[Dreadful as the murder video of
the journalist James Foley was, it is by no means the worst thing posted online
by, or involving, British and Western jihadists this week. In the jihadists’
theatre of savagery, Britons and Westerners have for several months taken
principal speaking parts.]
By Andrew Gilligan
The Japanese hostage lies pinned
to the sandy ground, bleeding from two long, slashing cuts across his face –
perhaps carried out with the same knife that one of his jihadist interrogators
is now pointing at him. “Where are you from? Don’t lie to me!” shouts the man, in
English. The alleged “regime soldier”, in civilian clothes, thrashes
desperately against his captors as his throat is cut: an 18-minute snuff movie,
complete with sound, of unwatchable horror, linked to a Twitter account
apparently belonging to the British extremist Anjem Choudary.
Dreadful as the murder video of
the journalist James Foley was, it is by no means the worst thing posted online
by, or involving, British and Western jihadists this week. In the jihadists’
theatre of savagery, Britons and Westerners have for several months taken
principal speaking parts.
The Foley video’s real
significance, perhaps not fully understood in the general shock, is different. Until
now, the Islamic State (Isil) has shown little interest in threatening the West.
In that video, this started to change, with “John the Beatle” promising the
“bloodshed of your people”. The ransom demand sent to Mr Foley’s family, published
yesterday, is even more explicit: “Today our swords are unsheathed towards you,
government and citizens alike,” it says.
The Afghan war, which has cost so
many lives, was supposed to deny Islamist terrorism an operational base. Now
the jihadists have a much better one – in Iraq
and Syria , separated
from us by a road journey and a short easyJet flight. It has been visited by up
to 2,800 Westerners since February 2011 (the start of the Arab Spring) – “more
than in all previous combat zones combined”, according to the International
Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College London.
About 500 of these, a
disproportionate number, are British (and a further 1,500 are EU citizens with
travel rights to the UK ).
Just under 4,000 Britons – including 1,450 children – have been referred to the
Government’s Channel programme, designed to divert those at risk of
radicalisation, though only about 20 per cent (777) are assessed to be actually
at risk of becoming involved in terrorism. The numbers have roughly doubled in
the past two years.
How did Britain
become such a wellspring of extremism, a Yemen
of the West? And what can we do about the hundreds of radicalised, brutalised
and combat-trained fellow citizens heading back to our shores?
The vast majority of ordinary
British Muslims are not extremists, as every poll shows. But extremists do
control, or heavily influence, many of the most important institutions of
Muslim Britain: key mosques, large Muslim charities, influential TV stations, university
Islamic societies and schools. Until recently, this was done with at best the
acquiescence, at worst the support, of the British state. It was acting partly
in the naive (and surely now disproved) belief that it could anoint “good”
radicals and use them against the “bad” ones, and partly through the loss of
moral perspective that seems to overtake some liberals whenever race is
involved.
In the most bizarre example, Ed
Balls, when education secretary in the last government, actively defended the
payment of public money – which continues to this day – to schools run by
supporters of the racist, separatist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, whose key aim, the
creation of an Islamic state, has now been achieved in Iraq and Syria.
Shiraz Maher, from the ICSR, believes
that “in many respects preachers and mosques no longer matter”, because social
media is seducing potential Isil recruits far more effectively. Of course
traditional forms of influence are less dominant now – but to say they no
longer matter is like saying newspapers or the BBC
no longer matter.
In fact, substantial numbers of
those Britons who have travelled to Syria
and Iraq have
been heavily involved with radical mosques – such as al-Manar in Cardiff ,
attended by the first British jihadists to make an Isil propaganda video – or
with radical groups, such as Choudary’s al-Muhajiroun, which is closely linked
to the first British suicide bomber, Abdul Waheed Majid.
