TUESDAY OCTOBER 30 2001 US faces attack 'within a week' FROM ROLAND WATSON IN WASHINGTON AMERICA was braced for another terrorist outrage in the next week after the FBI said that it had received a credible threat of an imminent attack. John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, said that he could not be clear about the target or the method of attack, or whether it would be launched against the US mainland or its interests abroad. But he sent out a warning to the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies to heighten their vigilance. Mr Ashcroft said specifically that the threat had been levelled “in the next week”. In a first indication of increased tension, an American Airlines Boeing 757 en route from New York to Dallas was diverted to Dulles International Airport in the early hours of today because of a threat. All the passengers were taken off the aircraft safely. The FBI issued a similar security warning a month ago, placing the country on its highest state of alert, which has remained. Rober Mueller, head of the FBI, said that the warning may have foiled an attack. Mr Ashcroft and Mr Mueller, making a joint appearance at the US Justice Department, said they appreciated how frustrating such incomplete information was, but they had decided to go public to encourage people to report any activity they regarded as suspicious. The warning came hours after President Bush warned the country to maintain its guard against terrorist attacks. Mr Bush said: “We believe that the country must stay on alert, that our enemies still hate us. Our enemies have no values that regard life as precious. They’re active. And therefore we’re constantly in touch with our law enforcement officials to be prepared.” The White House has often struggled to negotiate clearly the dividing line between its warnings of the need for vigilance and its urgings for people to get on with their lives. Mr Bush tried a new tack yesterday, casting the American public as being in the front line of the home front in the war against terrorism. “The American people must go about their lives and I recognise it’s a fine balance,” Mr Bush said, “but the American people also understand that the object of any terrorist activity is to cause Americans to abandon their lifestyles. And every American is a soldier, and every citizen is in this fight.” The FBI’s last public warning followed a broacast by al-Qaeda threatening the US mainland and all American interests around the globe. Like many of its pronouncements during recent weeks, last night’s warning prompted more questions than it answered. Government officials said that they had concluded the warning was “most likely” linked to the al-Qaeda network, masterminded by Osama bin Laden, America’s No 1 suspect for the September 11 hijackings, but Mr Ashcroft did not go so far in public. The FBI’s initial warning of more possible terrorist attacks came before the first anthrax case was revealed, but Mr Mueller played down a connection. Asked if the warnings were related to anthrax, he said that he had “no reason to believe at this point in time” that they were. The first warning was issued via the FBI website and last night’s hastily arranged appearance by America’s foremost justice officials to deliver the bulletin was an indication of the urgency attached to it. SOURCE:THE TIMES OF LONDON. THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF LONDON: The media should keep asking questions until it gets some straight answers. 30 October 2001 Governments and the media have an unfortunate but time-honoured tendency to blame each other when things are perceived to be going wrong. Now that the American-led "war on terrorism" seems to be running into the sand, our first instincts in the media corner are to question the intentions and competence of our political leaders . Ministers, meanwhile, are quick to blame journalists for their political discomfort. Twice in as many days, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has taken the media to task for impatience. And Mr Straw is by no means alone in feeling that the media – especially television – has sacrificed authority and accuracy on the altar of round-the-clock news. The proliferation of statements, press conferences and interviews, not just on the airwaves but in the columns of daily newspapers, all contribute to a barrage of noise that may indeed distort parts of the picture. Nor may Mr Straw and his fellow politicians be entirely wrong when they accuse the media – as he did at the weekend – of a lack of "humility and memory". But too much humility, and the media would have no opinions to offer; too much memory, and we would no longer be reporters of news as it happens, but chroniclers, with unrealisable ambitions of producing something far more than the first, impressionistic draft of history. Ministers may be disappointed and frustrated with the impatience they observe in the media. But they must also understand where at least some of the impatience originates. Comparisons are being drawn, on the government side, between media dissatisfaction with the slow progress of the campaign against terrorism, and very similar complaints voiced about the sluggishness of the early stages of the Kosovo war. As we witnessed then, there is nothing like victory to erase such complaints. Something similar may happen in Afghanistan too: the sudden collapse of the Taliban or the capture of Osama bin Laden still cannot be ruled out. Nor should we forget how close the United States' forces came to striking the Taliban a vital blow in the very first days of bombing. A chief aide and the young son of the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omah, were both killed in US attacks, while the Mullah