Britain : The Road to 7/7
The blasts in London have brought a new urgency into the debates on the linkages between the ‘War on Terror’, imperialism and terrorism, and has fuelled concerns about a racist backlash on British Muslims. Kalpana Wilson , writing from London , discusses the bombing and its fallout.
London , July 22 : It is now just over two weeks since the four bomb blasts which rocked central London – three in crowded rush-hour underground trains, one probably intended for the underground too, exploding prematurely on the top deck of a No. 30 bus. The death toll has now risen to at least 55, with those identified a typical cross-section of working Londoners with their origins in every continent. The four suicide bombers have been identified too – all of them British born – three of Pakistani origin and the fourth Jamaican, and their movements in the past year, from their homes in Leeds in northern England to Karachi and Lahore and back, are being traced. And meanwhile, as reported on the inside pages of the newspapers, several times as many people – in this case children as well as women and men - have been killed in the Anglo-American war on Iraq. It has been announced that for the first time British soldiers, including an Army colonel, will stand trial for ‘war crimes’ committed in Iraq . Yesterday’s failed explosions suggest that London may be the target of a sustained bombing campaign. And, shockingly, the police has admitted that a young Brazilian man, killed by plain clothes police who pushed him to the ground inside a London underground train and pumped five bullets into his body at point-blank range, was innocent.
While Blair echoed Bush as faithfully as ever in his statement from the G8 summit, referring to ‘evil ideology’ and insisting that ‘they’ want to destroy ‘everything we hold dear’, several commentators have argued that the political atmosphere in Britain has not shifted decisively, in the wake of the blasts, to the stifling of all dissent which has characterised the US in the years since 9/11. It is perhaps too early to judge this. But there are several obvious differences, one being, as Aijaz Ahmed noted recently, that these blasts come at a point when Britain is already embroiled in an imperialist war in which it is at best a junior partner, unlike 9/11 which was seen by the US neo-con establishment as the ‘opportunity’ to launch their long-planned offensive on the world’s oil reserves, and requiring just the kind of triumphalist mass hysteria at home which that incident was used to engender.
Apart from this however, two internal features contribute to a different post-attack climate in Britain . Firstly, there is the huge level of opposition to the war in Iraq within the country. Not only had an unprecedented 2 million people marched against the war at its inception, a recent survey finds two thirds of people believing that the bomb blasts were linked to Britain’s participation in the war on Iraq. And while left-wing MP George Galloway faced hysterical condemnation from the government for mentioning the ‘I-word’ in parliament on the day of the attacks – Defence Minister Adam Ingram accusing him of ‘dipping his poisonous tongue in a pool of blood’ - Tony Blair’s dogged insistence that there is no link between the blasts and the war on Iraq (or for that matter Afghanistan or the 1991 Gulf War) is leaving his government increasingly isolated.
First the CIA’s warnings of ‘blowback’ from Iraq’s killing fields were made public, and now the intensely pro-establishment think-tank Chatham House has declared that a policy they describe as ‘riding pillion’ on the US imperialist military adventures exposed Britain to just such dangers. Not long ago the ‘Downing Street Memos’, in which Blair revealed his commitment to Bush’s ‘regime change’ in Iraq long before the spurious allegations of ‘WMDs’ or Al Qaeda links were rolled out, were leaked to the public. And now it is being suggested that British intelligence documents which appear to state that an attack on London was not currently likely, and have been used to justify the downgrading of security arrangements there at the very time Bush and Blair were meeting for G8, have been ‘doctored’ by the government in the same way as intelligence reports on WMDs had been.
Secondly, the state and media-led responses to the blasts have been partly shaped by the specificities of British ‘multiculturalism’ as a strategy of control. It is important not to underestimate the extent of anti-Muslim racism in Britain and the role of the state in whipping it up, indirectly since the fall of the Soviet Union , and openly since 9/11. It was demonstrated in the aftermath of the blasts in the thousands of hate mails received by Muslim groups, in the firebombing of mosques, and in abuse and attacks in the street, including the murder of a Muslim man in Nottingham, and no doubt will be used to justify today’s ‘execution-style’ police killing. Harassment and racist abuse from the police, already a daily experiences for British Muslims going about their business, has only intensified. Yet while the dominant discourse of the state and media brands all Muslims as ‘fundamentalists’, ‘fanatics’ and ‘terrorists’, the government has continued to pursue a multicultural strategy which deals with so-called ‘faith communities’ (viewed as monolithic entities) through reactionary state-funded ‘community leaders’. Its response to the bombings has combined both these approaches. A new raft of repressive anti-terror measures are billed as ‘helping the Muslim community to confront extremism’ and Blair has repeatedly demanded that the community ‘do more’ to combat terror. As the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission protested, ‘these statements simply fuel the idea that the attacks in London were the result of a process that is understood, transparent and above all accessible to all Muslims in the UK . This scapegoats Muslims as the cause of terrorism and is a dangerous stereotype to promote at any level, let alone as the formulation of government policy.’
