A Nigerian Islamic fanatic flies to the Netherlands and tries to blow up a plane bound for Detroit in Michigan — and yet there was something grimly inevitable about the fact that it was Britain where police were scrambled and London where the fanatic’s accommodation was searched.
A Nigerian Islamic fanatic flies to the Netherlands and tries to blow up a plane bound for Detroit in Michigan — and yet there was something grimly inevitable about the fact that it was Britain where police were scrambled and London where the fanatic’s accommodation was searched. As Gordon Brown’s Cabinet plodded into the underground bunker after being summoned for an emergency meeting on Boxing Day, they might well have asked: why is it always us? How did Britain become the Petri dish of global terrorism? Why does every major attack seem to lead back here?
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab succeeded only in burning his balls, as Rod Liddle put it in his Spectator blog. But though Abdulmutallab failed, his attempt is still instructive. But for an accident of chemistry, some 300 people would have been slain on that Christmas day flight. The man himself — his motivation, his background, his links — tell much about the continuing war on terror. Eight years on, it is a war which ministers still struggle to comprehend.
A few months ago, the Cabinet Office finished the second draft of ‘Contest’, the official manual handed down to government departments to direct the war on terror. It is a document infected with the errors of the Labour years. It sees money as the solution to every given problem — and lack of money as the cause. ‘The experience of poverty and exclusion can create specific grievances which may then lead to radicalisation,’ the document reads. ‘Poverty and illiteracy are key factors leading to religious extremism.’
Our latest religious extremist, the 23-year-old Abdulmutallab, was given opportunities beyond the dreams of most children in Britain, let alone Africa. He studied at the exclusive British School of Lomé in Togo which offers the International GCSE — an English curriculum, judged too vigorous even to offer to English state pupils. From there he went to University College, London where he studied mechanical engineering and apparently lived in a £4 million house. It is a very expensive form of social exclusion.
This might surprise the government, but it fits a pattern. The new jihadi terrorists are uprooted, more Westernised than any of their predecessors in previous Islamist movements. Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, was born in Kuwait to a Pakistani father and Palestinian mother, educated in Wales, acquired an Iraqi passport and settled in New Jersey. Mohamed Atta, the lead 11 September bomber, was born to a wealthy Egyptian family but was radicalised as a student in Hamburg and trained in jihad in Afghanistan. They are not the indigenous output of the Arab world, nor poverty-stricken Muslims. They are jet-set jihadi.
London has long served as their main propaganda centre. The mosques of Finsbury Park and Brixton are as much to blame for the global jihad as any Saudi madrassa. All too often, British mosques have foreign imams who would be dismissed as crackpots in their home country but are given sanctuary and, through welfare, financial support in Britain. It is judges, not ministers, who sustain this refusal to extradite even those wanted on terror charges in their home country.
One feels for Abdulmutallab’s father, the chairman of a Nigerian bank who had reported his son to the American authorities six months ago. He did everything he could to bring up his child to be rational and right-thinking. In his play My Son, the Fanatic, Hanif Kureishi wrote about a Pakistani immigrant to Bradford who embraced his adopted country, but was bewildered to see his son embrace fundamentalism. The son, who has only known England, berates his father for being ‘too implicated in Western civilisation’ as he slips into a new terrorist sub-world.
It is the clash of cultures, not on the world stage, but inside the heads of these young men which is the common factor. They exist in a strange globalised world — one of airport lounges, of people with invented names, existing in cultural isolation both from their homelands and adopted countries. They mention foreign policy in their suicide videos, in hope of rallying the usually warring Islamic factions. It is almost a deliberate decoy, set up to fool Western policymakers. Kureishi’s play, which describes the problem with chilling accuracy, was written in 1994. This has been brewing for years, if not decades.
It is time to dispense, once and for all, with the delusion that poverty incubates extremism. Or that the Islamists who would kill us could be in any way assuaged by concessions in foreign policy. The jihadi menace is not born of poverty, or rationality, or any indigenous culture — Arab or otherwise. It is a separate phenomenon, more psychological than political. It does not care if British ministers do not now refer to a ‘war on terror’, or if America now has a black president. It does not respond to brinkmanship of any kind.
The simple fact is that, for a whole range of complex reasons, there are people out there who want to kill us and who have not stopped trying. We hear less about it partly because of the work the Security Services do — but, as the IRA said after the Brighton bomb, terrorists only have to be lucky once. We may all be tired with the war on terror. But it is not, alas, yet tired of us.
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