Owen Jones writes:
This morning, the front page of the Daily Mail carries a stark interpretation of David Cameron’s speech on Islamic fundamentalist extremism.
“PM: UK Muslims helping jihadis”, it booms in thick black text, tarring an entire slice of British citizens in one swoop. On which other community is it possible to inflict such dangerous, sweeping generalisations?
The assertion being made here – explicitly, not even implicitly as is the norm – is that British Muslims as a whole are helping mass-murdering zealots inflicting carnage across Iraq, Syria and Libya.
Extremists want Muslims to feel rejected, marginalised, treated as a dangerous “other” by the societies in which they live. The Daily Mail follows their script to the letter.
“Too often we hear the argument that radicalisation is the fault of someone else,” says our finger-wagging prime minister.
“That blame game is wrong – and it is dangerous,” he suggests, as he berated the redirecting of blame to authorities, rather than the individual.
This is the argument of those who align with Cameron’s way of thinking.
There is a “blame the west” mentality which continually reduces the cause of radicalisation to western foreign policy.
It infantilises radicalised Muslims, they argue, stripping them of individual agency. An evil poisonous ideology and those who propagate it are to blame, and nothing else.
There is no question that there is indeed a murderous ideology which, in the form of the Isis death cult, is one of the most despicable political forces on earth today.
Almost all of its victims are Muslims, a fact which is too often overlooked.
Extremist fundamentalist ideologies have often displaced the old secular nationalist movements that were aligned to the deceased Soviet bloc, that once positioned themselves at the head of anti-western sentiment in the Middle East.
In Iraq, this shift is unambiguous: many of the the old Baathists are now helping to run Isis. It is a statement of the obvious that, without this ideology, there would be no radicalisation.
And yet, when examining the rise of Nazism, we would not hesitate in examining the role of the punitive treaty of Versailles peace terms after the first world war.
A history student would be graded a D- if they simply reduced the rise of Nazism to “evil”. In no way would understanding these factors behind Nazism be regarded as somehow legitimising or apologising for it.
Is radicalisation all down to western foreign policy? No: a whole range of factors are involved in radicalisation, and it would be facile to reduce it to one thing or the other.
It may be different from one individual to another. But take this judgment: “Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – not a whole generation, a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack upon Islam.”
A statement from the Stop the War Coalition? No – it’s Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5. Is she somehow an apologist for making such an observation?
Fourteen years on from the start of the “war on terror”, and al-Qaida finally faces defeat, only not at the hands of the west, but rather by Isis, an even more extreme group.
The war on Iraq was partly justified by the threat of al-Qaida, who were not present when Saddam Hussein’s murderous secular dictatorship ruled, but who ran amok in the country after the invasion.
The western invasion of Libya has produced a broken, failed state increasingly succumbing to Isis and other extremist groups.
We assail extremist ideologies at home, while arming and cosying up to Middle Eastern dictatorships whose kingdoms export these ideologies, and are a source of funds and arms for extremist groups in Iraq and Syria.
Here at home, polls already show all too many Britons associate Muslims with terrorism and extremism. Lady Warsi warns that “a policy of disengagement with British Muslim communities” is fuelling radicalisation, too.
Yes, we need to challenge and confront perverse ideologies.
That means working in partnership with Muslim organisations and communities, not employing a rhetoric of collective blame that does nothing but play into the hands of extremism.
And yes, there are a number of factors driving radicalisation, but we should examine all of them, including factors within our control, such as (but not exclusively) western foreign policy and support for dictatorships complicit in the rise of jihadi terrorism.
I fear, though, that currently, we are doing exactly what our opponents will us to do.
This morning, the front page of the Daily Mail carries a stark interpretation of David Cameron’s speech on Islamic fundamentalist extremism.
“PM: UK Muslims helping jihadis”, it booms in thick black text, tarring an entire slice of British citizens in one swoop. On which other community is it possible to inflict such dangerous, sweeping generalisations?
The assertion being made here – explicitly, not even implicitly as is the norm – is that British Muslims as a whole are helping mass-murdering zealots inflicting carnage across Iraq, Syria and Libya.
Extremists want Muslims to feel rejected, marginalised, treated as a dangerous “other” by the societies in which they live. The Daily Mail follows their script to the letter.
“Too often we hear the argument that radicalisation is the fault of someone else,” says our finger-wagging prime minister.
“That blame game is wrong – and it is dangerous,” he suggests, as he berated the redirecting of blame to authorities, rather than the individual.
This is the argument of those who align with Cameron’s way of thinking.
There is a “blame the west” mentality which continually reduces the cause of radicalisation to western foreign policy.
It infantilises radicalised Muslims, they argue, stripping them of individual agency. An evil poisonous ideology and those who propagate it are to blame, and nothing else.
There is no question that there is indeed a murderous ideology which, in the form of the Isis death cult, is one of the most despicable political forces on earth today.
Almost all of its victims are Muslims, a fact which is too often overlooked.
Extremist fundamentalist ideologies have often displaced the old secular nationalist movements that were aligned to the deceased Soviet bloc, that once positioned themselves at the head of anti-western sentiment in the Middle East.
In Iraq, this shift is unambiguous: many of the the old Baathists are now helping to run Isis. It is a statement of the obvious that, without this ideology, there would be no radicalisation.
And yet, when examining the rise of Nazism, we would not hesitate in examining the role of the punitive treaty of Versailles peace terms after the first world war.
A history student would be graded a D- if they simply reduced the rise of Nazism to “evil”. In no way would understanding these factors behind Nazism be regarded as somehow legitimising or apologising for it.
Is radicalisation all down to western foreign policy? No: a whole range of factors are involved in radicalisation, and it would be facile to reduce it to one thing or the other.
It may be different from one individual to another. But take this judgment: “Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – not a whole generation, a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack upon Islam.”
A statement from the Stop the War Coalition? No – it’s Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5. Is she somehow an apologist for making such an observation?
Fourteen years on from the start of the “war on terror”, and al-Qaida finally faces defeat, only not at the hands of the west, but rather by Isis, an even more extreme group.
The war on Iraq was partly justified by the threat of al-Qaida, who were not present when Saddam Hussein’s murderous secular dictatorship ruled, but who ran amok in the country after the invasion.
The western invasion of Libya has produced a broken, failed state increasingly succumbing to Isis and other extremist groups.
We assail extremist ideologies at home, while arming and cosying up to Middle Eastern dictatorships whose kingdoms export these ideologies, and are a source of funds and arms for extremist groups in Iraq and Syria.
Here at home, polls already show all too many Britons associate Muslims with terrorism and extremism. Lady Warsi warns that “a policy of disengagement with British Muslim communities” is fuelling radicalisation, too.
Yes, we need to challenge and confront perverse ideologies.
That means working in partnership with Muslim organisations and communities, not employing a rhetoric of collective blame that does nothing but play into the hands of extremism.
And yes, there are a number of factors driving radicalisation, but we should examine all of them, including factors within our control, such as (but not exclusively) western foreign policy and support for dictatorships complicit in the rise of jihadi terrorism.
I fear, though, that currently, we are doing exactly what our opponents will us to do.
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