Chambers was given a space for a whinge in the Guardian yesterday. Blogger Shane Richmond on the Telegraph website compared his tweet to messages saying the authors wanted to kill or assault some politician or other, and pointed out that Chambers wasn’t at the airport when he sent the tweet. In the “New Review” in today’s Observer, David Mitchell also took Chambers’s side:

Certainly, the threat – and I suppose it is theoretically a threat, in the same way that an aspirin is a food and George Osborne a successor to Gladstone – was classified as “not credible” by the airport. I don’t know if that means they thought it was funny. Maybe these people sit in front of Morecambe and Wise, sides splitting, tears streaming down their faces, yelling “Not credible!” as Eric picks up André Previn by the lapels.

However, despite Chambers’s manifest lack of credibility, the security people were apparently obliged to inform South Yorkshire police, who arrested him a week later. They were obviously convinced he was a man of his word in terms of the week-and-a-bit timescale. With many plausible terrorist threats, they might have rushed straight round there. Or maybe they’re not morons and knew perfectly well that he had no intention of blowing up an airport but had decided to make an example of him.

It’s vindictive and it’s humourless. Could they not just have had a quiet word? Was bringing him to trial really in the public interest? Is a large fine, unemployment and a criminal record proportionate punishment for an irritated quip, albeit one made within the earshot of others? He didn’t actually send the message to the airport, written in letters cut out from a newspaper, wrapped round a raw liver and a holy text (Christian, Muslim or SMS).

The reason why, as Mitchell says, “we live in serious times” is because planes have been flown into buildings and on a few occasions nearly blown out of the sky, and because if you’re on a plane (as opposed to, say, a train) and any part of it blows up while the plane is airborne, the plane will be destroyed and you will die. People are nervous about flying at the best of times in a way they aren’t about car or train travel, because a plane is inescapable. That is why we take threats to blow up the air infrastructure seriously.

If the guy who had posted that tweet had turned out to have a Muslim name, regardless of the circumstances, there would have been no qualms about prosecuting him and giving him a much more substantial sentence than this idiot got. He may not be a Muslim and he may also not be a Nazi, but there have been quite a few cases of white guys having stashes of weapons found in their homes, intended for use in a race war. Just because you’re white and have an English name, it doesn’t mean you’re not a terrorist. As with the case of the English-Canadian married couple denied a visa because the wife is “underage” (19 years old), people whine about laws aimed at Muslims or other “foreigners” when “their own” people find that the rules apply to them too.

Why does the bombs-in-breasts story sound like hogwash? Apart from anything else, a timer-based explosive device would not go undetected in airport security scanners, because it would necessarily involve metal (the picture of explosives with a little clock in their report is pretty hilarious, by the way). Anyone with medical metal parts in their body, such as rods used to straighten their spine, would have to answer for it when going through the metal detectors at airports, so these women would have to as well. Breast implants, of course, do not use metal. The only devices which go undetected are those detonated chemically, and it would surely be noticed if a lot of women known for pro-terrorist views started having implants.

The other night, on Radio 4, there was a programme on about an effort by MI6 to plant false news stories in the media about Northern Ireland. They started off clever, circulating one story that a bomb which had gone off outside a pub frequented by Catholics (and was planted by Loyalist terrorists to kill Catholics) had in fact gone off inside it, implying that it was an IRA bomb that had gone off by accident. Later, they got over-confident and their stories became increasingly wacky, including one warning women against secreting explosives in their underwear. This story is obviously right out of the same book. These days, of course, they don’t have to rely on unattributable stories from a black propaganda wing of MI6; they openly attribute it to MI5 or some “terrorism expert”. But that doesn’t mean it’s not nonsense.

My concerns were that Dr Qadri was being presented by a newspaper with a history of Islamophobia, complete with an appreciation from Douglas Murray, as some sort of great hope, a Muslim scholar who will at last condemn suicide bombing unequivocally, when in fact Islamic scholars had been doing this for years, largely unacknowledged by the media who have continued to demand such condemnations since 2001. He did so with a broad-brush slur against other parts of the Muslim community, accusing them all of being terrorist sympathisers — thus further endearing him to people like Douglas Murray and his supporters.

