The SNP and the Islamist threat

The SNP is playing a deadly game with Islam

Tom Gallagher

28 July 2007

A civic reception will take place next month for the Glasgow airport workers and travellers whose courage on Saturday 30 June when bombers struck the terminal building may well have prevented horrific slaughter.

Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond will preside at the ceremony honouring Smeaton and the other heroes. This will only spoil the occasion because of the way the leader of the Scottish National Party and his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, have handled the terrorist attack. Both of them emphasised a narrow tribal identity which nationalism at its most unenlightened too often does. One of Salmond’s first public reactions was to reveal that the two men detained at the airport were not Scots, much to the chagrin of the security services who were well aware that such leaks could only hamper an effective reaction to the incident. Thus the suspects were defined by their Scottishness or lack of it. In the days ahead he and Sturgeon went to great lengths to deny the argument that religious ideology might be motivating Muslims to carry out acts of mass terror, even though this had already been argued in the press with considerable fluency by ex-radicals who had abandoned the revolutionary Islamic cause.
On 1 July Salmond made a well-publicised visit to Glasgow’s Central Mosque, to assure religious leaders of his determination to prevent the 25,000-strong Muslim community around Glasgow from being an object of attack. It is unlikely that in this encounter he urged them to co-operate with the intelligence services, or disavow the attacks on free speech which revived when Salman Rushdie was knighted. Or to examine whether there are ways in which Islam and its teachings are interpreted that drive young men in the direction of violence.

This might be hard for Salmond to do because facing down extremism requires close co-operation with the organs of the British state just as he is mounting a campaign to delegitimise the British role in Scottish life on many fronts. Of course he needs to build on a still-narrow electoral base when 32 per cent of the vote gave him a slender one-seat majority in the elections for a Scottish parliament in May. There is plenty of evidence that he sees the cultivation of Glasgow’s Muslims as one of the ways in which he can achieve an electoral breakthrough in a city always resistant to the SNP appeal. Sturgeon repeatedly stated on television that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’. Whereas the non-Muslim majority was sternly warned not to contemplate retaliation against Muslims because the full force of the law would be used against them, there was no equivalent call for Scottish Muslims to challenge radicals who exploit the violent traditions within Islam.

The Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) is emerging as the most vocal Islamic force in Scotland. It champions an austere brand of Islam and is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It is fiercely opposed to any British involvement in Muslim lands and struck up a tactical alliance with the Socialist Workers party to form the Respect party led by George Galloway. The MAB’s chief spokesman in Scotland is Osama Saeed, a vocal and energetic campaigner. He has previously stood as an SNP candidate and after the bomb attempt he was the local Muslim the BBC in Scotland nearly always turned to in order to speak for the 65,000-strong community.
Alex Salmond has been happy to meet the MAB’s Dr Azzam Tamimi, who told the BBC’s Tim Sebastian in November 2004 that ‘If I can go to Palestine and sacrifice myself, I would do it’. In December 2005, while addressing Islamic activists in Glasgow, he stated that the SNP was the best party in Scotland to represent Muslim interests. He cited the party’s stance on Iraq, Palestine and the war on terrorism, declaring, ‘We have been impressed by the warm and welcoming attitude of the SNP.’