Sunday 24 January 2016

The Istanbul Attacks : Turkey and the Growing Threat of ISIS Terror in Europe.

An attempted ISIS attack on London is likely in 2016 but Berlin could well be next. The terror attack on German tourists in Istanbul was about damaging Turkey's tourist business as well as sending the message to Germany, which pledged to indirectly assist the Western Powers in attacking the Caliphate, that they were getting closer.

The German Foreign Minister, Thomas de de Maiziere, on 16th January even suggested there was probably no evidence German citizens were targeted. With no hint of irony he claimed 'Germany and Turkey are coming even closer to each other", a claim that was truer than he could probably imagine.

Turkish officials, as well as Prime Minister Davutoğlu, claimed the suicide bomber was a Saudi-born Syrian refugee whose finger prints had been taken, as with those coming into the EU, but failed to be on any terrorist watch list. With security such as that, it is hardly suprising the risk of terrorist blowback increases

The other problem is Turkey has sought to use terror attacks as am ex post facto pretext to justify their own foreign policies, pretending that their own air strikes against ISIS had been thwarted by Russian intervention in the Syrian War which started on September 30 2015, some months after Turkey's own intervention on July 24.

Of course, Erdogan and Davutoğlu would want to blame Russia for having defeated their war on ISIS. For the Turkish AKP government never fought it, prefering to use the deal with the US to use Incirlik air base to launch their own air strikes against YGP aligned PKK militias and tilt the balance towards ISIS as a counter force.

The absurdity of this Turkish position has meant the US and Russia have effectively aligned to back the YPG  and its affiliated Sunni Arab Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with air strikes while Turkey, a NATO state, had vowed never to allow Kurdish forces to advance west of the River Euphrates without a military response.

It could be that Turkish government officials are looking to divert attention from their own collusion with radical jihadists before 2014 and having allowed ISIS to retreat into Turkey the better to regroup and attack Kurdish militias as late as the beginning of 2015. Erdogan in 2016 clearly regards Kurdish irredentism as a greater threat.

The arrest of three Russian jihadists, presumably from Chechnya, seems politically convenient too given the recent hostilities between Turkey and Russia that escalated when the Turks shot down a Russian fighter jet that was reported to have strayed into their air space. It shows Russia cannot control terrorists across borders too.

However, in effect, the US and Russia are acting, as Patrick Cockburn states, 'as though they were in a de facto alliance', leaving Turkey effectively excluded from having much to offer at the Geneva talks. Erdogan would be humiliated as he has staked his credibility as a regional power in overthrowing Assad and posing as Sunni Arab champion.

The danger is that Erdogan might not only step up the war against Kurdish nationalists within Turkey, and even clamp down on domestic critics ; he may gamble on ordering a  military intervention through a ground offensive in northern Syria to seize the territory between Jarabalus and Afrin

The aim would be to prevent the creation of a "Kurdish Corridor" from the frontier with Iraq to the Mediterranean. Yet it would contradict US strategy in Syria and could lead to direct conflict with Russia which would resist the incursion with aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles and force a change of tack from the West.

The upshot of that would be to draw Russia and the Kurdish PKK closer together with the PKK a proxy of Moscow and, in response, leading to a Pan-Turkic nationalist reaction as well covert backing for Turkic and Chechen jihadists in order to make problems for Putin again in Southern Russia.

The ultimate knock on effect of that would be the spread of radicalised jihadists and blowback risk  deep into Germany in continuity with the rising threats that have come from the Caucasus and Central Asia in the last decade and detailed by Guido Steinberg in German Jihad : The Internationalisation of Islamist Terrorism.

With huge unchecked numbers of migrants from Syria arriving through Turkey, some 1.1 million to date, that threat could increase with the strains put on German society should a Chinese financial or Saudi collapse-or both-crash trigger off a global economic crisis and slump with resulting mass unemployment.

Erdogan's lurch towards greater authoritarianism and militarism at home and abroad certainly would not be challenged by the EU or Germany because he could threaten to allow further numbers of migrants to travel west if Turkish interests are ignored over Syria in favour of Russia in the haste to finish off ISIS.

The migrant crisis is a handy means to extract money from the EU and as a bargaining lever both in 2016 and into the future as Central Europe gains up to a million mostly Muslims that would look to Turkey as a guarantor of their interests and religion in both Europe and Turkey, So the neo-Ottoman policy may be pursued by other means.

