The Muslim News

London, IRNA – Prime Minister Tony Blair Friday dismissed calls from Muslim leaders for an independent judicial inquiry into the causes of the London attacks carried by home-grown bombers.

“What happened we can see that very easily. What we need to explore with the (Muslim) community is why these young people came to this extreme view and did what they did,” Blair told The Muslim News.

He was asked to respond to previous calls by Muslim leaders to carrying a fully independent inquiry into London bombings to assess why they happened.

Answering questions at his monthly press conference, the prime minister argued that Muslims he had talked to “know perfectly well there is a problem that needs to be dealt with and want it dealt with.”

“We have to look at how we get right role models going into community, right people talking how Muslims integrate properly and how many have,” he said. “Extremism needs to be challenged as well as simply understood,” he said.

Muslim leaders have been angered by at the way Blair has not keep his pledge to consult with the community, with many saying that he was dictating his own agenda and using his claimed partnership as a “public relations exercise.”

During his press conference, the prime minister appeared to redefine the terrorism threat as a global phenomenon, which he equated as having “something of the same characteristics as revolutionary communism.”

This was “in the sense it has got an ideology, it’s very extreme (and) it can be used to engage young people at a certain level in a certain way,” he argued.

“It’s got often the cells of a loose association with one another, but on the other hand, they have got this ideology that bind them together,” he said, after previously blaming international terrorism on al-Qaeda being a networked organization.

He repeated it was therefore “very important” what happened in the Middle East, in Iraq and in Afghanistan but described it as a battle that was also against an ideology.

“It is a battle of ideas and what these people want to say is the purposes of western policy, American policy in particular, is to suppress Islam,” he said.

Blair used his press conference, which was specially called ahead of going on holiday, to announce a list of 12 measures to counter the current threat to Britain.

These included new grounds for excluding and deporting people,
Listing extremist websites, bookshops and centres and banning Hizb ut Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun as terrorist groups as well as a host of tougher legislation.

But his announcements also brought criticism for not being consulted from Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, who warned that the prime minister had put the cross-party consensus on terrorism “under strain.”

“The government agreed to properly consult opposition parties on their proposals, but this agreement seems to have broken down,” Kennedy said.

He warned that “no mention was made of the proposals during a briefing the Liberal Democrats received from the Home Office yesterday” and suggested that the department itself not have been aware of the Prime Minister's plans.”

“The Prime Minister intends to ban Muslim organisations, seek powers to close down mosques, and deport people who visit particular bookshops or websites,” the Lib Dem leader said.

“He is running the risk of inflaming tensions and alienating Muslims at the very time we need the different communities of Britain to pull together,” he warned, adding that Blair should not count on his party for support.
HC

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