Besides which, why is a fatwa against suicide bombing significant in a British context now? We have not had a successful attack since 2005, and the people who carried them out never belonged to movements which never recognised Qadri’s authority anyway. It was condemned at the time, much as the 9/11 attacks were. Whatever its significance in Pakistan, its importance in this country was overstated.

To begin with, Qadri’s fatwa is not by any means the first to condemn the use of suicide bombings, and he is not even the first supposedly genuine Islamic scholar to issue one. The tactic has always been controversial; there have been some scholars who approve of it, but since suicide itself is against Islam and the tactic originated among non-Muslims (the Japanese in World War II followed by the Tamil Tigers), its adoption was never likely to be universally accepted. Specifically, the mainstream Saudi Wahhabi scholars publically condemned it years ago, including a denial that suicide bombers were martyrs, as did a mainstream Sunni scholar called Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti, who is Malaysian but who lives in Oxford. Contrary to Douglas Murray’s accusations that Muslim condemnations of violence always contain caveats and double-talk, none of them make exceptions for, say, Israeli civilians. Dr Akiti’s fatwa specifically states that soldiers on the way back to the army base, for example, are not to be treated as combatants. Shaikh Nuh Keller, in 2003, disapproved of Palestinian suicide bombings on the grounds that suicide was against Islam and that they involve the killing of women and children, and unlike in cases such as those in Lebanon where fighters had killed enemy soldiers along with themselves, the “victories” spoken of in Palestine were only “propaganda victories”.

A further problem is that Tahir ul-Qadri is not by any means a universally accepted figure in the Muslim community, either here or in Pakistan. His authority is not accepted by all Barelvis, which is what is meant by “Sunni” and “Sufi” throughout this article. His fatwa will be accepted by his followers, who are likely never to have supported suicide bombings anyway, and ignored by a whole lot of other people. Having spent time among the Barelvis in east London (Walthamstow to be precise), I can state for sure that he is bitterly opposed by some of the Barelvi imams in that part of London. A Deobandi imam I spoke to in south London several years ago called him “a complete jahil”, meaning an ignorant person, and “an outcast, even for the Barelvis”. Mostyn-Owen claims that he has “the status of a Sheikh-ul-Islam”, but this is not accepted by much of the community and never has been. In the past, only the highest class of scholars had this title, many of them household names centuries later, as well as the official chief scholars of the Ottoman empire. Among the Indo-Pakistani community, there are plenty of imams whose followers give them high-flown titles and extol their phenomenal scholarship, but there is no sign of that scholarship or spirituality flourishing in the parts of London they influence.

Some of Qadri’s comments in this interview reveal his divisive, sectarian nature. Regarding Deobandis, he says:

As Dr ul-Qadri sees it, no terrorists have emerged from a Sunni or Sufi background: instead, they have come from the Salafis (Wahhabis) or Deobandis. The Deobandis are a South Asian variant which is close to the Gulf-orientated Wahhabis.

“Every Salafi and Deobandi is not a terrorist but I have no hesitation in saying that everyone is a well-wisher of terrorists and this has not been appreciated by the Western governments,” he said.

This simply isn’t true. Deobandis are recognised by Sunnis elsewhere in the Muslim world as Sunnis, and scholars from the Gulf who are not Wahhabis have travelled to the Indian subcontinent to study in Deobandi institutions. The similarities between Deobandis and Brelvis, regardless of their very different appearance and style, are much greater than between the Deobandis and the Wahhabis of today, who reject the Deobandis because of their adherence to the Hanafi school of law and various Sufi traditions. The main divide between the Deobandis and Barelvis is a bitter dispute over what some of the early Deobandi imams may or may not have written in their books a century ago which led to the Barelvis’ leader issuing a fatwa saying that the Deobandi scholars concerned were apostates. This is what it is all based on, along with disputes over such matters as whether celebrating the mawlid (birthday) of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) is acceptable — something the Deobandis, particularly in the UK, have moved towards accepting as more moderate forms of it have become apparent, such as in the Hadrami tradition.

