http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/13/1357230
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Prime Minister Tony Blair's office said on Tuesday there was no link between last week's bombings in London and the Iraq war.
In the House of Commons a day earlier, Blair rejected a suggestion that Britain was more at risk from a terrorist attack because of its involvement in Iraq. Blair said, "It is a form of terrorism aimed at our way of life, not at any particular government or policy."
Not everyone may agree. In the aftermath of the bombings last week, CNN's Christiane Amanpour was reporting live from the streets of London when her broadcast was interrupted.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: You know the reaction of the British people
was the reaction of the British people. These are people who have
gone through terror, war bombings, the Nazi bombings of World War
II, known then as the Blitz, and here we go, we have the British
people intervening right here in --
LONDONER: Tell the truth about why this war happened! Don’t touch
my bike! Tell the truth about what happened here! We’re in Iraq.
That's why. That's why it happened.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Thank you.
LONDONER: There were fifty killed in Iraq.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: As you can tell, and this is actually
important, you are seeing a live version of what is aggravating a
lot of people here in England and around the world.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Christiane Amanpour on CNN reporting from the streets of London last week, being interrupted live on the air, a man saying, “It's about Iraq.” We go now to Britain to speak with Milan Rai, author of Regime Unchanged and War Plan Iraq, one of the founders of the Voices In The Wilderness, U.K. He is currently coordinating the group, Justice, Not Vengeance and has been doing extensive analysis of the aftermath of the London bombings. He joins us on the phone from Hastings, England. Welcome to Democracy Now!
MILAN RAI: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the latest news, what the police are saying now in Britain about the four young British men of Pakistani descent?
MILAN RAI: Well, there are a lot of reports about them, the four young men. There are extensive profiles in the British press of the young men and their backgrounds and the disbelief in their neighborhoods and their communities that these young men, who apparently gave no sign of having strong political views, have carried out these terrible atrocities.
The most striking thing about the coverage is that there's one very big element which is missing. On Sunday, the Sunday Times had a front page story about a secret Home Office / Foreign Office joint report entitled, “Young Muslims and Extremism,” which was a report into why young Muslims in Britain were becoming more and more inclined to support and perhaps to participate in terrorist actions both in Britain and abroad. And one of the conclusions of that report, which was given to the Prime Minister last year, was, and I'm reading from the Sunday Times, “The Iraq war is identified by the dossier as a key cause of young Britons' turning to terrorism. The analysis says,” -- now it's quoting from the report itself -- "’It seems that a particularly strong cause of disillusionment among Muslims, including young Muslims, is a perceived double standard in the foreign policy of western governments, in particular Britain and U.S.’” And It goes on quoting from the report, “’The perception is that passive oppression, as demonstrated in British foreign policy, e.g., non-action on Kashmir [...], has given way to active oppression, the war on terror and in Iraq and Afghanistan, are all seen by a section of British Muslims as having been acts against Islam.’” So, that's all quotations from the Sunday Times and from a secret government report which has been leaked to the Sunday Times.
It goes right to the heart of the issue, which is gripping the country today, which is dominating news coverage. It's an authoritative report by the government's two main departments concerned with terrorism, Home Office and Foreign Office. And it is not there in the media, it's not there in the newspapers. It's been barely referred to since the Sunday Times splashed it on the front page. The Sunday Times led on the fact there were British recruits to the al Qaeda network, and those two paragraphs I have just read were not picked up anywhere else in the newspaper. No other newspaper has picked up anywhere else in the newspaper. No other newspaper has picked up on those conclusions. There have been a couple of references to the report and the fact that, you know, the Home Office and Foreign Office found that there were some British recruits, home grown recruits to the al Qaeda networks, but the crucial conclusion that this is to do with British foreign policy is just absent from the reporting that's going on right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Milan Rai, author of Regime Unchanged. In the piece in the Times of London on Sunday, at the very end of the piece, it says the former Scotland Yard chief who retired earlier this year said on one weekend, more than a thousand undercover officers have been deployed monitoring a group of suspected terrorists. Can you talk about what is happening right now in the Muslim community and among Muslim students in Britain?
MILAN RAI: Well, there's a great sense of fear. There are security operations going on. Young Muslim men are not on the streets because of the level of fear that there is right now. It's very, very frightening what's happening in terms of the mood turning against the Muslim community as a whole. A poll in the Telegraph found a few days ago that one in five people in Britain believes that Islam itself, not Islamic fundamentalism or al Qaeda or anything like that, but Islam itself, one in five people in Britain thinks that Islam itself is a major threat to British democracy, and that's a very frightening base for repressive action and for a lot of people turning the other way when repressive action is taken.
The same poll found that basically half of the people in Britain thought that Islam itself was some kind of a threat to Western democracy. And so people in Muslim communities around Britain are very, very worried. There's a real sense that a lot of people in Britain are waiting for the security forces and the police to come down heavy on the Muslim community, and that is bound to create more grievances, bound to create more alienation, bound to create more young men like the ones who have carried out this atrocity.
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AMY GOODMAN: We played that clip of Christiane Amanpour reporting live from the streets of London after the bombing and the man coming up and interrupting and saying, “It's about Iraq. It's about Iraq.” How much of that is discussed on your blog, “London blasts pressuring the media.” You talk about the media coverage of this.
MILAN RAI: Well, it's a very mixed picture. One of the curious things that came up in the last few days was a former conservative M.P. who now writes for the Times as a journalist, Matthew Parris, saying that in his very conservative circles, a lot of people are saying, you know, “Obviously, it's to do with Iraq.” So, I think there is this general perception that people recognize that the war in Iraq has contributed to anger, which has had a partial expression, which has contributed to these terrible atrocities in London. I think there's a general recognition of that.
And there were, you know, conservatives who were warning about these consequences before the war in Iraq. A quote which has not appeared in the newspapers, I think because it's so sensitive, but former Chancellor of the Exchequer for the Conservatives, Kenneth Clarke, said -- before the invasion of Iraq, he said, “When a bomb goes off in a Western city in the future, how much will this policy, invading Iraq, have contributed to it?” And he gave that warning way back in March, 2003, and there were a lot of people who were feeling that way, and there are a lot of people now on all sides of the political divide who feel that what was done to Iraq, what is being done now to Iraq has contributed to this.
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If we do those things, we should do them because they are the right thing to do, and we also know that doing the right thing will increase our security because despite all of the people saying that this has nothing to do with Iraq and so on and so forth, the people who have actually studied al Qaeda, like Michael Scheuer, who used to run the bin Laden unit for the C.I.A. from 1996 to 1999, he has said very clearly -- he is one of the experts in the C.I.A. about bin Laden. He resigned last November. What he said very, very clearly is, “If you say this has got nothing to do with our foreign policy, or if you say that al Qaeda has no realizable political demands, you are wrong.”
And what he says is that bin Laden has clear, focused and widely popular foreign policy goals. And they are to do with ending U.S. support for Israel, ending U.S. support for the repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and so on and so forth, ending U.S. and British support for [...] Indian oppression in Kashmir, and so on and so forth. These are real grievances which are felt by millions of people around the world. And bin Laden uses those grievances to recruit and to incite, and if those grievances weren't there, then whatever he himself would like to do, the pool of volunteers would dry up, the pool of finance would dry up, and that would make us safer. We should do it because it's the right thing, but it's also the way to make us safer. We have summed that up in the phrase, “Counter Terror, Build Justice.”
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