Englandistan in depth

Are a great number of Muslims in the UK really antagonistic toward their own country? An article in the New York Times Magazine is rather pessimistic. It also gives considerable detail on the counter-terrorism measures the UK is taking--much stronger than anything here in Canada. A few excerpts:

Lord Carlile of Berriew, a Welshman who is Britain's independent reviewer of counterterrorism laws, has wide access to classified intelligence about terrorism plans. He is the last person you would expect to hype the dangers. For one thing, his party, the Liberal Democrats, has reaped electoral gains by opposing Tony Blair's war on terror, particularly Blair's belief that Iraq is a front in that war. For another, Lord Carlile has made a name for himself as a civil libertarian — a champion of legal underdogs from the terminally ill to the transsexual — and civil libertarians are the ones who have led the opposition to antiterror measures. "How serious is it?" he asked, sitting beside a conference-room table in his law chambers off the Strand on a sunny morning this spring. "Very. Complacency, tempting though it is, is the worst possible attitude. We've been fortunate we haven't had more attacks. There will be more."...

Aggressive information-gathering is also meeting steady community opposition. Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 lets the police designate areas where anyone can be stopped and searched without cause. Muslims say that Section 44 is being used to target them. It tends to be the first thing heads of Muslim organizations complain about if you bring up the war on terror. Liberty, the British equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union, has accused the London Police of making virtually the entire city a Section 44 area...

Like most modern "diaspora" immigrants, the Pakistani-British visit their native country with little difficulty. There were 400,000 British visitors to Pakistan in 2004. All countries with large Muslim diasporas are vulnerable to the worldwide Wahhabi radicalization fomented at mosques and cultural centers financed by Saudi Arabia's government and its private charities. But on top of that, Britain is vulnerable to radicalizing trends of South Asia — India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. These trends risk becoming Britain's own, particularly among its socially isolated minorities...

More after the jump.

Mark C.

But over the past quarter-century, Britain has seen a dispiriting tendency toward segregation, or resegregation. Young newcomers have not found a niche in the service economy as easily as the arrivals of 40 and 50 years ago did in the industrial one...Last year, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, warned that much of Britain was "sleepwalking its way toward segregation." And this segregation is especially entrenched among Muslims. The researchers Tariq Modood and Richard Berthoud have shown that only 1 percent of British Bangladeshis and Pakistanis have white partners, versus 20 percent of Afro-Carribeans. The percentage of South Asian Britons who return to Bangladesh and Pakistan to find wives or husbands is hard to measure, but some researchers place it above 50 percent, and a European demographer calls ethnic endogamy "arrestingly high."..

When you talk to many Muslim leaders in Britain, you hear them focus almost obsessively on international politics, to the exclusion of religious, social and local political issues. The charitable way of looking at this is to say that it is a function of young people's burning to change the world — for the median age of Muslims is more than a decade younger than that of other Britons, which is pushing into the early 40's...

...A poll in February in The Daily Telegraph showed that 40 percent of British Muslims favor the establishment of Islamic law — but only piecemeal, and under certain circumstances. Even in heavily Muslim neighborhoods, there is no great public clamor to ban alcohol — usually a telltale sign of pro-Shariah agitation. And Britain's relaxed laws regarding religious dress — more akin to the American model than to the French — have allowed it to avoid the controversies over the Muslim headscarf that have roiled the rest of Europe. But Mustafa's [Taji Mustafa, a charismatic and confrontational spokesman for the group Hizb ut-Tahrir] other claim — that the vast majority of citizens in heavily Muslim Whitechapel sympathize viscerally and overwhelmingly with the radical position on Israel and, more generally, on foreign policy — must be faced squarely. For Mustafa is unquestionably correct.

People often talk about the "diversity" of the British Muslim population. This is fair if the dimension you are concerned about is skin color or per capita income or attitudes on the relative merits of Hanafi and Hanbali jurisprudence. But if the dimension is Western foreign policy, then there is really very little diversity at all. A Draft Report on Young Muslims and Extremism leaked from the Home Office in 2004 found that a main source of anger among youth was "a perception of 'double standards' in British foreign policy, where democracy is preached but oppression of the 'Ummah' (the one nation of believers) is practiced or tolerated, e.g. in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya." By overwhelming numbers, Muslims oppose all intervention in the Arab and Muslim world. Somewhere between 64 and 80 percent, depending on the poll you consult, opposed the recent Afghan war...

Foreign policy may be the only dimension on which moderates and radicals agree. But it happens to be the dimension the terrorists cite when they blow up buses. That harmony of worldview is a dire problem for Britain in general and Muslims in particular — no matter how narrow the terrain on which it is built. It creates a climate in which a sympathetic hearing is guaranteed for any claim that the real cause of terrorism is Iraq or Israel or America's love of big oil. (And if you are hunting terrorists by, say, tapping phones, it makes terrorists impossible to identify solely through the politics they profess.)..

...Britain is now betting that the country will retain its historically bottomless reserves of sang-froid in the face of a threat that is orders of magnitude more dangerous than the threat of the I.R.A.; that there is something in the makeup of Britons that makes them more stoical than, say, Americans in New York about bombs going off; that the quiet tenor of the British fight against Islamist terrorism thus far is a sign of good manners and forbearance, not of abject fright or sneaking sympathy; and that Britain in the age of the Diana funeral is the same country it was during the blitz.

It is a risky bet.

Posted by markc at June 25, 2006 10:33 PM