Islamic State: Britain and the Call of the New Modern Caliphate

The savagery of Islamic State is plain for all to see when broadcast across the globe via Youtube, social media sites and reportage such as that on Vice News. The gory spectacle of online decapitations, mass executions and enemy corpses strewn on pavements of Raqqa have lead the Caliphate to be called 'medieval'.

The idea IS is a medieval throwback is convenient in trying to compare it with the values of the civilised world and to portray it as irreparably 'other'. IS, from such a perspective, consists of pyschopaths looking for an excuse for gloating cruelty or else it is the real face of purest Islam just as it was back in the seventh century.

Politicians in the West such as Britain's Prime Minister Cameron, concerned at the prospect of battle hardened jihadists returning from Syria to plot terror attacks, have tended to downplay the nature of the 'so-called Caliphate'. They refuse to call is 'Islamic State' ( IS ) and President Obama refers to it merely as  'ISIL'.

By speaking of the need to 'degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL' on the 13th anniversary of Al Qaida's 9/11 attacks on New York, Obama has made it clear he refused to recognise it as an Islamic State. ISIL sounds rather more like an acronym for a deadly virus as opposed to ISIS which sounds rather less menacing.

Referring to Islamic State as ISIL makes it appear a lethal threat to the security of the region without being a legitimate Islamic State and thereby colluding with the view of itself as the direct successor to Muhammad's seventh century Arabian state; this is precisely what the self-styled Caliph al-Baghdadi would want.

However, when Britain's Nick Clegg refers to Islamic State “this medieval and vile movement” he was indicating such atrocities belong firmly in the Dark Ages. In fact, Islamic State both in ideology, tactics and propaganda belongs firmly in the modern world for a number of reasons politicians would prefer not to admit.

One reason is Islamic State is a consequence of the support and backing given to radicalised jihadists by Britain and America's Gulf allies in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Qatar, in particular, supported the al-Nusra brigades which, among many other jihadist groups, had members splinter off and joing ISIS throughout 2013-2014

Islamic State is a classic example of 'blowback'. It was only in April 2014 when ISIS became a threat to those who had backed Sunni jihadists in a proxy war against Assad's Alawite dominated regime, Hizbollah and its Iranian backers that Turkey, Qatar's main regional ally and NATO member, put al Nusra on the terrorist list.

Two years before Islamic State became Cameron called a 'deeper and graver threat than we have ever known', British jihadists were known to be flying into Turkey to cross the border to fight against Assad. Nothing was done as it is in September 2014 to fortify the borders because jihadi travellers were fighting the right enemy.

There is a history of MI6 andi the CIA having allowed jihadists from Britiain to go to Afghanistan and to fight in Bosnia and Kosovo so that they could be monitored and later 'turned' and deployed as intelligence assets that could provide information and act as informers on domestic Islamist groups operating within Britain.

A dark and shadowy power game has gone on with British jihadi-Islamists, one exploited by groups such as CagePrisoners, a front for Islamist agitation and anti-Western propaganda which has been able to exploit the very real fact of the CIA having imprisoned thousands of western Islamists and sympathisers without charge

A jihadi-Islamist sympathiser, Moazzam Begg, founded Cageprisoners after having been incarcerated in Bagram in Afganistan following his arrest in Islamabad in 2002 . He was subequently held in Guantanamo Bay until 2005 when he was 'rendered ' as part of America and Britain's so-called 'global war on terror'.

After having played on his role as a victim of Britain's foreign policy and been courted as a cause celebre on his return by the Respect Party and the Stop the War Coalition, Begg was re-arrested in March 2014 and charged with terrorism offences in July connected to his alleged role in training at a Syrian terrorist camp.

The flavour of Cageprisoner's propaganda could be seen in one advertised event scheduled for the 20th September 2014 entitled 'Is it a Crime to Care ? Syria-Gaza, Criminalisation of Islam'. The agenda is one of building up the image of a global Muslim community persecuted the better to propagate the ideology.

By blending a defence of jihadi-Islamist ideology with humanitarian missions to the Greater Middle East, a dark mirror is held up to British foreign policy and the contradictions between its stated policy of humanitarian intervention in Afghanistan to Iraq when compared to Britain's 'support' for Israel over Gaza.

