Islamic Terror Threat

So far, the government has refrained from introducing more Draconian legislation. Instead, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his ministerial colleagues have promised to reinforce the government's campaign "to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim community."

However, like Tony Blair's sterile appeal to moderate, mainstream Islam, this strategy is bound to fail because of two fatal assumptions. First, that every culture and every religion wants to become like the secular West. Second, resistance to Western secularization is fueled by false grievances and as such can be legitimately ignored.

The IHT has an interesting analysis on the Government's response to the recent failed car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow. Noting that "Those who have abandoned terrorism did so not as a result of secular injunctions or indeed horror at what they were doing. Rather, it was the realization that the variant of Islam they were killing for was itself Western, modern and secular," it concludes that given we are losing the battle of hearts and minds, we should instead encourage an Islamic renaissance and revive Muslim traditions that the fundamentalists have so violently suppressed.