London can be proud of its response to terror

12 April 2012

Five years ago today, Brits attacked fellow Brits on London's Underground and buses. Five years later, Londoners can be proud of how we refused to be divided and stood together against terror.

London remains a magnet for people around the world and a beacon of tolerance — and our police forces, with help from citizens, have prevented mass murder by those who seek to divide us. Today there is greater awareness of the mindset and networks behind terror.

But we should not rest on our laurels. Where are tomorrow's terror networks?

Terrorism is not born overnight. It festers in an underworld rife with hatred for the West, anger, separatism, confrontation and a feeling of perceived injustice. And when religion is added to the mix, we have young people thinking they're "martyrs", not murderers.

This breed of falsified religion, twisted politics, conspiracy theories and desire for martyrdom is today predominantly found in four places in the UK.

First, our prisons are filled with the convicts from a number of terrorist plots, and foreign terror suspects we cannot deport. Many of these individuals are radicalising and recruiting young criminals with the aim of launching them back into the outside world with their minds full of hate and thoughts of revenge against the society that imprisoned them.

Second, we have an epidemic of intolerant, supremacist religious preachers on university campuses who advocate hatred, separatism and confrontation under the cover of "freedom of speech". Some universities employ these hate peddlers as lecturers. The Christmas Day bomber in Detroit, who studied in England, was only the latest product of this campus indoctrination.

Third, the internet is brimming with sites that expose young web users to images of killing, explosions and even instructions for homemade bombs. These websites number in their thousands in Arabic, and are often one click away from less extreme websites in the UK. The response to those who advocate violence on these sites is, sadly, underdeveloped.

Who knows what is going through the tens of thousands of young minds that browse these websites on a regular basis?

Finally, networks that advocate and glorify non-state warfare are recruiting teenage men to their causes in some community centres and youth clubs around the UK. They prey on young lives by promising glory, martyrdom and revenge in place of drab suburban existences.

At the last count, Britain's intelligence services admitted monitoring nearly 3,000 potential terrorists. The situation is still severe but we will not live our lives in fear.

That is not the British way — stoicism and defiance are our national traits. But we also cannot turn a blind eye and hope all will be well.

As citizens, we have a moral duty to confront the separatism, bigotry, supremacist tendencies and Westphobia that underpin terrorism. From schools to universities to communities, where we find attitudes that sympathise with terror, we have a responsibility to uproot it. We cannot tolerate intolerance. We must and we will unite to triumph over terror. Over the past five years, London has shown how it can be done. But that task is not yet complete.

Ed Husain is co-director of the Quilliam Foundation, Britain's leading counter-extremism think tank

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