Two stories at the weekend suggested that the security world has decided that the London bombings last July were caused by Muslim anger over the war in Iraq, which is acting as the biggest recruiting sergeant for al Qaeda among Britain’s Muslims. Rejoicing among the anti-war camp has already broken out over such a politically useful analysis. But if these stories are true, what they in fact illustrate is surely the fatal inability of the security world even now to grasp the nature and severity of the threat facing this country.

The Observer reported that a Home Office inquiry has concluded that the London bombings were inspired by UK foreign policy, principally the decision to invade Iraq. The Sunday Times reported in addition:

A leaked top-secret memo from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) says the war in Iraq has ‘exacerbated’ the threat by radicalising British Muslims and attracting new recruits to anti-western terror attacks. The four-page memo, entitled International Terrorism: Impact of Iraq, contradicts Blair’s public assurances by concluding that the invasion of Iraq has fomented a jihad or holy war against Britain. It states: ‘It has reinforced the determination of terrorists who were already committed to attacking the West and motivated others who were not.’ It adds: ‘Iraq is likely to be an important motivating factor for some time to come in the radicalisation of British Muslims and for those extremists who view attacks against the UK as legitimate.’

Much is already being made of the fact that such assessments appear to contradict Tony Blair’s (unwisely sloppy) assertion that the London bombings were not caused by the war in Iraq. In fact, Blair went on to qualify his remarks by saying that the Iraq war was nevertheless being used cynically to incite Muslims to violence.

It seems to me as futile to deny that there is any connection between Islamist terrorism and the Iraq war as to claim that it is the cause of Islamist terrorism. That cause is simply jihad: a war by Islamists who believe that that they are on a holy mission to Islamicise the world and thus avenge the impotence and humiliation they think has been visited upon them by the dominant global culture of the west. This war is thus being waged upon countries which opposed the war on Iraq as well as countries which supported it, because its root cause lies not in any geopolitical grievance but in religious fanaticism, a cosmic and lethal manicheism and a desire for global domination.

But equally, geopolitical conflicts are being used -- as Blair said -- to whip up the hysteria and inflame the madness still further. Seeing themselves not as aggressors but as defenders of a victimised culture, the Islamists seize on any defence the west may mount to protect itself, citing such action as further proof of its perfidy in order to incite hatred and recruit yet more to the cause. This is the trap that terrorism always sets for its victims -- and there is no escape from it. A response by terrorism’s victims creates more terrorists; but not to respond is to surrender to terror. Thus, to follow the anti-war argument to its logical conclusion, the west must do nothing to defend itself against murderous aggression because this will in turn be used to recruit still more to the cause of terrorism. This is, of course, a recipe for cultural suicide.

What makes this so much worse, however, is that the west is actively promoting precisely this recipe, aiding the terrorist inversion of victim and aggressor and without a shadow of a doubt thus helping fuel the hysteria which is recruiting terrorists to the cause. Day in, day out, the British media bombard us with a relentless and wholly distorted narrative of the war in Iraq, which presents America as devils committing worse atrocities than Saddam Hussein and producing only carnage and making Muslims the victims of western aggression.

It is absolutely obvious that such incendiary falsehoods will inflame an already roaring grievance against the west and push particularly vulnerable young Muslims into the arms of al Qaeda. A moment’s thought would suggest that this particular variant upon the grievance is absurd, since what the British are actually doing in Iraq, along with the Americans, is trying to prevent Muslims from being slaughtered by other Muslims, and trying to help them to live in freedom and prosperity – an attempt that has been mired in bloody carnage partly through coalition incompetence, but that’s another story.