owed his escape to political indecision in Washington. But that failure cost the Allies dear. After three weeks of bombing, the coalition seems no nearer to either of its objectives – capturing Osama bin Laden or toppling the Taliban – and it is hard to see what more is envisaged than continued strikes on a country and a people that had little enough to destroy at the start. It is true that officials on both sides of the Atlantic insisted from the outset that the campaign would be long and hard, although the estimates have grown from mere months to years; it may even take as long as the Cold War. And we in the media may be too impatient for drama. But it is also true that both Americans and Britons have enough experience of official versions of military conflict to discount much of what officials say. How many times was the airport at Port Stanley rendered unusable? How often was the US about to dispatch its Apache helicopters to Kosovo? When the commander of the Marines says that his troops are "not ready", is this disinformation or evidence of transatlantic discord? There will always be friction between governments and the media at times of military conflict: the imperatives of the two are too different to make for cosiness – and thank goodness for that. But in this campaign the messages from officials have been especially blurred and contradictory. This has raised justified questions about the precise means and objectives of the campaign. Asking such questions is our job – and we will continue to ask, until we are given answers. Backyard terrorism The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years - and it's still at it George Monbiot Tuesday October 30, 2001 The Guardian "If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents," George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention. For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government. Until January this year, Whisc was called the "School of the Americas", or SOA. Since 1946, SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch show, Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni. In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by Guatemala's D-2, the military intelligence agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the "anti-insurgency" campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores studied at the School of the Americas. In 1993, the United Nations truth commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976. Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's Guillermo Rodriguez all benefited from the school's instruction. So did the leader of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which controlled the death squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico. All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department's report on human rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner, Alex Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven former pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year an SOA graduate in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its students from Colombia than from any other country. The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts... intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government", which is a precise description of the activities of SOA's graduates. But how can we be sure that their alma mater has had any part in this? Well, in 1996, the US government was forced to release seven of the school's training manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives. Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it and then immediately reopen it under a different name. So, just as Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself Whisc. As the school's Colonel Mark Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the vote in Congress: "Some of your bosses have told us that they can't support anything with the name 'School of the Americas' on it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It changes the name." Paul Coverdell, the Georgia senator who had fought to save the school, told the papers that the changes were "basically cosmetic". But visit Whisc's website and you'll see that the School of the Americas has been all but excised from the record. Even the page marked "History" fails to mention it. Whisc's courses, it tells us, "cover a broad spectrum of relevant areas, such as operational planning for peace operations; disaster relief; civil-military operations; tactical planning and execution of counter drug operations". Several pages describe its human rights initiatives. But, though they account for almost the entire training programme, combat and commando techniques, counter-insurgency and interrogation aren't mentioned. Nor is the fact that Whisc's "peace" and "human rights" options were also offered by SOA in the hope of appeasing Congress and preserving its budget: but hardly any of the students chose to take them. We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform itself: after all, it refuses even to acknowledge that it has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, given that the evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking the al-Qaida training camps to the attack on New York, what should we do about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning, Georgia? Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic pressure, and to seek the extradition of the school's commanders for trial on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that our governments attack the United States, bombing its military installations, cities and airports in the hope of overthrowing its unelected government and replacing it with a new administration overseen by the UN. In case this proposal proves unpopular with the American people, we could win their hearts and minds by dropping naan bread and dried curry in plastic bags stamped with the Afghan flag. You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I agree. But try as I might, I cannot see the moral difference between this course of action and the war now being waged in Afghanistan The prime minister's real test will come if he has to break ranks with Bush Hugo Young Tuesday October 30, 2001 The Guardian Tony Blair will today ask the nation to stiffen its moral fibre in the war against terrorism. He should not need to do this. War was started by the other side seven weeks ago. It has been fought by our side for three weeks. If we're facing a three or four-year effort, three weeks seems a little early to be doubting the nation's moral commitment. If the span is to be more like 50, as the chief of the defence staff idly suggested on Friday, then today's oration to the Welsh Assembly can only be seen as a gnat's bite on the hide of an elephant. But there's a reason why it has to be attempted, which tells one quite a lot about the mismatch between the two closest allies in the anti-terrorist coalition. In the US, there's no particle of doubt about moral fibre. America was hit. There can barely be a sentient American in the furthest reaches of Idaho who does not feel the inextinguishable consequences in his or her gut. The American reaction may be primitive. It's unlikely to please fastidious Europeans. But it will never be smoothed away. Time will not heal it. The memory will remain the more enduring because such a thing has not happened before. The assault on the nation's free and rich existence simply has to be avenged. Though that word is never used, it's the one that comes closest to fitting the sentiment that has banished all doubt from the American mind. So there's little criticism in America, either of the campaign or, more strikingly, of the way it's being conducted. Despite the manifest futility of continuing to bomb Afghanistan, the president receives the benefit of the doubt from all kinds of normally cavilling newspapers and columnists. There's some reporting, in the up-market press, of bits of the campaign that have gone wrong, especially the domestic part of it, the bungled response to anthrax. Otherwise, doubts about the detailed choices the Pentagon is making every day get buried deep inside the unsullied emotional commitment of a nation that can name, even if it cannot find, its mortal enemy. The moral view, in other words, unites a nation without even needing to be spelled out. The appeal that Mr Blair will today make to Britain - that she knows the difference between right and wrong and will always be guided by that - applies in this case a lot more clearly to the US. Senator John McCain, whose piece we print today, gives voice to this. He calls for an unyielding militaristic response, regardless of allied disagreement or any other conventional ideas. Most Americans will regard this as justified. To get near their mind-set, one might best consider how the British would feel if terror planes had been crashed into Canary Wharf and Big Ben. But they weren't. That's coming to be the point. This omission weakens the war's hold on the British gut. Most people here may regard the campaign as being in pursuit of a cause that is not only just but necessary to life, limb and human happiness. They want terrorism to be dealt with. But they haven't been in the line of fire. As time passes, the cause, however right, becomes a little more academic than it will ever be to Americans. This is beginning to generate a certain detachment, which coexists with the strategic pacifism that has existed in some quarters from the start. Our ICM poll today shows support for military action softening. There's a coolness among the people here that you will seldom find in New York or California. The government, however, is not cool. It is not able to be cool. The crisis has pushed Mr Blair to make the most passionate speeches of his life. Being so much further out front than other European leaders has given him, ministers claim, influence over President Bush. In the future, they say, Bush could never afford to lose him and will therefore continue to hold back from what the Brits don't like. I'm quite certain Blair has sensible opinions, especially about the folly of continued bombing. But the enormity of what happened to America comes into play here too. It drowns the British voice, just as it engulfs US self-criticism. The attack bulks much larger than anything we could say, and will appear more so the longer it is not redressed. This gap in national perceptions - the unequal feelings of the peoples - is the one Mr Blair will try and bridge. It's why he's already playing the Churchill card, even as the British sense of alarm is waning not rising. And some developments should assist in focusing the issue. In particular, if the bombing is replaced by more controlled if perilous land operations against the Taliban, domestic critics will have to decide where they stand. Are they just against the killing of civilians by ruthless and clumsy bombardment, as they mostly claim? Or against the entire effort to neutralise al-Qaida and do anything to terrorists anywhere except send in UN therapists with bags of gold? Absent the bombing, all targets gone, we'll get a better measure of the conscientious objectors. Another aid to the prime minister's commitment is the state of the political class. Leading the Conservative opposition is a man more completely in fealty to Washington than he is. There'll be no trouble from across the House if Mr Blair finds himself sunk ever deeper in George