Yet, of course, personal factors
are also vital. Many of those who have gone to Isil know each other – relatives,
flatmates, a group of 10 from Portsmouth ,
for instance. Throughout history, bored, maladjusted and sexually frustrated
young men have sought excitement and identity through violence. Where a non-Muslim
adolescent might only have the outlet of gang fights in shopping centres or
punch ups in pubs, young Muslims have the glamour, thrill and wider meaning of Middle
East combat. The connections they can make online, with others far
away, and the ease of travel in the globalised world complete the picture.
One person who works in the
Channel programme says that “a lot of the guys who go out to Syria
and Iraq
explicitly say they don’t have anti-Western sentiments before they go. They see
themselves as going out to fight the Syrian regime, which the West hasn’t done
anything about. Once there, they end up meeting different groups, and can take
on a much more radical belief system.”
This suggests that one of the
things we should do is try to deglamorise the jihad. Perhaps some parts of the
media could avoid treating Isil fighters as triumphant lions of terror, which
is exactly what their PR videos want us to do. That doesn’t mean suppressing
the truth – it means telling it.
On the battlefield – the thing
that matters most – Isil appears to have suffered a major defeat this week, losing
control of the Mosul dam, thanks to
US air strikes. In the media battlefield, that was completely drowned out, as
no doubt Isil intended, by the release of the Foley tape.
A potential British Isil recruit
may not be too bothered that he could end up dead. But around half of the
Britons who have died so far in Syria
and Iraq were
killed not by the regime-infidel enemy but by their own side through in-fighting,
and if that same potential recruit knew that, it might put a different
complexion on it.
If young men in Bradford
and east London heard stories from
disillusioned British Isil fighters who felt they were treated as cannon fodder,
that would do 20 times more good than any number of heartfelt condemnations
from middle-aged politicians or “community leaders”.
What that suggests, too, is that
we should be smarter about how we deal with those who return, and those at risk
of going. The understandable response so far has been a policing and criminal
one, but criminalisation is not the whole answer. Where there is evidence of
participation in atrocities, returnees can be prosecuted – one of the ways that
social media works in civilisation’s favour in this story. The vast majority of
returnees to date, however, have not been charged. Fewer than half have even
been arrested. Often there isn’t enough evidence to convict them of anything, or
anything serious enough to send them to prison for long. Sending people to
prison is about the best way you can devise of ensuring that they remain
radicalised, and perhaps infect other prisoners around them.
Channel, which works with both
potential and returned jihadists, has made what the Home Secretary, Theresa May,
calls “a very significant contribution to our national security.” There are
around 40 Channel workers, most of whom are British Muslims. They typically
meet their clients one-on-one, trying to build up trust, address the arguments
for violence and radicalism that they make – sometimes theologically, sometimes
not – and steer them towards non-violent approaches.
There are what one person
involved described as “differences of emphasis” between the Home Office and the
police over the programme. “There is a tendency for us [Britain ]
to prefer the criminalisation approach,” said the source. “The problem is that
an arrest quite often doesn’t lead to significant or any criminal action and
yet it can substantially set back the deradicalisation process.” Sometimes, too,
disputes between police and Channel allow vulnerable individuals to slip
through the cracks. This is what happened with Aseel Muthana, one of the Cardiff
jihadists.
Other European countries, including
Holland and Denmark ,
go further than Britain
in following a “reintegration” process for their returned jihadists. Both
Richard Barrett, former MI6 head of counterterrorism and Sir Richard Dearlove, the
service’s chief, have warned that harsh treatment of returnees could cause
further radicalisation.
Whichever approach is pursued, and
whether or not Isil develops into a serious threat to the West, it seems clear
that this is a battle of ideas. More than ever in a social media world, you
cannot lock up an idea in Belmarsh or turn it back at Heathrow. The only way to
defeat a bad idea is with a better idea. David Cameron’s Government has
creditably reversed some past tolerance of bad ideas. But on the very biggest
canvas, what the Middle East should look like and what
role Britain
should play in defeating terror and tyranny, Mr Cameron still gives a
convincing impression of not having any ideas at all.