The war in Iraq in itself didn’t cause the London bombers to blow up the Tube and a bus last summer. It was rather the story that the western media is promulgating, that the Iraqis are victims of the west rather than of their real persecutors in al Qaeda and the remnants of the Ba’ath party, that surely gave the death cult which for various reasons finds such purchase among certain Muslim youths its point of detonation. It is that utterly mendacious presentation which is the recruiting sergeant for terrorism – the climate of sheer raving irrationality about the war, the comprehensive re-writing of history and the spitting hatred towards America that have poured petrol onto the flames of jihad. In exactly the same way it is not Israel’s actual behaviour towards the Palestinians which so enrages Muslims across the world -- they have, in fact, precious little idea of the reality on the ground there because of the lies they are told. It is instead the false and malevolent portrayal of that behaviour, which both fabricates the past and so distorts the present, to an extent which could hardly do other than foment intense hatred and violence in response.

Next, one has to look at the motivation behind these conclusions reached by the security world. What should be uppermost in all our minds is that the London bombings represented a massive failure by that world. MI5 was caught with its trousers below its ankles. It had no idea, we were told, that Britain was at imminent risk from its own people. It was, in short, utterly incompetent. As the Observer acknowledged in its story:

Leaks last week from the intelligence and security committee similarly confirmed how Khan, the mastermind of July 7, slipped through a security net. MI5 called off surveillance on him in the months before the bombings, in which 52 people were killed.

However:

The Home Office narrative supports the parliamentary committee's general view that the security services are not to blame. Despite the trips abroad, however, the narrative says that the London suicide bombers were only ever peripheral players in terrorist organisations and that, on the whole, there was 'nothing exceptional' about them before the attack.

Eh? ‘Only peripheral players in terrorist organisations’? These ‘peripheral players’ murdered more than fifty British citizens and injured and maimed scores more. Another quartet tried to do the same two weeks later and failed only through their own uselessness – which mirrored that displayed by the service we entrust to protect us. The fact is that MI5 failed to detect these terrorists, and possibly even let them slip through its own dragnet. In other words these reports are snow jobs, exculpating the Security Service from its own patent and demonstrable failure.

That incompetence is almost certainly the result of the refusal by the security establishment to acknowledge the nature of the threat that this country is facing. Another detail in the Observer’s story gives us a clue. The Home Office document says:

Alongside Iraq, other ‘motivating factors’ for the bombers, three of whom came from west Yorkshire and one from Buckinghamshire, are identified. These include economic deprivation, social exclusion and a disaffection with society in general, as well as community elders.

This is demonstrably nonsense on stilts. The London bombers – like so many Islamist terrorists – were middle class boys with university degrees and good jobs. The claim that poverty or ‘social exclusion’ are factors in propelling such boys into the arms of al Qaeda is ludicrous. Much of its recruitment is taking place on British university campuses. It’s the ideology, stupid – not this sub-Marxist claptrap.

This whole litany of excuses – blaming Islamist terrorism on British foreign policy, the Iraq war, poverty and social exclusion – is the identical propaganda line being peddled by Muslims who are intent upon loading the blame for Islamist terrorism onto its victims and washing their own hands of the whole business. And it comes as no surprise that the British establishment in turn is parroting this rubbish. As I discovered to my shock when researching my forthcoming book Londonistan (see my home page and click on the cover picture to get to Amazon) the British security and political establishment is still in deep denial about the nature of the threat, and simply refuses point blank to accept that it is rooted in religion. But those who cannot even bring themselves to name what it is that they are fighting will never defeat it. Through its own incompetence, Britain’s establishment left its country vulnerable to last year’s atrocity – and even now is still leaving it exposed to danger by failing to grasp that it must tackle not merely the people entering terrorist cells but also what is entering people’s brain cells.

This secret establishment will use every trick at its disposal to cover its compromised tracks – including the priceless gift of a credulous intelligentsia, that has been so lobotomised by its hatred of America/ Israel/Blair that it has utterly suspended its normal cynicism about the secret state and now believes every word being so artfully planted by these masters of public manipulation. The secret state in America has successfully covered its tracks over its serial incompetence in failing to deal with the risks posed by al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein during the 1990s. It has done so by brilliantly manipulating the useful idiots and fellow travellers in the intelligentsia, so that all the blame for these terrible events has been successfully attached to the Bush administration and none to the CIA. Now watch MI5 and the rest of the security establishment pull the same trick in Britain.

Posted by melanie at April 4, 2006