STRUAN STEVENSON: REPRISALS ARE NOT THE ANSWER TO TERROR

http://www.iranfreedom.org/en/opinion/1451-struan-stevenson-reprisals-are-not-the-answer-to-terror

The Finsbury Park mosque attack in London is the latest horrific outrage to stun public opinion.

 So many innocent lives have been taken in recent terrorist attacks that many people in the UK are now clamoring for an appropriate response.

 The tit-for-tat nature of these events plays perfectly into the hands of the terrorists, whose aim is to set one section of society against another.

 We must not allow this to happen. It is too easy to get caught up in debates about the proportional value of solutions that involve an increased security presence and those that call for deeper engagement with, for example,

Muslim communities, to identify and root out extremist voices within. But following the Finsbury Park atrocity, should we also be calling for deeper engagement and surveillance within primarily white, British communities to root out extremists?

Following the Manchester and London Bridge atrocities there was an inevitable reaction from certain factions of the public and even some factions of the political establishment that immediately attempted to lay the blame at the feet of our British Muslim communities.

This is a common knee-jerk reaction, which is not only logically unsound it is also terribly impractical, because the demonization and alienation of moderate Muslims from British society is just the outcome that the terrorists would like.