Blair calls on Muslims to confront ‘evil ideology’
LONDON, July 19: Prime Minister Tony Blair called on Tuesday on Britain’s Muslim community to confront the “evil ideology” behind the London bombings following a meeting with leaders from Islamic groups in the country.
Muslim Britons and others must “confront this evil ideology, take it on and defeat it by the force of reason and argument,” Mr Blair told reporters.
The prime minister was speaking at a joint press conference with visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai, following his meeting with 25 Muslim leaders, including lawmakers, businesspeople and religious figures.
The gathering “revolved around the very strong desire of people from right across the Muslim community in our country” to deal with the problem, Mr Blair said.
As well as condemning the July 7 attacks in which at least 56 people died, the Muslim representatives voiced their determination to “confront and deal with head-on the extremism that is based on a perversion of the true faith of Islam, but nonetheless is real within parts of our community here in this country,” Mr Blair added.
Three of the four men blamed for the suicide bombings which ripped apart three London Underground trains and a bus in the capital, were British-born Muslims of Pakistani origin.
The fourth was a Jamaican-born Briton who converted to Islam.
Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, the main representative body for the country’s 1.6 million-strong Muslim community, described the 90-minute meeting as “important”.
“The meeting was an important listening exercise for the prime minister and people across the Muslim spectrum,” he told reporters afterwards.
The outcome was “that there is certainly this criminality in the community that has to be addressed,” Mr Sacranie added, while stressing that only a “very, very small minority” of British Muslims espoused extremist views.
Mr Blair has faced pressure in recent days over claims his support for the Iraq war made Britain a more tempting target for terrorism, a view expressed Monday by the respected Royal Institute of International Affairs think tank.
On Tuesday, a newspaper poll said two-thirds of Britons believed there was a link between the London bombings and the conflict.
Mr Blair rounded on this view at the press conference, warning that it was dangerously close to “the sort of perverted and twisted logic” used by the terrorists themselves.
“Of course, these terrorists will use Iraq as an excuse, or use Afghanistan,” Mr Blair said.
“September 11, of course, happened before both of those things and then the excuse was American policy, or Israel,” he said, referring to the 2001 attacks on the United States.
Further turning up the heat on Mr Blair, a US newspaper said that three weeks before the London bombings, Britain lowered its threat assessment level as a result of a confidential intelligence assessment of risk levels in Britain.
The report by the Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre concluded that “at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK (United Kingdom),” said the New York Times.
British police are mounting a massive investigation into the London blasts, much of it focused on who might have helped the bombers plan the attacks.
According to immigration authorities in Pakistan, suspects Shahzad Tanweer, 22, and Mohammed Sidique Khan, 30, arrived together at Karachi airport last November and left in February this year.
A third presumed bomber, 18-year-old Hasib Hussain, arrived last July via Saudi Arabia, but his point of departure has not been established.
Police suspect they might have attended madressas, or seminaries, in Pakistan, some of which teach extremist Islamic views.
Britain had been working with the Pakistani government to take measures against such establishments, Mr Blair said, while Mr Karzai added that he also wanted a crackdown.
Police have warned that London could face further attacks, a worry boosted Tuesday by a warning from the Al Qaeda terror to European nations that they should withdraw their troops out of Iraq within a month or face more attacks.
After August 15, “there will be no more messages, just actions that will be engraved on the heart of Europe”, said a statement signed by Al Qaeda group the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, dated July 16.
British police have begun deploying sniffer dogs to check for explosives on the London Underground rail system for the first time.—AFP
