Open Letter to MI5 Director General Jonathan Evans
If there was a prize for the most dangerously irresponsible statementof recent times, I would recommend that it be given to Mr. Blair for that statement. In my view, the least that can be said about it is that it cut the ground, not all of it but some, from under the feet of moderate Muslim leaders who were trying to stop the drift to extremism in their communities, extremism caused in large part by British foreign policy ? correction, by Blair’s foreign policy.
I don’t presume to speak for Muslims but I can say, because it’s true, that I have been engaging with Muslim communities up and down the UK for the past two years; so I have a good idea of what many of our Muslims are thinking, feeling and fearing and, more to the point, how your address to the Society of Editors is likely to go down with them.
There is no mystery about what they fear. They know that the monster of Islamophobia is on the prowl and licking its lips at the prospect of being able to go on the rampage in the event of another major or more acts of “Islamic terrorism”.
The words you spoke and which I think many Muslims will regard as giving momentum to Islamophobia were these:
“As I speak, terrorists are methodically and intentionally targeting young people and children in this country. They are radicalising, indoctrinating and grooming young, vulnerable people to carry out acts of terrorism.”
That may well be so. Almost certainly is so. But those words (and the whole of your address as reported) took no account of the fact that as most Muslims see it, the best recruiting sergeant for violent Islamic fundamentalism is American and British foreign policy. In the absence of any such context, I think many Muslims in the UK will regard your words as provocative and likely to cause white British racists and bigots of all kinds to look upon Muslim children anywhere ? especially those in tube trains, on buses and at airports – as terrorists intent on, or with thoughts of, blowing them to pieces.
It’s worth noting that three weeks before you made your first ever public statement as MI5′s DG, a YOU GOV survey found that British people are today “more suspicious” of Muslims than they were a decade ago. I don’t think you have helped matters on that front.
I also think it’s highly likely that many British Muslims will conclude that you’re not your own man and can’t be because Prime Minister Blair succeeded in politicising our security services, effectively destroying them as agencies capable of serving the national interest when it is in conflict with Number Ten Downing Street’s political agenda. If that’s not the case, I suggest you find a way to reassure the Muslim community about your agency’s integrity.
I’ll close by telling you why I took time out to write this letter. I’m trying to be helpful.
Yours sincerely,
Alan Hart.
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