Professor William Roff, of the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Edinburgh University, reports that four of his Malaysian students “have been subjected to racist violence”. One was hit in the eye by a stone thrown at him as he came out of Friday prayers at a mosque in Dundee. Another had graffiti scrawled on his house and excrement thrust through his letter box. A third, living with his wife and young children in an Edinburgh housing scheme, was subjected to such harrassment that he had to move. Professor Ross sees this as evidence of a “culture of active racism in Britain”.
William Dalrymple, one of Scotland’s best writers, speaks of inflammatory newspaper headlines that come “pretty close to inciting racial hatred”. They seem to him “parallel to what people were writing about Judaism in the 1920s. When you have a hysteria about a newly immigrated community you cannot be surprised when that precipitates acts of racial violence”.
The issue was back in sharp focus this week as a group of Muslim men arrested, but never charged, in a “terror swoop” across Scotland in 2002, held a press conference complaining that they were still, in effect, subject to State supervision.
No sooner had they finished claiming they were innocent men being treated as criminals than a newspaper commentator swatted their complaints aside, suggesting that excessive regard for human rights might endanger us all. It is better, ran the logic, that a suspect spend a few nights in a cell than that he be left at large uninvestigated.
All in all it is a depressing picture, which is not surprising. Since September 11, the world is a depressing, as well as dangerous, place. That, alas, has to be the starting point. The government may be exaggerating the threat of a terrorist attack here in Scotland; but it would be foolish to deny that the threat exists.
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The government, the security services, and the police have a duty to guard against any such attack. Only a fool would deny this, and it would probably be the same fool who would squawk most loudly and indignantly if there was a terrorist attack and blame the authorities for having failed to prevent it. In America, some of the fiercest criticism of the CIA and FBI in relation to 9/11 has come from liberals who oppose President Bush’s “War on Terror” and who would have been quick to protest about infringements of human rights if people had been arrested before boarding these planes and held on suspicion that fell short of proof.
Balancing human rights and the freedoms we prize with our security needs is a difficult and delicate task. There are three things of which we must all be aware.
First, there are people in Britain ready to engage in terrorism. They might not be official Al-Qaeda agents, but they are in sympathy with that organisation.
Second, they are Muslims, by birth or conversion. It cannot be otherwise. Al-Qaeda is an ideology as much as it is an organisation, and that ideology may be fairly described as Islamic extremist, hostile to Western values and the Western way of life.
Third, the vast majority of Muslims here view Al-Qaeda and its activities with hostility and dismay. They are no more likely to be members of an Al-Qaeda cell than your average Catholic Londoner or Glaswegian of Irish extraction was likely to belong to the IRA. They have come here to work and rear their families or, indeed, they have been born here. They are British citizens or hope to become British citizens, and the only thing that might lead them to have any sympathy with Al-Qaeda is the experience of being on the receiving end of racist or sectarian discrimination, abuse and violence.
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When people feel threatened, they might react in a manner that is out of proportion to the real danger. The State does this also. During the second world war, refugees from Hitler were rounded up and put in internment camps, because it was possible that some were Nazi agents posing as refugees. Japanese-Americans suffered the same fate in America. The responses now seem excessive. It seemed so to many at the time. Individuals suffered injustices. We may look back on it as shameful and, in many cases, stupid, as well as wrong. But at the time it could be defended.
British citizens who belonged or had belonged to British Fascist parties were arrested and imprisoned without trial under the Defence of the Realm Act. The national interest was held to justify what in other circumstances would have been seen as monstrous.
During the early years of the Cold War, Communists, or suspected Communists, were objects of suspicion here, and were spied on by the security services. In America, the Republican senator Joe McCarthy led a witch-hunt against suspected Reds. Innocent people suffered, lost their jobs, were even imprisoned for refusing to say whether they were, or had been, Communists, or for refusing to testify against former associates. Not many Americans look back on those years without shame. But there were Soviet agents active in America.
We are now living in a similar, perhaps more dangerous, time. More dangerous because, whatever secrets or information Soviet agents were passing to Moscow, they weren’t planning terrorist attacks. There weren’t planting bombs or flying aeroplanes into tall buildings. There were no suicide bombers among them.
Nor were there suicide bombers among the IRA men and women engaged in terrorist activities. When they blew themselves up, it was from incompetence, not intention. Memories of the IRA campaign, which was certainly violent and frightening, should, however, help us to retain a sense of balance and a sense of justice now. We kept things in proportion, distinguishing between the Irish barman who served us in the pub and the fanatics who planted bombs.
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We have to behave in the same way now. To indulge in Islamophobia, which William Dalrymple says correctly, alas, is now “the principal expression of bigotry in this country” is wicked and stupid: wicked as active racism always is, and stupid because nothing is more likely to provoke disaffection for this country among Muslims, and so push a few towards active sympathy with Al-Qaeda.
At the same time, Muslim leaders and preachers have a responsibility to their fellow non-Muslim citizens: a responsibility to refrain from incendiary language and to tell their people that, as long as there is reason to fear terrorist acts in this country, the security services will be active, arrests will be made and, sometimes, innocent people will be held for interrogation.
That, sadly, is unavoidable, because often interrogation is the only means to establish innocence once suspicion has been aroused.