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Page 3 of 3 JUAN GONZALEZ: And Milan, in England, as here in the United States, there have been many people picked up and detained on suspicion of connection to or involvement with terrorism. Could you talk a little bit about the numbers there in Britain and how many have actually been successfully prosecuted?  MILAN RAI: I don't have those figures at hand, to be honest. There is something of a dispute going on between the police and Muslim leaders about exactly how many of those detentions under counter-terror powers have led to any charges being proffered or any kind of terrorist-related prosecutions of any kind. The overall profile of it is exactly the same as we saw with the Irish community with the Prevention of Terrorism Act during the 1970s and ’80s, where we had a huge arrest rate and a very tiny prosecution rate, in terms of actually taking forward terrorism-related charges. And all of this harassment, which is what it amounts to, is contributing towards alienation, and that’s something that the government itself has acknowledged, as we know, through the leaked “Young Muslims and Extremism” report, which came out just a few days after the 7th of July attacks. And that report also said that the primary motive creating alienation amongst young Muslims and a drive towards extremism was British foreign policy and the way that it affected Muslims around the world. AMY GOODMAN: The fact that raids -- I don't know if they’re still going on, but have been through the last day in Wickham Place, where some of those from the 7/7 bombings last year, the train bombings happened. Milan? MILAN RAI: Well, three of the bombers were from a suburb of Leeds, and one of them was from the high Wickham sort of area. So what we're hearing now is that several -- most of these people who have been arrested are British-born. What we're hearing is that most of them come out of the Pakistani community. What we’re hearing is that quite a few of them are middle class and well-educated and so on, which is, if it turns out to be well-founded and if turns out these people actually have anything to do with a terrorist plot, which we don't know right now, but if all of that is the case, then that would fit in with pretty much the global picture of the kind of people who are involved in this kind of a thing, which is, it is better-educated people, it is people who have possibly a stake in society, possibly could have a better kind of a life than the average Muslim in the world or Muslim in any Western country, and it’s some of those kinds of people who feel apparently drawn to, in their eyes, defend Muslims around the world from Western assault. And when we look at what British suicide bombers have said in the past, and we know about ones before the 7th of July, as well -- the pair who struck in Israel; Richard Reid, the shoe bomber; and so on -- when we look at what they say, what they keep saying over and over again is that they conceive of their actions as a form of self-defense by the global Muslim community against Western foreign policy and its brutal impact. That's how they see it. That doesn't mean it’s justified, but that means that if we want to reduce their motivation to carry out these attacks, then we have to do something about these foreign policies, which are objected to by the majority of people in Britain and the United States, Muslim and non-Muslim. JUAN GONZALEZ: And Salma Yaqoob, you are an elected city councilor, recently won the election in Birmingham, but you’re also at the same time an antiwar activist. How are this alleged plot and these arrests, do you think, going to affect the antiwar movement and how are you counseling Muslims in Birmingham now to react to this situation? SALMA YAQOOB: Well, as far as a response, obviously we have to be dignified and just in our response. The fact is our country is under a great terror threat now. We can see the political reasons for that. I mean, the Security Services themselves said that with Britain's involvement in Afghanistan, in Iraq, that our country would be more at risk. This isn’t about religion. It’s about people taking what they call revenge. Their logic is, if you use violence, we can also use violence. We’re seeing it around the world. So what people in the antiwar movement have been saying from the beginning is, “Address the root causes.” This is not appeasement. This is saying, if you really want to stop terrorism, stop this state terrorism. We have a double standard. We have states with an army of airplanes -- already what we’re seeing in Lebanon, for example, is 30,000 sorties a day. 1,000 civilians have already been killed, and yet we're not hearing the talk about state terrorism at all. We’re hearing about Hezbollah. Yes, Hezbollah also has a role to play in this, but they all say that we're defending our country against an invasion. Lebanon did not invade Israel. That’s the fact. When we hear these kind of discourses in an unequal way, some people then become very enraged, and they don't address that politically. In the antiwar movement, what we're saying is we want to do things peacefully. We want to address things politically, and that's why people are frustrated with their own leaders, with Prime Minister Blair, saying, “We can't talk peace. We can't talk politics. If you are determined to use bombs and violence yourself, you are then helping to instigate a cycle of violence, and innocent people will bear the brunt of that.” AMY GOODMAN: Salma Yaqoob and Milan Rai, I want to thank you both very much for joining us. Salma Yaqoob is head of the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition, founder and vice-chair of the RESPECT The Unity Coalition in England, the political party, and is a city councilor in Birmingham. Milan Rai, co-founder of the group Justice Not Vengeance, and is author of the book, 7/7: The London Bombings, Islam and the Iraq War. Recommend this article...
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