The Great Britain Bust

The government, sadly for itself, does not have credibility on its side. Much of its credibility may lie in just how convincing the new finds are, but Muslim leaders continue to doubt government claims. "The whole operation may have no substance," Ghiyasuddin Siddiqui, director of the Muslim Institute, a leading Muslim group here, told Outlook. A failure to produce convicting evidence against the suspects would be another blow to the Blair government, he said. "After all, we went to war in Iraq based on false intelligence, and then there are a series of things that have taken place where intelligence has been found to be wanting. There is some problem at the level of decision-making, and the way intelligence is gathered and presented. We have a very big problem of credibility now."

Credibility problems arose in June with the raid on a house in Forest Gate in East London that the police suspected was being used as a laboratory to make chemical weapons. More than 250 armed police surrounded the house, and a group stormed in, shooting one of the two Muslims in there in the shoulder. The police searched and searched but found nothing to make chemical bombs with. The two were let off. Now the police say they found a pornographic dvd in which someone appeared to be underage. Terrible, but not terrorism. And Muslims are recalling again the case of Brazilian Claude de Menezes who was shot dead soon after 7/7 on 'intelligence' that he was a terrorist. Of the 7/7 bombings there was no intelligence.

Many Muslims are beginning to feel that Britain could have fallen into a Pakistani intelligence trap. "My fear is that it all probably started in Pakistan," said Siddiqui. "General Musharraf's position is very, very bad, and he wanted to do something to win the favour of Bush and Blair. " Such explanations may be simplistic, but Pakistan has a record now of periodically producing an arrest here, a tip-off there, to project itself as an ally in the war on terror.

The Pakistani connection with terror conspiracies, though, is not in doubt. Three of the 7/7 bombers were Pakistanis, and two of them had been to Pakistani madrassas. Before that, terror groups ran many recruitment centres in Britain; at one, they told Outlook some years back, that Muslim youths, overwhelmingly Pakistanis, had attended training camps "in thousands" in Pakistan and elsewhere. Now, whether or not some of these plotters planned the bombings, everyone believes they could have. Quite apart from those held, Britain's Muslims stand convicted for perceived intention.

More than the 7/7 bombings perhaps, a survey last month around the anniversary of the event strengthened that perception. "This was depressingly laid bare by a recent Times poll that stated that 13 per cent of British Muslims believed that the 7/7 attackers were martyrs," Labour MP of Pakistani origin, Shahid Malik, admitted. Not many in Britain are making fine distinctions these days between plotters and would-be plotters. "People are telling us again and again that we have a fifth column in this country, people who are untrustworthy and unreliable," said Siddiqui. "This is very damaging."

Muslim leaders say the young are provoked by Britain's foreign policy tuned in too closely with that of the US. "I think the majority of them are reacting to the international situation," Mushtaq Lasharie, Labour Party councillor and president of the group Third World Solidarity, told Outlook. "When the media shows a young, innocent one-day child being killed by Israeli bombs flown from the US through British airspace, Muslims in this country feel very frustrated. They say if we can't do anything, should we adopt the way of raising our voices through killing innocent people in the Western world, which is not right, but which might be the only way left to protest against the Western world."

Six MPs of Pakistani origin—Sadiq Khan, Shahid Malik and Mohammed Sarwar in the House of Commons, and Lord Patel, Lord Ahmed and Baroness Pola Uddin in the House of Lords—have written to the government that "it is our view that current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad—the debacle of Iraq and now the failure to do more to secure an immediate end to the attacks on civilians in the Middle East not only increases the risk to ordinary people in that region, it is also ammunition to extremists that threaten us all".

Extremists are exploiting the political environment, Siddiqui says. "Extremists among the Muslims have succeeded in convincing the entire community that this war on terror is, in fact, a war on Muslims and Islam. And when President Bush says that this war is against Islamic fascists, it convinces the innocent, ordinary people that perhaps there is some sort of conspiracy against Islam."

And now Muslims are being provoked by the very perception that large numbers among them support terrorism. "The way the arrests have been hyped up, the way the media has been reporting the arrests, the Muslim community feels it is under siege," Ahmed Versi, editor of The Muslim News here told Outlook. "Everything you watch on television, read in the newspapers, they are talking about Muslims, about Islam, about extremism among the Muslim community." One mosque has been attacked by arsonists, and others are under threat, he said.

But Muslim leaders are also acknowledging that there are people in the community who are asking for the trouble that the whole community is facing. Malik says mosques in Britain are extremely vigilant about who, and what, they allow on to their platforms, "with the exception of a very few". But how many mosques does it take to encourage how many terrorists?

The arrested suspects in this case are still some way from any conviction as terrorists. Deputy prime minister John Prescott has said already that many of those arrested may not face serious charges; whether any of them will is not certain either. How good the case is seems to depend primarily on how good the information is that the Pakistani intelligence says it got after the arrest of Rashid Rauf. It would be a good deal easier to recover lost baggage than lost faith.