The SNP is playing a deadly game with Islam

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.
John Smeaton, a 31-year-old baggage handler, became the emblematic figure for a day when God smiled on Glasgow. His comment that he was only doing his civic duty was indeed a boost for the battered concept of citizenship. He was affirming that, as well as rights, we also have duties that sometimes we are called upon to exercise in order to protect freedom and the rule of law.

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.