7/7 had nothing to do with foreign policy (it says here)
In an "Open letter to Tariq Ramadan" in the current issue of Prospect Magazine David Goodhardt rejects Professor Ramadan's recent Guardian article as a "grievance-seeking, responsibility-avoiding diatribe". According to Goodhardt, Muslims in Britain have never had it so good:
"Is there some discrimination, racism even? Yes, but there is far less than in the past and less than most other countries in the world.... The ideology of Islamophobia is a mixture of exaggeration (see Kenan Malik's work on this subject) and a sort of perverted utopianism that interprets the initial suspicion (and sometimes even hostility) towards strangers found in all cultures as proof of deep hatred of a particular religion."
The cover story by the appalling Shiv Malik is a study of 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan. In an accompanying editorial Goodhardt explains that "Malik's account decisively refutes the claim, often heard in the weeks after 7/7, that Khan had been a well-integrated British-Pakistani Muslim driven to angry despair by the war in Iraq".
Martin Sullivan