ceasefire now, or our Muslims will explode

Timothy Garton Ash on Gaza:

It directly affects our vital interests, not least because the latest round of Palestinian suffering (compounded by the Palestinians' own divided and irresponsible leadership) will further inflame the anger of Muslims living in Europe.

I haven’t actually noticed any of this. Not that I’m looking for it: but if there was any publicly detectable “Muslim anger” it would be noticeable here on the Crumpsall/Cheetham Hill border as it certainly was in the run up to the Iraq war. What people actually seem to be doing is getting up in the morning and going to work. I’m pretty sure that local Muslims are pro-Palestinian and want the UK government to take a tougher line on Israel, in common with a lot of other people and within the general framework of expressed opinion. If anything, given the Kashmiri origins of local Muslims, I’d guess that the India/Pakistan standoff gets more local attention: at least more sustained attention. But there seems to be a weird assumption that there’s a kind of autonomous lump of Muslim anger that swells or diminishes in strict accord with government policy or Israeli actions.

There may be some people toying with the idea of terrorism now who decide to get serious about it after Gaza: but that’s their decision, not some kind of excess of generalized resentment. And its also true that terrorism policy has to feed into foreign policy generally. But that's not the same as taking a kind of generalized bomb disposal approach to the opinions of Muslims. People should have their opinions addressed as citizens, not their emotions graded as threats.

Comments

[Malcs]

An excellent closing line.

[Chris Williams]

'sright.

Also, I think that the salience of India/Pakistan/Kashmir over Israel/Palestine is one of the great elephants in the UK's living room, wherein the discourses of both anti- and pro- imperialism are lifted from the US, and hence both overly focussed on the middle east. Killing my co-religionists winds me up, sure - but to get me actually mixing the paxo, you'd probably have to kill my cousins, or some childhood friends.