Bush's war. Quite the opposite. But the political class aren't everything. The people, not just the politicians, are being asked to get ready for the long haul, and this is where Blair's support for Bush, whatever Bush feels determined to do, can be far from guaranteed, as the weeks move into months, and the months to years. At some stage - possibly sooner rather than later - moral fibre will not be the issue, and popular judgment about the national interest will take over. The British war cabinet line is as follows. They see military action confined to Afghanistan, and worry about how it will succeed. That's why we get these casual, bewildering discrepancies about how long the campaign will last. The war part, conceivably, could take a year or three: staggering thought, both economically and strategically. The 50-year campaign, by contrast, is meant to be a description of the political, economic and diplomatic alliance to be forged against terrorists and their harbourers: extraordinary prophecy, but one the British might be led to understand. The American perspective is potentially quite different, answering America's unique experience last month. It looks to the military option, if necessary spread wide. As is well known, there are important men in Washington who thirst to extend this thing to Iraq, and whom history has taught no humility as to the chances of it succeeding let alone the chances of it getting wholly out of control. Mr Blair's undeviating allegiance to Washington so far is justified by the global importance of smashing al-Qaida and Bin Laden. It should also strengthen his hand in trying to stop the US extending the purely military campaign, and asserting his place, along with Secretary of State Powell, as a man of realism. "Blair is one of the few grown-ups at the table," a well-placed Washington observer told me yesterday. But it's not hard to see a time when the moral fibre in question will be his own, provable by his willingness to make a break. Comparing opponents of this war to appeasers is crassly ignorant Paul Foot Tuesday October 30, 2001 The Guardian The first I heard of Adam Ingram was when I spotted his name on a blacklist leaked to me at the Daily Mirror in 1987. The list, compiled by the Economic League, long since defunct, named "subversives" who might cause trouble if employed. I was dismayed that my own name was not on the list and that Adam Ingram's was. He was a newly-elected MP and seemed to have spent most of his early political life in the not entirely subversive environment of the East Kilbride Labour party. I protested vigorously in the Mirror about this smear. Now, however, Mr Ingram is minister for the armed forces, and likens those of us who oppose the war in Afghanistan to appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s. This theme was taken up by the government's chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, in her historic interview with Labour MP Paul Marsden. Last week the question - can opponents of the current war be compared to appeasers of Hitler? - was asked on the BBC's Question Time, but none of the five panellists answered it. So here are one or two features about the situation in Afghanistan that seem to distinguish it from the situation in Europe in the late 1930s, and appear to have eluded Adam Ingram and Hilary Armstrong. By 1939, the population of Germany had grown to 86m. The chief reason for its rapid growth was the annexation of the Rhineland (1936), Austria (1938), Czechoslovakia (1938) and Poland (1939). Afghanistan by contrast has a population (at most) of 25m, at least a third of whom are starving. The population figures are going down all the time because hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing the country. As far as I can discover, the number of countries invaded or even threatened by Afghanistan is nil. In 1939, Hitler and his colleagues had built the most powerful military machine in the world on the back of one of the three largest economies in the world. The German army had 100 divisions. In reserve, Hitler's special forces, the SA and SS, had 1.5m members. The German Luftwaffe, only a few planes in 1933, could take on any other air force in the world. By contrast the Afghan armed forces rely almost entirely on third-rate weapons and museum-piece planes stolen years ago from the Russians or donated by the Americans. While Hitler's forces aimed at annexation and attack, the Afghan armed forces are absorbed in defence against opponents in a civil war. While Hitler's armies, backed by the entire state machine of Germany, constituted a constant threat to all neighbouring states, the Afghan army does not threaten any other state. Indeed, the threat from Afghanistan does not come from the state at all, but from terrorists sheltered by the state. In these circumstances, any comparison between appeasement of Hitler in 1939 and opposition to the war in Afghanistan is crass to the point of imbecility. Pulverising an already pulverised country does not harm the terrorists harboured there - it builds support for them in other impoverished countries. It does not preserve the frightful images of September 11 - it obscures them in daily military blunders in Afghanistan. · The proposals of the trade secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to allow shareholders to vote on the amount of cream dished out to fat cat directors won't apply to this morning's annual meeting of shareholders of the big drinks combine Diageo. Paul Walsh, the company's chief executive, sees his basic remuneration package (salary, bonus, pension, chauffeurs, free health etc) rise by 16% to £1.7m. But wait. What is this unobtrusive little item tucked in under the main remuneration news? "In addition