While a storm has blown up between Nigel Farage and Brendan Cox this morning over the role played by Angela Merkel’s migrant policy in the Berlin Christmas market attack, the Today programme managed to find a man with a possible alternative explanation for the carnage: Brexit. Yes, really. This morning’s show ended with a man, introduced as a political scientist who has advised the French and German governments on counter-terrorism, offering the wisdom:
‘Brexit isn’t helpful…I mean so-called Islamic State were celebrating Brexit…we need to grow stronger, we need to find responses which are not only security-based , we need a common foreign policy.’
The idea that Islamic State ‘celebrated’ Brexit, and have been emboldened by it, is based on a post by Isis spokesman Abu Muhammad which appeared on the messaging service ‘Telegram’ on the morning of 24 June. The message revelled in gyrating financial markets and declared ‘get prepared to make it a month of calamity everywhere for non-believers’. The following week a small article appeared on page 15 of an extremist newspaper, al-Naba, declaring that the vote for Brexit ‘threatens the unity of Crusader Europe’.
There is a problem in interpreting this as a sign that Isis welcomed Brexit: like all good propagandists, Isis will put a positive spin on every piece of news. In the same way it ‘celebrated’ the election of Donald Trump – suggesting that it would economically destabilise the West, something on which markets appear to have taken a different view. Moreover, Trump seems to endorse Putin’s support for Assad – whose survival is hardly good news for Isis. Isis also ‘celebrated’ the decision of the US Supreme Court decision in June 2015 to legalise gay marriage – celebrate, that is, in its own inimitable fashion by throwing a gay man off a tall building. Isis will take anything that is in the news and use it as a rallying cry for its supporters – Brexit included.
That Isis doesn’t really think the vote for Brexit is helpful to its cause was given away in the next passage of the Telegram message, which declared:
‘All you believers and unifiers, if the tyrants have closed off to you the gates of migration, you open in their faces the gates of jihad and make their actions become a regret’.
In other words, Isis seems to fear that Brexit is part of a closing-off of borders, which will make it more difficult for its operatives to sneak into European countries, but is determined to find a way in anyway. To make the case that Isis benefits from Brexit is a form of propaganda of its own – first advanced by David Cameron in one of his last-gasp efforts to turn the referendum his way. It is not to be taken seriously.
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