---

Terrorism and Community Relations

I am neither an expert on community relations, nor, indeed, a member of the Committee and I am grateful for the opportunity to pursue various thoughts that have been stimulated by the uniformly excellent contributions of those hon. Members who are experts in community relations and members of the Committee. I start, optimistically, with a single rough statistic. There are well over 1 million Muslims in the United Kingdom. Yet as far as I know, the grand total of Muslim individuals who have been involved in terrorism or arrested for activities that were expected to get them involved in terrorism is not yet in more than double figures. That comparison speaks for itself. I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Brent, East (Sarah Teather) who said, in her first intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison), that those people should be seen not as Muslims per se but as a tiny minority of criminals in the Muslim community. The problem, however, is not, as the hon. Lady suggested, that members of wider British society tend to characterise those murderous individuals by their Muslim faith. It is that the people who subscribe to those extreme views and carry out the atrocities describe themselves as doing it in the name of Islam. Although they may be lacking in many qualities, they and those who send them on their mission possess in abundance one quality above all—that of expert propagandists. Those people do what they do precisely because they know that by operating beyond the bounds of what is acceptable in a free society against a free society they will have a good chance of subverting the pillars of that free society and driving wedges between the different communities that make it up. Insufficient stress has so far been given in the debate to two ways of tackling the problem. The first I have already mentioned: propaganda. If the people in question are such expert propagandists we need to set up the machinery of counter-propaganda, with the full support and essential co-operation of the leaders of the moderate Muslim community. How is it that young people may be brainwashed into sacrificing their lives in a belief that there is a religious basis for the view that they will be rewarded in the afterlife in some exaggerated way? They hold those views because someone has indoctrinated them. We need, desperately soon, people from the Muslim community—religious leaders with impeccable qualifications and immense depth of religious knowledge—to put forward the true interpretation of their religion, and to undermine the false vision that is given to impressionable young people capable of being indoctrinated. Secondly, an important factor that has not yet been mentioned is the accessibility of the political process. I am sure that all hon. Members look forward to the day when there will be as many Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament who are Muslims as there are Members in those parties who are Roman Catholic.