Manchester Attack: The Domestic Political Response in Britain is both Infantile and Inept

'Corbyn is also battling against accusations...of blaming the west for terrorist atrocities – including from May herself'.-The Guardian.

The unpalatable truth is that both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn both lead two useless political parties: both leaders are incompetent and weak on protecting Britain from jihadi Islamist terrorism. Neither of them can even bring themselves to actually utter the name the threat as jihadi Islamist terrorism.

Corbyn and Abbott represent the part of the British left who refuse to connect terrorism with the jihadi ideology for reasons of affirming their pathetic and pious multicultural and 'political correct' orthodoxies. They are joined in this by most of the PLP which failed to connect the Manchester Attack with Islamist militancy.

But Corbyn, is at least, honest enough to link terror to foreign policy. The problem is that he failed in his Friday speech to mention by name the states Britain is allied with and that promote and bankroll jihadi ideology and militias from Libya to Syria. These are the Sunni Gulf States, in particular Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The British "conservative" right, on the other hand, places grubby commercial and corrupt arms deals interests before standing up to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States. May was Home Secretary when MI5 was removing control orders from known Islamists to go and fight in Libya in order to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi.

Instead of having a proper national debate about the causes of jihadi Islamist terrorism, both parties refuse even to name it. There is a theatre of the absurd in which Corbyn is accused for 'justifying' terrorism for connecting it to a failed 'war on terror' that was officially dropped in 2009-two years before the Libyan War.

Corbyn mentioned a non-existent policy to position himself as 'right' on terrorism being made worse by Britain's foreign policy of military intervention having created ungoverned space in Libya, regions where Islamists just as Salman Abedi, and other British-Libyans sent there to fight, could learn their jihadi ideas and skills.

Broadly speaking, Corbyn is right. The shrill and often phoney denunciations of Corbyn for raising the connection between foreign policy and domestic terrorism prove, as Patrick Cockburn argued in The Independent yesterday, are attempts at deflecting attention away from their own clear failings as regards the Libya conflict.

The Conservative response to Jeremy Corbyn’s common sense statement that there is an obvious link between a British foreign policy that has sought regime change in Iraq, Syria and Libya and the empowerment of al-Qaeda and Isis in these places has been dismissive and demagogic.

However, the Labour Party voted for the Libya military intervention and, apart from Corbyn, barely have any moral high ground. Yet the StWC Corbyn chaired has, in the past, rationalised the jihadi terrorist threats as merely a reflex reaction to an "Imperialist" Foreign policy as opposed to one in which Qatar or the Saudis called the shots.

Corbyn does not actually have much more of a sophisticated understanding of Middle Eastern religion and geopolitics than any of the rest of the political elite at Westminster. He's just seen as wise compared to the others by simply having been against those wars on the general grounds they made terror 'worse'.

Given the mediocre quality of Corbyn's political rivals it is easy to see how he stands out as a 'man of integrity'. The Libyan intervention demonstrated Britain was led by incompetent buffoons who ignored the evidence that the rebel militias the RAF were supporting in Libyan cities on the ground were dominated by jihadists.

Corbyn could turn the heat back on the Conservatives if he called for a public enquiry into the Libyan War similar to the Chilcot Report. It would be entirely justified by the scandalous facts of the complicity of the British state in sending Islamists to Libya to fight a war whose outcome was unknown and losing track of them.

Unfortunately, Corbyn is compromised by the PLP, which would not want the boat rocked as regards Britain's role as client state of the Gulf Powers and which is deeply tied to Atlanticist think tanks and strategic ideologies of 'democracy promotion' through aligning with them. Hence Andy Burnham's waffle about 'extremism' too.

Burnham Reaffirms the Government Position and 'Nothing to do with Islam' Line.

“I have a different view to Jeremy on this.It (radical Islam) has used things to add to its cause. But it was there, we didn’t create it. [There's] a tendency to blame ourselves for everything sometimes, and I don’t think we should.

“We've got to deal with what this is – a twisted ideology that has no connection to being representative of the Muslim religion. The Muslim faith is a peaceful religion, and we've got to deal with it on that basis. 

“We've got to deal with what this is – a twisted ideology that has no connection to being representative of the Muslim religion. The Muslim faith is a peaceful religion, and we've got to deal with it on that basis.

The Mayor Of Manchester, who clearly has wanted to use his power base up there to distance himself from Corbyn down in London, has been reduced to uttering the usual platitudes and banalities about 'the Manchester Spirit' and running in a marathon to defy the jihadists. Burnham claimed, reaffirming both government propaganda.

In actual fact, Britain did help create it when it and the US, aligned with Saudi Arabia, backed the mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. This and the military intervention to remove Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait in 1990s led the 'Afghan Arabs' in Bin Laden's group to then plot targeting the West.

Even without the First Gulf War, the backing and support given to the mujahedeen provided a failed state in Afghanistan that was replicated with the Libya military Intervention that Burnham, of course, fully supported the government in pursuing. Burnham failed, as with the others, to hold the Cameron government to account.

As the Middle Eastern historian George Joffe has argued, there is no proof Gaddafi planned to massacre the citizens of Benghazi. This was largely used from the outset as a pretext for a British and French intervention that required 'regime change', an aim denied when the use of air power was advocated by Prime Minister Cameron.

Despite the fact the suicide bomber was the son of a father involved in the Libyan Islamic Fighting group, and both given asylum in Britain and his organisation used in a plot by MI6 to assassinate Gaddafi in 1996, Burnham is in denial at the links between the jihadi network and a specific strand of intolerant Wahhabi Islam present in Manchester.

Burnham reaffirms a tissue of clichés when he demands 'We've got to deal with what this is – a twisted ideology that has no connection to being representative of the Muslim religion. The Muslim faith is a peaceful religion, and we've got to deal with it on that basis.". This is simply incorrect. Islam is not entirely a peaceful religion.

This is the problem because despite all the affirmations of orthodoxy, enough people in Britain know that jihadi suicide bombing has everything to do with the Wahhabi and Salafi variant spread across the globe by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The silence on that amount to becoming a lie that people see as such and will revolt against.

By saying things that are quite transparently untrue, Burnham actually plays directly into the hands of those on the nationalist right that there is a conspiracy to deny Britain is being 'Islamised' or that the elites are too 'politically correct' to see the threat of Islam and its effects through mass immigration, a claim made by pop singer Morrissey.