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View Full Version : No compromise with those creating terrorism



HBot 5000
06-21-2007, 11:22 AM
By Alasdair Palmer, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/06/2007
Page 1 of 3

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../17/do1704.xml

Everyone who deals regularly with young children knows the response. You confront a truculent child with some fact he does not want to hear, such as that he will be sick if he eats another chocolate. He puts his hands over his ears and goes "la la la" as he turns his back and then ostentatiously pops that extra chocolate into his mouth.

Reading the Commission on Integration and Cohesion's Report, which was published last Thursday, I had the depressing experience that I was dealing with precisely that child. The commission was set up on June 28, 2006, nearly one year after the 7/7 bombings: by then, it had become clear that the bombers were native-born Britons who hated almost everything about the tolerant, secular society in which they were raised. The commission's remit was "to consider how local areas can respond to the tensions [increased diversity] can sometimes cause", and to "develop practical approaches... to prevent problems, including those caused by the dissemination of extremist ideologies".

And what is there in the report about that? Practically nothing. You search in vain for insights into the nature and dissemination of extremist ideologies, let alone for any form of practical solution to the dangers those ideologies present. There is just a lot of blather about the definitions of integration and cohesion, the difficulty of achieving either of them in practice, and the complexity of the various government agencies supposed to be involved in promoting them.


La-la-la is about the sum of it. Some of the commissions' recommendations are almost touching in their naivete. For example, they suggest that newly arrived immigrants be given "Welcome Packs" that explain the limits of acceptable behaviour in Britain. A spokesman for the commission suggested that "the packs may say that we like to queue at the post office and we don't really like spitting in the street". There is nothing about how, in Britain, one of our "core values" is that we're not too keen on a father who, in order to protect what he believes is his family's "honour", garottes, smothers or stabs his daughter 23 times because she wants to choose her own husband; that we do not believe that a son who is homosexual should be murdered; or that Jews are pigs, Christians are cross-worshippers, and Hindus deserve death.

The commissioners decided to create a fantasy Britain, one in which there aren't any significant differences in the ways different groups believe it is acceptable to behave. Its vision of happily co-existing cultures whose problems mostly stem from the fact that they are not given the right help by Government officials, has about as much in common with the reality of community conflict in Britain as the films the Soviet Union used to make about the paradise of plenty created by communism.

In one way, you can't blame the commission for that: the fantasy has been the basis of our collective response to mass immigration for at least the past 30 years, and probably longer. So, for example, the police have expended a great deal of effort to ensure that they did not recognise "honour killings" when they came across them. Dead women murdered for daring to have a relationship not approved by their family have been categorised as "suicides" or "stranger murders", but not as what they are, which is victims of the patriarchal culture in which they were raised. La la la.

In exactly the same spirit, the Security Service embarked on the now-infamous informal pact with terrorist groups, the essence of which was that MI5 pretended they weren't involved in mass murder, and the terrorist groups went on planning violence on an ever-greater scale. The pretence achieved nothing. The reality was that London became a centre for the planning of mass murder, and, as we learned on 7/7, for its execution.

The central fantasy has been that immigrants from very different cultures to our own share our commitment to tolerance, personal freedom and the separation of politics from religion that has evolved in this country over the past 300 years. There is an astonishing arrogance at the heart of that attitude: it is as if no other culture could possibly have anything like the hold over an individual that ours does, so that as soon as anyone comes into contact with our liberal, secular values, they must automatically convert to them and make preserving those values their highest priority.

The arrogance of the attitude is less of a problem than the fact that it is palpable nonsense. Inherited cultural traditions do not disappear the instant a new arrival passes through immigration control at Heathrow.

People who have been raised in a rural community based around the inviolability of the clan, on male authority, on the strict control of a woman's sexuality outside marriage, and on the commands of religion, will not suddenly flip over to our way of doing things - and they will have difficulty understanding when the children they raise here reject the traditional codes.

