THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRATIC POLICE STATE
Thomas Friedman is a famous columnist on the New York
Times. He has been described as "a guard dog of US
foreign policy". Whatever America's warlords have in
mind for the rest of humanity, Friedman will bark it. He
boasts that "the hidden hand of the market will never
work without a hidden fist". He promotes bombing
countries and says world war three has begun.
Friedman's latest bark is about free speech, which
his country's constitution is said to safeguard. He
wants the State Department to draw up a blacklist of
those who make "wrong" political statements. He is
referring not only to those who advocate violence, but
those who believe American actions are the root cause of
the current terrorism. The latter group, which he
describes as "just one notch less despicable than the
terrorists", includes most Americans and Britons,
according to the latest polls.
Friedman wants a "War of Ideas report" which names
those who try to understand and explain, for example,
why London was bombed. These are "excuse makers" who
"deserve to be exposed". He borrows the term "excuse
makers" from James Rubin, who was Madeleine Albright's
chief apologist at the State Department. Albright, who
rose to secretary of state under President Clinton, said
that the death of half a million Iraqi infants as a
result of an American-driven blockade was a "price" that
was "worth it". Of all the interviews I have filmed in
official Washington, Rubin's defence of this mass
killing is unforgettable.
Farce is never far away in these matters. The "excuse
makers" would also include the CIA, which has warned
that "Iraq [since the invasion] has replaced Afghanistan
as the training ground for the next generation of
'professionalised? terrorists'." On to the
Friedman/Rubin blacklist go the spooks!
Like so much else during the Blair era, this
McCarthyite rubbish has floated across the Atlantic and
is now being recycled by the prime minister as proposed
police-state legislation, little different from the
fascist yearnings of Friedman and other extremists. For
Friedman's blacklist, read Tony Blair's proposed
database of proscribed opinions, bookshops,
websites.
The British human rights lawyer Linda Christian asks:
"Are those who feel a huge sense of injustice about the
same causes as the terrorists - Iraq, Afghanistan, the
war on terrorism, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib - to be
stopped from speaking forthrightly about their anger?
Because terrorism is now defined in our law as actions
abroad, will those who support liberation movements in,
for example, Kashmir or Chechnya be denied freedom of
expression?" Any definition of terrorism, she points
out, should "encompass the actions of terrorist states
engaged in unlawful wars."
Of course, Blair is silent on western state terrorism
in the Middle East and elsewhere; and for him to
moralise about "our values" insults the fact of his
blood-crime in Iraq. His budding police state will, he
hopes, have the totalitarian powers he has longed for
since 2001 when he suspended habeas corpus and
introduced unlimited house arrest without trial. The Law
Lords, Britain's highest judiciary, have tried to stop
this. Last December, Lord Hoffmann said that Blair's
attacks on human rights were a greater threat to freedom
than terrorism. On 26 July, Blair emoted that the entire
British nation was under threat and abused the judiciary
in terms, as Simon Jenkins noted, "that would do credit
to his friend Vladimir Putin". What we are seeing in
Britain is the rise of the democratic police state.
Should you be tempted to dismiss all this as esoteric
or merely mad, travel to any Muslim community in
Britain, especially in the north west and sense the
state of siege and fear. On 15 July, Blair's Britain of
the future was glimpsed when the police raided the Iqra
Learning Centre and book store near Leeds. The Iqra
Trust is a well-known charity that promotes Islam
worldwide as "a peaceful religion which covers every
walk of life." The police smashed down the door, wrecked
the shop and took away anti-war literature which they
described as "anti-western".
Among this was, reportedly, a DVD of the Respect
Party MP George Galloway addressing the US Senate and a
New Statesman article of mine illustrated by a
much-published photograph of a Palestinian man in Gaza
attempting to shield his son from Israeli bullets before
the boy was shot to death. The photograph was said to be
"working people up", meaning Muslim people. Clearly,
David Gibbons, this journal's esteemed art director, who
chose this illustration, will be called before the Blair
Incitement Tribunal. One of my books, The New Rulers of
the World, was also apparently confiscated. It is not
known whether the police have yet read the chapter that
documents how the Americans, with help from MI6 and the
SAS, created, armed and bankrolled the terrorists of the
Islamic Mujahideen, not least Osama Bin Laden.
The raid was deliberately theatrical, with the media
tipped off. Two of the alleged 7 July bombers had been
volunteers in the shop almost four years ago. "When they
became hardliners", said a community youth worker. "They
left and have never been back and they?ve had nothing to
do with the shop." The raid was watched by horrified
local people. who are now scared, angry and bitter. I
spoke to Muserat Sujawal, who has lived in the area for
31 years and is respected widely for her management of
the nearby Hamara Community Centre. She told me, "There
was no justification for the raid. The whole point of
the shop is to teach how Islam is a community-based
religion. My family has used the shop for years, buying,
for example, the Arabic equivalent of Sesame Street.
They did it to put fear in our hearts." James Dean, a
Bradford secondary school teacher, said, "I am teaching
myself Urdu because I have multi-ethnic classes, and the
shop has been very helpful with tapes."
The police have the right to pursue every lead in
their hunt for bombers, but scaremongering is not their
right. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police
Commissioner who understands how the media can be used
and spends a lot of time in television studios, has yet
to explain why he announced that the killing in the
London Underground of the Brazilian Jean Charles de
Menezes was "directly linked" to terrorism, when he must
have known the truth. Muslim people all over Britain
report the presence of police "video vans" cruising
their streets, filming everyone. "We have become like
ghettoes under siege," said one man too frightened to be
named. "Do they know what this is doing to our young
people?"
The other day Blair said, "We are not having any of
this nonsense about [the bombings having anything] to do
with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan,
or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of
the rest of it. It is nonsense and we have to confront
it as that." This "raving", as the American writer Mike
Whitney observed, "is part of a broader strategy to
dismiss the obvious facts about terror and blame the
victims of American-British aggression. It's a tactic
that was minted in Tel Aviv and perfected over 37 years
of occupation. It is predicated on the assumption that
terrorism emerges from an amorphous, religious-based
ideology that transforms its adherents into ruthless
butchers."
Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago
has examined every act of suicide terrorism over the
past 25 years. He refutes the assumption that suicide
bombers are mainly driven by "an evil ideology
independent of other circumstances." He said, "The facts
are that since 1980, half the attacks have been secular.
Few of the terrorists fit the standard stereotype...
Half of them are not religious fanatics at all. In fact,
over 95 per cent of suicide attacks around the world
[are not about] religion, but a specific strategic
purpose - to compel the United States and other western
countries to abandon military commitments on the Arabian
Peninsula and in countries they view as their homeland
or prize greatly... The link between anger over
American, British and western military [action] and
al-Qaeda's ability to recruit suicide terrorists to kill
us could not be tighter."
So we have been warned, yet again. Terrorism is the
logical consquence of American and British "foreign
policy" whose infinitely greater terrorism we need to
recognise, and debate, as a matter of urgency.
First published in the New Statesman -
www.newstatesman.co.uk
