terror wars fuel terror and Islamophobia

Britain's wars fuel terror. Denying it only feeds Islamophobia

Those who send British troops to shed blood in the Muslim world must share the blame for atrocities like Woolwich

• 
• • Seumas Milne
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 29 May 2013
  • Jump to comments (90)

'The reason cited by the alleged Woolwich killers has been mostly brushed aside as unseemly to discuss.' Photograph: LA(Phot) Si Ethell/EPA

Eight years on, nothing has been learned. In the week since a British soldier was horrifically stabbed to death by London jihadists on the streets of Woolwich, it's July 2005 all over again. David Cameron immediately rushed to set up a task force and vowed to ban "hate clerics". Now the home secretary wants to outlaw "nonviolent extremist" organisations, censor broadcasters and websites and revive plans to put the whole country's phone and web records under surveillance.

"Kneejerk" barely does it justice. As for the impact on Muslims, the backlash has if anything been worse than in 2005, when 52 Londoners were killed by suicide bombers. As the police and a BBC reporter described the alleged killers as of "Muslim appearance" (in other words, non-white), Islamophobic attacks spiked across the country. In the first five days 10 mosques were attacked, culminating in a triple petrol bombing in Grimsby.

As politicians and the media congratulated themselves that Britain was "calmly carrying on as usual", it won't have felt like that to the Muslim woman who had her veil ripped off and was knocked unconscious in Bolton. Nor, presumably, to the family of 75-year-oldMohammed Saleem, stabbed to death in Birminghamin what had all the hallmarks of an Islamophobic attack last month – or, for that matter, the nearly two-thirds of the population who think there will be a "clash of civilisations" between white Britons and Muslims, up 9% since the Woolwich atrocity.

One key change since 2005 is the rise of the violently anti-Muslim English Defence League, given a new lease of life by Woolwich. More than 40% of Islamophobic incidents recorded by the Muslim organisation Faith Matters last year were linked to the EDL or other far-right groups. "It makes me feel I don't belong here", one Muslim community leader quotes his teenage son as telling him this week.

But almost nobody in public life mentions the war. The reason cited by the alleged Woolwich killers – the role of British troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terror – has been mostly brushed aside as unseemly to discuss. Echoing his predecessors, the prime minister insisted the Woolwich killing was "an attack on the British way of life". London mayor Boris Johnson declared there could be "no question" of blaming British foreign policy or "what British troops do in operations abroad".

Instead, the problem is once again said to be "Islamism", regardless of the string of democratic Islamist governments elected from Turkey to Tunisia. Or the focus is on the "mistakes" of MI5, as if any amount of spooking could detect the determination of an enraged takfiri killer to exact revenge with kitchen knives and meat cleavers. Whatever the focus, even to mention the western wars that drive these attacks is deemed to justify them.

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Denial of the role of US-British wars, occupations and interventions in the Muslim world in fuelling terror attacks at home helps to get politicians off the hook. But it also plays into the hands of those blaming multiculturalism and migration, feeding racism and Islamophobia in the process. The wars should be ended because they are wrong and a failure – but also because they fuel terrorism and divide communities.

Those who carried out last week's killing are of course responsible for what they did. But those who have sent British troops to wage war in the Arab and Muslim world for more than a decade must share culpability.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/29/britain-wars-terror-islamophobia#ixzz2UfpP3u3d

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/29/britain-wars-terror-islamophobia