Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
Muslims split on cause of bombings
The Washington Post
LONDON — Leaders of Britain's Muslim community who met yesterday with Tony Blair at the prime minister's office acknowledged strong disagreements among themselves over the root causes of the July 7 suicide bombings that killed at least 56 people here and injured 700. Police say four young British Muslims carried out the attacks.
Many Muslims blame the Iraq war, as do Britons in general. A poll in the Guardian newspaper yesterday said two-thirds of the public believed there was a link between the bombings and the war, echoing the view in a briefing paper on Britain's security services issued by Chatham House, a prominent foreign-policy research center in London.
Blair heatedly rejected such reasoning at a news conference after the meeting with the Muslim leaders, warning it was perilously close to "the sort of perverted and twisted logic" used by terrorists.
Yamin Zakaria, a Britain-based computer technician who publishes fiery manifestos on various Islamic and political Web sites, contends the bombings were payback, not just for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but for a long series of atrocities committed by the West against the Muslim world. In his view, these include the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a prison at Bagram in Afghanistan and the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba.
"It's human nature for people to fight back when they're attacked," he said. "You've slaughtered us for years, and no one hit back, but now that someone has, you cry foul."
Zakaria says the moderates who appeared at Downing Street are co-opted careerists and sellouts who do not speak for young Muslims.
One Muslim leader who was not invited to the Downing Street summit was Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian academic who is a leader of the Muslim Association of Britain, a coalition of predominantly Arab Muslim groups that was at the forefront of the anti-war campaign here. Tamimi is considered a moderate by many in the Arab community, but he also is a longtime supporter of Hamas, the radical Islamic group responsible for many of the suicide bombings in Israel.
Tamimi says the London bombings were an act of barbarism. But he placed much of the blame on the government while at a rally of several hundred anti-war protesters Sunday, near the Piccadilly line subway tunnel that was the scene of the worst of the attacks.
Several groups of Muslim clerics have issued fatwas, or religious decrees, against the London bombings, saying the acts were prohibited in Islam. About 100 incidents of vandalism and arson have been reported against mosques in London and Leeds in the aftermath of the attacks, The New York Times reported. The Islamic Human Rights Commission reported that Muslims around the country have received thousands of threats via e-mail.
"Britain is tolerant and respectful of all religions, but that respect and tolerance does not extend to allowing people to incite violence and terrorism," David Davis of the Conservative Party said Monday after representatives of the country's major parties agreed to push for sweeping new laws to combat terrorism.
Around 1.3 million of Britain's 1.8 million Muslims come from the Asian subcontinent — Pakistan, Bangladesh and India — and many have been here for two generations or more.
While Indians are often prosperous, many Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have been stuck on the bottom rung of Britain's socioeconomic ladder. Even the most mainstream of organizations, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, express a sense of grievance against British society, and complain about growing "Islamophobia."
As the signs grow that the bombings may have been organized partly in Pakistan, the government of President Pervez Musharraf is broadening a crackdown on Muslim militant groups it once helped sponsor.
Police detained as many as 50 men yesterday in a fourth day of searches and raids, many of them as part of the bombing investigation.
On Nov. 19, two of the suspects arrived together at the Karachi airport for a three-month visit that investigators have said may have been the occasion for detailed planning and organizing of the bombing plot.
seattletimes.nwsource.com |
