Monday 8 August, 8pm
Friday 12 August, 4.10am
To what degree did we bring the recent bombings – and possibility of further bombings in the future – on ourselves?
Why Bomb London examines the forces and influences that may have combined to make the recent bomb attacks on London more likely. The programme analyses whether a series of foreign policy decisions and domestic errors – social and political – made the transport bombings not so much a surprise as an inevitability.
Through investigating the divisions within the British Muslim community, reporter Deborah Davies asks whether the British government – or Britain's Muslim establishment – fully understand them. While prominent leaders are meeting with Tony Blair, younger Muslims are watching violent Islamist videos on the internet and listening to veteran Jihadists from Afghanistan and Iraq on recruiting drives. While their elders voice fears of a backlash after the London bombs, many youngsters are being drawn into a pattern of extremism which includes violence, expeditions to foreign wars and even, potentially, suicide.
The programme shows how, during the 1990s, the British government allowed known terrorists and extremists to settle in London and build up an underground network, despite the warnings from, and much to the alarm of, governments overseas.
One of Osama Bin Laden's lieutenants established an office in North London and was then implicated in the Al-Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Algerian Abu Doha – a close supporter of Bin Laden – also operated out of North London and was involved in terrorist plots against Los Angeles Airport and Strasbourg Cathedral on the eve of the millennium. By the end of the '90s, terrorists and extremists were allowed to live and function in London where they used British freedom of expression and civil rights tolerance to plan terror attacks abroad.
The programme tracks the clerics who inspired these hardened terrorists as they spread their extremist ideology through Britain. The siren voice of the Jordanian Abu Qatada – whose sermons inspired the suicide terrorists who hit the World Trade Centre on 9/11 – inspired a range of extremist voices and groups who sought to take over mosques throughout the UK, and create a taste for violence and for religious war amongst young British Muslims.
Inspired first by bloodthirsty tales of Islamic fighting and suffering in Chechnya and Bosnia, these same youngsters began to turn their anger directly towards Britain, their home, when British forces marched into Afghanistan and then, in 2003, into Iraq. These major and controversial foreign policy decisions suddenly put the UK onto the frontline of growing Islamist anger and frustration.