British Strategy for Home-Grown Religious Extremism

In an apparent show of response to the London bombings President Musharraf Perez arrested a senior cleric in Pakistan. Now, Perez might well be doing the right thing but it’s also known that very senior Pakistani military figures and politicians are very sympathetic or even colluding with Taliban and al Qaeda fugitives hiding along the Pakistan-Afghanistan borders.

So, I am just wondering whether this could well be just a hypocritical gesture, a symbolic sacrifice so to speak, to fend off the world’s staring eyes because the bombings were caused by mainly ethnic Pakistanis. To make matters worse (for Pakistan, that is), two of them had returned recently from Pakistan. Maybe it was also an opportunity to get rid of a troublesome mullah.

The British Government has just designed a strategy to crackdown on Islamist extremists and recruiters by way of a range of legislated anti-terror offences announced last night.

As a start, authorities detained the head of an Islamic religious school and 3 others. His madrassa is alleged to be where the bomber Shehzad Tanweer first made contact with al-Qaeda figures.

The Government intends to go for any preacher who glorifies atrocities, though legal experts voiced concerns about the difficulties of prosecuting them on such 'offences'.

The other prong of the British strategy to combat religious extremism in the Muslim community will be a campaign to combat the alienation and disaffection felt especially among young Muslims in Britain’s cities.

However, not one mention has been made of the principal provocation of Muslims, the one that causes the alienation and disaffection of young British Muslims and probably what had provided credibility to the clerics' call for jihad. Almost everyone, including Blair himself knows (except he would rather eat frog legs and soufflé than admit so) that it's the British military presence and interference in sovereign Muslim countries like Iraq.

As the doctor would say, it would be merely treating the symptoms rather than the cause of the disease.