Review: Generation Jihad
A week ago on Monday on BBC Two at ten o'clock a programme named Generation Jihad was broadcast, where Peter Taylor went back to his home county of Yorkshire in order to find out why the 7/7 bombers were radicalised, and therefore what can be done to counter-act this 'mass jihadi brainwashing' of young Muslim youth in the UK.
Taylor even went as far to claim that during the 80s with the National Front the 'seeds' of 'generation jihad' had been sown and now a small minority of radicalist Muslims is our 'biggest national security threat'.
The reportage of the infamous Salman Rushdie and his book The Satanic Verses was inevitably mentioned, where he claims he was 'struck' by a feeling that protests of that scale may ‘manifest themselves’ in the UK in the future.
West Yorkshire Chief Constable, Sir Norman Bettison, claimed that this threat will carry on for at least twenty years. He also stated that the Muslim community should play a bigger role in tipping off police on potential terrorists, but he fails to realize that there’s a fine-line between police involvement and alienation and that it’s been crossed.
Last Monday's episode, the first of three, examined social factors leading up to the bombings, albeit not in much depth. A handful of young Muslims were self-radicalising (via the ever-present evil, the internet) or being radicalised, even groomed, by Islamist cells along the al-Qaida interpretation of Islam as opposed to the moderate Islam practiced by their parents' generation. Most of the Pakistani population in the UK are the children of a huge wave of economic migrants who migrated to the UK from the 1950s to the 1970s who were more than happy to integrate with society.
Interviewing Muslim men convicted under the UK's anti-terror laws was an interesting part of the programme; apparently we can now fully blame home-grown terrorists on a mixture of Salman Rushdie and the internet. The term of 'jihad' wasn't fully explained to the viewers, and from this programme you'd think that small communities were perpetrating hard-lined Islam, setting up stalls in the streets with radicalist literature and media.
The Daily Telegraph recently published that it was believed by US intelligence that the UK has the biggest amount of extremists in the West. Coincidentally, the UK also has some of the harshest anti-terror laws, although not as strict as the US where if you’re from one of a series of fourteen countries, upon arrival in the US you’ll be more thoroughly searched on ‘anti terror grounds’.
One of the ways that this programme could have been a bit more palatable and informative would be to get a well-known famous Muslim on it to condemn the bombings and radicalization, such as journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, or Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the Muslim MP who was put on the Question Time panel when Nick Griffin made his infamous debut, or maybe an Imam from the Muslim Council of Britain; any well-known Muslim individual to come out and lambast Islamic terrorism would’ve done: it’s not as if there aren’t any who’ll voice and talk about the subject.
Peter Taylor & Co could have provided an accurate back drop to describe in depth the wars that are used as propaganda, and how those wars came about, why they decide to attack the west. For example, Britain selling arms to Israel. Or how the anti terror laws have had devastating impacts on communities, the rising rate of hate crimes and far-right groups condemning Islam, the Abu Ghraib scandal and last, but not least, the media’s damning portrayal of Muslims.
This show presented the lesser cause of jihad (a physical holy war, as opposed to the internal struggle of war) as an issue that’s black and white, right and wrong. They portrayed it as being solely an issue that the Muslim community had fabricated, not mentioning the various ways that the West has alienated Muslims and contributed to the issue itself. It’s a shared issue, to say the least.
What the nice chap in the pin stripe suit didn’t mention was that this overwhelmingly concerning issue of home-grown terrorists is a grey issue, and not something that can be lumped into categories such as ‘black and white’.
In conclusion, calling the fastest growing section of British society born since the 1970s ‘generation jihad’ doesn’t do anyone any favours with the connotations that it implies: they could have done so much more with this. I’d advise against seeing the next two parts of Generation Jihad (Sub-Ed Note - But if you do want to watch them they're still on the BBC iPlayer).
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