So, that the MQ group in London opposed the Abbey Mills mosque project is nothing surprising; Abbey Mills was a Deobandi project and Barelvis would have wanted it stopped for their own reasons even if they do not normally openly oppose them. The concern about “extremism” is just an excuse. It is not a sign of their commitment to peace, only of their hostility to Deobandis. The claim about Wahhabis being “well-wishers of terrorists” is also a lie. As already stated, the official Saudi scholars have always opposed terrorism, whether in Palestine or anywhere else. They are especially suspicious of groups seeking to wage jihad and ultimately to replace the Saudi regime. From talking to individual Deobandis personally I can state that his claim that they are all well-wishers is false as well. It’s true that many Deobandis supported the Taliban in the 1990s, but I would imagine that some Barelvis did as well. Certainly, they were active in the religious parties which governed Baluchistan and the NWFP under Musharraf. They are not nearly as pacifist as they make out when talking about “peace” to western newspapers.

Douglas Murray is also deluded about the importance and reach of Qadri’s fatwa. He claims that it “has the possibility of being respected by a far wider range of people than any of those individual non-scholarly Muslim voices who have also condemned terrorism without caveat”. Again, they are not all non-scholarly, but Qadri’s reach is to his own followers, and not many others. Many Indian and Pakistani Muslims will simply not take someone seriously as an upright Muslim, let alone a scholar, if their beard is trimmed to less than what they can grab with their fist, and this is the case with Qadri. He also claims that “the most violent interpretations of Islam have indeed trickled down to terrorists via learned scholars”, which is also mostly untrue. The justifications generally come from people with dubious scholarly credentials, are heavily based on skewed interpretations and extrapolations and are rejected by most actual scholars. Even if an individual who gives an extreme ruling, whether permissive or otherwise, is a scholar, Muslims are not allowed to accept it if it is known that most other scholars oppose him, and there are likely to be warnings not to take his word on that issue.

In short, this is a rather insignificant development which shows how ignorant the western press are about the make-up of the Muslim community and about Muslim scholarship. The fatwa will be taken up by people within the Minhaj-ul-Quran organisation and a few fellow-travellers, but most of those outside will have received similar rulings in the past anyway. As for those who do approve of this kind of thing, many of them either despise Dr Qadri and this will come as no surprise to them; others are likely never to have heard of him. It could be that it turns out to be an unusually comprehensive piece of work and may become a standard text on those grounds, but given how extensive Dr Akiti’s existing work on this matter is, I find that unlikely. It is a predictable stance by a sectarian figure, and its impact is likely to be very limited.

Among those they first interview are Hamza Tzortzis, who is a former HT member (or at least, former activist) who has since left, and Qasim Rafiq of FOSIS, who had been Abdulmuttalib’s predecessor as president of UCL ISoc, who said that most people who get radicalsied do so through watching BBC News and al-Jazeera. After him came Ed Husain, whose view that the separation of men from women, the latter submitting their questions in writing, “are examples of the hardline form of Islam that has become endemic in many ISocs”. He himself said that the practice belongs in Saudi Arabia, not in Britain. He also alleged that the views given out in “event after event after event”, the literature present in prayer rooms and the content of Friday sermons “clearly does provide the extremist mood music to which suicide bombers dance”.

OK … besides the suggestion of dancing to “mood music” (mood music is background music; you don’t dance to it), this amounts to blaming ISocs for people becoming suicide bombers when there is no definite link. The programme points out that six former ISoc members have become involved in terrorism, but that is a small fraction of how many there have been. If ISocs convey any view on politics, it ought to be one based on the tenets of Islam and influenced by concern for the Ummah, not for what the government might want Muslims to think. As for the matter of separating men from women, people may disagree with it, but the issue has no place in any discussion on terrorism.

Next, there is a female (supposed) former ISoc member, who alleges that there is a culture of intolerance in the prayer room in which sisters who do not wear hijab, do not pray “correctly”, or do not share the common view on certain political issues like Palestine or the Iraq war, are looked down on. While the issues of people “correcting” each others’ prayers based on instructions from unreliable, sectarian sources is a well-known problem, not just in ISocs, what “moderate” views on Palestine and Iraq were objected to is not explained. She also alleged that the “hijabi sisters” would refuse to associate with her if they knew she had non-Muslim friends, male or female; this could only have been a certain section of them rather than all or even most. I’ve seen women in hijab socialising quite happily with obviously non-Muslim women on many occasions, including around the university quarter around Gower Street where UCL is.