Through projecting visceral aggression on to the enemy, which is the British state and society, the propaganda narrative is one that suggests that Islamist resistance in the Middle East and in Israel is apiece with the need to resist a British state which is pursuing a global war on the Muslim umma. Hence,

'..the attacks on Islamic concepts of war, political governance and the unity of Muslim lands are nothing new, they have now increased on an unprecedented scale in the wake of the rise of ISIS and its declaration of a Caliphate. The matter is not about supporting or opposing the version of a Caliphate as demonstrated by ISIS but rather the criminalisation of Islamic political thought and ideology.

The concepts of jihad, shariah and khilafah are not the exclusive possession of ISIS but core Islamic doctrines subscribed to by almost one third of the world's population. It is telling that the government's treatment of ISIS is similar to its treatment of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb-ut Tahrir, and the Taliban, despite the enormous differences of belief and methodology between the groups.'

Islamism is not Islam and there are, of course, various trends within Islamism : ISIS is at the violent and bloody end of this political spectrum. But British Islamists, such as Jamal Harwood, head of Hizb-ut-Tahrir and Anas Altikriti of the MAB, hold to the idea that revolutionary Islamism is the one true political Islam.



The grim irony is that many British Islamist movements, front organisations and propaganda outfits such as the British Muslim Initiative are backed and bankrolled by Britain's foremost Middle Eastern ally in the Syrian conflict and commercial trading partner in the form of its Gulf partner Qatar.

The MAB is essentially an British version of the Muslim Brotherhood which Qatar and NATO member Turkey backed against Iran and Hizbollah with the full support of Britain, the US and France through such groups as the Friends of Syria created in 2012 by Nicolas Sarkozy, the then French President.

Qatar was prepared to back the most ruthless Sunni militants and jihadists in Syria and the most stalwart defender of Qatar has been the the British government. In April 2014, Philip Hammond was in Doha when he announced locating a British military base in the gas rich emirate and arms deals worth QR230.

The Muslim Brotherhood, of course, is a relatively 'moderate' Sunni militant group backed by Qatar in Egypt and in Syria. This is one reason Britain and the US was prepared to work with it and  identify with Qatar's regional strategy to back it until the Egyptian coup in 2013 and the emergence of Islamic State in Syria.

It is within this context that David Cameron in March 2014 ordered an enquiry into whether the Muslim Brotherhood should be branded a terrorist organisation. The reason, given that the group had been effectively given cautious backing in 2012, was the fear of Britain being caught up in any blowback from Egypt.

Despite the idea that the 9/11 Al Qaida attacks on New York 'changed everything', Britain continued being a haven for Islamist malcontents or 'Londonistan' and no terrorist charges were ever brought against those who had been advocating it such as Abu Hamza, who was extradited to the US, Omar Bakri and Abu Qatada.

London remains in 2014 a place where Islamist exiles from the Muslim Brotherhood are allowed to settle and act as influential lobbyists with a media apparatus supported by Qatar because of the scale of billions of pounds worth of gas wealth being invested in the Stock Market, prime real estate and buying influence.

Any decision to put the Muslim Brotherhood on the terrorist list would be a purely political decision based on realpolitik considerations and the need to please Britain's other regional allies such as Saudi Arabia and , of course, Israel which has its own influential lobby groups and detests Qatar for backing Hamas in Gaza.

It is in response to that threat that Anas Altikriti is ramping up the messianic propaganda offensive against the British State for being complicit in the oppression of Muslims both within Syria and Gaza and being "Islamophobic" in its attempt to criminalise legitimate Muslim aspirations for a Islamist political order.

In such circumstances, there is a danger of ever greater "radicalisation" within Britain as the Islamist emphasis upon the Caliphate, jihad and the imposition of sharia law, portrayed by Cageprisoners as "not the exclusive property of ISIS", could catch on as potent symbols of Muslim unity against 'western imperialism'.

After all, a prime component of IS propaganda is to provoke the west and grab media attention. Beheading journalists is a tactic to draw attention so that fellow jihadi travellers in the Middle East and the Britain can exploit the outrage to suggest these killings are only in revenge for the 'greater slaughter' of Western policies.

Such propaganda has been the consistent line from those ranged against the British government and prepared to rationalise terrorism to a point just short of justifying it ever since 9/11 when the 'war on terror' was first launched and groups such as the grotesquely named Stop the War Coalition were set up.