The notion of dividing the oppressed into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ has always been dear to the British establishment and predictably we now see the emergence of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims in Britain – ‘good’ means being ‘loyal’ to the British state and taking little interest in global politics – but it has other more insidious elements. A particularly disturbing example of this came in the liberal and generally anti-war national daily The Guardian just a week after the blasts. Two young people, both British Muslims, both now dead, were profiled on the front page. Hasib Hussain, at 18 the youngest of the suicide bombers had, we were told, ‘no future’ while 20 year old bank clerk Shahara Islam, a victim of the bus bomb, had ‘everything to live for’. More offensive was the description of the dead woman – a local café owner in the area where she worked, one Shahid Khan, explained that ‘she was a pleasant, modern girl…I saw her in mainstream clothing. She had a nice manicure and her hair was always straightened. She didn’t look like some stereotyped ethnic minority’.
Evidently however, the blasts have not, as Blair clearly hoped, weakened anti-war feelings or the anti-war movement itself. The days which followed saw a series of meetings and vigils at which people came together to condemn this horrific attack on innocent civilians while making common cause with the thousands more victims of imperialist aggression in Iraq , Afghanistan , or Palestine .
Given the government’s continuing attempts to deny all links between the ‘barbarism’ of 7/7 and their own actions, it has clearly been important to emphasise the connections, and speakers at the rallies emphasised that the bombers were young men ‘angry’ at the attacks on fellow Muslims across the world. Meanwhile some observers such as British-based writer Ziauddin Sardar have been looking more introspectively at the contradictions within Islamic thought itself and in particular at the rise to predominance of Wahhabism at the expense of other trends. Both of these approaches are relevant, yet a more complex analysis from left and progressive forces is also desperately needed. For example, the suicide bombers in this case were not highly educated young men from privileged Arab families but the sons of working-class South Asian immigrants, born a region of Britain devastated by the de-industrialisation of the 1980s – where only five years ago their contemporaries took to the streets in riots against police racism. These young men grew up in the post-Thatcher atmosphere of economic despair, and in a climate where the demonisation of British Muslims had become the dominant element within the discourse of British racism (unlike the earlier period when all South Asians and African-Caribbeans were targets and resistance too was shared.)
More broadly, it was the era of globalisation, of the marginalized invisible pockets of the ‘Third World in the First World’ and of a new imperialist offensive in which, perhaps for the first time since the end of colonialism, events and struggles taking place outside the West have definitively shaped racism and identity within Britain.
Trends within Islam too cannot be understood in isolation from the past and present of imperialism. Tariq Ali has described in ‘The Clash of Fundamentalisms’ how the rise of Wahhabism almost from its inception was inextricable from successive imperialist projects. And while most people are aware of the roots of Al Qaeda (and much else) in the CIA’s nurturing of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, less well-known is the fact related by Dr Ghyasuddin Siddiqui of the British-based Muslim Parliament that in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher’s government actively welcomed to Britain ‘fundamentalist’ clerics who portrayed the war against the Soviet Union as ‘jihad’. Then as now, a number of British-born Muslims were inspired to travel abroad to train and fight. At that time however they went with the tacit blessing of the British government.
Now more than ever, Britain ’s anti-war movement needs to provide a coherent analysis of the historical roots as well as the contradictions of the phase of imperialism we are living through. But for the moment at least, it is too politically divergent and contingent a coalition of forces to be able to do so.
In the 1970s and 80s, British Black activists countered racist anti-immigration rhetoric with the slogan ‘We are here because you were there’ in a reference to the ravages of colonialism. In this new era of globalisation and unending imperialist war, it seems that this phrase has acquired many more layers of meaning.