There is an exceptionally penetrating article in this month's Prospect magazine by Shiv Malik, who spent several months in Leeds investigating the background of Mohammad Siddique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain, three of the bombers who killed 52 Londoners when they blew themselves up on 7/7. One of the remarkable things about Mr Malik's piece is that it is based around a recognition that it is impossible to explain how Khan, Tanweer and Hussain became suicide bombers without examining the culture from which they came. Their parents had come to Britain from rural, tribal Pakistan, and they did their best to re-create in Yorkshire the culture in which they had been raised. Islam was a part, but only a part, of that cultural background: arranged marriages, and the primacy of family obligations over all others, which are not intrinsically Islamic, were others.
Mr Malik discovered that the children of the first generation to migrate were tempted by at least one part of Britain's secular, liberal culture: the primacy of personal choice, or what might be loosely termed "the right to pursue happiness".

They wanted to be able to choose their own lovers, and they resented their parents' attempts to marry them off to their cousins, the tradition that in rural Pakistan ensured that family land stayed under family control. Yet, as so often with the second generation of an immigrant community, Khan and the others also rejected the values of the Britain they encountered growing up in Leeds. They wanted to be neither Pakistani nor British; instead, they found a new identity by embracing ******* Islam. That version of Islamic fundamentalism allowed them to marry the girl of their choice, provided she was a Muslim. It also provided a theological justification for mass murder, preached the necessity of overthrowing secular, tolerant society in Britain, of imposing sharia law here, and of replacing democracy by an Islamic government of mullahs.
Mr Malik's article shows in arresting detail how a conflict within the culture of an immigrant group can lead to the radicalisation of the next generation.

British foreign policy, which has been blamed for the creation of home-grown Islamic terrorists, has had very little to do with it (in fact, the idea that all we have to do is change Government policy and the problems will disappear is another way of avoiding the reality). Mr Malik is not the only one to notice this. Ed Husain and Hassan Butt, both of whom were "captured" by violent Islamist ideology but who have now escaped from it, have also emphasised the point. Both have been threatened by the Islamists with death, and Mr Butt is now in hiding because an attempt was made to kill him. But it is an indication of our collective reluctance to face up to the facts Mr Malik so clearly articulates, that his article has been published only in the relatively obscure Prospect. His research was commissioned by the BBC, but the BBC didn't want it, and did not commission a film based on it. Mr Malik was told that his conclusions were "anti-Muslim", a perfect example of the attitude which guarantees that the root causes of home grown terrorism are never addressed. La-la-la.

The reality is not all doom and gloom. The right to pursue happiness will surely eventually take root in a less violent and more liberal form among people from cultures that are inimical to it. Communities based on religious and cultural fundamentalism are unpleasant places in which to live, and that fact should eventually penetrate. There are things that can be done to speed up the rate at which that happens, such as creating a better ethnic mix at the school level, and ensuring that new arrivals learn English. Education is not an immediate panacea, however: the fundamentalist, tribal mentality has a remarkable ability to persist even after a successful education. Hassan Butt recalls that when he was fund-raising for jihad, the most enthusiastic donors weren't recently-arrived peasants, but established "doctors, businessmen\u2026 professional people who wanted to donate substantial amounts of money".

The conflict between our culture and one that insists a father is obliged to kill his daughter if she marries outside her tribe, or which says that democracy should be forcibly replaced by theocracy, is a conflict for which there cannot be a compromise solution. In that sense, the jihadists are right: our secular, tolerant, individualist society is irrevocably opposed to their values. We will not prevail in the struggle until we, too, recognise that fact, and do everything we can to confront and expose the cultures that deny the individual's right to pursue his or her own conception of happiness. That, however, is precisely what we are not doing. Government policy still seems based on the myth of multiculturalism: denying that the conflict is real.

The Government has not even found the heart to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group that openly recruits Muslims to violent jihad. It may even be on the receiving end of a government grant.

Commenting on the reluctance of moderate -Muslims to challenge their extremist counterparts, Hassan Butt has said: "We're always going to lose the battle to the militants by being in complete denial about it." His remark holds true of the non-Muslims running Government policy: following the lead of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion will mean following it down the cul-de-sac of fantasy, illusion and total impotence. And that way disaster lies.
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