The 9/11 Wars (114 page)

    
9
.
Home Office,
Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on
7
th July 2005
, HMSO, May 11, 2006, p. 19.

  
10
.
Richard Norton-Taylor and Riazat Butt, ‘Queen is target for al-Qaida, security sources confirm’,
Guardian
, November 14, 2005.

  
11
.
In February 2004, Khyam had been recorded by MI5 telling Khan, a few months before the latter had set out for a training camp, that ‘you’ll be with Arab brothers, Chechen brothers. The only thing I will advise you … is total obedience to whoever your Emir is … whether he is Sunni, Arab, Chechen, Saudi, British … I’ll tell you up there you can get your head cut off.’ See James Brandon, ‘Al-Qa’ida’s Involvement in Britain’s “Homegrown” terrorist plots’,
CTC Sentinel
, vol. 2, no. 3, March 2009, p. 10.

  
12
.
Esther Addley, ‘7/7 inquest: “Pandemonium here … we have really got to get some control” ’,
Guardian
, October 11, 2010.

  
13
.
British ministers made extraordinary efforts to deny any causative link between the strikes and the war in Iraq, despite the advice of their own security services, despite blindingly obvious evidence all around them and despite, exactly a year after the bombings, the release of the videoed testament of Shehzad Tanweer, who explained that ‘the non-Muslims of Britain’ were being targeted because they had ‘openly supported the genocide of over 150,000 innocent Muslims in Falluja’.

  
14
.
The two men Ibrahim was travelling with are believed to have died in Afghanistan. ‘Police monitored bomb plotters’, BBC News Online, January 18, 2007.

  
15
.
Evan Kohlmann, ‘Abu Musab al-Suri’s final “Message to the British and the Europeans” ’,
Nefa Foundation
, August 2005.

  
16
.
Author interview with Pakistani intelligence officials, Riyadh, March 2008. ‘Al-Suri has not surfaced anywhere since though may have been “rendered” to Syria.’ William Maclean, ‘Al Qaeda ideologue in Syrian detention – lawyers’, Reuters, June 10, 2009.

  
17
.
Text of statement by Mayor Ken Livingstone,
Financial Times
, July 7, 2005.

  
18
.
In 2001, 30 per cent of Londoners were born outside England. See Leo Benedictus, ‘Every race, colour, nation and religion on earth’,
Guardian
, January 21, 2005. For 2006, the figure for Londoners born outside the UK was 32 per cent according to the Greater London Authority’s Data Management and Analysis Group report by Laura Spence, February 2008,
A Profile of Londoners by Country of Birth Estimates from the
2006
Annual Population Survey
, p. 1.

  
19
.
Obituaries of those who died in the 7/7 bombing, Guardian Online, accessed July 7, 2010.

  
20
.
Kenan Malik, ‘The Islamophobia Myth’,
Prospect
, 107, February 2005.

  
21
.
GfK NOP Social Research,
Attitudes to Living in Britain – A Survey of Muslim Opinion
, August 2006.

  
22
.
Michael Meacher, ‘This war on terrorism is bogus’,
Guardian
, September 6, 2003.

  
23
.
Oriana Fallacci,
The Rage and the Pride
, Rizzoli, 2002. For sales figures: Jennifer Schuessler, ‘Gift books for millionaires’,
New York Times
, December, 20, 2010.

  
24
.
Bruce Bawer,
While Europe Slept
, Doubleday, 2006. Melanie Phillips,
Londonistan
, Encounter Books, 2006.

  
25
.
Address at the opening of courses at the University of Leiden, September 2004.

  
26
.
Christopher Caldwell, ‘Islamic Europe: When Bernard Lewis speaks’,
Weekly Standard
, October 4, 2004.

  
27
.
Tony Blankley, ‘An Islamist threat like the Nazis’,
Washington Times
, September 12, 2005.

  
28
.
Robert Leiken, ‘Europe’s Angry Muslims’,
Foreign Affairs
, July/August 2005.

  
29
.
Charles Krauthammer, ‘What the uprising generation wants,’
Time
, November 13, 2005.

  
30
.
Niall Ferguson, ‘Eurabia?’,
New York Times
, April 4, 2004.

  
31
.
See CIA World Factbook 2007 listings for Algeria, Turkey, Tunisia, France. Available online at
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
. A series of other commentators dismissed a complex and technical debate among demographers and considerable evidence that reproduction rates among European Muslims are already declining and are likely to decline further in coming years (as they have done both for other European migrant communities and in many Muslim migrants’ countries of origin) as European wishful thinking. See Chapter 14 for more.

  
32
.
Bat Ye’or,
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005.

  
33
.
‘Tales from Eurabia’,
The Economist
, June 22, 2006.

