JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Salma Yaqoob, some of those arrested were from Birmingham, and the names have been released by the British government today. Any of those names familiar to you at all? Or what’s the reaction in Birmingham?

SALMA YAQOOB: No, none of the names are familiar to me personally. But the reaction in Birmingham is one of shock, you know, people gearing up for their holidays, and this has just come out of the blue for many people; and also a real feeling of cynicism, as well, as Milan pointed out, because there have been so many blunders. I mean, he mentioned the Forest Gate incident, which was a recent one. We've had the ricin plot, which in the end turned out not to be a ricin plot. Manchester football stadium, we were told, there was a huge terrorist plot there. Then it turned out there wasn't anything. The Brazilian young man was shot last year, and we were told at that time, “No, we’re 100% confident we’ve got a terrorist here.”

And so, because of this, there’s a major caution in the general public in accepting what is going on, and also because the timing of this, with Prime Minister Blair coming under so much pressure. Just last weekend, we had 100,000 people demonstrating against his support for Israel and America with what’s happening in Lebanon at the moment. And so, people are a bit skeptical. And people are saying, “You know, we don't know whether these men are innocent or not. They may well be guilty, but why are we hearing about these arrests before even charges have been made upon them? And why don’t we find out at the end of a process, at the end of a trial, when all the evidence is there, and then let’s bring this out in the public?”

JUAN GONZALEZ: You mentioned some of these other alleged plots. Maybe some Americans here are not familiar with some of them. The Manchester club plot, I think there were about ten people originally arrested on that. Can you talk a little bit about that and what happened?

SALMA YAQOOB: Well, basically we had the headline news that people going to this football match, which obviously people love going to -- you know, it’s our national sport -- that there was a terror plot and that people would be blown up. And yet, it then emerged later on that there was no such plot. We heard about ricin, you know, this dangerous element, biological warfare in our streets, and after a trial actually emerged that the evidence just did not stand up, and the men were released.

But the fear, the panic, the feeling of being under siege, of course, that you don’t erase, and we do have a climate of fear. Just last night, we’ve had a mosque attacked in Chester using flammable liquid. And so we’re already seeing the backlash start. And this is also what people here fear, with our different communities here, that whole communities come under that suspicion, whole communities come under demonization. So people are saying, “We want to see hard, cold facts.” Already, we’re seeing the politicization of this information. We have President Bush coming out, saying, “See? We told you so. It’s all about Islamofascists.” You can see how the judicial process itself becomes corrupted, and one has to question who is gaining by the use of this information at this stage in an investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Milan Rai, what about this use of the term -- and we're seeing it here more and more in the United States -- of “Islamofascists”?

MILAN RAI: Well, I think that here in Britain, and I guess in the U.S., as well, there has been a bit of a split personality as far as the government's attitude towards the Muslim community is concerned, where on the one hand there's lots of warm words, there’s lots of ennobling of particular favored leaders within the Muslim community and so on, and on the other hand, there’s a way of speaking about Muslims, and also there’s a way of treating Muslims through the police and intelligence operations and so on, which merely increase alienation, and, in fact, that was explicitly stated by the most senior Muslim police officer in Britain, who said the way that counterterrorism is being pursued is deepening alienation.

“Islamofascism” is a kind of handy term for demonizing one particular strand of the militant forms of Islamic -- violent forms of Islamic fundamentalism. And what the Bush administration has always been trying do is it’s always been trying to draw on the moral legitimacy of the Second World War and trying to refer to the Axis powers and trying to raise what they are doing to the level of the fight against fascism and Nazism in the Second World War. And it’s nothing of the kind.

Al-Qaeda is not a single unitary military-style organization. It’s a network of networks. It’s a loose association of people who are inspired by Osama bin Laden and what he calls for, but who are not commanded by him or any small leadership group around him. And I think we're seeing even now in the mainstream media cautionary words from within the security and intelligence services, saying we don't know whether this has any connection to Osama bin Laden and the core al-Qaeda leadership. This may be completely unconnected, just as the 7th of July attacks appear to have been very nearly completely unconnected to the al-Qaeda leadership and only connected by the passing of a video statement to the al-Qaeda leadership without them having any command over the operation.