LONDON, 21 July 2005 — Western foreign policy has fuelled the Islamist radicalism behind the bomb attacks, which killed more than 50 people in London, the British capital’s Mayor Ken Livingstone said yesterday.
Livingstone, who earned the nickname “Red Ken” for his left-wing views, won widespread praise for a defiant response, which helped unite London after the bombings. But he has revived his reputation for courting controversy in recent days. Asked yesterday what he thought had motivated the four suspected suicide bombers, Livingstone cited Western policy in the Middle East and early American backing for Osama Bin Laden.
“A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in US detention camp Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn’t a just foreign policy,” he said.
Police say they believe there is a clear link between Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network and the four British Muslims who blew up three underground trains and a double-decker bus on July 7.
“You’ve just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil.
We’ve propped up unsavory governments, we’ve overthrown ones that we didn’t consider sympathetic,” Livingstone said.
“I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s ... the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians to drive them out of Afghanistan.
“They didn’t give any thought to the fact that once he’d done that, he might turn on his creators,” he told BBC radio.
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government has insisted the bombings have no link to its foreign policy, particularly its decision to invade Iraq alongside the United States.
A top think tank and a leaked intelligence memo have also suggested the war has made Britain more of a target for terrorists.
That did not stop the right-wing Daily Telegraph castigating Livingstone, a maverick member of Blair’s Labour Party who was celebrating London’s selection as host of the 2012 Olympics just hours before the bombers struck. Yesterday’s edition of the paper featured a picture of the mayor between photographs of two Muslim clerics under the headline: “The men who blame Britain”.
Livingstone has made clear he condemns all killing, including suicide bombing. But is also a long-standing critic of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
“If you have been under foreign occupation, and denied the right to vote, denied the right to run your own affairs, often denied the right to work, for three generations, I suspect if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers ourselves,” he said yesterday.
Israel’s Ambassador to London Zvi Heifetz accused the mayor of expressing sympathy for Palestinian militants.
“It is outrageous that the same mayor who rightfully condemned the suicide bombing in London as ‘perverted faith’, defends those who, under the same extremist banner, kill Israelis,” he said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the two meetings by Muslim leaders occurred only three days apart, one in Birmingham and one in London. Both condemned the terrorist attacks in the British capital, but they couldn’t agree on one key issue: Are suicide attacks forbidden by religious law?
The fact that one group said “yes” and the other group said “not always” could be one reason Muslim radicals sometimes succeed in recruiting disaffected young people as suicide bombers, even in Western democracies such as Britain. Some clerics argue that such strikes can be used against an occupying power — an exception that offers the radicals religious backing for their attacks.
Britain’s allegiance with the United States in Iraq has brought that debate home, even as it remains unclear what, precisely, motivated the July 7 London bombers.
“There is a very clear split between what the Islamic leaders said about whether suicide bombing is right or wrong in places such as Palestine, Kashmir or Chechnya,” said Lord Nazir Ahmed, a House of Lords legislator and a well-known Muslim moderate in Britain.
The split makes it easier for extremists to take root, Ahmed said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“What happened in London has no justification in Islam,” he said. “We have to make that clear in our fight against Muslim radicals.”
Britain’s largest Sunni Muslim group met in Birmingham on Sunday and issued a binding religious edict, or fatwa, condemning the suicide attacks that killed dozens on three London subway trains and a double-decker bus as the work of a “perverted ideology.” The group’s governing council said the Qur’an forbade suicide attacks and called such terrorism a sin that could send the perpetrators to hell.
Three days earlier at the London Central Mosque, 22 imams and scholars also condemned the July 7 attacks and said the four British Muslim suspects should not be considered martyrs because innocent civilians were killed. But the Muslim leaders stopped short of condemning all suicide bombings.
“There should be a clear distinction between the suicide bombing of those who are trying to defend themselves from occupiers, which is something different from those who kill civilians, which is a big crime,” said Sayed Mohammed Musawi, the head of the World Islamic League in London.
Underlining the sensitivity of the issue, Musawi’s contention that attacks are justified against “occupiers” came only after a spokesman for the leaders read a carefully worded statement condemning the London attacks. Even so, none of the other scholars and imams at the event expressed disagreement with his stance. As in other religions, Islam contains denominations with differing interpretations of its holy book, including liberal, moderate and fundamentalist factions. That is especially true in Britain, given the diversity of its 2 million Muslims, many immigrants from countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Still, the recent reaction by Muslim leaders in Britain about suicide bombings could confuse some Muslims, given the cloudy definition of what constitutes “occupying forces.”
Debates rage over whether the suicide bombings that target Westerners in Afghanistan, Russians because of Chechnya and Israelis in response to the occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank are permitted by the Qur’an. And what about attacks such as those in Iraq that kill civilians and relief workers in an effort to force US, British and other foreign forces to withdraw?
When Prime Minister Tony Blair met with leaders of Britain’s Islamic community on Tuesday to discuss the response to the London bomb attacks and how to root out extremists blamed for radicalizing Muslim youth, some imams said the occupation of Iraq by US and British forces is a key challenge Imam Ibrahim Mogra said he believed the widespread public opposition to the war in Iraq had played a part in the London attacks, which he criticized as murderous and unjustified.
“As Muslims, we feel the pain and suffering of our brothers and sisters around the globe every single day,” he said. “It has been a successful recruitment sergeant for people who wish to preach hatred for our country and our government.”
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