The Bombers

Published: 02/07/2007

The bombers
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

As they wake up to news of the foiled car-bomb attack on Glasgow Airport, I know what millions of my compatriots – atheists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and Christians- will be saying this morning, their easy Sunday ruined by yet another alleged Islamicist plot: ‘What’s wrong with these crazed Muslims?’ ‘Why the hell are they here if they hate it so much?’ When will we be rid of the lot of them?’ ‘ What do they want? ’ ‘Other minorities also have a hard time, they don’t blow up nightclubs and airports’. What these aggrieved Britons don’t realise is that exactly the same conversations are taking place in most Muslim households too, with many more expletives flying. Sane, ordinary British Muslims are even more incandescent and less forgiving of such nihilists whose barbarism undermines our fundamental right to belong to this country as absolute equals. These are hobby terrorists with screwdrivers and screwed heads; they appropriate legitimate concerns, turn them into excuses on their own violent reality shows, sure to be broadcast again and again on screens around the world.

With no politics, no aim, no dreams, no noble imperative, for these Islamicists and their ideological masters, the means is the end. They are at once satanic abusers of our faith and social misfits unloved by all except their own reject band of brothers. Scorned by those they claim to defend, the dreaded sociopaths now seem determined to fatally wound the social contract made between this country and Muslim citizens. Only each assault deepens our sense of nationhood. We still rail against racism, unethical government policies and generational impoverishment - and I do so incessantly, as you know. Our young are rightly enraged about Palestine and Iraq. Unlike self righteous Neo-con liberals, we see how this profound sense of injustice can dangerously alienate them from British society. However, when bloodthirsty Islamicists strike, we experience a collective intensification of our attachment to Britain- there is no place like this home for us, the only place we want to live and die in.

On Saturday night at a joyous and lavish Shia wedding in Hertfordshire, Muslim guests were livid about ‘these bastards giving us a bad name.’ ‘Send them packing to the Middle East or Pakistan, see how they like it there’ said a solicitor to much cheering at one table. ‘Time to say we love this country. Too many of us don’t say that enough. For Muslims, no better country -that’s why so many want to come over’ added a businessman, who had come here penniless and turned his fortunes around within ten years. The father of the bride too arrived in Britain with little and joined a small English family firm. He brought entrepreneurial energy; they gave him encouragement and unfailing support. Together they made their aspirations bloom. There is no more loyal subject than this immigrant, who for many years led the pre-dawn prayers at our main mosque in Kensington.

As we enter another hyper-crisis period, the danger is we will again succumb to the dystopian nightmare of irreconcilable clashes and culture wars. Calls for draconian, illiberal laws are sure to ring through the nervous land although thus far the new government sounds more temperate than the bruisers Blair and Reid.

The measured response ( let us hope it doesn’t give way to official hysteria) is an acknowledgement that few Muslims now excuse the killing brigades. The apologist Muslim Council of Britain whose leader was knighted by Mr Blair is a spent force. It tried to incite rage and riot over Salman Rushdie’s knighthood and failed. Muslims realise what a disaster that confrontation was for both sides. Now, like Uriah Heep, the MCB grovels and seeks rehabilitation. Ex-militant Ed Hussain and Hassan Butt have written denunciations of fellow jihadis. The hardline Hizb-ut Tahrir ( HT) asks Muslims not to ‘fuel dangerous political agendas’ These suspect organisations have been humbled and discredited.

One Independent reader, sociology graduate Soraya described to me how Islamicists operated against modernist Muslims and other students. An idealistic young woman, she fell for the leader, a charismatic man who all too soon did her head in and wrapped it up in a cloak of his choosing: ‘He commanded me to declare I hate this country and got me into a niqab. Then one day I heard him chatting up this new student and he was saying exactly the same things to her as he said to me when we met, about beautiful eyes, and how he loved women with spirit. It was like Shirley Valentine, when that Greek Romeo chats up British women. I told him to bugger off.’ Her hair is lovely in the photo she sent me, free now as she is.

I am not naïve. Islamicists are cunning and well connected. Their backers pretend to believe in liberal democracy whilst plotting its demise. But there are now passionate Muslim democrats too standing up to be counted. Imran Ahmad, young trustee of British Muslims for Secular Democracy ( BMSD) writes in Unimagined, his evocative memoir: ‘ I have had great opportunities and choices. There still is racism in the indigenous society, it’s undeniable …but [compare] Britain to all those so-called Islamic countries, where tribalism is endemic and anything is used as an excuse for discrimination, hatred and mistreatment: village, clan, family, sect, province, class, money, gender, occupation, even shade of skin. At least Britain is committed to implement the highest ideals– personal freedom, social equality, human rights and justice.’

With friends like these, Britain can beat its enemies within. Have faith; a time will come when jihadis will terrorise our lives no more.

Published in The Independent