Douglas Murray: Should We Embrace Sharia Law?

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Douglas Murray. Photograph: The Jerusalem Post
A Political Culture Gone Bad
THE JERUSALEM POST: Douglas Murray says it’s five minutes to midnight in Britain’s battle against radical Islam.

Listening to Douglas Murray, one gets a picture of a world turned on its head, one where relativism has trumped common sense, where the state pays its enemies more than its soldiers and where turning in the inciters becomes an act of incitement.

Murray is the 31-year-old director of the Center for Social Cohesion, a London-based think tank that studies radicalization and extremism in the UK, and he is an outspoken critic of the British government’s response to the challenge of radical Islam.

Our meeting takes place shortly after the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks, four suicide bombings committed by British Muslim men that killed 52 people and wounded hundreds of others. Murray believes that while the security services have learned the lesson of that event, government and politicians have so far failed to do so.

Britain’s thinking and its political culture, Murray says, have “gone bad” and it has become afraid to state its own values. Britain has become a society that no longer knows how to draw the line.

He is particularly critical of the government’s “Prevent” strategy, set up after the 7/7 bombings to tackle Muslim radicalization by providing a counternarrative. “Prevent,” says Murray, is an example of the government attempting to “do theology.”

“When the British government comes out after 7/7 and says, ‘Islam is a religion of peace,’ you can understand the reasons it is saying this – it is trying to reach out – but obviously there is something terribly counterproductive about this,” says Murray. “The problem is that the government seems to believe it can do theology. I’m a small government guy and I like government to do as little as possible.

The way I see it is that government can’t do many things very well – it doesn’t even do taxes very well, it doesn’t do policing very well, but the thing it definitely can’t do very well is theology, in particular a theology it knows very little about, or is only starting to learn about.”

For Murray the answer lies not in outreach, but in affirming the values of the state and in laying down the law.

“Instead of getting embroiled in endless wars and debates about a religion which is not our national religion, which after all is a minority religion and has no particular history of any significance in Britain – instead of getting involved in that conflict, which may or not be won by the progressives, you say what you are as a state,” he declares.

“A lot of young Muslims have said to me in recent years, ‘You ask me to integrate, but what are we integrating into? What is Britain, what are British values?’ It’s very hard to tell people to integrate if you don’t tell them what they are integrating into. It’s very hard to tell them to be British if they don’t know and you don’t know what Britishness is. The fact is that we have been very poor in saying what we are and we have also been very poor is saying what we expect people to be. We’ve been very good in stressing what rights people get when they come to Britain and very bad at explaining what responsibilities come with them.”

Britain, says Murray, has made a terrible mistake in the direction it has taken with its Muslim minority since the Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses affair.

“The problem is,” he explains, “that the British government has pushed young Muslims into becoming young Muslims when it should have pushed them into becoming young Brits. In other words, the direction of travel it sent them in has been deeply backward.” Continue reading and comment >>> Ilan Evyatar | Thursday, July 15, 2010

We Have Not Learnt the Lesson of the July 7 Suicide Bombing
THE TELEGRAPH: In the five years since suicide bombers killed 52 people in London, placatory government policy on Islamist terrorism has achieved little but store up trouble for the future, argues Douglas Murray.

Whose law? Members of Islam4UK leave a London press conference in January. Photograph: The Telegraph
Tomorrow [Today] marks the fifth anniversary of the day suicide bombing came to Britain. On July 7, 2005 three young British-born men exploded their devices simultaneously on the London Underground. A fourth man detonated his an hour later on a bus in Tavistock Square. Together they left 52 people dead, many more injured, and a country only starting to realise that a problem it had long exported had found its way home.

While July 7 was the first time that jihadi terrorism had come to British streets, these were not the first streets to which British-born Islamists had brought terror. Two years earlier, two young British men had gone to Mike's Place, a bar in Tel Aviv, and carried out a suicide bombing. Almost a decade before July 7 – in 1996 – the man said to have been Britain's first suicide bomber died in Afghanistan, self-detonating to kill opponents of the Taliban forces he was fighting alongside.

By 2005 British-raised jihadis had fought around the world, spurred on by radical clerics at home, backed by British networks and allowed to operate by a government and security service who believed that this was a problem for other people. It took 10 years for Britain to extradite to France the Algerian man accused of blowing up the Paris Metro in 1995. Britain had become a soft touch: a magnet for foreign jihadis and a hub of home-grown radicalisation.

To coincide with the fifth anniversary of July 7 this week, the Centre for Social Cohesion is releasing Islamist Terrorism: the British Connections. It is a 500-page, telephone directory-sized work that aims to present an overview of every traceable Islamist convicted of Islamism-inspired terrorist offences and attacks over the last decade. It also examines the scope of British-linked Islamism-inspired terrorism threats worldwide since 1993, listing many foreign combatants and extradition cases and British citizens convicted abroad.

It presents a timeline of the jihad, a list of the major networks and analysis of the data, presenting the most accurate picture possible of what makes up a violent British Islamist. Terrorism expert Marc Sageman has already said it "will become the indispensable reference for any future inquiry into British neo-jihadi terrorism". Yet it is a work that neither the Home Office nor the Crown Prosecution Service, nor any other department of government, has got around to compiling. >>> Douglas Murray* | Tuesday, July 06, 2010

*Douglas Murray is director of the Centre for Social Cohesion

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Islamist Al-Muhajiroun Relaunch Ends in Chaos Over Segregation Attempt
Anjem Choudary at the Al-Muhajiroun meeting. Photo: The Guardian
THE GUARDIAN: An attempt to relaunch the controversial Islamist group Al-Muhajiroun ended in chaotic scenes after the management of the London venue that was to host the group's first meeting in five years cancelled proceedings, complaining "fundamentalist thugs" had tried to enforce the segregation of men and women.

Supporters of the group, which wants sharia law in Britain and has praised the 9/11 terrorists as the "Magnificent 19", were ordered to leave Conway Hall in Holborn on Wednesday night when it emerged that Al-Muhajiroun had placed bouncers on the doors and were not letting women into the main hall.

Speakers who had been invited to share a platform with Anjem Choudary, the group's leader, accused Al-Muhajiroun of inviting them under false pretences.

Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, said the platform of the planned debate was "completely unacceptable". "I'm perfectly willing to debate Anjem Choudary and Al-Muhajiroun's ideas," he said. "His ideas are not difficult.

They do not stand up. But it's very clear that this debate is not neutral. This was a segregated event, policed by Al-Muhajiroun's guards."

He said he had been invited to the event by a student society, Global Issues Society, but the Islamist group had hijacked proceedings.

Giles Enders, chairman of the South Place Ethical Society which runs the hall, took to the stage and explained that the terms and conditions of Conway Hall do not stipulate segregation. He then declared the meeting cancelled. >>> Robert Booth | Thursday, June 18, 2009