Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: We must unite to face the next attack

British Muslims are again being made to feel they are not entitled to the same rights given to others

Don't blow it, not now, I want to say to the police, intelligence services, the media and politicians. The swell of Muslim support they managed to marshal in the aftermath of the first bomb attack on London is receding since the second wave of attacks, because the people charged with keeping us safe within the rule of law are themselves succumbing to hysteria, unlawful acts, scapegoating and double talk.

On 7 July, howls of shared pain and disbelief arose in London bonding Britons of all hues. Muslims and non-Muslims were united, revolted and determined to beat the bastards. Perhaps that is why the second, hastily arranged series of attacks was executed. These Islamicist nihilists probably never understood what London means to Muslims the world over. However, leading up to and since the second violation, the mood among Muslims is altering. The killing of an innocent man - a poor law-abiding Brazilian electrician mistaken for a Muslim terrorist - has made us Muslim parents intensely fearful, much more than the bombs. In this situation the targets are selected within set physical profiles (Arab and Asian), and the shots came from a police officer, a professional who should, in these chaotic times, have had better information than he did.

My son - tall, dark, uppity - walks and takes the tubes and buses because he can't drive. What if plainclothes officers go for him and he resists? I have been talking to my Asian friends and we share the same anxieties. All of us understand and do accept (though it is incredibly hard) that our boys will be stopped more and questioned and sometimes treated harshly because of the identity of the bombers. But we don't accept that our men must now expect to be shot too, just because policemen suspect them of no good.

How wide is this shoot-to-kill strategy? Are some officers themselves maddened by the sight of men who look as if they may be Muslim? Do they have buried prejudices which have risen since the bomb attacks? Can we trust them to do the right thing? Can they trust themselves? Years ago in Stoke Newington police station, where an alarming number of black men were being beaten up in custody, I got some of the officers to admit that black men terrified them and the fear led them to over-react. It is highly likely the same syndrome is appearing today with Asian terror suspects.

Muslims are also getting alarmed at the surging press demonisation of all Muslim thinkers, writers, theologians and professionals. In the past few days high-pitched British commentators have assailed the Swiss Muslim philosopher Tariq Ramadan whom they want to keep out of the UK. Yet he has boldly called for a moratorium on Sharia punishments in Muslim states and for the Ummah to return to true compassion and humane justice: "Muslim societies need more education, not more punishment. Muslims know how to do something but not why you do it so we have a ritualistic and formulaic adoption of Islam devoid of deeper meanings." (You can imagine the response from the mullahs.)

We let firebrand right-wing Americans into our land of free expression, and rabbis with strongly flavoured views and Hindu fundamentalist politicians, but we can't admit an intellectual and thoughtful Muslim? Is that fair or sensible? As it happens I think Ramadan is not modernist enough, but I would like to listen to his views, and young Muslims would too. Then there was that appalling way in which the entire media swooped on the British Egyptian biochemist who was presumed to be a key player in the first bomb plot. His face was on all the front pages and broadcast over and over again on the news channels before any evidence had been gathered. He was in Cairo at the time where he was interrogated, presumably in ways which would make our stomachs heave. Now it appears he may be innocent.

British Muslims feel too that the present delicate situation is being exploited by the pro-Israeli lobby. Interviewers regularly push Muslim spokespeople into an admittance that Palestinian suicide bombs are an exact equivalent of the London blasts. The suffering is the same but the two situations cannot be compared. Israel wants to cleanse itself of any culpability. To kill innocent Jewish people in clubs and at bus stops is indeed horrific but so is the shooting of young Palestinian boys and other citizens by Israeli soldiers.

Haggai Matar, an Israeli activist, writing in a new book Refusenik! (published by Zed Books), understands: "Today militarisation and racism among the Jewish population have reached a fascist level. The repression of critical thinking, the total acceptance of the occupation's crimes, the idolisation of the army and the gradual acceptance of 'ethnic cleansing' - all of these constitute only a part of our society's collapse."

There is a deletion of history too among the ultra-Zionists who today demand Muslim compliance with their versions of the truth. After 1946, the Irgun movement led by Menachem Begin and other Jewish terrorists, were as merciless as the Palestinian terrorists today. Both were and are fighting for the same cause, a homeland. The Irgun attacked King David Hotel leaving 91 dead; an Arab village was razed - 254 dead. Tax offices, immigration offices, British administration buildings were bombed. British officials and soldiers were kidnapped, sometimes strung up.

Finally, Muslims of all classes, even those who feel irrevocably British, are increasingly dismayed by the slimy words of British politicians eager to talk about the "ideology" of evil Islamicists and not at all about their own malevolent machinations and duplicitous politics. This global threat was born when corrupted Islam mated with the corrupt foreign policies of the West and the USSR. It started in Afghanistan under Soviet occupation, in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt and Algeria where the US, UK, France and other European countries play their immoral, self-serving games.

Muslims, rightly, have been asked to wake up and act to redeem their faith and rescue the young faithful from the temptations of glory offered by murderous Islamicist warriors. But our young will not look our way if they see a duff deal, if Western governments avoid any blame for the state we are in. Their interventions in the world have made it easier for terrorism to flourish. We have yet to hear a single member of our government accept that responsibility.

British Muslims are again being made to feel that they are not entitled to the rights and respect given to others. You don't want this resentment growing just when the country needs to come together in trust and co-operation to face the next attack, which will surely come soon.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk