From Dr G. G. Debono MD

In his letter, The price for being America’s foremost ally (TMIS, 24 July) Moustafa Megawer claims that “...the loss of innocent civilian lives, whether in London or Iraq…” is “thanks mainly to the illegal war on global terror and the ill-justified invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq”.

This is not true. Mr Magawer’s version is a convenient simplification which distorts the truth to suit his purpose.

First of all, the causes of the terrorist attacks in the UK had been brewing for a long time. Secondly, it is significant that all four terrorists were British born. The underground extremist Islamist bodies that operate in the UK, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Ghurabaa are more consistent with an ideological basis – they have little to do with Iraq. Without Iraq the terrorist pot would have boiled over just the same sooner or later in the UK. The 11 September atrocity in the USA preceded intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq by many months. There had also been other atrocities on Western targets in a number of countries years before 11 September 2001, and long before George W. Bush became president. For instance, al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Centre as long ago as 1993. Thus the origin of the terrorism we are now witnessing in the UK goes back a long way. Its origin in the UK probably dates back at least one decade and pre-dates the Iraq intervention.

The most one can say regarding military intervention in Iraq is that it may have given the (British) terrorists a good excuse to wreak their terror tactics in London sooner rather than later. Bush’s intervention in Iraq has, of course, also given the likes of Mr Megawer a convenient excuse for their apparent support of terrorism. Mr Megawer goes as far as calling the war on terrorism “illegal”. Now this is truly astonishing. Are we to understand from this that Mr Megawer actually approves of terrorism? Does Mr Megawer think that terrorists should be free to massacre innocent people in the UK and other countries with impunity? The tone of his letter almost suggests that he is pleased that nearly 60 Londoners have been assassinated by four terrorists.

The root of the problem is that Muslims in the UK, unlike those in the USA, do not have any sense of identity with their adoptive country. They became incapable of integration into Western culture and developed an anti-Western bias over the years. Up until now the UK has been very tolerant towards Muslim extremists and opened welcoming doors to all kinds of dissidents and political refugees. This tolerance was counter-productive and ultimately provided fertile ground for the dissemination of Islamist anti-Western sentiment and the recruitment of terrorists from a reservoir of disaffected Muslim youths.

Therefore to say that “…Tony Blair’s alliance with the American President George W. Bush sparked these attacks on London…” is a gross misrepresentation. Terrorism would have endured just the same without Iraq or Afghanistan. One could even argue that it might have been worse if al Qaeda had been given free rein in Afghanistan. Mr Megawer describes the war in Iraq as being “all about revenge for the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York”. Well, fair comment, but then how long does Mr Megawer expect the USA, or any nation, to remain passive while her citizens are repeatedly massacred by terrorists?

Mr Megawer’s reference to the estimated 165,000 civilian deaths caused during the military intervention in Iraq as “truly a genocide, a war crime” is grotesque. There is no dispute that this loss of human life was utterly regrettable, even when it occurred in spite of the care taken to limit damage to hard military targets. But surely this should be put into perspective with the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by Saddam Hussein? It is estimated that 180,000 innocent Kurds, 60,000 innocent Shiites and 50,000 other innocents were deliberately executed, often with extreme brutality and sadism, at the orders of Saddam Hussein. Human rights officials claim that these 300,000 executions is a gross under-estimate and put the total of those killed by Saddam nearer to 500,000. Even this estimate may be conservative, as Iraqi politicians estimate that this number amounts to over a million. These figures do not include the million or so dead in the Iran-Iraq war.

This must also be said. One of the 7 July terrorists was a teenager, the oldest terrorist had just turned 30. What makes the kind of terrorism that Mr Megawer condones particularly loathsome is the shameful system whereby gullible young people are persuaded to blow themselves up in order to kill as many innocent people as possible. This is done by imbuing them with hatred of others on religious grounds and brainwashing them into believing that their suicide will entitle them to all kind of delights in the afterlife. This is an obscene travesty of religion. The perversity is heightened by the fact that the very people who persuade these youths to commit suicide, will probably live to a ripe old age and die peacefully in their beds. The platform for such evil brainwashing is often a mosque and clerics are often responsible.

The problem will not “ simply go away” when “both the US and Britain turn their full attention to finding a real solution for the problems of the Middle East” – as Mr Megawer says in his letter. The causes are more subtle than that and Muslim leaders in Britain are now starting to admit that they must rein in the extremists in their midst. In any event, the USA and Britain have been trying to find a solution. The vast majority of Iraqi citizens were pleased to see the end of Saddam’s monstrously evil regime to the same extent that the majority of Afghans was pleased to see the end of the Taliban era. But finding a solution keeps being thwarted by opposing minority factions in both Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the expected peace did not come about because of a few fundamentalists.

Finally, lest Mr Megawer misconstrues the purpose of this letter – the object here is not to condone in any way the interventions in Iraq or Afghanistan. The purpose is to draw attention to the extreme bias in Mr Megawer’s misleading letter, which simply cannot be left unchallenged. The bigotry and distortion in Mr Megawer’s letter is so extreme as to make him appear to condone terrorism. This sort of attitude is precisely what is responsible for the continuation of the terrorism which afflicts the modern world.

G. G. Debono