THE TIMES - Monday 7th January 2002

'Allah came knocking at my heart' BY GILES WHITTELL

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there has been a surge in conversions
to Islam since September 11, especially among affluent young white Britons. Six months ago Elizabeth L. - a graduate in political science, the daughter of affluent white British parents, an opponent of terrorism in all its forms - climbed Mount Sinai at night to watch the desert sunrise from its summit. "It was the stillest, most peaceful place I've ever been," she says. "I could hear my feelings come up from within me, and in one surreal moment it all seemed to come together."

Last Friday, at 4.45pm, Elizabeth went to Regent's Park Mosque in
Central London and converted to Islam. It wasn't hard. She didn't even have to wear a scarf. Witnessed by two Muslim men and nine other friends squeezed into the imam's office, she pronounced, in Arabic learnt from a tape the night before, the words she will repeat like a mantra five times a day for the rest of her life: "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger." Afterwards there was a modest celebration at Al-Dar on the Edgware Road. Elizabeth and her well-wishers sipped mint tea and smoked apple-flavoured tobacco from a hookah. There was no booze, but she never drank much anyway.

Why has she done this? "I know it sounds clichéd, but Allah came knocking at my heart. That's really how it feels. In many ways it is beyond articulating, rather like falling in love." It was, in other words, intensely personal. As she read the Koran and prepared for her conversion, the September attacks came and went and failed to derail her spiritual journey, despite their proven link to a fundamentalist Islamist terror network. In as far as they featured in her thinking, they even elicited some sympathy. All terrorism is cowardly, she says. "But I can see why people get fed up with the West. Capitalism is enormously oppressive."

Elizabeth is not a freak, and she is certainly not alone. There is compelling anecdotal evidence of a surge in conversions to Islam since
September 11, not just in Britain, but across Europe and America. One Dutch Islamic centre claims a tenfold increase, while the New Muslims Project, based in Leicester and run by a former Irish Roman Catholic housewife, reports a "steady stream" of new converts. This fits a pattern set by recent history. Similar surges followed the outbreak of the Gulf War, the Bosnian conflict and the declaration of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Some of the newcomers doubtless do not share
David Blunkett's enthusiasm for overt espousals of Britishness. They may
even have been caught on police videos flag-waving for the Taleban. But
most will speak our language and support our football teams with roughly
average fervour, and some - by all accounts a rapidly expanding minority are white, more educated and more middle-class than the Home Secretary himself.

These are some of Islam's more surprising converts. They have chosen
their new creed over the world's other great religions having had the
privilege of choice, often confounding their own and their families' prejudices in the process. They are highly articulate and tolerant to a degree. They're People Like Us, only they're not. They're Muslims. They pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan and hope to go to Mecca before they die. They answer their mobiles with "salaam alaikum".

Unlike Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber of American Airlines
Flight 63, Britain's pukka Muslim converts, as the label implies, tend to be over-privileged, not under. Unlike James McLintock, the Scots lecturer's son being held in a Peshawar jail, the fighting in Afghanistan has dismayed rather than attracted them. They are people like Elizabeth (who asked for her name to be changed because she has not told her parents yet); like Lucy Bushill-Matthews, a 30-year-old graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, who flirted with Islam as a student in order to dismiss it, but found it "so simple and logical I
couldn't push it away"; like "Yahya", whose father is a pillar of the
Anglo Establishment and who feels that Islam "fits right into British
tradition"; and like Joe Ahmed-Dobson, a son of the former Labour
Minister Frank Dobson who believes that Islam transformed his spiritual life - and helped him to get a first at university.

If there is something familiar about these people's startling choices, there should be. We have been here before, or at least Imperial Britain's adventuring classes and their moneyed gap-year successors have. T. E. Lawrence fell hard for the romance and otherness of Islam and came to embody them for succeeding generations even though he never
converted. Gai Eaton, a former British diplomat now in his seventies, did convert. His influential work Islam and the Destiny of Man has become required reading for bright young Anglo-Saxons turning to his adopted faith, often as an expression of dissatisfaction with a Western culture that appeared to have offered them everything. Matthew Wilkinson made headlines when he converted and changed his name to Tariq in 1993; he was a former Eton head boy. He and Nicholas Brandt,
another Etonian and the son of an investment banker, swapped their
destinies as scions of the Establishment for a Slough semi shared with
four other Muslims. Lord Birt's son, Jonathan, forsook a fast track into the ranks of the great and the good by converting in 1997 and starting a PhD on British Islam. So did a son and a daughter of Lord Justice Scott, the scourge of Tory sleaze and the chairman of the Arms to Iraq inquiry.

And so did Jemima Khan. "My decision... was entirely my own choice and in no way hurried," the 21-year-old daughter of the billionaire James Goldsmith declared angrily after suggestions that she had converted to marry Imran Khan, the former Pakistan cricket captain. She noted accurately that the Koran allowed Imran to marry any Muslim, Jew or Christian (even though it bars Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men). She pointed out that Imran's sisters, far from being oppressed by his brothers-in-law, were all educated professionals, and she insisted that she found the tunic and trousers she would henceforth have to wear "far more elegant and feminine than anything in my wardrobe". Her plea seemed hard to credit in the circumstances, but it is a common one from educated British women trying to persuade baffled non-Muslims that conversion did not mean surrendering their independence or their critical faculties.

For Lucy Bushill-Matthews, it meant the reverse. "When I went to Cambridge I joined the Christian and Islamic societies and all three political parties," she says. "I wanted to explore all the possibilities in order to dismiss them." She thinks of herself as pragmatic and not all that spiritual, and as such she found Islam irresistible. "It made sense of all the world's faiths. It was a clear, simple way to believe in God." She claims that it has even helped her to land good jobs by marking her out as a free thinker. Her husband is a Muslim of English and Iranian descent whom she married after converting.

Yahya, too, chose Islam from the broadest possible religious gamut. He
was raised in a high-profile London family that, because of his father's
position, could not be seen to favour one faith over another. He then
took a degree in comparative religion - the theological equivalent of a blind wine tasting - and Islam, quite simply, won. "It's pure monotheism," he says. "It has a clear moral system and an intact tradition of religious scholarship. No scripture expresses its message of the oneness of God as clearly as the Koran. It also has a remarkably rich mysticism, which may be what appeals to middle-class white Brits like me." Yahya converted five years ago. Now 33, he is at Oxford writing a PhD on British Islam and is dismayed not just by last September's attacks, but also by the mauling he says his religion has suffered since in the media, even - or especially - at the hands of would-be sympathisers. "It's very painful for all of us to be associated with such sickening barbarism (of the attacks)," he says. "That's not what we signed up for. And now we can't portray our religion in undiluted form. It's always mediated by someone else. It's incredibly frustrating to have Polly Toynbee trying to save you from yourself."

So does this wry and thoughtful soul share the credo of al-Qaeda? Of course not. But the belief system in which he and the terrorists
co-exist has a serious and often lethal public relations problem. The parallel that comes to mind is with the environmental movement, boasting tens of millions of members paying dues to the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Sierra Club, and a handful bent on burning down ski lodges in the Rockies.

Well before September 11, well-heeled defectors from Anglicanism to
Islam proved so unsettling to traditionalists that the Cold War author and journalist Philip Knightley branded them "the new Philbys". They were running from privilege, he suggested, driven as much by a sense of guilt at what they had as wonder at the mysteries of Islam. The fact that Kim Philby's father happens to have converted to Islam was taken to support the accusation. Levelled at Joe Ahmed-Dobson, it quickly seems ridiculous. The son of the former Health Secretary is a child of new Labour and the opposite of a rebel. He works on inner city regeneration, finds spiritual satisfaction in Islam's "constant impetus to do the right thing", and credits his first-class degree to the structure his faith has brought to his life.

All those I spoke to agreed that Christianity claims to answer the same
yearnings for meaning and guidance. All had rejected it on intellectual grounds. Why grapple with mental puzzles such as the Holy Trinity and
Original Sin, they asked, when the alternative, asserting neither,
proved to them so much more satisfying? It was this clarity that won over Batool Al-Toma, the former Catholic who offers guidance to converts at the New Muslims Project. She tells them they need not change their names, advises women to dress modestly but not alienate their families with radical wardrobe changes and checks they have converted freely. Islam is not generally a missionary faith, she says. At one billion and counting, history shows it doesn't need to be.

Articles 061101

IDS Snubs Anti Racist Pledge, Bob Roberts Political Correspondent

TORY leader Iain Duncan Smith yesterday snubbed a campaign aimed at
preventing racism against British Muslims. The right-winger refused to sign a pledge card appealing for tolerance and condemning attacks on people and places of worship fuelled by religious bigotry. Mr Duncan Smith's absence from the Islam Awareness Week launch- supported by Labour and the Lib Dems - drew angry condemnation last night...

