The alleged bomb plot uncovered by British police last week has revealed a sharp divergence of opinion between different groups of the British body politic, and some interesting polls have come out that show, over a year on from the attacks of 7/7, that little progress has been made in breaching the divide between communities.
Firstly, a Dispatches documentary entitled "What Muslims Want", interviewed around 1,000 Muslims to determine what their views on terrorism, politics and life in Britain were. Some of the results are frankly disturbing.
Almost half of young British Muslims aged 18-24 (45%) believe that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by the US and Israeli governments, and only around 20% reject such conspiracy theories totally. One in five also believes that the holocaust was a fabrication or has been exaggerated.
Eighty-one percent of British Muslims said they thought of themselves a Muslim first and a British citizen second; a higher percentage than almost any other Muslim country, only bested by Pakistan at 87%.
The survey also revealed a gap between the community's perception of the extent of Islamophobia in Britain, and the actual extent. More than half of those surveyed believed that hostility towards Muslims had increased since the tube bombing attacks last year, yet more than three-quarters of respondents had not been subject to any hostility, and the vast majority of those who had been were subjected to verbal rather than physical attack. In a similar vein, almost half thought that Muslims were disproportionately subject to police stop-and-search tactics – but less than three percent knew of anyone who had actually been stopped and searched.
On the other side of the political spectrum, British conservative magazine The Spectator released the results of a YouGov poll it conducted in response to the terror alert last week, seeking the views of the proverbial 'Johnny Englander'.
Almost 75% of respondents believe that Britain is fighting a global war with Islamic terrorists who threaten the country's way of life, while the vast majority reject assertions that the terrorist threat has been exaggerated for political purposes.
A majority of respondents, (55%) supported the introduction of passenger-profiling which would include taking a person's religious and ethnic background into account, a step that Metropolitan Police Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei claimed would make "travelling whilst Asian", a criminal offence.
Respondents were not receptive to the assertions of Muslim MPs and peers who sent a letter to Tony Blair urging him to change UK foreign policy or risk further radicalising Britain's Muslim youth. Only 12% felt the UK foreign policy should become more conciliatory, while 53% felt it should become more aggressive.
What are we to make of these numbers? The most obvious conclusion is that the political aspirations of Britain's Muslim community and wider society differ to the point where they are in danger of becoming irreconcilable. It appears also that as attack follows attack, follows crisis after crisis, that the view of each community becomes more entrenched, and less open to compromise and dialogue.
It also seems reasonable to conclude that both the government's initiave to engage with the Muslim community, and the community's efforts to tackle extremism are failing.
However much these surveys represent the political reality in Britain today, one thing is clear: that community relations between the Muslim community and the wider society are at a pretty low ebb and that improving them, by any means necessary, is in the interests of all.
