YESTERDAY Home Secretary Reid dismissed the many appeals for a change in British Foreign Policy from a multitude of community and political leaders, who blamed the rape of Iraq, Palestine and now the Lebanon by the US, UK and Israel for the ‘radicalisation’ of Muslim youth, saying that there was no connection between the two.
At the same time an ex-head of the Metropolitan Police Lord Stevens laid into the ‘Islamic Community’ saying that it should face up to the task of combatting ‘Islamic terrorism’ since the Muslim community owned it, and it was their duty to fight it and eradicate it.
When the British ruling class was at war with the Provisional IRA there was never any attempt to try to say that there was absolutely no link between the struggle of the IRA and the British occupation of the north of Ireland, since such a denial would have been laughed out of court.
What the ruling class did in the end was to negotiate a way to end the struggle, as far as the provos were concerned, by agreeing that at some stage in the future when there was a Catholic majority in the north, if that majority voted in favour of joining the Republic the British government would not stand in its way. Since that agreement there has not been a single Irish terrorist attack on Britain.
The difference between the two cases, Ireland and the Middle East is oil, more oil and yet more oil, plus gas in the Middle East and Central Asia without which US and British capitalism will not survive.
This is why, for Blair, there can be no going back from his special relationship with Bush.
This was why he was completely in support of the plan drawn up by Condoleezza Rice that there must not be a Lebanese cease-fire until Israel had been given enough time to wipe out Hezbollah, if it could.
The fact that the imperialist powers cannot do without a ‘New Middle East’ where they will hold the oil resources in their hands, is the reason for them not being able to see any link at all between their slaughter of Arabs and Islamic peoples, and the desire by some of those who associate themselves with the victims to gain revenge.
It is the imperialist powers who are the creators of Middle Eastern terrorism, and in fact, they owned it, as they did Osama Bin Laden, when he served US and British interests against Russia in Afghanistan.
Blair and Bush see an ‘axis of evil’ that must be destroyed if they are to plunder the world.
At home, Blair sees his bloody foreign policy, as well as his home policy of levelling the Welfare State, being rejected by millions of radicalised people, Muslims being a small minority of these people. The vast majority of people who marched against the war in Iraq and march against the war in the Lebanon are non-Muslims.
This is where the struggle for a ‘new’ Middle East comes together with an attack on basic rights at home, so that the government can deal with its opponents both working class and Muslim, with a special emphasis on demonising the Muslims, as the owners of terrorism.
In Britain the wars for a new Middle East and the war against the working class at home, have spawned no jury courts, a government target of giving the police 90 days to hold a suspect before he or she has to be charged or released, control orders, house arrest and summary justice to replace legal judicial process.
The government now states that there are plots everywhere. Plots to blow up 10 planes in the air at a time, two dozen terrorist groups plotting in Britain to kill tens of thousands, with the Home Secretary saying publicly that basic rights are getting in the way of convictions.
The latest massive raids were organised by the Home Secretary and his Cobra committee of police chiefs and army officers with the PM and the House of Commons out of the country on their hols.
There is only one way to answer this capitalist conspiracy against basic rights and the workers at home and abroad, and that is with a British socialist revolution that will bring in a workers government, withdraw all British troops from the Middle East and extend the hand of friendship to the Lebanese, Palestinian and Iraqi peoples. This will be a real blow against terrorism.