Though the StWC was created by disgruntled far leftist agitators indulging in toy town revolutionary politics as well as political has-beens from the 1980s dismayed by the collapse of British Communism and the Soviet Union in 1991, it rapidly became dominated by Islamist fronts such as the MAB.

What united the British hard left and Islamists was common opposition to the British state, the perceived global dominance of American Imperialism and the ideology which presented it and Israel as the two main determining reasons why the Greater Middle East was embroiled in conflict and wars.

As a consequence to this supposed 'anti-war' activism in Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair and hack propagandists such as Denis MacShane started to step up the the rhetoric about Britain and 'the west' being menaced by an alignment of dictators such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Islamist terrorists.

Blair's manner of 'framing his response' to events in the Greater Middle East in the run up to the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 ended up giving credence to the idea popular among opponents of the war that the US and Britain were engaged in a long 'civilisational war' with Islamism at home and abroad.

Of course, Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator whose overthrow led to chaos. The installing of a democracy by 2005 only widened and deepened Iraq's pre-existing sectarian tensions and led to an open warfare that had not abated by 2014 when ISIS stormed in from Syria and led a Sunni Arab insurgency.

What Blair's government did was to confirm the propaganda narrative of jihadi-Islamists that Britain's foreign policy was about destabilising and dividing and ruling oil rich lands for the exclusive benefit of its corporations and decadent western consumers whose repellent materialistic lifestyles were part of the problem.

The ideology of Hizb-ut-Tahrir and other Islamists identifying with a transnational Islamic State was that the false decadent existence of the westerner was inauthentic. The hypocrite Blair embodied this state and society which exploited Muslim disunity just in order to grab what was really Muslim people's oil.

Propaganda such as this had long found a receptive audience in the Middle East. That it found support in Britain was not surprising as it was the case bit forward by radical leftists who saw the Iraq War as an invasion to seize control of Iraq's oil and, in truth, that was an important reason behind it.

Radical Islamist and their leftist allies in the Stop the War Coalition were able to frame the 'war on terror' narrative in Britain as a 'war of terror' in which the victims were Muslims irrespective of Blair's proclaimed belief that the invasion of Iraq was a war of liberation from a dictator who murdered Muslims.

The irony is that both radical Islamists and pro-liberation radicals in Britain agreed that Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator: they were only at odds because Islamists regarded the western imperialists as the 'root cause' in creating the dictatorship and backing it in the first place whereas Blair saw it as an outgrowth of pure evil.

Blair saw Baathist dictatorships and Islamism as a consequence of a evil totalitarian ideology while Islamists saw Saddam Hussein wholly as a CIA backed stooge who had done the West's bidding in containing Iran and was kept in power after the First Gulf War of 1991 to protect other tyrannies such as Saudi Arabia.

The stated purpose of Blair's 'ethical foreign policy' in using British forces to protect civilians from brutal regimes by assisting in removing them. It was to make a break with previous Cold war realpolitik and the policies that had led to the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s by paramilitary Serb militias.

Contrary to improving Britain's standing in the so-called 'Muslim World', Blair's decision to join in with the US in Iraq was portrayed in 'anti-war' propaganda as a war on Muslims for oil just as nothing had been done to save Bosnian Muslims because there was no oil in the former Yugoslavia at stake.

The War in Afghanistan in 2001, which was less than two years old when Iraq was invaded, was more difficult to portray as a cynical war for resources using a humanitarian pretext, though the interest the US government and UNOCAL had in building a gas pipeline was often mentioned as the 'real reason'.

It was the Iraq War that overshadowed the way Britain and its relationship with Muslims and political Islam was portrayed. Blair was adamant that Islamism was a the global threat after the fall of the Soviet Union just as global communism had been after 1945 when Britain and the US had defeated fascism in Europe.

The irony, once more, is that this messianic depiction of Islamism, called after the London Bombings of 2005 by the neoconservative politician, Michael Gove as 'seamless totalitarian movement ( Celsius 7/7 page 12 ), was one groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the MAB agreed with, except for Islamism meant 'liberation'.

Though Islamism was not one monolithic ideology uniting fanatics in power or else sleepercells waiting to be activated across the west, what happened in the decade after the Iraq invasion raised the stakes in that either the Arab nations would move towards democracy or stay under dictators said to be imposed by the west.