Turkey's policy has been consistently to big up the Kurdish PKK threat and effectively use ISIS as a check on them in Syria, something that continues to hold back the decisive possibility of destroying the Caliphate and which is clearly the source of the jihadist terror threat to the 'near' and 'far' enemies abroad

Germany may wish to cooperate with Turkey and it and the EU has no choice. But there is little possibility of defeating ISIS while Turkey continues to hope it could use Sunni jihadists as pieces on the regional chessboard in not only Syria but in the Caucasus region and eastwards in Xinjiang in China too.

 It is going to be incredibly difficult to end the war in Syria without persuading Erdogan to see sense. The Kurdish threat was not so great as ISIS will become now that it has shown belatedly that it needs to start sealing its borders with Syria and so incurring the end to ISIS's stand off with Ankara hitherto ( previously Kurds were targeted )

What certainly needs to happen-and has partly already occured and will happen anyway-is for European states to start restoring their border controls and ending the Schengen Agreement. Merkel is clearly deluded in this respect in believing continued mass migration and free movement across borders could coexist.

As John Gray put it,
'....uncontrolled immigration on the scale that has been reached in the past year cannot avoid posing security risks in conditions that ­approximate those of war. If Isis militants form only a tenth of 1 per cent of the ­million or so migrants who have entered Europe to date, a thousand or more new risks have been created. When it is recalled that the Isis militants who have returned from Syria to Britain are believed to number in the hundreds, the danger is clear enough. A major terrorist threat can be created by very few people.'

Argentina vs Britain and Corbyn vs Cameron: The Falklands and Oil.

The reason Argentina has become concerned with staking out claims to share sovereignty over the Falklands is the prospect of Britain developing the great oil wealth that lies offshore. Before the discovery of oil in 2010 and after the military defeat of 1982, Argentina was simply was not as interested in Las Malvinas

Corbyn's calls for a 'power sharing deal' with Argentina rests on a rather dubious comparison between Northern Ireland and the Falklands. Northern ireland broadly had two historic communities, one Catholic Irish and stressing its Irish identity and the other Protestant and 'Ulster', emphasising its British identity.

There is no comparison as regards the population of the Falklands where all its inhabitants are British and overwhelmingly voted to remain attached to Britain. If self determination means anything, then the message of the referendum in 2013 could not be clearer, in which case the question is one of power politics.

It could be that Corbyn supports self determination only when those claims are being made against 'Imperialist' and 'colonialist' powers; Palestinian claims are against Israel and, by extension, the US and 'the West' and so politically correct. The Falklanders are for Imperial power and, therefore, politically incorrect.

But Corbyn tends to look favourably with romantic zeal towards Latin American radical nationalism, whether Hugo Chavez's socialist populism in Venezuela or Cristine de Kirchner's attempts to wrest control over Argentina's economy and resources by renationalising the YPF out of the hands of Spain's Repsol.

Between 2012 and her electoral defeat in November 2015, President Kirchner attempted to resort to assertive nationalism, in the tradition of Peron, to boost her electoral fortunes and derive greater benefit from its shale oil reserves, as well as threatening to sue British oil companies exploring for off the Falklands.

It appears odd Corbyn is chose in late 2015 to express solidarity with the outgoing government and his idea of a 'power sharing deal', not least as the incoming President Macri has made plain he wants sovereignty disputes over territorial seas to be solved 'peacefully' through tactful diplomacy.

That was quite the reverse of Kirchner's accusations of 'British colonialism' and the Falkland islanders being nothing more than 'squatters', the implication being that they could at a future stage be removed from Argentinian property and expelled. That loathing was returned by denunciation of the 'Botox Queen'.

It would appear Kirchner's Justicialist Party value Corbyn as an asset given his other call for 'reasonable accomodation' as regards the Falklands. The Argentinian ambassador to London was quick to hail Corbyn as 'one of ours',a phrase that curiously sounds like Margaret Thatcher's 'one of us'

Of course, Thatcher's war in 1982 against the Argentine military junta's invasion and occupation was followed by he comments that the enemy without had been defeated and that with the hard left opposing her-including Jeremy Corbyn MP elected in 1983-it was time to take on 'the enemy within'.

Corbyn's comments could be portrayed as part of a determination to cosy up with populist and national forces opposed to Britain and the West's in Latin America now that President Macri has declared he wants a more global 'investor friendly' Argentina and struck a deal with US energy firms to develop its shale oil.

