When the Gloves come off, the Molotovs come out

"When the gloves come off, the Molotovs come out: that's the lesson we should have learned about policing minorities. "

Excellent article by Faisal Bodi below. Just think about how things have deteriorated in this country since 9-11: stop and search, police harassment, internment, control orders, severe police brutality, public execution, and now shooting people in their own homes. For those who argue that this is for all our safety, it is worth clarifying that no community is more terrorised and feel less safe in this country than the Muslim community. And would the same people be saying the same things if the shoe was on the other foot?

Terrorist - Until Proven Innocent

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/faisal_bodi/2006/06/terrorist_until_proven_innocen.html

The Forest Gate fiasco just gets worse for the Met. It now appears that the boys in blue omitted to check out their tip off. They also failed to announce their identity as policemen when they burst into the family home of Abul Koyair, and Mohammed Abdul Kahar, shot the latter in the chest, not the shoulder as earlier stated, beat him up as he lay wounded and in shock, told him to "shut the fuck up", and dragged out his elderly mother in handcuffs.

Just for good measure they put in a repeat performance with the family at next door. It's bad enough but when it happens in the shadow of the continuing IPCC inquiry over the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes (his olive skin made police mistake him for a Muslim), and lingering anger over the brutal arrest of Babar Ahmed, it does make your hackles rise and set you wondering whether terrorising the Muslim community is not an undeclared policy. With such an unenviable track record in the war on terror one might have expected to see the police exercising more caution and self-restraint, not to mention a degree of professional humility and decency.

Let's put this into perspective. Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Iraqi arm of the west's number one enemy, is put under surveillance for several weeks before US forces take the decision to dispatch him. In Forest Gate, a 23-year-old man with no history of crime is shot in his own home on the basis of a an informant's uncorroborated tip off.

British police have come to rely heavily on "man in the mosque" intelligence. They see it as an effective way of penetrating close-knit communities in the same way they used to rely on IRA informants.

In Preston, many young men in my community have received visits from MI5 officers on the strength of an informant's tip off that they have travelled to Afghanistan, or harbour extremist views. However, for all the tens of doors that have been knocked, to date not a single arrest has been made.

The problem with this type of intelligence is that it is often gleaned from petty criminals for whom police have found a better use, or from people trying to settle a score. As such it is notoriously unreliable.

But on this occasion, the monstrous intelligence bungle was again compounded by a disproportionate use of force. This is where things get really scary for for it suggests that when it comes to policing Muslims, it's shoot first and ask questions later.

Even then the Met could have limited the fallout by maintaining a professional silence over events until the smoke had lifted. Instead it went on a PR offensive that quickly turned into a humiliating own goal. We now know that Mohammed Abdul Kahar wasn't shot in the shoulder, as police initially stated in order to downplay the seriousness of the incident. He was blasted at close range in the chest, without any prior attempt to peacefully restrain him.

We also know that the cocksure posture they adopted in telling the world's press they had intelligence pointing to the presence of a chemical bomb was premature.

The fiasco doesn't appear to have shamed the media Islamophobes either. It was educational watching them as they set about suggesting that the brothers possible beliefs made them complicit in their own ordeal. Do they support suicide bombings? What were their views on jihad? Was it fair that they may receive more compensation than the 7/7 victims?

I hope the Prime Minister was watching today's proceedings. Having heard the other side of the story it might persuade him to drop his support for his namesake at the head of the Met. But I think that all this talk about sackings is a diversion. The problem goes beyond the Blairs. His real target should be the waves of anti-terrorism legislation that has been brought into force over the last six years. In criminalising large swathes of political activity they have turned fighters of injustice into terrorists and given police a free hand to administer the kind of "pre-emptive" strike that is far more characteristic of Tel Aviv than London.

That's an incendiary recipe. If our own history has taught us anything about policing minorities, it's that when the gloves come off, the Molotovs come out.