Jewish Chronicle, May 9 2003.

The revelation that two British Muslim boys turned themselves into human bombs to murder Jews in Israel has been for many a savage shock.

It has hideously embarrassed the Muslim community. The vast majority of British Muslims abhor violence and are entirely peaceful citizens. They are understandably horrified by the association of their community with mass murder.

Nevertheless, there is a huge problem here, and it does no-one a service to sweep it under the carpet. This home-grown atrocity cannot be dismissed as an aberration. Dozens of young British Muslims volunteered to fight with the Taleban. One Muslim extremist has claimed there are 50 more British human bombs waiting for the signal to strike, either in Britain or Israel.

Similarly, Fuad Nahdi, the publisher of Q News -- a voice, to a significant extent, of Muslim youth -- has forecast a British intifada. ‘First Tel Aviv, then Manchester?’ as the Guardian helpfully suggested. This is apparently because we are not listening to Muslim ‘pain’.

And the cause of this pain is Israel. Here is the sickening root of the problem. For when it comes to Israel, many so-called moderate Muslims cease to be moderate at all. They simply abandon truth, logic and fairness; and the truly terrifying thing is that so many appear impervious to factual, objective, fair-minded argument.

No doubt Mr Nahdi would cast himself as a moderate. Yet he writes of Israel’s ‘decades of military rule on behalf of Jewish conquerors over resentful Christian and Muslim populations’, ‘colonial-style racism and apartheid-style zoning laws’ and ‘the conqueror’s control of the third holiest place in Islam’. No mention that Israel has been under violent siege for half a century from Arabs bent on eradicating it altogether.

If Muslims think this is the voice of moderation, no wonder Britain now has a major problem. And as Mr Nahdi further enlightens us, it is not just Abu Hamza or Omar Bakri Mohamed who are fomenting this kind of hysteria. Such ‘radicalisation’, he says, is taking place in mosques up and down the country.

Indeed; in the wake of the Tel Aviv bombing, several British Muslims qualified their shock with the justification that this was an inevitable quest for ‘justice’ over Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians.

And despite careful attempts to limit public utterances to the disputed territories, many simply don’t think the Jewish state should exist at all. The Muslim Council of Britain’s media officer, Inayat Bunglawala, admitted this in the JC’s own letters page a few weeks ago. Yet he is among the first to complain that even writing about Islamic terrorism is to tar the moderate majority unfairly with the extremist brush.

This ‘moderate’ majority delegitimises and demonises Israel through lies, distortions and group libels, while sanitising or excusing Arab terror.

Many Jews want to reach out to Muslims. They are like us in so many ways. We see in them our own grandparents and great-grandparents, facing dislocation and prejudice as recent immigrants. So – as Richard Stone wrote last week -- Jews should take part in forums to encourage mutual understanding and friendship between the two cultures.

Such initiatives are commendable for all participants. And of course, Jews should acknowledge Israel’s errors or misdeeds. But one has to ask how useful such forums are if they serve to deny Muslim antisemitism and refuse to challenge Muslim antipathy to Israel.

Worse still are those Jews who agree with such Muslims that Israel is a ‘Nazi’ or ‘apartheid’ state, and who -- instead of fighting such group libels -- grotesquely condemn those who draw attention to them as ‘Islamophobes’.

Those who either support or brush aside such distortions also connive at the inversion of truth and historical evidence at the core of this obsessional hatred and defamation of Israel. It is an inversion which leads directly to the recruitment of young British Muslims into the terrible death cult which has hijacked their religion, and actively undermines the attempt by courageous moderate Muslims to promote Islamic reform.

The British authorities should actively arrest, prosecute, imprison or deport all those who preach incitement or recruit for terror. It is astonishing that they do not. Their failure to do so, quite apart from putting everyone in danger, is also a betrayal of all those decent Muslims who are aghast at the corruption of their faith – and their children -- by these religious fascists.

But the poison will never be drawn unless and until both Muslims and the wider establishment and media start telling the truth about the history of Jews and Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine and about current realities; and until they abandon the moral relativism which has inverted terrorist and victim in the Middle East and airbrushed Jewish ‘pain’ -- and the responsibility for inflicting it -- out of the picture altogether.

Posted by admin at May 9, 2003