to the above emoluments, the directors received payments and made gains under longer-term incentive arrangements." These mystery gains cost the company £6.7m, compared to £2.4m last year, an increase of 277%. Paul Walsh was in the money once more. He got £2.1m (only £370,00 the previous year). All in all, Mr Walsh got a fantastic £3.9m. Most of these mighty increases were ascribed to something called TSR and something else called Sepsos, variations on the old Tory theme of share options, handed out by directors to themselves, bought cheap and sold dear. How did the 71,000 Diageo workers do in the same period? Wages and salaries were slightly up - 1.8% - but their "aggregate remuneration" fell, from £1,612m last year to £1,605m. None of Patricia Hewitt's proposals would have made the slightest difference to any of this. Shareholders are not inclined to vote against their bosses. But if it wanted to, the government could easily slim down the fat cats. A 100% income tax on annual income of more than £500,000 would be a start, and might even build a few hospitals into the bargain. Britain's hidden history Reclaiming little-known stories of 500 years of black presence in this country is an education for all of us Lola Young Tuesday October 30, 2001 The Guardian In the early 1980s, a friend and I visited a school in north London as "role models" for black children and to deliver a message: "You have a history, not just in Africa or the Caribbean but here in Britain. It is a history that goes back to Roman times, and there are individuals about whom you should know more." We talked about Mary Seacole, the Jamaican "doctress" who offered to help Florence Nightingale tend the sick and wounded at Sebastopol during the Crimean war: a woman who, after being rejected by Nightingale, used her own resources to set up a hospital at the front, and whose funeral in London in 1881 was a major public event. After the talk, we became aware of incredulous looks from the kids. One eventually spoke: "You made this up to make us feel better, didn't you? If it was true, why haven't our teachers told us about it? There's not been anything on TV about this woman. I don't believe you!" Though hardly a household name, Seacole's achievements have now been acknowledged through television, radio and literary biographies, and commemorated with a blue plaque on one of the places in London where she lived. But what about the other black people - writers, actors, political activists, artists, doctors, inventors and artisans - who have made their mark on the cultural and political life of Britain since at least the 16th century? Shortly after that encounter with the sceptical schoolboy, I came across the story of Sarah Baartman, a South African woman abducted from her home in 1810 and brought to London, Manchester and Paris. She was put on display, semi-naked, in freak shows and examined by scientists of the day. After her death in Paris at the age of 25, she was dissected and her genitalia and other body parts put on display in the Musee de l'Homme in Paris. She gained notoriety during the l9th century as a representative of all that was different and deviant from the norm, in sexual and racial terms. I was intrigued by the way in which her physical shape (she had what were considered to be grossly extended buttocks) was used by 19th-century scientists to demonstrate the inferiority of the African "race". But there was something else that got to me. During the five years when she was displayed around Europe, she was written about, drawn in cartoons, became the subject of a play, was referred to in a court case and the House of Commons - and yet hardly anyone today knows about her significance in 19th-century abolitionist struggles or in the development of "scientific" racism. Many people still grow up believing black people first arrived in Britain in the 1950s - and they are not even quite sure how and why they came here even then. Doubtless there are millions for whom the significance of October in the calendar of black British life is a mystery. But in case you thought that the notion of black history is one confined to the US or black nationalist militants, October is black history month - and after two decades it is really taking off, with a huge amount of activity around the country. The exclusion from our educational system of black contributions to the mainstream of British history encourages white people to think of us as being without a history or heritage. At the same time, it is also a source of alienation and disaffection among young black people in particular, but also for the post-Windrush generation in general. Sadly, much historical evidence of black peoples' presence in Britain over the last 500 years or so has been lost. The imperative now is to collect, document, preserve and display what remains. By bringing such evidence to the attention of black people hungry for more knowledge of their past, and to white people who may think they already know about theirs, black history month can make an important contribution to the understanding of how and why history gets made in the forms it does. Of course, on its own, a more complete knowledge of these many hidden histories cannot cure racism or ignorance. But it can help make people think before taking on a misty-eyed view of Britain as an all-white nation since time began. Some aspects of our histories are painful: slavery and colonialism are obvious examples. But we cannot expect to move forward and develop more effective ways of engaging with "cultural diversity" without acknowledging the past and recognising the tensions and contradictions that are a part of historical events and processes. For me, black history month is not about saying that