They then interviewed the provost of UCL whose opinion was that university authorities cannot be the police, and that restricting outside speakers will not make a great deal of difference to terrorism as “the influences on young minds are many and varied”. The reporter then said that his team had discovered that an al-Muhajiroun presentation had taken place last December, with Anjem Choudhary chairing and a video-linked message from Omar Bakri Mohammed. The university had given a statement that they had been deceived by the person who booked the room who said he was from a London youth centre, that complaints had been made about the conduct of some attendees, and that the person who booked that meeting would not be allowed back.

There then followed an interrogation of Daud Abdullah over his signing of the Istanbul Declaration, which called for Muslims to fight foreign warships sent to police the “ceasefire” and prevent the smuggling of guns into Gaza “by all means and ways”. This leads to them arguing over what that phrase meant and whether it includes or excludes military means, but the real question should have been what it has to do with British students being radicalised and how much his course contributes to that. Daud Abdullah is then heard explaining that Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006 and thus represents the will of the Palestinian people, and on that basis he supports them; he did, however, express disapproval to the killing of civilians, whoever they are.

After Daud Abdullah, they moved onto Shahidul Mursaleen, a member of the “moderate group” Minhaj-ul-Quran, who told how he had found himself unable to promote or arrange events on certain campuses because of interference from HT students. If such things are going on, surely they should be seeking help from the university authorities so that one group cannot prevent another from operating. Normally, however, universities reserve much of their poster space for internal use, which includes registered student societies and does not include outside organisations. Did the MQ group have permission to put the posters up? Surely they should try and settle these matters through the proper channels rather than running to the media.

Next came Anthony Glees, professor of security studies at Buckingham university, who alleged that universities had become “safe spaces for radicalisation that can lead to a state where a student is ready to be recruited by al-Qa’ida”. He blamed political correctness for allowing such radicalisation to be presented as free speech, such that those responsible could not be touched:

There is only free speech within the law; you should not be at liberty to incite people, you should not be at liberty to radicalise people so that they turn to terror. Joining al-Qa’ida is not like joining the Young Socialists or the Young Conservatives. It is a step change and it marks a move towards total abhorrence and hatred for everything the liberal democracy of this country stands for.

But the fact that al-Qa’ida depise western liberal democracy is not why anyone is fighting them; it is their behaviour as fighters and their behaviour when they get a chance to rule, or influence rulers, that motivates people to fight them. The west itself has produced a number of ideologies over the years whose followers despise liberal democracy, as well as academics who have acted as apologists for every dictatorial regime from Pinochet to the Khmer Rouge. This is not the same as inciting people to commit terrorist acts, as they would have gone to prison if they had done that, and quite rightly so. And as for “radicalising people” etc., if this is done by clearly teaching them that al-Qa’ida are fighting for Islam and that it is the duty of Muslims to support them, this should clearly not be allowed, but talks by former Guantanamo Bay prisoners and slideshows about atrocities in Iraq or Afghanistan, even though they may have this effect on some people, are free speech. As Qasim Rafiq said, people could be radicalised by simply watching the news, but in any case, the real radicalisation likely comes through websites anyway.

In short, this is yet another attempt to blame the Muslm community in the UK and its institutions for a terrorist act it had nothing to do with. They cannot find any real evidence that Umar Abdulmuttalib acted under the influence of “radicals” in the UK, so they make completely irrelevant attacks on elements of conservative Islam that they find objectionable, but which does not attract significant protest from those affected, and draw attention to some problems which are real, but which again have nothing to do with the Christmas bombing attempt. Sectarian bias and political control of ISocs is a real issue in some places, and if the Muslim student community tolerate it, it may be because they get their central job (organising Friday prayers and Ramadan fast-breaking facilities, for example) done efficiently enough that they can be ignored the rest of the time. None of these problems necessarily contributed to the terrorist act in Detroit or any other; the fact that they attack ISocs generally indicates that they cannot find any concrete evidence of a link.

