Daily Mail UK
23:52pm 10th
August 2006
Last week, I sat in a room full
of senior police and counter-terrorism experts from countries all over the
world, and listened to them discussing the likelihood of more terrorist
attacks. The buzz word I heard all day long was 'home-grown'.
No longer the battle-hardened
veterans of the Afghan war. No more the diaspora of Arab nationals fired up by
the persecution in their native countries. It's now our own home-grown kids who
are the biggest threat to their fellow countrymen. We're now witnessing Al
Qaeda's third generation in action.
Three of the 7/7 London bombers
were born in Britain; the fourth came here from Jamaica as a baby and converted
to Islam as a teenager.
The warning signs have been
there for years.
Three years ago I worked on a
Dispatches documentary which clearly demonstrated how deeply affected young
British Muslims were by what they saw as a concerted campaign against Muslims.
We broadcast horrific propaganda videos which were in circulation throughout
the UK. I bought a new batch on Oxford Street, in Central London, just
recently.
These films depict horrific
atrocities that the makers believe have taken place against innocent civilians
in places like Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine and Kashmir. They portray Mujahadeen
warriors who have attacked "oppressive" occupying forces as heroes.
Whipping up a burning sense of injustice, they channel young men into a
distorted view of Islam in which suicide bombings are justified in Western
countries because, they say, our governments do nothing to stop the violence
against their fellow Muslims.
These emotions are churning all
over the world - a home-grown generation venting its fury on the community in
which it lives.
This accumulated anger exploded
one bloody morning last July in London. The Government tried to downplay the
effect of our foreign policy, especially the Iraq war but their spin was
destroyed by the words of the suicide bombers themselves. In his farewell video
Mohammed Siddique Khan says, in his soft Yorkshire accent: "I am directly
responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until
you stop the bombing and torture of my people we will not stop this fight."
In a second film, cruelly
released last month on the anniversary of the bombings, Shehzad Tanweer warned
that the attacks would continue and become stronger until British troops were
pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The kids drink in all this material and share their anguish
in unregulated chatrooms
As well as watching videos, many
Muslim youngsters, who live just down the road from all of us, sit in their
bedrooms or in internet cafes, looking at pictures of mangled, burnt bodies of
women and children - portrayed as casualties of "attacks" by Western
forces.
In recent weeks, those inciting
hatred have sent fresh images from Lebanon and even some recycled ones that
have done the rounds before. I've seen one email claiming to show
"pictures from Lebanon the media won't broadcast". The worst is of a
baby killed in the womb. It has a gaping hole in its back after its mother was
shot in the stomach.
Except it's not a picture from
Lebanon - I first saw this photograph weeks ago among a grotesque gallery of
pictures from Iraq. Maybe this tragic baby is even Chechen or Bosnian. In
death, he's become international - an extraordinarily powerful recruiting tool
to bind Muslims together in common outrage at what's happening to their
brethren.
Alongside the internet images of
human suffering, there are dozens of websites offering bomb-making expertise,
weapons training and religious justification for attacking Western targets.
The kids drink in all this
material and share their anguish in unregulated chatrooms. Al Qaeda doesn't
need the training camps of Afghanistan, when the "virtual camps" of
the web can reach a whole new generation - the home-grown generation.
So what about attitudes within
that generation? This week's Dispatches programme, "What Muslims
Want", featured a specially commissioned NOP poll of 1,000 British Muslims
aged 18 and over. Some of the results were equally startling and depressing.
Overall, almost a quarter - 23
per cent - felt the London bombings were justified because of British support
for the U.S. war on terror, but among younger Muslims the figure rose to 31 per
cent. Almost a half of the under-25s polled said they weren't surprised the
bombers were British. And over a third of all those questioned said they
thought there would be another terrorist attack by British-born Muslims on the
UK.
Among this home-grown generation
of British Muslims the sense of injustice is growing, the feeling of kinship
beyond national boundaries is growing, the frustration at the West's
"slaughter" of their Muslim brothers is growing. And it takes only a
tiny number of such angry young people to cause mayhem and carnage.
Deborah Davies is a
Dispatches journalist who has reported on Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda for over
a decade.