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The danger of Briton vs Briton
published: Tuesday | July 26, 2005


THE RECENT terrorist outrages in London will have inevitable and deep effects on British society. There is a danger that the United Kingdom, increasingly riven by suspicion and blame throwing after the attacks, will become more divided, and could retrogress to the dangerous and damaging racial profiling that was common in British society between the 1950s and the 1970s.
The attacks in London have left many fingers (including Mr Blair's, despite his caveats) pointed at Muslims. Inevitably, British Muslims fear that they will become victims of retaliation by non-Muslim Britons. There has already been hate-mail to Muslims, indications of an attack on a mosque and an attempt to burn the home of one of the alleged suicide bombers.
There is the danger of official overreaction, as indicated by the shooting to death by the police of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician. He was said definitively by the police to be linked to the terrorist attacks. The police have now said that he was not.
To avoid this danger, Britain's leaders, and those who speak for different sectors of the society, must reform their thinking on the society, and must begin to accept some facts of the cosmopolitan society that they so proudly proclaim.
They must accept immediately that British Muslims are not "foreigners" as some of the country's leaders tend to suggest in their understandably emotive reactions to the outrages and the murders by the terrorist bombers. This is a problem indicated in the labels applied to Jermaine Lindsay, one of the alleged bombers. Having left Jamaica at five months old, Lindsay is correctly referred to as 'Jamaican-born'. However, regardless of the state of his official documentation, Lindsay is not Jamaican, but British.
A containment of the dangers of resurgent racial profiling must start with widespread British acceptance that the attacks on London are internal, and not external. Ignoring the essence of multicultural Britain and refusing to accept that the perpetrators can be home-grown will lead to a misplaced search for foreign scapegoats. Racial profiling will turn Briton again Briton, on the basis of ethnicity and religion. This will lead to the society imploding, handing the terrorists an easy victory.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.

Brings back certain memories of a Canadian runner.

Canadian Ben Johnson wins gold!!

A little while later.................

Jamaican born Ben Johnson has tested positive........