:: Media Times Review Blog ::

The measures will affect the fate of four noted figures of Londonistan. First, Omar Bakri Muhammad – the flamboyant Syrian founder of al-Muhajiroun, supporter of Osama bin Laden and the “magnificent nineteen” hijackers of 9/11 – made the sudden decision to take a “holiday” in the Lebanon, after two decades’ residence in Britain. The British home secretary swiftly transformed his visit into a permanent ban on re-entering the country.

Second, Omar Bakri’s fellow-scourge of Britain’s tabloid press, the Egyptian cleric Abu Hamza, remains in detention pending a decision to strip him of his acquired British nationality and extradite him to the United States.

Third, the equally controversial Abu Qatada – the Jordanian-Palestinian known as “al-Qaida’s ambassador in Europe” – languishes in prison awaiting extradition to Jordan; this move remains hypothetical, so numerous and diverse are the possibilities of judicial appeal.

Fourth, Tony Blair referred to the case of Rachid Ramda – an Algerian national, whose extradition over possible involvement in the 1995 bombings of the Paris metro France has been demanding for a decade – to illustrate the need to “change the rules of the game”.

A smashed consensus

The British government’s new course has thrown British liberals into turmoil. They have denounced Blair’s measures as “sabre-rattling” that poses a deadly threat to their society’s traditional freedoms. But looking beyond the political controversy, it is clear that the abandonment of Londonistan raises profound and complex questions regarding the very model of a multicultural society.

Before the 7 July attacks (and the abortive 21 July reprise), Britain was the multicultural champion of Europe, along with the Netherlands – whose own approach has been questioned increasingly since the murder of film director Theo van Gogh by a fanatical Islamist of Moroccan origin in November 2004.

Londonistan used to represent the tip of the multicultural iceberg, to the point of becoming a caricature of it. It posited the theory that the offer of refuge to radical ideologues would allow them to exert a positive influence on young people tempted by Islamist violence, and thus dissuade them from rebelling against a state which had allowed Abu Hamza, Abu Qatada, Omar Bakri and the like to flourish.

For a decade, the policy “worked” insofar as it did save Britain from violent attack. But it had a cost: the spread of radical, extremist discourse, regarded as lawful provided it did not lead to violence. This discourse made its voice heard in Britain thanks to a total absence of a national identity among many young people (despite their British citizenship), as well as to the exacerbation of an international Islamist identity accentuated by the grand deeds of the global jihad.