All praise to the security services for preventing what appears to have been another Islamist terror plot in Britain. However, with the London mayoral elections upon us, I am reminded of the comments made immediately after the 2005 London bombings by Brian Paddick, then deputy assistant commissioner of the metropolitan police. Mr Paddick, who is now Lib-Dem candidate for London mayor stated (very emphatically) in a televised speech that there is absolutely no connection between Islam and terrorism. I'm not quite sure what qualifications Brain Paddick felt he had to speak on what Islam is or isn't. But 3 years on, it is very doubtful if many British people believe him...
The troube is that when such statements by public figures are later seen to be demonstrably untrue, it allows racist political parties (I won't give them the oxygen of publicity by naming them) to tell ordinary British people that the government has lied to them. However, such groups then twist the truth by adding that not merely Islam but Muslims in general are linked to terrorism.
The latter claim is empahtically not true and designed soley to further the racist aims of such groups and as such wholly reprehensible. However, such poisonous seeds can only be sown by racist parties because public figures like Brian Paddick have made emphatic public statements on issues which they clearly knew little about and which even a cursory reading of the news over the last 3 years shows to be demonstrably false. Statements such as Mr Paddick's, whilst no doubt intended to prevent attacks on ordinary Muslims are inherently dangerous because their evident falsehood provides a fertile soil for racist parties to plant their own twisted and perverted claims in the minds of ordinary people.
What Brian Paddick (and Tony Blair and a host of other Labour government figures who have made simlar claims) should have said was not that "there is no connection between Islam and terrorism", but that "the vast majority of ordinary British Muslims are deeply peace loving and as shocked at the terrorist bombings as the rest of us".
The challenge for any public figure speaking on this subject is to make a clear and emphatic distinction between on the one hand, Islamic political ideology, which is what Islamist terrorists aim to impose on the rest of us by means of violent jihad; and on the other hand, ordinary Muslims, the vast majority of whom are deeply peace loving and pround to be British.
You don't create good community relations or good government by ignoring problems. Sometimes nettles need to be grasped and the ideology behind Islamism in both its violent and 'peaceful' forms is one such nettle that the Labour government and the Lib-Dems have clearly failed to grasp.
