Senior officials and experts from Britain and France agreed Thursday to recruit more Muslims to help fight the spread of radical Islam in their countries. Some of the officials, who met at the British embassy in Paris, told journalists that the governments were not aiming at imposing quotas but rather “recruitment objectives”. The need to have Muslims in the police and other administrations was made clear in the investigation into the July attacks on London’s transport system, which found that the bombers came from Britain’s Muslim community. One official, Mark Carroll, head of the Cohesion, Faith and Equalities unit of Britain’s Home Office, said that “the public services can only effectively serve the communities if they include representatives from those communities.” Home Office Minister Hazel Blears said that Britain and France had to find ways to channel the anger often nurtured in their respective Muslim communities into legal avenues, and that part of the anger stemmed from a feeling of being misunderstood by authorities. Hiring more Muslims to communicate with those communities would be one way of attenuating that feeling of alienation, she said.