...Lib Dems' home affairs spokesman Simon Hughes said: "This is anindefensible and inexplicable decision and it will be a great disappointment to British Muslims many of whom may have voted
Conservative in the past...

...In his letter, Mr Duncan Smith said he would "always be intolerant of
those intolerant of others"...

Arrogant Tories Fail Race Test, Voice of the Mirror

IT ISN'T only the battle to bring Osama bin Laden to justice which is so
hard. The struggle to convince Muslims that this is not a war against
them is proving just as difficult. It is not enough just to say that we
are all on the same side. We have to show it by our actions. One way to
do that is to unite in condemning the ignorant racists who attack
Muslims because of the September 11 atrocities...

...What does Mr Duncan Smith expect voters to think when he fails such a
simple test to prove he supports the fight against racism? With the
world in crisis, it has never been more important for Muslims and other
minority groups to feel all political leaders understand their problems.
Iain Duncan Smith's refusal to sign the pledge is arrogant, ignorant and
offensive.

Killing bin Laden will not end terror, warns Straw

Killing bin Laden will not end terror, warns Straw, Daily Mail

<http://www.femail.co.uk/pages/news/ article.html?in_article_id=82595&in_ page_id=1262>

Capturing or killing Osama bin Laden will not prevent his al Qaida
network launching fresh terrorist outrages, Jack Straw has warned...And
Mr Straw insists that terror, not Islam, is bin Laden's true religion...

Tories defend Islamic pledge refusal, Express

<http://www.express.co.uk/story.html? story=4&r=30878914003561315>

Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith is defending his party's failure to sign a
pledge of religious tolerance in support of Islamic Awareness Week...But
Mr Duncan Smith says he wants to issue a "bigger and fuller" statement
than the pledge, and has repeated his support for the Muslim
faith..."The reason why I wanted to make the statement rather than just
sign a pledge is that I felt I wanted to go wider than the pledge. I
wanted to make a bigger and fuller statement than the pledge made...

In sickness and in stealth, Lucy Ward, Guardian

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/ Article/0,4273,4292764,00.html>

The government's drive to eliminate forced marriages risks further
alienating the Muslim community, says Lucy Ward...New figures to be
published by the government today will show that 200 cases of young
women and men forced into marriages abroad were investigated by the
foreign office and police in the last year. The numbers are higher than
ever before and represent the result of an unprecedented focus by the UK
government on an issue previously regarded as taboo, or simply too
complex and troublesome for politicians to address...

...The problem, however, is that the context for today's announcement is
significantly different from a year ago, when the home office and FO
published their "action plan" on forced marriage...The risk now is that
government efforts to address a human rights issue will be regarded by
some in the UK's Muslim communities as heavy-handed interference, which
could play into the hands of the prejudiced minority...While the focus
group research appears to have provoked a feeling that the government's
approach is misconceived or even discriminatory, its aim was to obtain a
more sophisticated picture of how forced marriages are viewed by
different Muslim communities, picking up variations by gender, age and
social class...

A corrosive national danger in our multicultural model

British Muslims must answer some uncomfortable questions,Hugo Young, Guardian

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/ Article/0,4273,4292809,00.html>

...British Muslims going to fight against British interests in
Afghanistan is a quite extreme case. We don't know for sure if any have
done that. In any case the numbers will be few, though there's an issue
about whether they will get back unpunished. The telling question arises
out of pervasive statements of support for the Taliban, backed up by a
lot of airy declarations by Islamic leaders here that their religion
comes before their country, together with a reluctance by British
progressives to attempt a rigorous definition of the limits of
multiculturalism.

...Perhaps the trouble for British Muslims as a community is that not
enough of these uncomfortable questions have been asked of them.
"Multi-culturalism" gives them shelter from decisions about allegiance
that the events of 11/9 can no longer allow to be postponed. No one is
arguing for monocultural uniformity, nor is any disrespect implied for
the cultural varieties that enrich this country. But we're learning
that, out of concern for the defence of immigrants, we tiptoe round the
values and norms that constitute the obligations that are central to
being British - and the policies to serve them...

<mailto:h.young@guardian.co.uk>

AFGHANISTAN VS. VIETNAM

Ian Buruma
Guardian

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/ Article/0,4273,4292760,00.html>

If the US retreats with a bloody nose, the consequences for the world
would be too dreadful to contemplate...So is this another Vietnam? Some
people writing in these pages appear to believe so. There is indeed, on
a rhetorical level, a slight air of deja vu. The old "quagmire" is
invoked again...

What about the Islamists? If the Islamist revolution were purely local,
confined to Afghanistan, or Algeria, or even Saudi Arabia, it would
perhaps be best to keep western armies out of these conflicts...Bin
Laden's first interest seems to be in his native Saudi Arabia, but he is
also an exporter of revolution and his network could trigger off
violence anywhere. Quite apart from all this, Bin Laden's organisation,
unlike North Vietnam, launched a direct attack on the US. By inciting
all Muslims to fight against "the crusaders" he has effectively declared
war on the west...If ever there was a good reason for the US, and its
allies, to intervene, this would be it. The dilemma, however, is worse
than anything in Vietnam...

...we cannot pull out without having achieved a decisive victory over
Bin Laden and the Taliban. If the US retreats with a bloody nose, the
victory goes to the Islamist revolution. The consequences in Israel,
India, Pakistan, Egypt, and indeed in much of the Muslim world, are too
dreadful to contemplate...

MP ACCUSES WEST OF 'ANTAGONISING' THE MUSLIM WORLD,By Marie Woolf, Independent

<http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/ politics/story.jsp?story=103394>

The rebel Labour MP Paul Marsden, who was compared to an appeaser of
Hitler for opposing the war in Afghanistan, yesterday accused the West
of "antagonising" people in the Muslim world at the start of a Pakistan
fact-finding mission.

On the first leg of a trip to gauge the humanitarian situation on the
ground, the MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham said the West had "a total lack
of understanding of the Muslim way of life in the region". He said he
hoped his presence would "embarrass the British and American governments
into doing something" to help the refugees, and renewed his criticism of
the West's attitude to the Muslim world. "You can't erase 1,000 years of
Islamic history with a sound bite," he said...

Phil Reeves: The end of a special relationship?

PHIL REEVES: THE END OF A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP,Independent

<http://argument.independent.co.uk/ commentators/story.jsp?story=103347>

...Much has been written about the efforts of the US and its allies to
court the Arab and Islamic nations (with the help of Messers Blair and
Straw), so that they are at least willing to keep the streets quiet as
this strangely abstract war is prosecuted...Behind the scenes, the US is
as keen to ensure that Israel does not destabilise its coalition as it
is to persuade the governments of Syria, Iran and Egypt of the need to
co-operate...

LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: THE AMERICANS HAVE LEFT IT TOO LATE TO SEND IN GROUND TROOPS BEFORE WINTER, Independent

<http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators /story.jsp?story=103328>

'One way to conduct a ground campaign without risking casualties is to
back someone else's army'

The most controversial issue internationally in contemporary wars is the
air campaign, because that leads to the death of civilians, while the
most controversial issue domestically is the ground campaign, because
that can lead to casualties amongst one's own troops. There is a
trade-off between the two...One way to conduct a ground campaign without
risking excessive casualties is to back somebody else's army. This is
what the US is now doing with the Northern Alliance...

MICK HUME: SENSE OF EXCLUSION THAT IS MADE IN BRITAIN,Times

<http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001380016- 2001384014,00.html>

...Not for the first time in this conflict, the authorities are aiming
in the wrong direction. The estrangement of our Muslim communities has
little to do with any Western hostility towards Islam. It is more a
consequence of the weakness of the West's own common values, the lack of
any core beliefs around which people could assimilate into British
society. The problem is not in Afghanistan, but over here...

...A community cannot be cemented together simply by saying that
differences should be ignored, like a belch at a dinner party. Now a
senior Labour MP has proposed an American-style Oath of Allegiance in
schools, as a way of bringing society together. But what symbol of
multicultural national unity should children swear allegiance to? The
Crown's public standing has sunk so low that the Broadcasting Standards
Commission says it was not offensive for a black comedian to call the
Queen a bitch on BBC Television. Parliament is widely dismissed as an
irrelevance, the Union Flag as the standard of the far Right. Maybe
English kids could salute David Beckham and Michael Owen. Or how about
Hail, Harry Potter?...

JONATHAN CLARK: DESPITE THE DENIALS, THIS WAR IS ROOTED IN RELIGION, Jonathan Clark, Times

<http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001380016 -2001384011,00.html>

...Popular responses show a similar lack of perception. Americans
denounce the suicide highjackers as "cowards" or "deranged" (rather than
intelligent, courageous religious zealots) and presume that worldwide
anti-Americanism is fed by jealousy of Americans' material wealth
(rather than by pietistic rejections of the values which that wealth
projects). Yet liberal, secular societies have liberal, secular
equivalents of the idea that those dying in a jihad at once reach
paradise: not until Muslim teaching on this point changes, and we
respond to religious war better than to call it terrorism, will the
problem be solved. If it took moderate Catholics and Calvinists decades
to redefine their political theologies, however, the prospects for Islam
doing so soon may be poor...

WASHINGTON TO RESUME ARMS SALES TO INDIA, Roland Watson, Times

<http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001380016- 2001383744,00.html>

AMERICA has agreed to resume arming India, Delhi said yesterday, as
Washington dangled a range of financial offers and diplomatic
concessions to sweeten world opinion for an accelerated war in
Afghanistan. The Indian Defence Ministry said that the US had agreed to
start supplying "specific items of defence needs", after a visit by
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary...

...Washington is close to striking a deal with Tajikistan for the use of
three airfields close to the Afghan border. An agreement will see the
United States plough tens of billions of dollars into the former Soviet
satellite. The Pentagon said that it hoped soon to "have the capability
to get access to Afghanistan from north and south"...

LABOUR REBEL CALLS FOR END TO STRIKES, Stephen Farrell

<http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,, 2001380016-2001383936,00.html>

THE REBEL Labour MP Paul Marsden called yesterday for an immediate end
to bombing in Afghanistan, saying he was more in touch with public
opinion than the Prime Minister. Hours after arriving in Pakistan to
meet aid workers and visit refugee camps on a fact-finding trip for
which he himself paid, Mr Marsden said that the bombing alienated the
Muslim world and recruited fighters to the Taleban. He challenged Clare
Short, the International Development Secretary, saying she was "clearly
mistaken" in her insistence that bombing did not stop food getting into
Afghanistan...

BRITISH MUSLIMS WOULDN'T PASS THE TALIBAN TEST, By Amit Roy, Telegraph

<http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/dt?ac= 005424463700271&rtmo=Vr8wk8kK&atm
o=YbA37bYp&pg=/01/11/6/do01.html>

THE British really should not get too hot and bothered about the
prospect of thousands or even hundreds of young British Muslims going
off to fight for the Taliban. The Taliban are not stupid and are
unlikely to accept untrained British Muslims who suddenly want to fight
for them.

And, in any case, according to my Pakistani friends, who are pretty well
informed, the number involved is small and those involved ought to be
equated with the "Loony Left" of old. They are dismissed as "disaffected
youth" who are enjoying a bit of attention for the first time in their
lives. But their numbers, it is also being hinted, might include
"British operatives" being slipped into Afghanistan to gather much
needed intelligence on the Taliban. If that is the case, far from trying
them for treason, as some are suggesting, we might one day have to
honour them for risking and possibly sacrificing their lives for Allah,
Queen and country...

...Reports that British Muslims are going off to enlist for the Taliban
should be treated with common sense.

UNLIKELY SUSPECTS HELD AS FBI ARRESTS 1,000, Toby Harnden, Telegraph

<http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/ main.jhtml?xml=/ news/2001/11/06/ wsusp06.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/11/06/ixhome.html>

THE detention of 1,147 Muslims as part of the investigation into the
September 11 attacks on America has angered civil liberties groups and
yielded few concrete leads, Bush administration officials concede. While
comparisons between the arrests and the internment of 110,000 Japanese
Americans after Pearl Harbour are far-fetched, defence lawyers argue
that many are being held in custody as a result of "racial profiling"...

...Apart form a visa violation, the only evidence presented against
Mubeen was that he and Mohamed Atta, the hijackers' ringleader, renewed
their driving licences at the same office within 23 minutes of one
another. Osama Elfar, 30, an aviation mechanic, was charged with
overstaying his visa. However, he claims that the real reason for his
arrest was that he is an Egyptian Muslim, like Atta, and has a first
name which is about as popular as "Adolf" was during the Second World
War...

Articles 051101

1THE BATTLE OF OUR LIVES (The Sun should be commended for injecting sanity into the debate. Contrary to the Sunday Times' unscientific survey, Muslims are not the enemy within.) Sun Leader

Against that background we read that 40 per cent of British Muslims agree that bin Laden is "justified in any way to mount his war against the United States." The poll also shows 68 per cent quizzed thought they were Muslims first, before being British. For The Sun, which has argued strongly that Islam is not an evil religion, the survey at first made depressing reading. Yet, on reflection, can it be the case that four out of ten Muslims want to kill us? Do they lurk in every corner? Are some of our cities awash with blood?

No, no and no. There is a difference between surveys and bombing - especially when many Muslims feel threatened, scared and powerless. And if churchgoers were asked after evensong if they were "British or Christian" first - might they not say Christian?

The Sun refuses to accept that British Muslims are intent on destroying their country. Some are - but so are some "Christian" fundamentalists called the Real IRA, who on Saturday set off a bomb in Birmingham. If we brand Muslims our enemies, they will become our enemies.

If we put up the shutters, the shutters become a symbol of war. But if we do as Tony Blair does - and reach out in friendship to Muslims - we have a chance. We must fight intolerance on the margin - on both sides. For if we lose now, we will lose lives on the streets of Britain...

complete article

<http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,31-2001381231,00.html>

2) 'UK MUSLIMS SET TO FIGHT BRITISH TROOPS' Daliy Mail

British Muslim who has travelled to Pakistan to support the Taliban has claimed there are more than 600 other Britons in the region backing the
regime...

complete article

<http://www.femail.co.uk/pages/news/article.html ?in_article_id=82426&in_ page_id=1262>

3) ARCHBISHOP BACKS AFGHANISTAN AIR STRIKES CAMPAIGN (The archbishop claims that the war is about justice. Killing innocent people - aka collateral damage - can never be justified.) Daily Mail

..."It is quite important we find ways in which those who have committed such crimes are brought to justice," he said, referring to the terrorists responsible.

..."You want to do injustice to bring justice?" Islamic educationist Ishaq Koohegi said. "This is absolutely unbelievable when it is coming from such a high-ranking Christian religious leader. "He speaks like a politician and approves of what is going on and what is hurting Islam and Muslims," added Koohegi, who runs Discover Islam, a Bahraini group that offers courses in Muslim education...

complete article

http://www.femail.co.uk/pages/news/article.html ?in_article_id=82276&in_ page_id=1262>

4) BLAIR PLEDGES TOLERANCE FOR MUSLIMS Evening Standard

A pledge signed by Prime Minister Tony Blair committing the Government to religious tolerance of British Muslims is being launched. The document, unveiled to mark the start of Islam Awareness Week, has also been subscribed to by dozens of faith leaders, leading politicians and newspaper editors.

Signatories have promised to work towards better community relations between faith groups and avoid using language of an inflammatory or discriminatory nature. They include Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, editor of the Financial Times Andrew Gowers, editor of The Mirror Piers Morgan, Archbishop of Wales Rowan Williams and Executive Director of the Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh...

complete article

5) 'NOW WE'RE LOSING THE WAR AT HOME' (Finally there is some objectivity and debate in the US press on this 'war against terrorism') By James Langton

...President Bush's appointment of former Governor of Pennsylvania Tom Ridge as head of homeland security is a "PR gimmick"...Mr Fuerth warns that "we need to focus our war aims"...

The White House, he says, should be prepared to make preemptive strikes against foreign governments providing expertise and materials to terrorist groups. Their governments need to be aware they will "face consequences more swift and more final than economic sanctions", he suggests.

A hawkish tone is also taken by the normally-liberal political magazine, The New Republic. Lawrence Kaplan, a senior editor, complains that "the sporadic fusillade being directed at Afghanistan makes the air war above Kosovo look ferocious"...

There is concern at the suffering the air raids are having on the civilian population of Afghanistan in the Los Angeles Times. "What set out to be an American war on terrorism has become a war against Afghanistan," says William Pfaff. "The substitution of Afghanistan for terrorism, or the identification of the one with the other, is not only unjust but diverts US policy from where it was intended to go."

The flood of refugees and civilian deaths from missed targets... have damaged American in the eyes of world opinion. "...

complete article

6) WE HAVE FAILED TO TEACH TRUE MESSAGE (Sardar says that Muslims are to blame for teaching Islamic idealism and not realism) Evening Standard

...What motivates young British Muslims to go and fight for the Taliban?

Who is responsible for their willingness to die in a foreign land?

