Terrorism Special: Taking Apart the Myth about the 2005 London Bombing and "Multi-Culturalism"

Today is a horrendous anniversary. Six years ago, four British men carried out suicide attacks on the London transportation system, killing 52 people --- students, tourists, people on their way to work.

Now, thanks to British writer Kenan Malik, we supposedly have a definitive explanation as to the cause: Britain's policies on multiculturalism.

Writing in today’s New York Times, Malik argues that those looking for answers "need to look … at public policy, and in particular the failed policy of multiculturalism". As a result of these policies that discourage "assimilation", “Many second-generation British Muslims now find themselves detached from both the religious traditions of their parents, which they often reject, and the wider secular society that insists on viewing them simply as Muslims. A few are drawn inevitably to extremist Islamist groups where they discover a sense of identity and of belonging. It is this that has made them open to radicalization.”

Leaving the fact that not all four bombers were born in Britain, as Malik suggests in the piece --- Germaine Lindsay was born in Jamaica and moved to the UK as a small child before converting to Islam as a teenager --- his mono-causal explanation for the atrocity of six years ago is simplistic, divorced from history, ignorant of the scholarship on violent extremism, and oblivious to the evidence around the 7-7 bombings, including from the British security service MI5.

Official multiculturalist policies may indeed be a problem for western societies (although it is of interest that Malik omits from his analysis a country, Canada, that is more diverse than the UK and which for decades has embraced multiculturalism as an official aspect of its national identity), but it was not the sole cause of 7-7 or other post-9/11 acts of terrorism. Even Malik seems to realize the dubious nature of his argument, as he brings Germany, France, and the US into his piece, even though none of the three embrace anything approaching an official policy of multiculturalism. Indeed, both France and the United States subscribe to the assimilationist policies that Malik endorses as protection against such extremism.

In those countries, according to Malik, it is apparently racism that has led to alienation: he cites as an example the French ban on the burka, Yet an assimilationist approach would prohibit the burka, since it encourages the kind of difference that Malik believes leads to terrorism. As for the US, the recent failed "Times Square Bomber" was a Pakistani immigrant who had seemingly embraced the American dream and been embraced by America; he was motivated, in his words, by anger over repeated US drone attacks in Pakistan to seek revenge.

The reality is that there is no easy answer to what causes terrorism. The British security service MI5 has found no clear pattern to explain who will become a terrorist. Those involved "are a diverse collection of individuals, fitting no single demographic profile, nor do they all follow a typical pathway to violent extremism". The radicalism that Malik singles out as being encouraged by multiculturalism does not offer the answer --- not all radicals become terrorists; not all terrorists are radicals. The authorities recognize this reality, hence the embrace of terms such as “violent extremism” as a distinction from those who are simply extremists. Some form of grievance appears to be a required catalyst in the path to violence --- in their martyrdom videos, two of the 7-7 bombers specifically mentioned British foreign policy as a factor in their actions. In 2004, an internal Home Office/Foreign and Commonwealth Office study, Young Muslims and Extremism, found that the double standard of western foreign policies, including on such issues such as Israel-Palestine and India-Kashmir was a significant source of grievance and alienation for young British Muslim men. While anger over foreign policy is not the sole cause of terrorism --- otherwise there would be a lot more of it --- that is no excuse for ignoring it completely, as Malik does.

Indeed, it would be interesting to see how Malik would explain another example of a group of British men who betrayed their country for ideological reasons and, in doing so, cost others their lives. Would he have blamed the Cambridge 5, who were recruited by Soviet intelligence while students at Cambridge University in the 1930s, on a lack of assimilation? Would he have completely ignored the wider climate that produced them, but also thousands of others who embraced Communism but did not spy for the Soviet Union? Would he have been dismissive of the impact of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Spanish Civil War, which saw thousands of young British men go off and fight out of a sense of solidarity with a bigger cause, despite the opposition of their government?

Overlooking all this would be a fundamentally flawed way to understand "radcialism" in the past. Overlooking it now reduces a complex topic like terrorism to a buzzword.