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| British jihadists fighting for Islamic State |
(The Telegraph) 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?
Britain’s key failing is that it was tough where it should have been liberal, and liberal where it should have been tough. It extended detention without trial and stop-and-search: sweeping measures that affected everyone and left Muslims, most of whom are completely blameless, feeling under attack. At the same time, it was ridiculously tolerant and indulgent towards a small minority of Muslim radicals.
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.
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