“Scorpio”, a Pakistani 15-year-old from the Sparkhill area of Birmingham, is talking to his friend Ali about recent events. “It’s bad,” he says. “Now I can’t go to people of other nationalities and say, ‘I’m Pakistani, I’m the best of nations’.” His friend interrupts. “No. But you can’t go and join the British army though. Then you’ll be fighting on the gora‘s [white man’s] side against Pakistan.” The two friends switch to Urdu, arguing over the rights and wrongs of Muslims joining the British army. At the end, Scorpio tells his friend: “Yeah, but who cares if you join?”
It’s a good question. Nine arrested suspects are alleged to have cared about Muslims enlisting in the armed forces so much, that they were planning to put a Muslim soldier on “trial”, sever his head as punishment and post the video on the internet as a warning to other British Muslims not to forget whose side they were on.
Yet there is doubt and confusion in Sparkhill. According to assistant chief constable David Shaw, from West Midlands police, this is partly the fault of the media: “Members of the community are bewildered by what is being reported,” he said at a press conference last Friday. But also, “sources close to Shaw” revealed he felt the inquiry had been “hijacked”, and that it was “obvious” there were “various agendas at work here”.
On Saturday, around 150 people: elders, men with families, a few teenagers and even fewer women, gathered for a public meeting at the Birmingham Central Mosque, where they would hear well-known radical activists from Birmingham’s Muslim community fill in the blanks on what those “various agendas” were.
Local Respect Party councillor Salma Yaqoob claimed that “demonising” Muslims was the government’s “weapon of mass distraction” from policies abroad. Whitehall “spin” had now indelibly linked the images of Ken Bigley’s murder with Birmingham: this was threatening community cohesion, causing further alienation and making Muslim youths susceptible to radicalisation. But at the same time, Yaqoob reminded those gathered that terrorism and events such as those of 7 July were “not a failure of multiculturalism”. As with Northern Ireland, terrorism was a “political issue”. Either way, it seemed the government was to blame.
Imran Waheed, lifetime Birmingham resident and lead spokesperson from Britain’s largest radical Islamic group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, told the audience that the government was “playing politics with security”. Like Yaqoob, Waheed explained that the government’s “Machiavellian plotting” had been employed to “distract the people from their foreign policies in Iraq and Afghanistan”.
Moazzam Begg, the Guantanamo Bay detainee was the last to speak at the 90-minute meeting. The former owner of the Maktabah al-Ansar bookshop, one of 18 premises to have been raided by the police, told the audience that he was acquainted with one of the alleged suspects. In fact, his friend – whom he wouldn’t name – had helped him to draft a statement condemning the kidnapping of Norman Kember in December 2005. He said that he was “convinced” there was no plot, and the actions of the police represented a “fishing trip”. When he announced that the sting had been codenamed “Operation Gamble”, the audience erupted into laughter; and when he said that metaphorical “heads would roll” once the truth was out, he received an ovation.
The idea that British jihadists would want to behead fellow Muslims appears a particularly shocking new development in homegrown terrorism. But Shiraz Maher, a former recruiter for Hizb ut-Tahrir, who is also a Birmingham resident, explained to me that if the plot is real, then the tactics of kidnapping and beheading should be seen as a sign of the jihadist movement’s weakness, rather than its strength. “The Muslim community has traditionally been nonchalant towards extremism or extremist mosques, and the terrorists have always used that to allow them to manoeuvre and operate,” said Maher. “Now people are turning their backs on these groups. As a result, they have to target Muslims specifically in order to silence dissent and debate within the community.”
A former member of the British jihadi network, who wished not to be named for security reasons, also suggested that the tactic of beheading should be viewed as a sign of weakness, or as he put it, a failure of “creative drive”. Over the years, he explained, the British jihadi network was usually made up of people who were more ideological and strategic in their actions. But in the post-7 July environment, where many of those members have been arrested, killed, gone abroad or quit, the network may be having trouble educating high-quality strategists at a fast enough rate. The beheading plot could be a sign that the network is now operating on empty and has been reduced to employing criminals and simple “cold-blooded killers”.
Shiraz Maher also said that, by playing politics with the information from the investigation, Whitehall may be doing the work of the terrorists for them. “The point that the alleged plotters may have wanted to make, which was to scare Muslims who are choosing to integrate, has already been made by leaking the details of the plot,” he said. “In Muslim communities, that debate about joining the British army and the police is now taking place.”
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