Blair takes on Islamic extremism

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who yesterday called for an international conference on Islamic extremism, is proving far more willing than President Bush to demand that Muslim leaders confront their own failings in the global war on terror.

In the two weeks since coordinated suicide bombings killed at least 56 persons on London’s subways and a bus, Mr. Blair has repeatedly said the Islamic community and scholars face a special responsibility to curb the “evil ideology” behind the attacks.

Britain’s Muslims must “confront this evil ideology, take it on and defeat it by the force of reason and argument,” Mr. Blair told reporters in London on Monday.

British officials said details of the proposed conference remain sketchy, but Mr. Blair told the House of Commons yesterday that it would address head-on the sources of Islamist violence, such as Muslim religious schools in Pakistan and other countries that have a violently anti-Western bias.

The British prime minister noted that more than two dozen countries have been attacked by al Qaeda and its affiliates, and Britain cannot defeat the threat alone.

“Though the terrorists will use all sorts of issues to justify what they do, the roots of it do go deep, they are often not found in this country alone, [and] therefore international action is also necessary,” he said.

Mr. Blair’s response contrasts with the language used by Mr. Bush after the September 11 attacks, also engineered by al Qaeda and its sympathizers.

Despite leading military coalitions to oust regimes in overwhelmingly Muslim Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Bush repeatedly insists that his global war on terror is not a war on Islam.

“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace,” he said in a visit to Washington’s Islamic Center just five days after the 2001 attacks.

The State Department this week took the unusual step of publicly repudiating the comments of Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, when he suggested that the United States consider bombing Mecca and other Muslim holy sites in the event of an Islamist nuclear attack.

Such comments are “insulting and offensive to all of us,” said State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.

Mr. Blair and his top ministers have reached out to British Muslim leaders since the July 7 bombings and have stressed that the vast majority of the country’s 1.6 million Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding.

But London police Commissioner Ian Blair also said this week that Britain’s Muslim leaders had been in “denial” about the extent of extremism in their midst.

“The crucial issue now is: ’Can we engage with the [Muslim] community in Britain so that they move from being fairly close to denial about this into a situation in which they really engage us?’” he said.

The Guardian newspaper reported yesterday that British officials are setting up “Muslim Contact Units” to gather intelligence on extremist activity in a number of regions.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke told lawmakers that the government planned to create a global database of extremists and would push for more powers to prosecute and deport those who offer even an “indirect incitement to terrorism” — measures clearly aimed at Islamist propaganda and hate speech.

Nile Gardiner, an analyst on British politics at the Heritage Foundation, said Mr. Blair, far more than Mr. Bush, “is taking a head-on approach and not skirting the central issue, which is Islamic terrorism.”

He said the differing approaches of the two reflect in part the fact that the September 11 attackers all came from abroad, while the four bombers who carried out the London attacks were second- and even third-generation British citizens.

Mr. Blair has also earned a measure of respect and diplomatic leeway in the Arab and Muslim world by pressing Mr. Bush repeatedly for progress on the Palestinian-Israeli settlement even as the war in Iraq continues.

Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the District-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the group welcomed Mr. Blair’s idea for an international gathering on Islamic extremism.

He said leading Muslim groups around the world have condemned the London bombings, including in a statement to be released today by leading Canadian imams condemning religious-inspired terrorism.

“It clearly shows that we are all fed up with any violence that claims to be motivated by religious belief,” Mr. Hooper said.