In practice, there should be no reason why Britain and Argentina could not cooperate the exploit the oil wealth in the region given that BP has previously been courted as a potential partner in developing the shale oil reserves. Corbyn seems to have assumed there is an actual ongoing conflict over the Falklands.

It could be Corbyn is wants shared sovereignty in place of the unilateral assertion of the Falklanders and Britain's right to develop all offshore oil reserves. That would make sense in the context of PM Cameron's staunch claim at Davos on January 21 2016 that there would be absolutely no negotiation on sovereignty.

Corbyn did not mention oil and neither did Cameron, though this is the real issue at stake, part of a New Global Great Game, what Michael Klare calls The Race for What's Left and a potential trigger for future resource wars as the Great Powers increasingly vie over access to energy and control over energy flows.

Given depleting gas reserves in the North Sea since 1999, the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, as a result of the contest between the West and Russia its taking of Crimean oil reserves, and the continued stalemate in Syria, control over Falkland reserves offers Britain the possibility of future energy security.
As Ministry of Defence made clear,
"By 2029 there is expected to be a considerable increase in demand for energy. In particular gas will be of increasing importance as states struggle to maintain energy supplies, Many boundary disputes, such as those in the Arctic, Gulf of Guinea and the South Atlantic will become inextricably linked to the securing of energy supplies."
It also offers the possibility of conflict if mishandled. However, that appeared to be a far more likely possibility under a government such as Kirchner's. Even so, the press release of Corbyn's talks with Alicia Castro on the day Hilary Benn, his rival as Shadow Foreign Secretary, declared his support for the Falklanders is curious,

Benn's interview in the Sunday Telegraph came just three days after Cameron declared at Davos that there would be no renegotiation of the sovereign status of the Falkland Islands and without Corbyn even having been asked for his own position in the light of the renewed press attention on his talks with the embassy.

Whatever is thought about Corbyn's position, it does seem there is an attempt to portray him as a 'national security threat' for challenging various shibboleths of British foreign policy that date back to the 1980s from the Falkland Islands to the supposed continuity in 2016 with the Cold War struggles against Russia.

Thursday 7 January 2016

Britain and the Saudi-Yemen War.

The disappearance of the Parliamentary watchdog on arms sales abroad is not so mysterious when it is considered that the Saudi military intervention in Yemen started in March 2015. There is no reason why government would want any sort of examination of the use of British made weapons in indiscrimate bombings.
The hope is that the 'forgotten war' would remain forgotten because aligning with Saudi Arabia against Houthi militias, backed by Iran, is considered a major geostrategic imperative required to check Iranian influence. It is part of the wider proxy war being played out across the region, most obviously in Syria.
Supposed realpolitik, therefore, trumps any humanitarian considerations the British government have. Britain is involved in milirarily assisting the Saudi war effort along with the US as a matter of intentional policy decisions based on the claim, as made by Phillip Hammond, that the Saudi War in Yemen is 'legitimate'.
The idea that humanitarian and military objectives are at odds presupposes that is a problem for Cameron's government but it is not. Certainly it would like to preserve its image as force for moral good in the world but it tends to think that this always dovetails perfectly with the power interests it backs.
The US directly supports Saudi Arabia's war.Britain supports the US to retain prestige as a Global Player that the Gulf States want to work with as a partner. Focusing on the narrow issue of whether war crimes have been committed, as important as that is, ignores the fact Saudi Arabia does as it pleases.
Saudi Arabia is regional hegemon and leader of a coalition of Gulf states blitzing Yemen. It includes Bahrain where Britain started work on the Mina Salman Port on October 31st 2015. Hammond said 'The presence of the Royal Navy in Bahrain is guaranteed into the future, ensuring Britain’s sustained presence east of Suez.'
How the Saudi led war contributes to 'regional stability' is not clear but the obvious fact is that it does not and it has little basis in legality according to international law experts. The war to reinstall Hadi at his request depends on his acceptance as the legitimate leader but this is just claim not a fact.
As Madawi Al-Rasheed claims 'The Saudi war on Yemen is not an inevitable war of self-defense forced on the leadership by Houthi expansion inside Saudi Arabia and undermining Saudi national security. Instead, it was a pre-emptive strike to inaugurate an aggressive Saudi regional foreign policy.'
The British government can hardly recognise that Saudi Arabia is committing war crimes with British made jets because it is directly complicit in having created-and in continuously maintaining-the Saudi war machine in 2015. FO legal advisers are claiming Britain could be tried for war crimes
Apart from that, the Saudi War is unwinnable and helping AQAP and ISIS to gain ground just as the proxy war in Syria has. The danger is that, along with disgruntled Shia within Saudi Arabia itself, jihadi violence will blowback as the war drains further the ability of the Al Saud monarchy to buy off discontent.
The collapse in the oil price has reduced oil revenue earnings drastically. But, even more bizarrely and dangerously, Saudi Arabia has actuallyACTIVELY aligned with AQAP as a means to roll back the Houthis despite the US having fought its drone war with the jihadists since the group was created in 2009.
Hammond made plain that British involvement in air strikes in Syria allowed Saudi Arabia to concentrate on the 'legitimate' Yemen War. It is hard to see how Britain's air strikes on ISIS are going to defeat global terrorism when its ally was ready to aid them in Yemen ready for ISIS to step in to take over.

