Last month I spent an afternoon in the company of a 91-year-old German called Karl-Heinz. He was a teenage paratrooper in 1944, whose war ended when he was shot in the face by an American sniper the day after D-Day.
Karl-Heinz hated the Nazis, but they for their part respected the martial prowess of the parachute regiment. On several occasions, he told me, he was approached by the SS while about town in his uniform, but their attempts to recruit Karl-Heinz into their ranks failed. He didn’t fall for their guff about true Germans only serving in the SS.
ISIS is to Islam what the SS was to Germany and as the West prepares to usher in a new year we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking 2018 will be any different to the three previous years. ISIS may have been defeated militarily in the Middle East but its ideology is intact, as enticing as ever to a minority of young Western Muslims.
How the West eradicates this ideology is the question taxing the minds of every Prime Minister and President in office. For Theresa May the issue is all the more urgent following the arrest of Andi Sami Star, who will appear in court today charged with the preparation of an act of terrorism.
One pities Britain’s spooks who, according to Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s counter-terror coordinator, are trying to track as many as 25,000 Islamic extremists. Only a fraction of that number are prepared to murder but most are likely to be so enamoured of their ideology that they will at some stage seek to recruit fellow Muslims to their way of seeing the world.
That is what Max Hill, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, doesn’t seem to understand, nor the three British judges sitting at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission who recently defied the government and allowed an ISIS bride to retain her passport. Perhaps the woman, identified only as G3, is unlikely to ever bear arms but how many people might she try to convert to the Islamists’ ideology?
Earlier this year Jonathan Evans, the former head of MI5 declared that Islamic extremism is an enemy that will be with us ‘in another 20 years time’. That seems an optimistic prediction.
The Islamists’ ideological roots have spread so far around the world, and in many cases, grown to such depths, that it’s hard to see how they can be removed, peaceably, at least, within two decades. Saudi Arabia’s recent pledge to ‘crush extremism’ has been heralded by some in the West as a sign that moderate Islam is in the ascendency. It’s not. In this month alone a female Egyptian singer has been jailed for eating a banana in a suggestive manner, an Iraqi beauty queen has received death threats for posing in a bikini, and a statue of a naked woman in Algeria has been vandalised because of its indecency. The reality is that as the West becomes ever more liberal so the Islamic world turns more conservative; one wonders what they make of our obsession with LGBTQ issues in Kabul and Khartoum.
Of course, the West, as conceited as it is naive, continues to confidently declare that its values will prevail and many in positions of power still broadly adhere to Barack Obama’s view that ISIS is a Junior Varsity basketball team whose ideology is not to be taken that seriously.
We didn’t take the Nazis seriously, either, in the early days. In an editorial in 1925 The Times described Hitler and his followers as ‘cranks’. Twenty years and millions of dead later the crank ideology was finally defeated.
Comments