Impressionable young men of many faiths, who embrace the notion of victimhood, often look at the world's injustices and say "something must be done". They look at injustice done to others, the abundant ranks of the poor and wretched. They allow themselves to be persuaded that the answer is to inflict their own injustices on others in retaliation. In their uncompassionate compassion, they take up their cause on behalf of and in the name of God, the oppressed, the working classes, or whomever...

In Western society, prejudice and ignorant distortion aimed at Islam abounds. Young Muslims' dissatisfaction is fuelled by racism, social exclusion and marginalisation, little-Englander jingoism that fulminates against immigrants and asylum seekers. Politicians such as William Hague incite anti-Muslim sentiment. And the moderate Muslim community must bear its own share of responsibility. We tell our children that Islam stands for peace and submission...

Our kids learn to memorise the Koran parrot-fashion, without any appreciation of its message or spirit....

All Muslims, by acquiescing in emotive rhetoric, in some degree share responsibility for raising young men who would rather kill and die than live with the real world with all its moral doubts and uncertainties...

Most moderate Muslims share with the militants a dream of a utopian "Islamic state"...

Instead, we should be teaching our young that flawed humanity must do its best by its own imperfect efforts, peacefully to achieve some approximation of what is right and just. In that task, the contemporary "Islamic states" present us with salutary cautionary tales...

complete article

<http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/ news/top_story.html ?in_review_id=471314& in_review_text_id=425526>

7) LOSERS IN PATRIOT GAME (Although Tony Parsons' article is rather balanced, he cannot help using Islamic terminology in a derogatory manner.) Tony Parsons, Mirror

IT IS difficult to know what we should do about the young British Muslims who want to fight for the Taliban. Charge them with treason, or have a whip-round to help them on their way? ...

Talk of charging young British Muslims with treason is pointless. The last thing we need is an Bobby Sands, dying for the cause in his cell. If these nutters from Luton, Leicester, Birmingham and Ilford want to fight for the Taliban, then let them go. Like the Oxbridge-educated British toffs who spied for the Russians in the middle of the last century, they will eventually discover that the system they adore looks nowhere near so good in
close-up...

...But if you don't feel British, if you do not feel a profound love for this country, if you do not feel a degree of gratitude for the land that raised you, educated you and cared for you, then you are better off somewhere else...I don't think many British Muslims will join the Taliban. Most of the fanatics are all mouth and burqa...

The headscarf, or hijab, is widely seen as a symbol of oppression. But if it's that simple, why do so many British Muslim women insist on wearing it - even if their husbands ask them not to?

Complete Article

<http://mirror.icnetwork.co.uk/columnists/tonyparsons/ tonyparsons/ objectid=11406405&method=full>

(back to the top)

8) THE HEADSCARF, OR HIJAB, IS WIDELY SEEN AS A SYMBOL OF OPPRESSION... Raekha Prasad, Guardian

Sumaya Shakur was out shopping with her husband and two children in north London last week when her toddler son got under the feet of a passing couple. They reacted with a flood of spit and abuse, and told
Shakur: "Go back where you come from." This a journey that would in fact have taken her to the east end and her husband to the Midlands...

This is not a easy time for Muslim women who choose to cover their heads: the headscarf has become a red flag to those consumed with hatred of Islam... As a symbol of Islam, the scarf has rarely been as contentious in Britain as it is now. Perceptions of Muslims - ally or foe, backward or progressive...and the image of destitute women fully covered in the burka begging on the street appears daily on our screens, perceptions of the headscarf as suspect and oppressive will, by subtle association, be heightened in many minds.

...Among Muslims worldwide, there is little consensus over the rights and wrongs of wearing the headscarf: the debate is more about whether they're free to discard it than to choose wearing it...It was in the
mid-90s that the French education minister banned "ostentatious religious symbols", leaving little doubt that it was the headscarf to which he referred.

In France, at that time, there was great anxiety about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria inspiring terrorism in France. Young Muslim women who didn't wear the scarf protested against the decree by suddenly donning it.

In Turkey, the struggle for secularism has led to female MPs being banned from wearing the hijab in parliament...In recent years, the British-born daughters of scarf-free mothers, have increasingly worn the hijab as an affirmation of cultural identity.

Arzu Merali..."Many young women have been brought up in a western feminist, educated and secular way. But then it didn't actually deliver. Wearing the hijab is not saying that you hate modernity, but that you don't want to be judged for
what you look like."...

complete article