The daughter of the Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood movement Soumaya Ghannoushi, one of the many offspring of political exiles from Arab nationalist dictators who had been allowed to seek refuge in Britain, was a founder of the British Muslim Initiative designed to mobilise British Muslims as a political force.

Ghannoushi made it plain that is Britain and other Western nations did not stop their support for Arab dictators and Israel, then the threat of terrorism coming back to visit the West was going to be a regrettable consequence that they would have coming to them in the form of blowback.

Ghannoushi was considerably more sophisticated is presenting British leaders such as Tony Blair with a choice: either continuing to back corrupt secular dictators and rentier elites in the Maghreb and Near East and face an aggressive fanatical response or else back democratic Islamist reformers.

Ghannoushi, who benefitted from a wealthy background and private education, was a regular orator at anti-war movements in London in the first decade of the new century who had a fondness for incendiary rhetoric and yoking together the predicament of all Arab Muslims in different lands into one suffering umma.

 'In our globalised world, crises can no longer be kept far away, left to rage in distant lands and devour obscure nations. The troubles of Kabul, Jenin and Falluja now spill over on to our shores, towns and cities, lay bare our fundamental vulnerability, and put an end to our sense of immunity....London and Washington must decide which Islam they want: a peaceful, democratic Islam, crucial to any pursuit of global stability, or the anarchical and destructive Islam of al-Qaida and its ilk'.

Ghannoushi's stance was clear: the most ferocious and violent jihadist movements were wholly a reaction to colonialism and western imperialism, a form of resistance that was the outgrowth not of any real or imagined shorcomings within Islam as a 'religion of peace' but a pathological response to oppression.

What Ghannoushi was revealing was a veiled threat on behalf of the British umma whereby if Britain sided or was seen to be siding with regimes that oppressed the democratic aspiration of Arabs, through aligning with Islamist movements that were not aligned with Al Qaida, then they would become terrorist targets.

Ghannoushi's was power claim, a judgement of what 'ought' to happen concealed within a discourse that masqueraded as a mere statement of the facts. Clearly it had little time for minorities that were non-Islamic in the Middle East by conflating Arabs with Muslims and the quest for an Islamic dominated state.

Democratic Islamists such as Ghannoushi rejected Al Qaida and Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Yet they retained the idea that Islam's lack of any clear distinction between the realm of the political and of the religious contained the true liberatory potential that those with the correct view of Islam would apply if free from western meddling

One problem with the vision of Islamism as the source of true freedom and diversity-within-unity is that in practice is would always cause chaos and have a ready excuse in the context of Arabic politics that the failure to realise democracy was less to do with the flaws in the doctrines but western policy.

By 2011 with the revolt against Ben Ali in Tunisia was replicated in Egypt. Arab uprisings across the region had created new hopes of a democratic order but within two years by 2013 the result had been chaos and either the restoration of authoritarian regimes or the collase into conflict, violence and terrorism.

The only exception to this bleak scenario was Tunisia where the Rachid Ghannoushi's Ennada Party won an election in October 2011, a result that was accepted and created a regional partner the western states were prepared to work with. Needless to say, firebrand daughter Soumaya Ghannouchi has been quiet ever since.

Elsewhere in the Maghreb and Near East the prophecy of an end to secular nationalist dictatorships and its replacement either by reformist Islamised democracies or else Sunni militancy, jihadi insurrections and blowback has actually happened as a consequence of events in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

The collapse of the old order of nationalist dictatorships after 2011 came without western interference, laying bare the futility of the decision to invade Iraq a decade before. It came too late as the effects of years of corruption, mismanagement and struggles over resources as oil and water caused intractable conflicts.

Blair continued to stand by his idea that Middle Eastern dictators and Islamist terrorism were both part and parcel of the same disorder, except where those dictators were amenable to western interests. That proved evident when as a UN special "peace" envoy he praised Sisi's crushing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Though Blair seemed alone in being the most vociferous western public figure lauding the use of military force to overthrow an elected but shaky government in Cairo, machine gun demonstrators, ban opposition parties, and pass the death sentence of its leaders, Britain ended up giving de facto recognition to Sisi's regime.

