BRITAIN yesterday paused for two minutes’ silence to remember the dead of July 7, 2005, the 52 people killed in four simultaneous attacks on London’s public transport system.
Few will have needed reminding of that terrible summer’s morning. Londoners were more buoyant than ever that day: their city had clinched the Olympics the day before; just a week earlier, the Live8 concerts had injected a sense of hope and enthusiasm that ordinary people could do something to alleviate the suffering of the world.
That optimism was shattered in just a few minutes. More disturbing still, came the realisation that the bombers were not djihadists from abroad, like the hijackers who had commandeered American planes a few years before, but home bred suburbia radicals from Britain’s very own Muslim community.
One year on, there will be relief that the carnage of July 7 has not been followed by more and greater attacks, as promised by one of the bombers in a posthumous video released this week, though that has perhaps more to do with faulty explosives and police vigilance than any lack of willing suicide bombers.
There will also be relief that the attacks have not been followed by a backlash against the community that bred the bombers, though British Muslims without doubt feel increasingly alienated, the victims if not of overt attacks, then of public fear and ever closer police attention.
Most significantly, the conditions that drove four young British men to kill dozens of innocent people one morning last July have not gone away. A recent report by British counter-terrorism officials seeking to understand the reasons behind the attacks has underlined the central role of British foreign policy in motivating disenchanted young Muslims in the UK.
The report says that in interviews with detained suspects, the questions of Iraq and Palestine come up again and again as a motive for their actions. It may be over-simplistic to describe terrorism as the result of foreign policy, it adds, pointing to underlying social frustrations and cultural insecurities, but “what western foreign policy does provide is justification for violence”.
Britain is not alone in facing the problems of second and third generation immigrant communities stumbling between integration and rejection. One only needs to think of last year’s riots in France to see the depth of frustration evident across Europe. But is it coincidence that while social frustration among French immigrant communities boiled over into riots, in Britain it translated into djihad?
The intelligence report rightly points to “insecurity and fear, loss of identity through encroaching secularism and a sense of cultural failure, past and present … Hatred of the west may be characterised as transferred self-blame and self-hatred”. But it is the perceived persecution of Muslims across the world by Britain and its American ally that has lit the fuse of radicalism. And for as long as that policy remains, innocent Britons will remain at risk.
