A Nation and Islam
By admin • Jun 10th, 2010Preoccupied by wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the British government may have overlooked a poisonous tide of anti-Muslim sentiment developing at home.
The cry for blood is sounding again. Another devastating attack, this one in Moscow, met by another vow to mirror aggression with violence where it has long proved counter-productive.
Today’s leaders, it seems, refuse to acknowledge that harnessing the words of warriors in response to attacks on state security is both antiquated and destructive in an age where populations no longer take up their sticks and rush into battle to protect their mud huts at the first hint of foreign aggression.
Yet leaders continue to give inflammatory speeches, whipping the public into a frenzy of racial contempt and tribal finger-pointing in countries that allegedly endorse multiculturalism, equality, and racial harmony.
Following the recent Moscow attacks, Russia’s leadership wasted no time in pledging their determination to root out attackers and “destroy them all.”
“We know that they are lying low, but it is already a matter of pride for law-enforcement agencies to drag them out of the depths of the sewer,” announced Putin on March 29, following the explosions of two bombs during morning rush hour, which officials say killed 38 people and injured more than 60.
Putin’s words have a familiar ring. So do the future consequences they may have on ethnic communities who shoulder the blame. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York in September 2001, American leaders were equally vociferous about their commitment to violence.
Pointing “the full wrath of the United States” at the Taliban, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell proclaimed: “You either respond and rip them up, help us rip them up, get rid of them, or you will suffer the consequences.” U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld offered a slightly clearer, but no less vigorous image of a “broad, sustained effort that will have to use our diplomatic, our political, our economic, our financial strength, as well as our military strength.”
Speaking without the tempering influence of advisors a few days after the 9/11 attacks, America’s then-president, George W. Bush, harnessed the words of the ancient warrior to maximum disadvantage when he characterized his response as “this crusade.”
And a crusade is clearly how many in the West have perceived it, if the spiralling state of anti-Muslim sentiment among Western populations is anything to go by. Having followed America into both Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain has accompanied its retaliation against terrorism with the customary words of war, and their vaunted ideals of multiculturalism and racial equality are reaping the inevitable consequences.
After the attacks on the London Underground and bus network in 2005, the Muslim Council of Britain (M.C.B.) stated that “these evil deeds make victims of us all,” a claim that has proved uncomfortably pertinent several years on.
Following the 2005 bombings, police figures showed a 600 percent rise in attacks motivated by religious hatred, and in August 2005 the Islamic Human Rights Commission said it had received 320 complaints of attacks on Muslims since July 7, compared with a typical average of five a week.
