudi Arabia), and Palestinian suicide bombings (some scholars agree with the tactic, others don’t). Mufti Barkatullah, in a speech given after the expulsion of Abu Hamza’s group from Finsbury Park mosque, spoke about the “physical and spiritual filth” they had introduced, and about how they had cursed the Saudi royal family from the pulpit after they had contributed to the mosque’s finances. You will not find many Muslims with any great sympathy or affection for the Saudi royals, but the mufti still walks the streets.

Next, we see what amounts to an advocacy of right-wing anti-immigration policies and an attack on recent sensitive policing policies. While I thoroughly disagree with ID cards, a policy targeted at “the usual suspects” (men with light-brown skins and beards) seems outdated given the suggestions that recent acts of terrorism appear to be the work of drug dealers who smoke and drink. One of the newspapers this morning even mentioned “white mercenaries” as possible culprits for last Thursday, meaning not that old-public-school-boy gang rotting in Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea, but white Muslims from the Balkans. Either way, an anti-terrorist policy which assumes the ordinary white bloke is not a terrorist because he’s an ordinary white bloke may be as ineffective as one which picks on an innocent Muslim because he seems a bit hostile (maybe he thinks you’re a dirty kafir, or maybe he just got out of the wrong side of the bed).

And what’s with these silly right-wing canards about it being too easy to get here through marriage, about our supposed ceding of asylum policy to the EU (fact: the UK is not in the Schengen treaty, and unlike many continental countries, you need a passport to go to other EU countries, except Ireland)? The fact is that people, of no apparent terrorist threat, experience considerable difficulty in obtaining residency through marriage (the ongoing saga of the Cable family is one example), and the Blair government has been willing to deport asylum seekers to such a plainly unsafe country as Zimbabwe. The UK has no excuse for not knowing who is in the country and who isn’t.

A number of accusations are made about the police’s policy on dealings with Muslims; if it really is ‘to seek the consent of those he supposes to be community leaders before “going in”’, this would seem absurd if the suspicion is, say, an imminent terrorist threat. Some of it may be to do with simple community relations; if you cause offence to the religious sensibilities of an entire community, it may store up future hostility to the police which may surface when they need to know what led to a police officer being killed, for example. In fact, the police raided a mosque in 2002 to remove illegal immigrants, so it should not be doubted that they would do so if the suspicion was that guns or explosives were being stored there. (It stands to reason that Muslims, if they want to protect the sanctity of the mosque, should not use it for these purposes.)

The most important question is for Muslims, and the authorities’ attitude towards them. Embedded in modern government are too many advisers who believe in a quietist policy. To them, the most important thing is to avoid a “backlash” against Muslims. But the truth is that the backlash only threatens because the terror strikes.

By the same token, terror strikes only because of British or American foreign policy; this is an idea which earns much condemnation whenever it is raised in the media, particularly as it gives the impression of the person raising it harbouring some sympathy or glee. He next accuses the government, “mired in ignorance”, of having “little idea how to find the trends in Islam that could really improve the life of our country, and run with them”. The problem is that Muslims have made efforts to distance themselves from the aspects of British society which drag it down, but are routinely accused of separating themselves from society through such means as Islamic schools (and even homeschooling). There are aspects of Islam which could improve the life of this country, but they are not things which could be brought in by government: dressing decently, polite and appropriate conduct, respect for elders and other people generally.

Moore then makes a number of accusations about the community not doing enough to disassociate itself from its violent elements.

When did you last hear criticisms of named extremist groups and organisations by Muslim leaders, or support for their expulsion, imprisonment or extradition? How often do you see fatwas issued against suicide bombers and other terrorists, or statements by learned men declaring that people who commit such deeds will go to hell?

The Salafi Publications website, which represents western followers of the establishment scholars in Saudi Arabia, is full of condemnations of the extremist groups, some by name and some in general. I am not a “Salafi” myself and disagree with much (if not most) of its content, but most of the al-Qa’ida type of terrorist are “Salafi”, i.e. Wahhabi, by sect. The site also contains a piece by Ibn Uthaimeen (a senior Saudi establishment scholar who died a few years ago) condemning suicide bombers.

As for “support for their expulsion, imprisonment or extradition”, this requires that we jump to the conclusion that what the security services and politicians say is likely to be correct, and I’m sure Muslims are not alone in rejecting such assumptions. Even when I wrote my article on “Shaikh” Faisal, I sought assurance from a scholar that I would not be responsible for whatever harm Faisal might come to if, for example, he were to be deported to Jamaica.

When do Muslim leaders and congregations insist that a particular imam leave his mosque because of the poison that he disseminates every Friday?

Where do imams disseminate poision every Friday? Having never encountered a situation where this was happening, I can’t say if it would or wouldn’t happen. I don’t know of anywhere this has happened other than Finsbury Park.