Juan Cole on why the latest Bin Laden tape is most probably faked, as its contents are not in keeping with his past style and wasn’t picked up by agencies which monitor radical Islamist websites:

Another clue: the alleged Usamah listed only one grievance, that of Palestine, and he framed it in terms of the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Wouldn’t he have some concerns about the US drone strikes on the positions of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the northwest of Pakistan and in Afghanistan? About Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan war? If this is a recent audio, as shown by the reference to the December 25 attack, why not gloat about the attack on the CIA forward operating base by an al-Qaeda double agent only a few days afterward?

It is not like him to attempt to steal the thunder of Hamas in Gaza, and Hamas has already told al-Qaeda to butt out. Moreover, if all he has to offer is a lament about Gaza, then there is nothing distinctive about that. It makes him seem as though he is hitching his wagon to someone else’s star. Bin Laden comes from a business background, and one of his principles was always to seek leverage. When a Muslim radical group already has a lively insurgency going, he feels, there is little point in his putting money and resources into it. That is one reason he never focused on Palestine. He is about encouraging operations that would not otherwise be undertaken, as against US embassies in East Africa, the USS Cole at Aden, and New York and Washington.

The diction about the suffering people in Gaza, moreover, is not Bin Laden’s style. Contrary to what is often alleged, his concerns with Palestine go back to at least the 1980s, and are real and central to his ideology. The al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in the 1980s used to get together and give each other sermons on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem on a frequent basis. Bin Laden’s partner until 1989, Abdullah Azzam, was a Palestinian activist who thought that fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan was more realistic than the PLO struggle against Israel at that point in time, and more likely to redound to the cause of political Islam; but Palestine was always on the agenda for the future.

He notes also that “nobody in the Muslim world seems to care” about the tape or whether he issued it or not, and that Al-Jazeera “demoted” it, giving a former US ambassador an unusually long space in which to rebut it. If it is him, “it is a pitiful Bin Laden trying to stay relevant by grandstanding and stealing others’ thunder”.

Today, it was revealed that the scanners could not be used on travellers under 18 as that would break child pornography laws, which prohibit naked images of people under that age (a trial at Manchester airport went ahead only after under-18s were exempted). There are also worries that images of celebrities or “people with unusual or freakish body profiles” would be exploited by some security staff.

The disability group blog FWD/Forward notes that all manner of medical items will show up in the scans, among them catheters, incontinence pads, colostomy bags, breast implants and prostheses, and the genitalia of people with intersex conditions:

People with marginalised bodies already have major issues with air travel – with the uncertainty of the security process, with the practicalities of dealing with aids and needs while travelling, with the spoon-sapping of travel, with no option but unfamiliar foods that may affect the body unpredictably, with the difficulty of maintaining personal privacy in prolonged periods in close quarters with others, with unpredictable delays that affect health, with security threats when bodies don’t ‘match’ identification documents.

Soon there may be one more element in the mix: the sure knowledge that one’s personal business will be laid bare in front of security-theatre goons who will almost certainly be poorly trained in disability awareness and gender tolerance.

I give it 24 hours before clandestine mobile phone images of travellers with marginalised bodies show up on the Internet.

The discussion which follows is worth reading, in my opinion; it touches on whether scanning is preferable to pat-downs or not, and the extent to which security staff (or “security theatre goons” as the post calls them) can be relied on to be sensitive to the needs of people with various disabilities and medical conditions. Someone advanced the idea that Israeli methods of ensuring airport security are worth exploring as throughput is vastly quicker than at British or American airports, although others countered that the authorities there are open that racial profiling is an important part of it, that “most of my Muslim friends (or people of descent that leads to them being assumed to be Muslim) who have attempted to enter Israel have experienced as a component of their security procedures their willingness to profile people of a particular religion and detain them for 8+ hours in a little room while periodically questioning and harassing them” and that some people with disabilities such as autism might fall foul of their behavioural profiling methods. (The notorious case of Maysoon Zayid should serve as a warning to anyone advocating Israeli methods as a complete solution.)

