Cover Story

Just don’t call it war

16 July 2005

Boris Johnson says it is time to reassert British values in the face of extremist Islam

There has been a fatal elision between the ‘war on terror’ and the campaign to democratise the Arab world, and many Muslims can be forgiven for thinking that this is really a war to democratise the Middle East in the interests of General Motors, evangelical Christianity, Hollywood and global pornography. No wonder they dislike it; and if we use the vocabulary of war, it gives the maniacs all the more excuse to wage war on us. When Bush said, ‘If you are not with us, you are against us,’ and then invaded Iraq on charges that were frankly trumped-up, he co-opted tens of millions of Muslims into the camp of his enemies, even though they might loathe Saddam. They had nowhere else to go.

To keep talking of war plays on militant Muslim paranoia, and, incidentally, since it is a key point of Islamic theology that the suicide bomber may not be called a martyr, and therefore entitled to his ration of virgins/raisins, unless he dies in ‘war’, we are by our own vocabulary offering these people an incitement to murder and a laissez-passer to paradise. Above all, misplaced talk of ‘war’ is a distraction from the real disaster, which is that we have a serious and long-term security problem, not in Iraq but in this country, among young men who speak with Yorkshire accents. This is a cultural calamity that will take decades to correct.

We — non-Muslims — cannot solve the problem; we cannot brainwash them out of their fundamentalist beliefs. The Islamicists last week horribly and irrefutably asserted the supreme importance of that faith, overriding all worldly considerations, and it will take a huge effort of courage and skill to win round the many thousands of British Muslims who are in a similar state of alienation, and to make them see that their faith must be compatible with British values and with loyalty to Britain. That means disposing of the first taboo, and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem.