The Roots of Islamist Terrorism...

Tap a Brew, Provoke the Islamists

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In a recent article for The Guardian, "Blair can no longer deny a link exists between terrorism and foreign policy" (June 4, 2007), Tariq Ramadan argues:

Tony Blair and his government have obliged civil servants to deny that a link exists between terrorism and British foreign policy. While the invasion of Iraq can never be claimed as ethical justification for terrorist attacks against innocent citizens in London, it would be absurd to deny the reality of the political connection between the two.

Former Ramadan supporter David Goodhart, who edits the liberal magazine Prospect and who has previously interviewed Ramadan for this same magazine, has written an "Open letter to Tariq Ramadan" (Prospect, June 2007) expressing his disappointment in Ramadan's article:

I was disappointed by your piece in the Guardian on Monday 4th June. For what it's worth, I have spent quite a lot of time in the past year or two defending you from the many people in the British political class who are influenced by the predominant French-American view that you are a dangerous extremist (recently rehearsed, as you will know, by Paul Berman in the New Republic). Having heard you speak several times, and interviewed you in depth for Prospect, I concluded that whatever your former beliefs, you now thought that Muslims should embrace and integrate into western societies....

Perhaps you have your "realpolitik" reasons too for repeating the grievance-seeking, responsibility-avoiding diatribe that I read in the Guardian -- all too familiar from far less accomplished Muslim thinkers than yourself -- claiming that all this Muslim extremism in Britain is someone else's fault, probably the British government's. But it is still nonsense. You come close to repeating the canard that Mohammad Sidique Khan was a well-integrated young British-Pakistani driven mad by Tony Blair's foreign policy. Well, I implore you to read the cover story in the latest issue of Prospect magazine by Shiv Malik. It describes how Khan, who had indeed been relatively well integrated as a youngster, became seduced by the temptation of extreme Muslim identity politics. There are two reasons why Muslim youth seem to be especially vulnerable. First, the acute generational conflict created by moving from traditional social and moral orders to a modern liberal society; second, the existence of various Islamist political-religious ideologies offering a total explanation of the world and the young Muslim's potentially heroic role in ushering in a new one. Khan had swapped his parents' traditionalist Islam for the "pure" Wahhabi faith in the mid-1990s, and by 1999 he was already seeking to perform violent jihad -- many years before 9/11 or the Iraq war. (Of course, the latter did enrage him too, and it made Britain his target instead of Kashmir or Israel.)

To blame it all on British foreign policy and racism will simply not do. British Muslims are among the politically freest and richest in the world, which is why so many more Muslims are desperate to come and live here....

And foreign policy? Britain in the post-cold war era, and especially under Tony Blair, has been running a more "interventionist" policy than was possible earlier. Some of those interventions -- such as that in Sierra Leone, 70 per cent Muslim -- have been relatively successful and popular. Others, especially that in Iraq, have been unsuccessful and much more controversial, splitting the country in two....

But in any case, the idea that British foreign policy has been run on an anti-Muslim agenda does not stand examination. In Bosnia and Kosovo (and Sierra Leone), Britain took military action on behalf of Muslims, in some cases against Christians. In Iraq, rightly or wrongly (and Prospect was opposed to Britain's role) we helped to remove a secular dictator, and we will leave behind a Muslim democracy of some kind.

Well, we can hope that this democracy stuff will take in Iraq, but things don't look too promising there.

Although Goodhart is correct to note the complexity of Britain's foreign policy and the fact that Britain has often intervened to help Muslims, the critic Ramadan is also correct to note that Britain's foreign policy provokes Islamist terrorists. So does America's foreign policy.

Many policies, of course, provoke Islamists:

Israel's policy toward the mostly Muslim Palestinians. Russia's policy in mostly Muslim Chechnya. India's policy in mostly Muslim Kashmir. Thailand's policy in its southern, largely Muslim provinces. The Philippines' policy toward Muslims in its southern island of Mindanao. The policy of the 15th-century Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella toward the Muslim Moors. The policy of non-Muslims in southern Sudan in resisting Islamization. The policy of the Jyllands-Posten on free expression about Islamic topics. The policy of the British government in bestowing a knighthood on the ex-Muslim Salman Rushdie. The policy of the Christians holding church services in largely Muslim Indonesia. The policy of Christian workers meeting secretly for private Bible study in strictly Muslim Saudi Arabia. The policy of women anywhere going unveiled. The policy of non-Muslims remaining non-Muslim. The policy of Buddhist statues remaining Buddhist statues. The policy of somebody, somewhere in the universe, drinking a beer.

All of these things are very, very, very provocative to Islamists.

Will Hutton notes that "The West provokes Islam not by doing anything ... it provokes at least some strands of Islamic thought simply by being" (Why the West must stay true to itself," The Observer, June 17, 2007).

Indeed, not only the West, but also the rest of the non-Muslim world, for every non-Muslim place or non-Muslim person provokes the Islamists simply by being ... non-Muslim.