there are two - or more - histories defined by racial or cultural identity. After all, we are talking about all our histories, not just those of black peoples. It's a strategy to raise awareness, and disseminate information about the rich texture of British history. It's a necessary adjunct to research that reveals the evidence for interconnectedness of historical narratives and recognises the extent to which we are all in the business of making history. · Lola Young is project director at the Archives and Museum of Black Heritage and professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University. TUESDAY OCTOBER 30 2001 Rage of Luton Muslims THERE is a terrible, visceral rage among Luton’s young Muslim brotherhood, a fury so powerful that already dozens of men, all British born and highly educated, have disappeared to fight for the Taleban. It has left parents terrified, the town’s mosques full of loathing and yesterday, as The Times discovered first-hand, seen journalists and photographers physically attacked. Afzal Munir, 25, a newly married business graduate and one of two men from the Bedfordshire town killed in a US rocket attack on Kabul, worshipped at a one-room radical mosque situated in the Call To Islam Bookshop, above an insurance shop in the Dunstable Road. Within a minute of arriving outside the mosque, this Times reporter and cameraman were set upon by a Muslim man, who had rushed, enraged, from a halal butcher shop. “You insult Islam, you corrupt Islam!” he screamed, smashing the camera to the ground and grabbing another photographer by the throat. “You don’t understand how angry we Muslims are!” Five other Muslim men joined him, surrounding us, as he demanded the other camera. Their sense of fury was frightening. Five hundred yards away, outside Luton’s Central Mosque, the third largest in the country, Mohammed Abdullah, a 22-year-old accountant, articulated this rage. His words should serve as a warning to Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, who yesterday said British men joining the Taleban would either die in Afghanistan or face prosecution if they returned here. “They want to die there,” Mr Abdullah said. “These are well-educated people. They have families. I knew Afzal. He loved his wife. But you must understand: all Muslims in Britain view supporting the jihad (holy war) as a religious duty. All of us are ready to sacrifice our lives for our beliefs.I am jealous of Afzal. He has reached paradise.” He continued: “There are people leaving all the time. Not just in Luton, but all over Britain. We, as Muslims, don’t perceive ourselves as British Muslims. We are Muslims who live in Britain. All we want to do is go to Afghanistan to defend the honour and sanctity of Islam. I have a wife who is eight months pregnant. But I am thinking of going and helping my Muslim brothers. I read that we are brainwashed. That is nonsense. We are intelligent people and we hate America and the British Government for the bombing.” Behind such talk, which dismays the elderly leaders of Luton’s 22,000 Muslims, lurk the seductive, articulate disciples of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, leader of al-Muhajiroun, the British Islamist organisation that encouraged Mr Munir and Aftab Manzoor, the other dead man, to join the jihad. Sheikh Omar, who is under investigation for allegedly issuing a fatwa against the Pakistan President, General Musharraf, described the two men as “martyrs beyond a doubt”. Shahed, the group’s Luton leader, admits that he urged the pair to join Osama bin Laden’s jihad — but not “physically” — by donating money. “But if we write about issues, about what is happening to our brothers in Palestine, it can excite people. If I see Tony Blair on TV, and listen to his hypocrisy over Palestine, I want to grab his throat.” The group has been causing problems in Luton since 1994, when Sheikh Omar and his followers tried to take over control of the Central Mosque. It, and other extremist organisations, now recruit outside the town’s 50-odd mosques. Targeting the young, they repeat, again and again, that all obedient Muslims must support bin Laden and his holy war. They are banned from the Central Mosque and the university campus, but Mr Munir attended their Friday meetings. He went to school and college locally, loved cricket and football, and three weeks ago disappeared without telling his wife where he was going. “He was a quiet, extremely religious boy,” Mohammed Sulaimen, president of the Central Mosque, said. “All parents are worried. Many have gone to join the Taleban, perhaps dozens. Afzal, he took his passport, some money, and he goes. This group, it keeps taking people, brainwashing them. They give them these pamphlets. It makes them angry. But what can we do? We can’t stop them going.” Syed, a community worker, has visited Muslim communities across the country. “They are disappearing all over Britain. They say they are going down to the shops, and never return,” he said. Shahed and supporters set up a stall in central Luton yesterday, chanting anti-American slogans and carrying banners. “The Devil is America, and the British Government,” said Abdullah Khan, 23. “It is Bush and Blair I blame for Muslims going to fight. They are being provoked to do it by those two Great Satans.” SOURCE:THE TIMES OF LONDON 30/10/01 With the very best of good wishes, Musa Amadu Pembo Glasgow, Scotland UK. [log in to unmask] May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,guide us all to His Sirat Al-Mustaqim (Righteous Path).May He protect us from the evils of this life and the hereafter.May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,grant us entrance to paradise .. 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