By Andrew Gilligan
8:42PM BST 25 Jul 2011
1281 Comments
I wouldn’t suggest that anyone was actually pleased by the horror in Norway. But within hours of the gunman being identified as white, certain British Islamists and their sympathisers were behaving as if they had caught a lucky break.
“Nationalists pose a bigger threat than al-Qaeda,” asserted one Robert Lambert, a co-director of the European Muslim Research Centre at Exeter University, on the al-Jazeera website. The Islamist threat, he said, was “minimal” by comparison. Ibrahim Hewitt, the head of a charity called Interpal, wrote that “the new Right is on the rise across the West” thanks to “the collusion of Western governments”.
Clearly, the number killed by Anders Behring Breivik is greater than in any single Islamist terror attack in the UK; and equally clearly, the murderer was motivated by hatred of Muslims. This cannot, however, have been his main motive, or he surely would have taken his assault rifle to an Oslo mosque, rather than an island of white teenagers. To even suggest equivalence between years of Islamist terror and the far Right, based on a single, awful case, is deeply dangerous and false.
Not that Bob Lambert needed even a single case. Last year, he published a report claiming that there already was an outbreak of what he quite seriously called “terrorism” against Muslims in Britain, with an “alarming rise” in anti-Muslim hate crime.
No evidence was supplied for these broad and inflammatory claims, because there is none. Few would agree that being called a racial epithet constitutes “terrorism”. While nobody should deny that there is anti-Muslim hatred in Britain, and it’s disgraceful, nearly all the available evidence shows that it is not “rising” but diminishing