An article in Salon about some key differences between Britain and America.
[quote from article by Andrew Brown begins]
As far as can be told, every single one of the suspects arrested here was born here. One was a white convert, known until a year ago by the strikingly un-Muslim name of Don Stewart-Whyte. We are not dealing here with something wholly foreign. The discovery of the plot comes less than a week after a poll for a reputable television program suggested that between a quarter and one-third of young British Muslims say they understand the motives of the suicide bombers who struck London in July 2005; about the same proportion would be happy to live under sharia law. Given a Muslim population of about 1.6 million, this translates to something between 100,000 and 200,000 people who could be described as terrorist sympathizers.
Now, from an American perspective, that can seem incredibly dangerous....Of course, the presence of a large disaffected and angry bloc of Muslim voters who believe that British foreign policy is immoral and misguided creates a problem. The fact that our army in Iraq will almost certainly have to retreat, defeated, makes the problem worse. It looks as if the army in Afghanistan is fighting a much harder war than some politicians foresaw; it's also clear that America will have to pull back from Iraq, and the British army is hardly going to stay there on its own.
One may not like the fact that the invasion of Iraq has made homegrown British terrorism more likely. But it is a fact, acknowledged by almost everyone except Prime Minster Tony Blair. The trouble is that a defeat in Iraq will make the invaders seem both weaker and more immoral. This is a dangerous position to be in.
[quote from article by Andrew Brown ends]
A similar article, also posted at Salon by MarK Benjamin, makes similar points. Is the UK better than the US at Stopping Terrorists? Americans bust the hapless Sea of David gang. The British round up real terrorist rings. But experts say the UK arrests more extremists because more of them live on British soil.
[quote begins here]
Sir Ian Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London, reported last December that there had been a 75 percent increase in the antiterrorism operations carried out by his officers in the five months since the bombings in London on July 7, 2005. Between 2001 and those attacks, according to the New York Times, British law enforcement had already broken up seven or eight major terror plots. Since the attacks, there have been at least four more serious terror plots in that country, including the widely reported incident just weeks later when four suicide bombs failed to explode. In April 2006 alone, according to the Daily Telegraph, police were involved in 70 antiterrorism investigations, and officials said the pace was "accelerating." Of the more than 60 people facing trial on terrorism charges, two-thirds were arrested after the 2005 attacks.
Do those numbers mean the British are better at rooting out real terrorists than we are? Maybe not. Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank and a terror expert, has a simple explanation for why it seems like the Brits are arresting scarier people and more of them: "There are scarier people over there than there are here."
The difference in arrests in the United States and Britain appears to have much more to do with demographics than the relative skills of law enforcement. Most terrorism experts say the most insidious threats from terrorism now come not from organized terror organizations launching attacks that were hatched overseas, but from disenchanted Muslim extremists at home. And Muslim communities in the United States are generally more affluent and less dogmatic than those in Britain, which has a Muslim population of nearly 2 million. O'Hanlon described Muslim communities in Britain as "more cut off and more isolated" than in the United States.
"In the United States, the problem is one of dangerous people infiltrating the country, but the domestic problem is quite limited," said Daniel Byman, a terrorism expert and a professor at Georgetown University. "In the U.K. and in Europe in general, there is a large, unsatisfied Muslim population. It is a completely different issue. We think about bad guys overseas. They think about bad guys down the block."
[quote from article ends here]
I had no idea that there was so much activity of the sort happening in England (where my husband's family and a couple of my close friends currently reside). Nick says that he knew and he was unsurprised when I read him the statistics.
This can't be good for the British people who are Muslims with no such sympathies or aspirations. According to this article at BBC Online, the British police are currently very concerned about the possibility of violence to Muslim members of this population.
[quote from article begins]
The head of the Muslim Council of Britain said Muslims were "fully behind" efforts to prevent attacks.
Dr Mohammed Abdul Bari said the community supported curbs on terrorism, but warned of "a distance" growing between them and the police.
Peter Fahey, the communities and diversities spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), said forces would be "very alive" to any threats.
He added that he was aware that there was a distrust among the Muslim community.
"It is something that we take very very seriously and we are working all the time to break that down," he said.
Dr Bari warned police must be very careful, as the failed raid in east London in June created "a distance" between them and Muslims.
"The people that I have been listening to - the old, young, men and women - they are saying that they are fully behind the police when it comes to national security and the public safety," he said in an interview with BBC Radio Leeds.
He called on his community to "work together" with detectives, saying: "This is our society and we could have been victims as well, so there is no second thought on that."
[quote from article ends]
In additon to police raids, British Muslims have faced what Dr. Bari calls "Islamophobic acts." Watching BBC World tonight, I felt like crying when I watched the stunned, weeping father of two of the suspects trying to cope with the information. Next we saw two good-looking young Muslim men saying that they did not believe that one of the suspects could possibly be guilty. "He just got married!" they said. "He's too nice a guy to be involved in something like that!"
Of course, the British have lived with terror and terrorism; and according to me, one reason they're good at tracking it down is that they've had years and years to learn the ropes. There's a lot we could learn from them.
For one thing, we could learn to do the necessary without excessive rhetoric. In fact, I imagine that most ordinary people could do without it now. Passionate speechifying just doesn't cut it. His writers must grasp this fact to some extent, because they've ramped up the rhetoric to the point of offending U.S. Muslims. His free use of the phrase "Islamic fascists" was unfortunate.
[quote from article from BBC Online, Bush's language Angers US Muslims, begins]
Mr Bush used the term on at least two separate occasions this week.
On Monday, during a press conference from his ranch in Texas, he said terrorists "try to spread their jihadist message - a message I call ... Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism".
A moment later, he said "Islamo-fascism" was an ideology that is real and profound".
Then, on Thursday after the arrest in Britain of two dozen people suspected of plotting of bomb planes travelling to the US, he said "Islamic fascists... will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom".
That day, the Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote to him to complain.
Its chairman Parvez Ahmed condemned his "use of ill-defined hot-button terms", which, he said, "feeds the perception that the war on terror is actually a war on Islam".
[quote from article ends]
Furthermore..."fascists"? Both Nick and I turned to one another when we heard this and said "That's not right."
And I'm glad to say that Security Expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for International and Strategic Relations agrees. [quoting from article] ""Security expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies agreed that the term was meaningless. "There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term," he said. "This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one's opponent, but it doesn't tell us anything about the content of their beliefs." [quote ends]
For the president's speechwriter, some helpful advice from Mark Twain: "Use the right word, not its second cousin."
I felt that his delivery of these strong words was oddly lacking in force and conviction; he really looked as if he were dialing it in. I don't imagine for a moment that he chose those words, or that he thinks that all Muslims are fascists, but he really ought to give the person who did choose them something else to do. When the president starts calling names he is opening the door for people (I call them "bigots") who can only think in categories to do the same. Which is the beginning of the end of civility.
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