Cold War Legacy: Why the US and Britain are standing by Saudi Arabia.

The US and Britain want to achieve preserving their hegemony in the Greater Middle East against that of rival powers, though it is misleading to claim that the Gulf powers are 'vassal states' ( Chomsky ). The truth is worse than that as it the Gulf states that have turned Britain into their servant.
Essentially, it is about preserving interests, the profits from the colossal arms trade, which Britain leads the world in with Saudi Arabia, and preference as an investment destination for Saudi petromoney. It is Britain that is dependent on Saudi Arabia rather than vice versa.
Fear of Saudi collapse is leading Britain and the US to demonstrate all the more that they are a loyal ally, especially after the nuclear deal with Iran which was about bringing Tehran in from the cold as a way to involve it in solving Syria as well as shoring up Shi'ite dominated Iraq.
The intractable problem is that while the US and Britain effectively help back internal repression in Saudi Arabia, the more likely it would increase resentment against the Saudi monarchy and the West. It will hasten too the emerging Sunni-Shi'ite clash that is developing across the region.
Western foreign policy has failed as has the old Cold War alliance system, which reached its nadir of 'effectiveness' in the 1980s with the Gulf States backing the mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the USSR and Saddam Hussein against what was then a revolutionary Islamist Iran.
The problem is that Iraq no longer acts as a 'balancing power' between Iran and Saudi Arabia as a consequence of the Bush's and Blair's invasion of 2003 and the fragmentation of the state into Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni territories. Iran is central to maintaining the Baghdad government.
The US and Britain has not quite got used to the idea, as remains clear with the disastrous policy towards Syria of demanding 'Assad must go', that it does not have the means to single-handedly determine events in the Greater Middle East along with Saudi Arabia.
On the contrary, the attempt to try and balance Iran's growing influence by aligning firmly with Saudi Arabia's policy elsewhere, as is the case on Syria and Yemen, is helping to ratchet up the proxy war and cause the chaos that ISIS has exploited
From one perspective, US and British foreign policy has helped replace the AQ threat with a worse one. From another, it could be considered that the war on ISIS has positive spin off benefits in testing out and developing the military technology, especially drones, and in selling more arms.
Yet, from another viewpoint, it makes no sense at all to be directly supporting a Saudi state that has openly backed AQ given that it is the terrorist atrocity of 9/11 that stimulated what was once called the 'war on terror' and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The idea the US and Britain have leverage over Riyadh is increasingly untenable. Cameron claimed the Saudis give him information which 'keeps us safe' from terrorism. Yet whatever truth there is in that ( which is highly questionable ), the source of global jihad ultimately emanates from Saudi Arabia.
Unlike during the Cold War, where these sorts of geopolitical power games and arms deals could be carried out at great distance from the West, the contribution these failed foreign policies are making towards anarchy and chaos will almost certainly blow back towards Europe and the US.

Saturday 2 January 2016

Donald Trump and the Terrorist Threat.

'The footage of Trump appeared between two clips of militant leader Anwar al-Awlaki, killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011, saying Muslims in the United States would face a choice between leaving for Islamic countries or staying at home to fight the West.'
Donald Trump's comments in the the Republican Presidential candidate race about stopping Muslims entering the US until the threat posed had been checked and 'understood' seem to have been seized upon by those who think that it makes for Somalia's jihadi al-Shabaab militants propaganda more effective.

