LONDON - Any British Muslim who supports armed resistance anywhere, including the Palestinian territories, favours sharia law, fails to condemn attacks on British occupation troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, regards gayism as sinful, or supports the restoration of a pan-Islamic caliphate in the Muslim world will be labelled as "extremist", according to the British government's extra ordinary proposal in its latest draft on counter-terrorist strategy leaked to the Guardian. The idea would then be to sever all links with such people and their organisations, following home secretary Jacqui Smith's announcement that counter-terrorism needs to move beyond tackling violent groups to challenging "non-violent extremists". According to the Guardian, this is the most transparent folly. Since polling shows most Muslims hold one or more of these views (as do millions of non-Muslims, in the case of resistance), the effect would be to brand the whole community extremist and further alienate Muslim youth with - as Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain puts it - a New Labour version of the Tebbit cricket test. Tacit British support for Israel's onslaught on Gaza has radicalised a whole new swath of young Muslims and non-Muslims alike. And a taste of what this new drive to blur the distinction between political violence and non-violent protest is likely to mean was on show last weekend, when police arrested 10 people on the M65 near Preston, on their way to join George Galloway's 110-vehicle aid convoy to Gaza. Security sources were quoted as claiming the arrests were in connection with a "potential threat of terrorism in the Middle East". But seven have already been released without charge, and the timing of the operation is seen locally as an attempt to smear and intimidate the Muslim community. The government's counter-terrorism strategy is a recipe for creating terrorists. The report said that Britain's ruling New Labour's sins in the war on terror are catching up with it. And it's not only officials, but politicians, up to and including Tony Blair, who could be in the legal frame as a result of British collusion with torture, "extraordinary rendition" - illegal abductions to third countries - and "ghost" prisons. No doubt a battery of state powers and immunities will be deployed to head off such humiliation. But as this week's chilling ICJ's report on the counter-terrorist free-for-all put it. Of course that's no coincidence, since Britain is the state that most faithfully followed the US in invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. And now that the Afghan imbroglio is to be escalated, with Barack Although Obama has vowed to close Gitmo, ban US torture and shut secret prisons, that doesn't apply to "short-term facilities", and US intelligence officials have even promised an "expanded role" for extraordinary rendition. And as yesterday's House of Lords decision to allow the deportation of the cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan showed, torture will still be outsourced to others. But don't imagine there won't be a cost for this bitter fruit of imperial war. Last month, Gordon Brown's security minister, Lord West, became the first member of the government to acknowledge the connection between the horrors of the seven-year assault on the Muslim world and the threat of terror attacks in Britain. The claim, much repeated by Blair as prime minister, that there was no link with foreign policy was, West declared, "clearly bollocks". But in other parts of the government, the refusal to face up to that link is becoming ever more obtuse, underpinned by a growing tendency to criminalise political dissent in the Muslim community. That seems bound to give terrorists exactly the "greater justification" Rimington was talking about, said the report.