The Centre For Social Cohesion

Acres of newsprint today are given over to reporting and commenting about yesterday’s guilty verdict of five young British Muslims for conspiracy to make and explode a 600kg bomb somewhere in the Home Counties, either a Kent shopping centre or a London nightclub.

Much of this newspaper copy is devoted to delineating the links that only now can be made known publicly, but which were long known to MI5, between those convicted yesterday and two of the 7/7 London suicide bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. Much editorial comment today debates how culpable MI5 may have been in deciding not to place Khan and Tanweer under 24-hour surveillance after their links to these suspects became known to it, and how far the whole matter should be made the subject of official enquiry.

Important though these issue undoubtedly are, I shall leave it to others to debate them. Hindsight always offers 20/20 vision.

Of far greater potential importance to me than the question of how culpable MI5 may have been for not acting on information it had about the links between Khan and Tanweer and those terror suspects convicted yesterday is a brief report in today’s Times about something else that also entered the public domain only yesterday.

Perhaps the most interesting response to the ‘Bluewater cell’ convictions is this piece in today's Telegraph, written by Ed Husain, a former London-based student who was also once a member of the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT).

HT were one of the groups which Tony Blair promised to proscribe after 7/7, when he claimed that ‘the rules of the game have changed.’ But the rules did not change, and although David Cameron also recently calling for a ban on HT in Britain, they remain legal and extremely active - not least on UK campuses.

Once upon a time in a not so far-off kingdom, still somewhat anachronistically known as a united one, there lived two lads each named Ed, although neither was given that name at birth.

One had been originally named ‘Muhammed’ and so disenchanted with the kingdom in which he grew up did this Ed become that, as a young man, he joined a group of coreligionists bent upon turning it into a caliphate under Shariah law.

In its submission of written evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee on Global Security, so the Sunday Telegraph reports, the Church of England claims Britain’s recent foreign policy has been counterproductive in terms of fighting Islamist terror. Rather than helping to minimise the risks of suffering it, Britain’s role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq has only served to recruit British Muslims to the cause of jihad and increase the risk it faces of suffering terror attacks.

According to the newspaper report, the church in its submission called on Parliament to use Tony’s Blair’s departure from government as an opportunity to ‘recalibrate its foreign policy towards the USA, Europe and the Middle East’.

In a comment piece in today’s Times, David Aaronovitch takes the Church of England to task for suggesting the invasion of Iraq has boosted recruitment to the ranks of Islamist terror. He cites the radicalisation of Ed Husain in 1993-4, as well as that of other British Muslims who became radicalised well before 2003, as evidence that western foreign policy has been less instrumental in causing Islamic terrorism than ‘Muslims and Islam in general’.

I do not see how the fact that recruitment to Islamic terrorism began well before the 2003 invasion of Iraq shows that the invasion has not enormously increased recruitment to the ranks of Muslims waging jihad both here, there, and elsewhere. And I think it must be conceded that it has done. See the overwhelming evidence that it has done in the very illuminating recent article 'The Iraq Effect' by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank.

Nor do I see how the pre-existence of Islamic terrorism before Bush declared war on terror shows that its ultimate cause resides less in western foreign policy than it does in the very nature of Islam and its adherents.

The widow of the lead suicide-murderer of 7/7 has been arrested this morning, along with three others, for allegedly plotting an act of terror.

This comes at the same time as the arrest by the FBI of six jihadists on American soil. The six are believed to have been planning an attack aimed at achieving a maximum number of US service personnel casualties at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

Inter-faith dialogue; compulsory mixing of schoolchildren to promote better race relations ….

There seems currently no end to the number of straws to which Labour ministers and prime ministers are not unwilling to cling in a desperate bid to salvage the country from the parlous state into which ten years of their hopelessly misguided immigration and multicultural policies have brought it.

We should not feel afraid, however, of saying that, at present, only one recently settled minority is proving hard to integrate adequately in Britain -- its Muslim one. The reasons why this is so are many and complex and not to be addressed fully here.

What can and should be said, however, is that neither the compulsory mixing of all the country’s school children by twinning schools, nor inter-faith dialogue between the members of its different faith communities, either on their own or together, are at all likely to solve the most acute problem the country currently faces regarding social cohesion. This is that of preventing its young Muslim citizens becoming so alienated from mainstream British society and life as to be susceptibile to radicalisation by extremists intent on turning them into terrorists.

Education has, I believe, a crucial role to play here in promoting social cohesion, but only if educational policy takes a very different course from what is currently being proposed for it by the government.

David Cameron’s piece in yesterday’s Observer started promisingly.

‘The challenges of cohesion and integration are among the greatest we face’

That’s certainly admirably on-message with us here at the Centre for Social Cohesion.

In his comment piece in today’s Times, entitled ‘Don’t try and put the ration into immigration’, David Aaronvitch takes exception to all forms of governmental limit to foreign immigration into this country.

His stated reasons for opposing all such limits are lame indeed.

On 9th June a ‘day of action’ is going to take place to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Six Day War. But this event - named 'Enough' - is not a celebration of the outbreak of peace, or a commemoration of the dead. It is, rather, a rally against ‘Israel’s military occupation of Palestine’.

The march is due to go through central London, and the organisers are stating that ‘We want tens of thousands of people to join us for the primary international event of the year in support of the Palestinian people’.

I suppose we should welcome the fact that, as reported in today’s Times, the 100,000 Muslim children currently in attendance at madrassas in this country are to be required to receive lessons in citizenship that are designed to encourage them to share ‘British values of justice, peace and respect’.

However, I am not altogether convinced that the means chosen to accomplish this end will be entirely up to the job, desirable though that end undoubtedly is.

According to the news report, the specially designed citizenship curriculum is to ‘highlight Koranic teachings on respect and tolerance, and emphasise the value it places on human life’.

Since the Koran is precisely what forms the inspiration and supplies the intellectual and moral license for today’s jihadis, I am not sure making it the basis for underwriting the liberal values associated with British citizenship is necessarily going to do the job that it is being called upon to do.

I wrote last week about the celebrity-endorsed protest due to take place in London in a couple of weeks time to commemorate the Six Day War, and - rather more ominously - ‘Israel’s military occupation of Palestine.'

The website of the ‘Enough’ coalition states that they ‘[oppose] all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Holocaust denial or Nakba denial, in forwarding the work of the coalition.’

Today's newspapers contain two different horticultural stories each with a bearing on social cohesion.

The first concerns the opening yesterday of a ‘multi-faith’ garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, reportedly designed ‘to show how faiths use plants and flowers as symbols and are linked through horticulture’.

One of the ‘commitments’ expressed on the site of the ‘Enough’ coalition - due to march through the streets of London in a fortnight to oppose the ‘Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories’ - is that its members all ‘reject the use of violence in their single or joint actions and uphold the principle of non-violent campaigning.’

Not for the first time, we have reason to doubt whether the Enough coalition is telling the whole - or indeed any part of the - truth here.

Among the organisation signed up to the Enough coalition is the Muslim Association of Britain. MAB counts among its heads the Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi.

According to their own literature, the organisers of next month’s planned London 'Enough' demonstration against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories are ‘a group of charities, trade unions, faith and other campaign groups …[who] have come together because … [they] want peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike’.

A poll by the respected Pew Research Center has caused concern in America with its finding that one in four young American Muslims consider suicide bombing sometimes acceptable.

But to us here in Great Britain, one figure ignored in the States stands out even more.

A recent article in the International Herald Tribune provides its readers with some not entirely reassuring details about how young British Muslim students attending their country's burgeoning madrassas are being taught citizenship in them.

With the help of a £100K government-grant, a model citizenship curriculum is being drawn up, it reports, that is currently being pilotted by ten Muslim clerics teaching at six Bradford madrassas. Students receiving citizenship education according to this curriculum are reportedly being asked to to debate such tricky questions in civics as the following:

A group of Islamic extremists want to buy fertiliser that could be used to make a bomb. Should the shopkeeper sell it to them, even if he suspects it will be used for “holy war”?

Ahmed, whose jihadi friends want to attack a local supermarket in retaliation for the war in Iraq. Is it right for Ahmad to harm innocent Britons just because their government invaded a Muslim country?'

The Centre for Social Cohesion this morning hosted Dr Wafa Sultan at a meeting of opinion-formers in Westminster.

Wafa Sultan is a Syrian-born psychiatrist who now lives in the United States. She leapt to international prominence in February 2006 after an outspoken interview on Al-Jazeera (click on link to watch). The clip was swiftly disseminated and viewed by over a million people on the internet in the following weeks alone. Dr Sultan – who in her interview tackled, and trounced, a cleric who tried to stop her from expressing her opinions – fast became a spokesperson for women and independent thinkers across the Muslim and Western world.

A motion adopted yesterday at this year's annual conference of UCU, the country's newly-formed trade union for academics, calls upon members to decide whether to boycott Israel's universities.

Regardless of how they vote in what looks like fast becoming a bi-annual, if not annual, ritual at this time of year, the mere fact only Israel was singled out for this form of special treatment when its human rights track-record can hardly be judged any worse than that of many other countries, even judged by the lights of advocates of the boycott, suggests only one thing. Either what drives them is sheer unadulterated anti-Semitism or else the Arab lobby here is fast acquiring such a degree of influence as bodes ill for the future of this country, let alone that of Israel.