Myths behind opposition to war on terror

Melanie Phillips:

Dhiren who? Mention Dhiren Barot to anyone and the chances are that you’ll be met with blank looks. At best, some might say, ‘Oh, wasn’t he that guy who, er, that trial recently, yeah, bit worrying…’ Thus the British have somehow failed to register the significance of the conviction last month of a man who was one of al Qaeda’s biggest fishes, guilty of the most devastating terrorist plot ever known in this country and one which would made 9/11 look like a minor warm-up act.

This former airline ticket clerk plotted to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a series of synchronised atrocities in Britain and the US. He planned to blow up public buildings using gas cylinders in limousines, to mount a gas attack on the Heathrow Express rail shuttle, and to blow up the Tube under the Thames to rupture the walls keeping out the river. Police found in his notebooks details of how to construct a chemicals laboratory, along with recipes for poisons and plans to use radiation to spread sickness, panic, chaos and death on a vast scale.

Terrifying and astounding as all this was, the real significance of the case lay in the way it punctured the myths fuelling Britain’s state of denial over Islamist terrorism.

Myth one is that Britain is only threatened by such terror because the war in Iraq has radicalised British Muslims. Yet Barot was laying his infernal plans before 9/11, let alone the fall of Saddam.

As long ago as 1999 he advocated bringing western countries to their knees. Significantly, he observed that this could only be achieved by Muslims living in western countries, because only they understood the culture, geography and common practices of the people amongst whom they lived.

He also acknowledged the crucial insight that the British still do not grasp: that the single greatest recruiter to terror is terror itself. The reason terrorism was a religious duty, he wrote, was that ‘terror works’. That is why, as the head of MI5 Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller has noted, the scale and speed of radicalisation among British Muslims increased after the 7/7 bombings.

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Myth two is that British Muslims turn to terror because they live segregated lives or are poor and alienated. But Barot, a middle-class, suburban former grammar school pupil, was born and raised as a Hindu, converting to Islam only at the age of 20.

Myth three is that President Bush and the world Zionist conspiracy are to blame for fuelling Islamist terror. In 1995, Barot attended a terrorist training camp in Kashmir. George W Bush was not yet even a twinkle in a neocon eye; the sainted Bill Clinton was in the White House, and US interests had already been under attack by the Islamic jihad for years.

For Barot, a former Hindu, to be radicalised to Islamist extremism by the issue of Kashmir —the totemic dispute between Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan — not only suggests a highly complex personal pathology at work here, but also shows the utter absurdity of blaming British Muslim radicalisation on America, Israel or Iraq.

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There is much more including more myths. The religious bigotry of the enemy is the root cause of all these conflicts. This bigotry was not caused by America, Israel or Iraq. It is caused by the preachers of hate who have too strong a following in the Islamic culture. It has corrupted that culture and made everyone suffer for that corruption. The task of destroying that culture of religious bigotry will take several generations, but the fight is worth it.