With the disintegration of the borders drawn up between Syria and Iraq by Britain and France in 1916, the Sykes-Picot 'line in the sand', the collapse and disintegration of Libya following the western backed overthrow of Gaddafi and the rise of jihadi-Islamists there, the stage was clearly set for the new Caliphate.

In northern Syria, the failure of all political systems since the Turkish government abolished the Caliphate in 1924 after three years of war against Assad had failed to remove him and the brutality of war has laid waste to vast parts of the country, made the new Caliphate the only political 'solution'

In Iraq, the Sunni Arabs had been marginalised and pushed out of Iraqi national life by the dominance of Iranian backed Shi'ites in Baghdad and the growing autonomy of the Kurdish region: both regions where Sunni Arabs were not diminant had the vast majority of Iraq's oil wealth.

Within Britain, the call of the IS Caliphate has been confined to a few who went to fight against Assad but numbers also of jihadi-travellers who sympathise with it even if they have not wanted to join in as combatants They serve in other capacities as making good jihadi wives or executioners of journalists such as James Foley.

The response to these atrocities and British born jihadists by Cameron repeated similar mistakes of the sort made by Tony Blair. Having done nothing to stop the jihadists going to Syria when they were fighting on the 'right side' against Assad, Islamists are pointing now towards their criminalisation as a double standard.

Cameron started to use similar language as Blair about a 'generational struggle' with ISIS when Britain and the US had supported Saudi and Qatari policy throughout 2012 and 2013 and did little or nothing to put pressure on Riyadh or Doha to stop the flow of funding jihadists in Syria.

The phrase 'generational struggle' was in any case deployed by Cameron during the Algerian hostage crisis of January 2013 as a means by which disparate threats against western resource interests such as Algeria's oil and gas could be welded together as a united threat to Britain's way of life and security.

The reason for these rhetoric sleights of hand and precision tooled media soundbites is to provide the impression that there is a one global movement of jihadists that stretch from otherwise exotic far off Muslim lands directly right into the heart of Britain with the same intention of causing terror and mayhem.

This rhetoric is useful as 'public diplomacy' because it softens up the public mood for military intervention when it is needed. It also serves to conceal the facts that those violent jihadi-Islamist threats have emerged and surged out of the blowback created by the support given to such jihadist forces by Britain's allies.

Terrorism expert Michael Clarke claimed, 'The danger of the prime minister's rhetoric.. is that it can serve to unite forces that might otherwise be fractious and ineffective. The most obvious strategic mistake would be to unite forces which will otherwise become more disparate in the natural course of events."

However, the dangers in that were factored in to the 'business as usual' approach that Britain has taken towards jihadi-terrorists as useful as assets when fighting against forces such as Assad's which stand in the way of its geopolitical ambitions and its oil and gas interests in the Middle East.

Jihadi-Islamists in Syria and Iraq no less than powers such as the US and Britain are playing the long game in vying for control over resources. In calling itself 'Islamic State', the new caliphate has attempted a propaganda coup which aims to unite jihadists across Africa and the Middle East against 'western imperialism'.

The rationale is to trap Western politicians within their own rhetoric about a 'unified threat' and drawing them into war with any one jihadi-Islamist group where oil and gas or strategic interests are at stake: from Boko Haram in Nigeria, al Shabaab in Somalia, AQAP in Yemen and jihadi-Islamists in Libya and Sinai in Egypt.

So would appear that IS could spread as a 'franchise' operation and global brand throughout these lands.With East Ukraine in conflict and the Libyan capital haven fallen to jihadi-Islamists, the EU powers are far more than the US, with its shale oil and gas, increasingly concerned for energy security at all costs.

In Britain's case, it is Qatar that is courted as the long term supplier need to step in and up the export level of liquified natural gas to Britain as North Sea gas depletes It is also Qatar which is responsible for backing not only Muslim Brotherhood forces in the Middle East but also militias in Libya and also the Taliban.

While Qatar did not directly fund or back Islamic State it is a direct consequence of its rivalry with Saudi Arabia in trying to back the jihadists most effective in advancing their interests and to install its government in Damascus. Saudi Arabia backed factions opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood which it now calls 'terrorists'.

The danger is that such regional rivalries among those Gulf state powers which are allied with Britain could be fought as proxy wars just as they are at present in Libya between Qatar which backs militant Islamists and the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia that are all backing forces previously loyal to Colonel Gaddafi.

