Scholar waylaid by British police for reading article about terrorism

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Iqbal Sacranie, the British Muslim leader who had lobbied last winter for a law that would make it a crime for anyone even to speak of the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism, and who was then knighted. In reply to that piece, Raphael Israeli, the Moroccan-born Israeli author of Islamikaze, sent me a copy of the below letter to Prime Minister Blair about an infuriating experience Professor Israeli had in Britain this past summer. In the Orwellian world of today’s Britain, allies and defenders of terrorists are knighted, while opponents of terrorism are taken off trains for reading articles about terrorism.

Prime Minister Tony Blair
London 14 September, 2005

Dear Mr. Prime Minister:

In pursuance of my previous letter to you after the London bombings, to which I have received a response from your office on 28 July, I wish to transmit to you the following, in the hope that someone of authority in your entourage will have the time to deal with it, in view of its gravity.

I was invited to participate in a seminar in Suffolk that took place on 25-30 of August. On my way out from London to Paris on the Euro-Star at the Waterloo Station on Tuesday the 30th, and after I sat with my wife in the train in the wake of long hours of waiting, I was apprehended by the British Security authorities and asked to leave my seat and accompany them out of the train. Apart from the trauma that the humiliating arrest in the middle of all the appalled looks of the passengers who must have viewed me as a fugitive criminal, I was made to miss the train to Paris with the tight schedule that was appended to it. All that was based on the suspicion by those security officers that since I left some computer print-outs that dealt with terrorism behind me in the cafeteria ( there are no waste baskets in the station for security reasons), I must have had something to do with terrorism.

Now, that is a bit a too much. I am a partisan of a strong hand in the fight against terrorism. Any suspect should be arrested if he did anything suspicious. But to arrest a person merely for what he reads, especially as this happens to be my specific field of expertise in academia? In that case, all the thousands academics, politicians, journalists, diplomats and students, who view that stuff every day, ought to be held as permanently liable for arrest. I told that much to the officers who arrested me, even suggesting that only in Stalinist Russia that was an accepted practice, but to no avail.

The fact that after various verifications and recourse to the Internet the over-zealous officers realized their error and hastened to apologize, leaves open serious questions:

a. Can arrest of innocent and respectable citizens be left to the whims of officers whose judgment is obviously flawed?

b. Must the arresting officers suggest to their foreign victims that they “did not have to come to England if they did not like the procedures”? And how about the fact that I was invited to lecture there and did not go there out of my own volition?

c. Must free people be circumspect about what they read in public, in the heart of free London at the heart of the free world?

d. The officers apologized all right, but who will compensate me for the hours I wasted, for the humiliation and trauma I underwent in the company of my wife and for the losses I have had to endure? I was supposed to arrive in Paris at 5:00 PM, to make my way to a town outside Paris where I was to address a large audience (ironically on terrorism) and be put up there for the night. So, not only did I have to annul the schedule, with all the attending damage to my reputation (regardless of the explanations and excuses I produced), but I also lost the Eur. 500 remuneration I was to receive, I had to provide the Eur. 90 for the hotel I took on my own, and I unnecessarily took that trip to Paris instead of going on with my program straight from London.

All my protestations were in vain, because the officer obviously did what he was told to do, though he could be a bit kinder. He also refused to give his name, but I am sure that with the time table I submitted above and with his identity number that he yielded to me (196037) he can be easily located.

I hope to hear from someone soon.

With my deepest respect, I Remain

Truly Yours
Professor Raphael Israeli
History of Islam and China
Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 16, 2005 12:18 PM | Send