By Paul Vallely
A few days after suicide bombers killed 52 people on the London transport system I was sitting on an Underground train in the British capital. A man got on the train and sat opposite me. Our eye met briefly and then he looked down. He looked Pakistani or perhaps Indian. On his lap rested a medium-sized rucksack, of the type which had contained the bombs a few delays earlier. This could be another bomber, I thought. It was a discomfiting feeling.
Not long afterwards I was talking to a Muslim friend in Manchester, 200 miles to the north. He had just come back from London too. It had been a disturbing experience for him also. Every time he had sat down on a train or bus, or indeed in any public space, he felt: “Everyone is looking at me thinking I might be a bomber.”
My mind went back three decades to the days just after Irish republican bombers killed 19 people and injured 200 more in twin IRA blasts in bars in Birmingham in the English Midlands. There were significant numbers of Irish people at the Catholic church I attended. My great-grandfather had migrated from Armagh 80 years earlier and, though I felt utterly English, I felt culturally attuned to those who had migrated to England more recently. I was shocked then to hear acquaintances whose accents were still Irish rather than English like my own, talk about the fear and suspicion – and occasionally downright abuse and hostility – with which they were greeted as they went about their business in my country.
The actions of tiny few had tarnished the reputation of an entire people. So it is again today, with an entire religion.
In situations like this our reasons deserts us, and atavistic prejudices resurface. Warped syllogisms skew our perceptions of reality: the bombers were all Muslims, Britain has many Muslims, therefore all British Muslims are bombers.
We know this is not true. We also known that we make risk-benefit analyses all through our lives; a lot of people get killed in car crashes, but we do not therefore conclude that all cars are bad, or that we must never cross a road. My chances of being killed by a car in Europe today are far far greater than that I would be the victim of a terrorist attack.
Yet despite all that the temptation is to regard all Muslims, and most particularly strangers, with suspicion. That mood is what gives considerable support from an otherwise freedom-loving British public to plans by the British government to introduce a 90-day detention-without-trial for terrorist suspects.
The danger is that suspicion can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is the lesson of the long bloody conflict between the IRA and the British people. At the height of that the British government introduced open-ended detention-without-trial called internment. It became – as even one of those in charge of the fight against IRA terrorism, the former Northern Ireland Secretary, Tom King, admitted – the IRA’s “greatest recruiting sergeant”. Internment heightened a sense of injustice among the relatives and friends of those arrested. Those jailed became more radicalized in prison. And there was actually a rise, rather than a fall, in violence after internment was introduced.
We must not repeat the mistakes of history. If we treat Muslims with suspicion we push some of them into the hands of the extremists. And from that we would all emerge as losers.
Paul Vallely is Associate Editor of The Independent, London, UK.
