By Sanjay Suri
LONDON, Jul 11 2005 (IPS)

The bomb blasts in London last week that killed more than 50 and left more than 700 injured, have shaken the Muslim community of Britain more than they have shaken London.

Life in London did not quite return to normal Monday, but was headed that way as hundreds of thousands of commuters got back to work on the Underground and on buses. Three trains and a bus were bombed in London Thursday morning last week.

But Muslims got back into business with a double fear. They were just as vulnerable to a terror attack as anyone else – many of those reported missing and the injured were Muslims – and they were additionally fearing a backlash.

”Mosques in Leeds (200 km north of London) and in London have been firebombed, at other mosques windows have been smashed,” a spokesman of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB)who gave his name as Inayat told IPS. ”This has been spread around the country. But fortunately so far people have not been hurt.”

Fears arose after the far-right British National Party (BNP) issued a strongly anti-Muslim statement on the ”Islamic terror attack” following the blasts.

”The London Massacre has tragically brought home to the entire country the terrible price ordinary people are now having to pay for the combination of the failed multi-cultural experiment, doubled up with Tony Blair’s decision to involve Britain in a war that had nothing to do with us,” the BNP said in a statement.

Hackers suspected of far-right sympathies crashed the MCB website. By one estimate, the MCB was sent about 30,000 hate emails.

The MCB responded by trying to get on with work as usual. ”We cannot counter far-right hatred,” Inayat said.

The police have stepped up patrolling in Muslim areas, and constables were posted outside many mosques over the weekend.

Muslim fears were exacerbated by a statement from former Scotland Yard (London police) chief Lord Stevens Lord Stevens that up to 3,000 British- born or British-based people had passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps. The comment seemed to point to thousands of Muslims as potential terrorists.

In one public comment after another leaders said they had no doubt that ”the vast majority” of Muslims in Britain had nothing to do with terrorism. But that remark seemed to leave room for a significant minority that did.

Britain’s estimated two million Muslims include a large number of Pakistani origin. Many Pakistani youth have been targeted by jehadi groups. A group of Pakistani youths with their faces covered with scarves told IPS at an Islamic centre earlier that ”thousands” of British youths are going to Afghanistan and other countries to join training camps for jehad (battle in the cause of Islam). Such images are returning to haunt many Muslims now.

Britain has not seen the kind of backlash against Muslims that came after the 9/11 terror attacks. This was a far smaller attack even though it was on British soil. But it reinforced perceptions of an association of terrorism with Islamic beliefs.

”People do things in the name of Islam which are totally contrary to Islam,” chair of the Council of Mosques and Imams Dr Zaki Badawi said in a statement. But such remarks did not seem to convince everyone. And they did not seem to prevent nervousness amidst the Muslim community.

”These attacks have led to great uncertainty and worry,” Tim Ripley from the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies in Britain told IPS. ”They would focus police attention on the Muslim community, which leads to accusations of victimisation, and then becomes the first step in a dangerous spiral.”

Ripley said there was no doubt that many young Muslims had been recruited in Britain for training camps in other countries. ”We know the case of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber (who took explosives on a flight to the U.S.) who attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Ripley said.

”Several others are proven to have been there,” he said. ”That certainly indicates a trend.” But it should also not lead to ”any paranoia about ‘the enemy within’,” Ripley said.

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