What is strange about such claims is the assumption that it is Trump's uttered statements that apparently could lead Muslims within the US and the wider world towards anti-Western hatred. Yet it is unclear whether Trump's demagoguery stands out that much as something that could really radicalise.

After all, it is drone strikes are said to have played a role in recruiting for Al Qaida in Yemen as has the invasion and chaos created by the Saudi invasion and war with the HouthisContinually since 2001, politicians in the US and Britain have warned that military campaigns in Muslim lands are about 'keeping us safe here'.

What Trump has fastened on to is the idea that no matter what the US does abroad, Americans have not been safe from Islamist terrorism because 'we don't know who we are letting in'. Yet statistically most of the killing in US domestic 'terror' attacks have been committed by fanatics with guns who are not Islamists.
As the New York Times reported,
'Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.'
However, since 2001, the media image and presentation of terrorism as a threat has been something that emerges from out of 'the Muslim World' and which necessitates a military response. That was what 'the war on terror' was about, the all embracing pretext to commit to policies not strictly about anti-terrorism.

For the US is still in Afghanistan, but few seem to know why and 'public diplomacy' does not even invoke the terror threat any more. In fact the media has moved on to Syria and Iraq because of ISIS, the war on which is clearly about defeating a jihadi group that threatens and commits regional and global terrorism.

Yet to big up the case for military intervention, ISIS is termed an 'existential threat' to the West by politicians such as Cameron. When that sort of language is used, it is hardly surprising that when there evidence that ISIS operatives have been able to cross porous borders from Syria into the EU that there is alarm.

Obama himself, very sensibly, appears to have rejected the sort of language that Cameron was using as late as July 2015 about ISIL posing an 'existential threat'. Other repeated soudbites inherited from the George Bush and Tony Blair era that persist into the present include 'generational struggle'.

'Existential threat' was dropped by Obama in December 2015 because the threat level became so obvious in the course of that year.The need today is to play down the threat now that it has grown in order to avert a counter-productive level of fear that is manifesting itself across Europe and the US

While Trump is hardly helping America's image, he is not really so much worse than the other Republican candidates such as Ted Cruz who said "We will carpet bomb [ISIS] into oblivion. I don't know if sand can glow in the dark, but we're going to find out". Carpet bombing would of course mean mass civilian casualties.

Politicians in the West seem to put too much of an emphasis on 'public diplomacy'. Even if Republican rants hardly help and make a bad situation worse, the real driving force behind ISIS style jihadi-terrorism remains Saudi Arabian and Gulf State funding and the continued proxy war these allies have with Russia and Iran. 

There is no sign yet that the Western powers are prepared to cut a deal with Russia to impose a peace on Syria to end the proxy war and so create then a Syrian force capable of retaking the lands annexed by the Caliphate. These momentous decisions-or lack of them-are far more important than Trump's poses.

The more Syria continues to collapse into barbarity and complete chaos as consequence, the more the primarily Sunni migrants will head through Turkey towards the EU and, in conjunction with ISIS plans to exploit that, the greater the threat of terrorism being associated with weakly enforced borders will be.

It is that terror threat being realised in waves of jihadist terror atrocities, such as have been visited upon Iraq and Syria blowing back into the West, that could stimulate a far right reaction and the increased polarisation in European societies that ISIS is hungering to exploit as part of its apocalyptic war.

Friday 1 January 2016

David Cameron's New Year Message: Language, PR Politics and The Denial of Reality.

“When our national security is threatened by a seething hatred of the West, one that turns people against their country and can even turn them into murderous extremists, I want us to be very clear: you will not defeat us.
And we will not just confront the violence and the terror; we will take on their underlying poisonous narrative of grievance and resentment. We will come down hard on those who create the conditions for that narrative to flourish."
Prime Minister Cameron gave Christmas and New Year speeches to outline fairytales. As with any 'speech' by David Cameron, the emphasis is on the politically correct framing devices and use of words to recreate a fictional version of reality that would be absorbed passively in the age of the consumer.