When did a British Muslim last go after a Muslim who advocates or practises violence with anything like the zeal with which so many went after Salman Rushdie?

How do you mean “go after”? There were demonstrations over Rushdie’s book, but there were measured responses as well, and condemnations by Muslim organisations of Khomeini’s fatwa, which certainly succeeded in raising pro-Iranian sympathies among ordinary Muslims.

Why is not more stigma attached to the Muslims who are murdering other Muslims every day in Iraq and the Middle East?

What does Charles Moore know about what Muslims think of the various armed factions in Iraq who carry out acts of terrorism? A small fraction of Britain’s Muslim community are Iraqi - we do not have much knowledge about what goes on there other than that bombings take place on a regular basis. I should add that Muslims are generally distrustful of the media, and may suspect that the true nature of some of the armed factions is different to how the press portrays them. But that does not mean that a Muslim would not condemn outright atrocities, if he knew for certain that one had taken place.

What communal protection is offered to those Muslims who really are brave and confront Islamist violence, or the poor treatment of women, or call for democracy in the Middle East?

What evidence exists that any protection is needed? There is no history of assassinations or acts of sabotage among the Muslim community here, and very little in the USA (there was an incident in New York where an imam who opposed a particular sectarian group in the Lebanon was beaten up, but I can’t think of anything else). Websites like Muslim WakeUp! have caused much controversy and offence among even mainstream Muslims, but its authors are not under round-the-clock police protection to my knowledge.

How much do mainstream political parties with Muslim councillors and candidates really insist on their religious moderation and co-opt them to extrude the bad people lurking within their communities?

Very simply, extremists do not join political parties. Besides being opposed to democracy anyway, they regard these particular parties as the enemies of Islam, and Muslims who join as sell-outs and even apostates. Some of the Muslim politicians are not actually all that religious.

Towards the end, we have the old call for a “Gandhi” to appear among the Muslims:

When a nation, a race, a political movement, a group of workers, the followers of a religion have legitimate grievances, there generally arises amongst them a champion who can command respect for his advocacy of peace, his willingness to fight without weapons and to win by moral authority. There may be many such grievances for Muslims in Britain, and in the West, but we are still waiting for the Gandhi or the Martin Luther King to give them the right voice.

It may have escaped Moore’s attention, but there is no mass movement of any sort among British Muslims, so it appears that the community does not have the grievances necessary to sustain such a movement, violent or otherwise. History shows that non-violent resistance is sometimes effective (as in India), but sometimes it isn’t, and force is needed to expel or otherwise remove the offenders (as in Ethiopia and Romania). Even Martin Luther King said, “if your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi. But if you enemy has no conscience, like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer”, a Lutheran pastor executed for plotting to assassinate Hitler.

Our community leaders do not stand out as “non-violent resistance” leaders because there is no major violent tendency in the community here (and the small minority who may be sympathetic to the idea do not respect these community leaders anyway). We have been told since 9/11 that an attack has been inevitable, and it has indeed happened, but the Muslim community itself has not been a source of violence. There have been no attacks on targets hostile to Muslims (even in the Netherlands, there has been only one such incident), nor even campaigns of intimidation or sabotage similar to those of the animal rights movement. No, we have seen four random bombings, two of them in or near Muslim areas, with apparent Muslim casualties. So there is no reason why the fingers should be pointed at “the Muslim community”, given that we have no reason to support actions like this. If we are not forthcoming with information on the “terrorists in our midst”, it’s because they don’t tell us who they are.

(Update 16th July: a few months ago I heard a story on Radio 2’s morning thought slot about Badshah Khan, a Pathan Muslim contemporary of Gandhi who also advocated non-violence. The problem was that I thought he was saying “Pacha Khan”, and I did a Google search for him while planning this piece, but not suprisingly found nothing related to Badshah Khan. Thabet has an entry on him at his blog. The Radio 2 report interestingly mentioned a phenomenon Badshah Khan noticed which is still prevalent in our Ummah today: the tendency to ridicule and insult others’ religions, while taking grievous offence when non-Muslims ridicule ours. Does Allah ta’ala not tell us in the Qur’an not to curse others’ idols, lest they insult Allah in their ignorance?)

It should be clarified that one, rather than two as previously thought, of these attacks directly hit a Muslim district, namely the Edgware Road bomb. The other was travelling on the Circle Line from Aldgate, not Aldgate East, to Liverpool Street, meaning that it had come along the Thames from the West End through the City. The line through the East End, where the Asian Muslims live, is the Hammersmith and City line through Aldgate East. (Then again, it’s possible that the culprits did not know the bombs would explode at Aldgate and Edgware Road.)

Various incidents of hostility to Muslims have been reported, including an arson attack on a mosque in Leeds and abusive phonecalls to mosques and Muslim organisations. I mentioned to people I had instant-message conversations with yesterday and today that the proof of the pudding would be jumu’ah today, and there has been, to my knowledge, no trouble. The worst is expected tonight from drunks tonight after the closing of the pubs around 11pm. I don’t fear a mob backlash, because for that you need people to whip up the mob, and the sort of people who would do something like that are held in no great esteem in London, and may be looking at imminent jail time for race hate offences. I am more worried about this being used as an excuse to step up “security” by curbing civil liberties.

I must say, I am getting pretty annoyed with the recurrent attempts to establish “7/7” as the name for this event. This convention was used for the 9/11 attacks because there was no other succint way of describing them. This was the first time I heard the Madrid bombings referred to as anything other than “the Madrid bombing” or something like that. This incident was not exactly 9/11 anyway and I don’t entirely buy the al-Qa’ida story, for reasons John B spells out here:

The bombs were far too rubbish to be the work of a global terror network with any kind of supply chain: the terrorists didn’t even have any Semtex, hardly killed anyone ([less than] 100 people is rubbish if you’re aiming to maximise casualties), and didn’t cause any property damage. And the amount of collaboration and organisation required was negligible: “blow trains up around 9AM tomorrow. See ya”.

This morning the possibility of all the attacks being the work of a single person was even mentioned, although they have now ruled that out. But the last terrorist attacks we had in London - a series of pipe bombings - turned out to be the work of a single attacker, namely David “I’m a nazi and I like killing people” Copeland.

Even if the attacks were the work of more than one person, it doesn’t necessarily point to al-Qa’ida, even if those responsible were Muslims. This was the first attack in which it would be obvious to any local Muslim that Muslims would be in the front line (the embassy bombings in east Africa, for example, were done during the morning prayers, when it was imagined that Muslims would be off the streets and in the mosques). The attack was on purely civilian targets, rather than military (eg. the Pentagon, the USS Cole), political (Washington) or economic (the WTC), and the damage caused was relatively minor (a bus and a few train carriages, rather than a bridge or a power station, or any other whole building).

Then again, it might not matter who did this, because whatever evidence does come up is likely to be used as an excuse to blame it on al-Qa’ida, despite the weakness of previous al-Qa’ida links: that suicide note, which appeared to have been written by a non-Muslim without basic Islamic knowledge, which debunks any Israeli link, and what the English-language media has so far not told us about last year’s Madrid bombings:

For their part, the conservatives have, since then, devoted all their strenuous efforts to defending their record. They also insist that too many question marks remain about the 2004 attacks - the physical perpetrators were petty Madrid-based criminals; the explosives used were sold by traffickers in northern Spain who are suspected to have supplied Eta too; regional police authorities had known about those dealings since 2001 but had not acted. A local Socialist party official had even been visiting a suspected Islamist terrorist in jail. Ties between the suspected terrorists and the Moroccan secret services have surfaced.

Bear in mind: the worst atrocities of the Algerian civil war were massacres of Muslims carried out by members of the security services pretending to be “Islamic terrorists”.

The political comment has included some unsavoury material. As tasteless as George Galloway’s assessment that the bombing was a result of British participation in Iraq must have seemed coming just hours after the attacks, I can’t think why else terrorists of the al-Qa’ida stripe would hit London. I’m sure some people would have taken it to be a gleeful “I told you so” message, though I’m not so sure; the attacks were in, or fairly near, his constituency, after all.

Worse is the asinine comments by people trying to disprove any link by pointing out that 9/11 happened before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t know if everyone has forgotten, but they came after a decade of sanctions against Iraq leading to numerous children dying due to lack of essential medical equipment, after the raid on the medicine factory in Khartoum, the long-term stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia, and long-term aid to Israel, among other provocative actions. We see the same refusal to link what happens to us with what our governments do in the countries where the terrorists apparently come from. One can expect the right to act like this - to forcibly discourage anyone from questioning the actions of “their” politicians; one has to wonder why people on the left would jump in with them and display similar selective blindness and defamatory vitriol.

But again, I’d like to voice my continued opposition to any anti-libertarian “security” measures which might be pushed through on the back of these attacks. The last time such things happened, in the 1970s, resulted in a number of people doing years of jail time for bombings in which they were not even remotely involved - and that was when there was a campaign, rather than just one incident! There were the embassy bombings, and then nothing else. There was 9/11, and then nothing else. Madrid, and then nothing else. We can’t assume that this is part of a campaign! We can’t let fear get the better of us! I honoured what my mother told me, that I shouldn’t go to London, but someone was trying to persuade me not to go even to Croydon to get my hair cut. I have heard of two incidents in the past when a bus got the top deck ripped off it, and they were caused by the driver going into a low bridge or a building by mistake! (One of these was in Aberystwyth in October 1996 when I was a student there.) If you get injured or killed on the bus or train, an accident is by far the most likely cause. If we talk about not being cowed by terrorists, and then sign our liberties away, we prove ourselves to be mealy-mouthed cowards.