  
34
.
Extracts from the Zawahiri tape, Times Online, August 4, 2005. Al-Zawahiri issued a statement towards the end of 2005 which specifically targeted British Muslims, calling the Queen ‘one of the severest threats to Islam’ and, in passing, revealing deep cultural ignorance, threatening all those who called themselves ‘British citizens, subject to Britain’s crusader laws’ and who were ‘proud of [their] submission … to Elizabeth, head of the Church of England’.

  
35
.
Author interview with Alain Bauer, criminologist, Paris, March 2008.

  
36
.
Exact figures are hard to find. For example, at Aulnay-sous-Bois Ministry of the Interior press officers gave a figure of sixteen vehicles burned whereas the fire brigade recorded 150 separate interventions during a week of rioting. Author interviews, Paris, November 2005.

  
37
.
Mucchielli,
Quand les banlieues brûlent
, La Découverte, 2007, p. 20.

  
38
.
Many on the French left argued that they were in fact youngsters without previous criminal involvement who were more motivated by rage, hate, despair, alienation and a deep identity crisis than any involvement in narcotics. The arguments over the cause of the riots was in part political theatre, a result of internal French domestic politics, mainly the bitter and personal rivalry between Sarkozy, whose political persona and appeal was based on tough rhetoric on law and order, and his rival for the succession to President Jacques Chirac as leader of the French right, the less populist, urbane Dominique de Villepin, who favoured a more centrist, ‘compassionate’ conservatism. Uninspired and uninspiring, the French Socialists had little influence on the public conversation.

  
39
.
‘Les juges ne confirment pas le portrait des émeutiers dressé par Sarkozy’, Agence France-Presse, November 17, 2005.

  
40
.
French Government Centre of Strategic Analysis, Report for the Office of the Prime Minister:
Enquêtes sur les violences urbaines: comprendre les émeutes de Novembre 2005, les exemples de Saint-Denis et de Aulnay-sous-Bois
, Paris, 2006.

  
41
.
For more see Timothy Garton-Ash, ‘Anti-Europeanism in America’,
Hoover Digest
, 2, 2003. Also Justin Vaisse, ‘American Francophobia Takes a New Turn’,
French Politics, Culture and Society
, vol. 21, no. 2, July 2003. The latter in particular is an excellent discussion of the development of these stereotypes and of their reinforcement from 2003 onwards in the US media and among US politicians

  
42
.
Melanie Philips, ‘Why France is burning’,
Daily Mail
, November 7, 2005.

  
43
.
Mark Steyn, ‘Wake up, Europe, you’ve a war on your hands’,
Chicago Sun Times
, November 6, 2005.

  
44
.
Reuven Paz, ‘The Non-Territorial Islamic States in Europe’, paper, Project for the Research of Islamist Movements, Hertzeliya, Israel, November 28, 2005.

  
45
.
‘On faisait un peu le Baghdad, quoi’ were the exact words of Paolo Savalli, of mixed Moroccan/Italian background, in Bobigny two months after the riots. Author interview, January 2010.

  
46
.
One example from the author’s own late teenage years was the controversial 1988 hit ‘Fuck Tha Police’, by American rappers Niggaz With Attitude.

  
47
.
Mucchielli,
Quand les banlieues brûlent
, p. 29. See the 2004 report of the National Human Rights Advisory Commission (Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme, CNCDH).

  
48
.
Laurence and Vaisse,
Intégrer l’Islam
, p. 276.

  
49
.
Attacks on French Jews numbered 510 in first six months of 2004 as against 593 in the whole of 2003 according to ‘Anti-Semitism on rise in Europe’, BBC, March 31, 2004.

  
50
.
This killing was the first explicitly anti-Semitic murder in France since 1995. The ‘gang of barbarians’ ’ own understanding of Islam was cursory to say the least. Charles Bremner, ‘Youssouf Fofana jailed for the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi’,
The Times
, July 11, 2009, Pascal Ceaux and Jean-Marie Pontaut, ‘Youssouf Fofana: confessions d’un “barbare” ’,
L’Express
, January 23, 2008.

  
51
.
Author interviews, Bobigny, France, December 2005, January 2006.

  
52
.
Cecilia Gabizon, ‘La Carte des émeutes de novembre 2005 confirme le profond malaise des immigrants africains’,
Le Figaro
, October 15, 2007. See also Hugues Lagrange and Marco Oberti, eds.,
Emeutes urbaines et protestations
, Les Presses Sciences, 2006.

  
53
.
Christophe Cornevin, ‘Des troubles nés de l’exclusion, selon les RG’,
Le Figaro
, December 8, 2005.

  
54
.
Author interview with Olivier Roy, Paris, December 2005. Also Olivier Roy, ‘The Nature of the French Riots’, SSRC, November 18, 2005. Jean-Marc Sébé,
La Crise des banlieues
, PUF, 2007, p. 74.