Gary Younge, in yesterday’s Guardian, noted the pattern of reactive and repressive security measures following terrorist attacks (or attempts), which are often fruitless in terms of catching actual terrorists, alongside failure of the authorities to do their jobs properly and take notice of intelligence which is available, to the extent that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was able to get onto a plane after his own father had warned that he was a terrorist threat. Meanwhile, the much-resented liquids restrictions in the UK are, it turns out, not being enforced rigorously: news reports emerged that the ban was breached in the past week, while this lady reported various inconsistencies and confusion on different parts of her recent journeys.

Still, one aspect of this case which has not been adequately discussed is the fact that these scanners represent the first case in which non-suspect people are subjected to this kind of invasion of their privacy to non-medical staff: an image of them naked. If this gains general acceptance, it will be much less easy to object to any future invasion: it will be said, “you get seen naked every time you fly; what’s so objectionable about this?”. Given that experts believe that such scanners will not detect explosives and other chemicals, only objects, it is difficult to see how they will prevent anything that existing security measures, if implemented properly, would not prevent. It will simply give the state more licence to impose more intrusive “security” measures whenever they claim there is a need. It should be resisted vigorously.

Seriously, the story does not give a single piece of evidence to back up their headline. Apart from that, they mention that this man “featured on the periphery of one counterterrorism intelligence operation in Britain” and that the “US intelligence authorities” (which ones?) were interested in conversations he had with “at least one al-Qa’ida member”. As for the ISoc talk, another story claims that neither Galloway nor Bindman in fact attended. They also claim that he “attended some of the radical meetings held at London colleges and mosques”, including those held by Anwar al-Awlaki. However, regardless of his views on jihad, al-Awlaki spoke on matters far more diverse than that; his best-known material is on biographies of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and the Sahaba. This does not prove that he was recruited for al-Qa’ida there.

Oh, and he used to wear a white robe and a skullcap. Very incriminating.

It still seems that they are scrabbling around trying to find a British connection to this attack, which involved someone who left the UK 18 months ago. There are a whole host of references to posts he made on Islamic Forum (gawaher.com), but that forum is not just used by “radicals” but by Muslims of all persuasions. There are continual references, such as by Stephen Pollard in the Daily Express, to mosques bringing in preachers from Saudi Arabia who are hostile to non-Muslims, but since the institutions and preachers involved all condemn terrorism, it is an entirely separate, if legitimate, issue. The flimsy proof they have for the claims that Umar Farook was radicalised in London gives weight to the suspicion that this attack had nothing to do with the UK.

I would agree, if I was absolutely convinced that Megrahi was guilty. In this case, there is a whole lot of doubt about whether he really did the deed; there has been much speculation that the real guilty party might have been Hizbullah or Abu Nidal. Not all of the people who say this are, as alleged in today’s Guardian, people making up conspiracy theories in desperate grief. If I was convinced he was guilty, his old age and illness would be no grounds for compassion, as I have argued in the past regarding child abusers who are brought to justice when old and sick. If he had served 20 years, it would be different, but he has been in jail for about 10 years, including the time he spent in detention while being tried. In the UK, although we rarely pass whole-life sentences, the minimum jail time for murder is usually 12 or 15 years, and that is when there is only one victim and no aggravating factors such as armed robbery, terrorism or sexual assault.

Even if he is guilty, the main perpetrators are still free and, indeed, western governments want to buy oil from and sell arms to them. Kill one person, you’re a murderer. Kill many more and you’re a politician. Myra Hindley was left to die in jail; General Pinochet was allowed to come to London for years to buy weapons until Labour came to power.

Mehdi Hasan, the New Statesman’s senior politics editor, on a man stopped in his tracks while preparing to use tennis balls as bombs, whose case hardly got any coverage in the national media because editors were not interested: the man’s name is Neil Lewington, and no, he’s not a white convert to Islam but a Nazi. Despite the fact that “ethno-nationalists”, most of them white, commit the vast majority of terrorist attacks in Europe, they get a fraction of the media coverage and, in this country, they get handled with kid-gloves by the law.