HOW can one respond to the murder of schoolgirls? Here I do not credit the anodyne expressions of outrage at “terrorism”, which all but the most fervent Islamists and their far-left enablers seem capable of. Above the natural emotive – horror, fury, despair – rises the clamour for retaliation, sounding with each atrocity louder. Mass deportation, mass incarceration, mass surveillance: the tyrannical solutions demanded by the radical right are as stupid as they are cruel. Monday’s outrage would not have been stopped by such measures, even were we to discard our traditional reluctance to lash out at innocents. The proponents of such schemes know this. They are proposed chiefly to express anger and to generate headlines, clicks and book sales. But it bears remembering, as the Conservative MP Dominic Grieve observed today, that authoritarian states are little safer from terrorism than free ones. Indeed, the entire point of terrorism is to provoke such an overreaction. Recall that one sect of Islam has declared war – total war – on all non-Muslims and on every Muslim it finds heretical, impious or merely insufficiently supportive. Those who would treat all Muslims as the enemy become the enforcers of the Islamic State’s most overweening claim: that it is the rightful sovereign of all Muslims, and that they are either soldiers of the Caliphate or infidel lackeys. The howling voices on the radical right wish to lend to ISIS the Muslims living here, in the West – alien or native, fanatic or cynic, they discriminate not. They would press them into the service of the Caliphate without a moment’s hesitation, and deny them any chance to choose. That this murderer was motivated by his Islamic beliefs is obvious. That we are at war with his evil ideology is equally obvious. Most obvious of all is that none of this need be so. Through their actions, British Muslims can and do choose, every day, what it means to be a Muslim, and the path of the suicide bomber remains mercifully unpopular. This is true even though a great many British Muslims, perhaps even a majority, hold reactionary and antediluvian views. Indeed, a formidable portion of these sympathise with the aims and even the means of jihad, though they do not practice it, and it is precisely for this reason that we must respond with care. For those who harbour a spark of sympathy, however dim, for Salman Abedi’s cause form a reserve army – thousands strong, and with garrisons and advance camps in every major city in the Western world. If our policy is brought in line with the Islamic State’s, that every Muslim must choose between the Caliphate and the West, how many thousands will choose the former over the latter?

 

Another response, one less dangerous but equally wrong, is to look inwards, and find blame in ourselves. We are attacked, the argument goes, not because the Islamists pursue a totalitarian ideology with pretensions to world conquest, but because of our aggression overseas. This claim is popular and superficially plausible, but wrong. Those who imagine, as do the isolationists of left and right, that the terrorism haunting Europe and America is the ghost of our crimes against the Islamic world are fooling themselves. There is a persuasive symmetry to the idea of “blowback”, and many find comfort in the idea that we could keep ourselves safe merely by withdrawing from the affairs of the world and leaving well alone. It is also true that our foreign policy decisions can inflame radicalism as well as soothe it. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 almost certainly was a propaganda gift to violent Islamists. But the notion that we would not be targeted if we steered clear of foreign entanglements is sadly deluded, for some fairly obvious reasons. First is the trivial point that we do not know what would have happened had we not invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, or chosen not to support the Libyan rebels. The primary reason critics like Simon Jenkins assert with such confidence that we wouldn’t be in this mess if we had just left well enough alone over the past decade is that we have no way of checking. Similarly, the specifics of a given excuse for terrorism – the invasion of Iraq, for example – obscure the disingenuous generality of the strategy of justifying terrorism by excuse: if it weren’t Iraq, it would be Afghanistan, or Bosnia, or the occupation of Palestine or the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire; even the British occupation of Egypt or the Crusades. Now, the British Empire’s mishandling of the Palestinian mandate and other former Ottoman provinces like Iraq is a more worthy topic of discussion than most, but it is nothing more than that, since any mistakes Britain made in that period cannot be reversed. Blaming the Balfour declaration of 1917 for Islamist atrocities committed today is an ambitious historical argument, but is not particularly helpful for deciding what to do about it now. (Incidentally, the proof that excuses such as Iraq are hollow is that Islamists have recently attacked France, Sweden, Belgium, India and Germany, all of whom opposed or stayed out of the invasion of Iraq.) Consider too the other horn of the dilemma, entirely ignored by the isolationists, that often we are damned if we intervene and damned if we don’t: the genocide against Bosnia’s Muslims by Serbian and Croat forces was an incomparable recruiting tool for radical Islamists, and one enabled entirely by NATO’s failure to intervene earlier. Similarly, the suggestion that an Islamist like Salman Abedi was radicalised by Britain’s support for the heavily Islamist Syrian and Libyan opposition movements against their respective, non-Islamist dictators is entirely implausible. But even if all the above were untrue, understand that the price of never being able to intervene militarily or politically in the Islamic world for fear of retaliation is unacceptably high. The catastrophic collapse of Iraq into ruin and bloodshed overshadows interventions that were both successful and necessary: recall the French invasion of Mali in 2013 to clear out the local Al Qaida affiliates who had recently seized the north of the country; the multinational operation in 2014 to prevent ISIS’s genocide of the Yazidis; or the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam’s invading armies in 1990-1991; to name just three. The reality is that, had we let our fear of angering Islamists dictate our actions, we would have of force stood by to watch countless innocents suffer torture and death, and their murderers enjoy the spoils of their aggression without fear of justice or reprisal. The isolationists demand we surrender any claim to moral leadership in the world, and that is a price we cannot pay.

 

What, then, is to be done? We are fortunate in that, having defeated the Provisional IRA, we know what we need to do. The analogy is not perfect, but the basic strategy remains the same. First, we must refrain from handing our enemy needless (as distinct from unavoidable or justifiable) propaganda victories. Refraining from demonising Muslims is not merely the just thing to do, but the prudent thing to do. For this reason, crude and oppressive measures such as banning Islamic garb should not be entertained, however politically tempting they may become. Second, we should rely on good policing at home. This requires patient investigation, plentiful resources and – crucially – extensive co-operation with friendly Muslim informants and intellectual leaders. Third, we must aggressively counter Islamist propaganda and confront the sources of such propaganda, at home and abroad. On the home front, this might well require mandatory secularism in British schools, perhaps even including private religious institutions, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Abroad, a harder stance on theocratic terror states such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan is long overdue. Fourth, we should work to reduce long-term immigration from the most retrograde Islamic societies such as Afghanistan and Pakistan (although we should continue to accept what genuine refugees we can, prioritising the most vulnerable). Fifth, we must intensify our efforts to assimilate the Muslims already living in the U.K., including second and third generation immigrants, many of whom live in deep poverty and in isolation from white British society despite living in the heart of our great cities. The struggle will be long, but under no circumstances should we accept Monday’s attack on Manchester as normal, excusable or inevitable.

Nathan

Saturday May 27th, 2017

London