A Cameron 'speech' has to be 'conservative' enough to allay fears of the real threats of ISIS terrorism by 'standing tall', remaining vigilant and 'tough' and 'taking the fight to them' through bombing the Caliphate in Syria. It has to be 'progressive' in promising an end to evil by taking on the 'root causes'

Any attempt to deal with 'the root causes' of evil 'extremism' is a radical progressive stance inherited from Tony Blair. The 'stance' and 'speeches' are infused with the sort of messianic certitude favoured by neoconservatives in the US with its portrayal of dark forces within that shall be vanquished by wars on evil.

Yet the idea that terrorism could be defeated by 'confronting a narrative' is ludicrous. For 'mainstream' politics no longer takes on ideas in the public arena but instead attempts to find acceptable public formats for reshaping perceptions through language from stilted phrases to emitting the right buzzwords.

There are a number of reasons why PR politics is futile. Stock phrases such as 'Islam is a religion of peace' are intended to assuage Muslims but only end up annoying others who can see quite plainly that, even aside from ISIS, that Islam must have 'something to do' with 'religiously inspired' violence.

Of course, ISIS does not represent Islam in its purest form. Yet its ideology and dogmas, its cultural frames of reference and language, from caliphate to kufr and jihad, all hail from a politicised interpretation of the Qu'ran and aspects of Islamic theology that ultimately stem from the Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia.

It is the oil rich kingdom that has bankrolled madrasas and jihadists across the Middle East and wider world and helped create ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The violence of the Caliphate is in 2015 blowing back westwards and its power and influence derive from its uses to regional powers that are Britain's allies.

If Cameron were to 'come down hard on those who create the conditions for that narrative to flourish' he would start with Riyadh. But there is evidence some Tory politicians have a close relationship with Saudi Arab donors and successive governments have not wanted to risk losing lucrative investments and arms deals.

So the promotion of Wahhabi teachings in Britain is considered less important than a report on the Muslim Brotherhood done to assess its threat of 'extremism'. As has become obvious in Syria, 'extremism' is a politically convenient word meaning jihadists who threaten British interests. 'Moderates' do not.

The danger with Cameron and the political class play acting with words and labels like this is that it creates a fantasy version of reality. This makes it easier to persist in folly, such as entering the war in Syria without a strategy ( other than making absurd claims about 70,000 "moderate rebels" waiting to storm Raqqa ).

The other more evident danger is that, instead of the jihadi-Islamist 'narrative' actually being 'challenged' from a standpoint of logic and reason, the hypocrisy of the British government stimulates ever greater cynicism among those claiming that the 'real threat' is actually the government 'narrative'.

This is as true whether from the populist right ( 'Islam is the problem' ) or Islamists ( 'real Islam is the solution' ) and so the potential for spiralling paranoia and mutual accusation intensifies rather than diminishes because reality is ever more boiled down into slogans and soundbites that prevent intelligent thought.

Hence Cameron's government gets more deeply drawn into contorted and clumsy attempts to police opinion and redefine what is 'extreme' and what is 'moderate' rather than commit to practical policies and the open political debate that would preserve a free society from the grip of the emerging security state.

The 'root causes' of terrorism come less from 'poisonous narratives' but from the practical empowerment of jihadi groups through Saudi Arab financing. This allows the material spread of their power in the real world and allows those tapping in to the ideas they promulgate to believe that in joining them the world can be changed.

The causes of radical jihadism are ultimately political and interconnected with the appeal of 'political religion' for those who can plainly see that Muslims across the Middle East are suffering, in part, because of Western foreign policies, no matter how these impacts are said to be unintended consequences.

Even if ISIS is defeated in Syria and Iraq, the political instability and violence that drives the sort of 'narrative' based on conspiracy theories and hatred of sinister Western and collusion with 'Zionist elites' is going to remain, not least as long as Saudi Arabia keeps relentlessly bankrolling and promoting these ideas.

It is very difficult to prate about promoting 'our values' when the reality is the British government firmly aligns with the biggest state sponsor of jihadist terrorism in the world which spends billions on supporting both terrorists and dictators such as Sisi in Egypt and fomenting proxy wars from Libya to Syria and Yemen.

The persistence in pursuing foreign policies that over time promote state collapse and civil war, despite intentions to the contrary, only generates larger number of those who associate the liberation of their own lands with the destruction of the 'imperialist' forces that have have create tyranny and oppression.

The reality is that if Britain, along with other western EU states, is going to be open to mass migration from those lands destabilised as a consequence partly of its foreign policy, it is going to invariably face resistance from within Muslim diapora communities by those who value religious identity over the nation.