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Islamophobia
...It has become increasingly clear since 9/11 that western intelligence agencies have completely failed to understand or to penetrate the networks of Islamist ultra-radicalism. No intelligence agency predicted the attacks on New York or Washington, DC. Nor were there any warnings of the attacks since then in Kenya, Bali or Morocco. Intelligence briefings linking Saddam Hussein to anthrax attacks in the US, or to a nuclear and chemical weapons programme in Iraq, have all proved wildly inaccurate or, as in the case of the documents detailing Saddam's search for nuclear materials in Niger, they were simply made up.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair's neoconservative chums in Washington, immune to the justifiable fears of the Muslim world, talk blithely of moving on from Iraq next year to attack Iran and Syria. They have also invited Franklin Graham, the Christian evangelist who has branded Islam a "very wicked and evil" religion, to be the official speaker at the Pentagon's annual service - and this immediately prior to his departure for Iraq to attempt to convert the people of Baghdad to Christianity.

All the while, the paranoia and bottled-up rage in the Muslim world grows more uncontrollable, and the attacks by Islamic militants gather pace, gaining ever wider global reach and sophistication. As long as British Muslims remain at the receiving end of our rampant Islamophobia, and remain excluded from the mainstream of British life, we can expect only still greater numbers of disenfranchised Muslims in the UK to turn their back on Britain and rally to the extremists.

As Jason Burke points out at the end of his excellent book Al-Qaeda, "The greatest weapon in the war on terrorism is the courage, decency, humour and integrity of the vast proportion of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. It is this that is restricting the spread of al-Qaeda, not the activities of counter-terrorism experts. Without it, we are lost. There is indeed a battle between the west and men like Bin Laden. But it is not a battle for global supremacy. It is a battle for hearts and minds. And it is a battle that we, and our allies in the Muslim world, are currently losing."

This month's upsurge of rampant Islamophobia in Britain, widely reported in Muslim countries, is the last thing we need in such a desperately volatile climate....