Across many of the lands to which a stake has been claimed by the new Caliphate of Raqqa, whole parts of states have collapsed in part or completely where a combination of climate change, drought and overpopulation has put pressure upon society and  thrown up jihadist movements against corrupt regimes.

Within Britain, the British Muslim Initiative and the Cordoba Foundation are promoting a vision of the Muslim World that Britain ought to be bound to uphold, that of the Muslim Brotherhood, unless it would want to be condemned to being an oppressor of the Muslim umma as seen in the recent Gaza-Israel War.

The danger is where the British State is portrayed as not having upheld the interests of Muslims, it is held to be hostile and putting itself in the camp of the enemies of the Muslim Brotherhood abroad and so of the freedom of Muslims everywhere including within Britain.

So when Cameron made a speech playing up the 'ISIL' as 'a greater and deeper threat to our security than we have known before' he reacted in precisely the way IS would have wanted by conflating Islamic States threat in the Middle East with as yet unrealised and abstract threat within Britain.

The publicly made avowal of 'depriving people of their citizenship' and prosecuting people for terrorist activity abroad taps in to the idea promoted by groups like Hizb-ut Tahrir and Cageprisoners that British Muslims everywhere are second class citizens and so the 'extremism' the government condemns feeds on.

By converting the entire regions where British jihadists could head into one seamless global battleground, the British government is acting in a manner more likely to make that become a reality by doing little to have put pressure on Saudi Arabia or Qatar to stop backing 'extremists' only to change when blowback beckons.

Those British jihadists who went abroad were not stopped by the British security services in 2011. Nor were plans made then to work with Turkish security because it was policy back then to funnel jihadists towards fighting Assad. Jihadi sympathisers are aware of those double standards and ready for revenge attacks.

The irony of jihadi-Islamists invoking Western foreign policy as a justification for terror attacks is as absurd as the botched and shoddy realpolitik strategy of that foreign policy in having facilitated the very rise of the Islamic State to which they would owe allegiance over that of a Britain to which they feel no primary loyalty.

That there are those who feel the call of loyalty to a caliphate in Britain has long been apparent, even if not quite the one being created by al-Baghdadi in Syria and Iraq. But that the British government would effectively play a part in creating one through the consequences its own policy strategies is a black farce.

How to Prevent Islamist Terrorism in Britain.

With Islamic State now posing the new improved version of the previous terror threat offered by Al Qaida in the mass marketplace for insane terror brands to self-identify with, Harun Khan, deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, says the threat could only grow if they are not involved in countering it,

"They need to be talking to us and others to understand what it is that's leading these boys down this route..Part of the problem is the constant talk of legislation, harassment and monitoring, stripping people of their passports. This is what's leading young people towards radicalism."

Well, given that the threat of violent jihadi-Islamist terrorism in Britain predates the creation of IS and the Syrian Conflict, which started in 2011, by at least ten years, this statement is mendacious spin and a cretinous "explanation" of how young British Muslims could be drawn into terrorist activity.

The most likely aim of Khan is to uphold the MCB as a group that acts as the 'representative' of the 'community', given that there is no such corporate institution in Islam equivalent to 'the Church', whether the Church Of England or the Roman Catholic Church.

The reason a small number of young British Muslims are drawn towards terrorist activity is due both to identification with the aims of certain violent Islamist ideologies as well as to the fact that they could actually get to Syria in the first place because the government did nothing to prevent them.

The British government have only started ramping up the rhetoric now because Sunni militants dominant in Syria are no longer useful 'assets' in trying to overthrow Assad ; the Islamic State ( IS ) in control in northern Syria is targeting not only the Kurds in Iraq but also the Free Syria Army Britain backs in Syria.

The argument that the terror threat is only consequence of a "poisonous ideology", the explanation put forth by Cameron or else the case that 'its a response to Western foreign policy', spouted by Islamist ideologues, are both equally wrong and intentionally based on a power game.

The Islamic State is said to have had around 500 British born insurgents fighting for it and they went because they could. The question is why nothing was done previously in conjunction with Turkey to try to halt the flow of fighters who wanted to go there in the first place.

The answer is that the British born jihadists were fighting against Assad, the chances would be that they would either be killed or could be used to gain information and that the British security state prioritises risky geopolitical strategies concerned with energy security over terrorism.

The reason why British-born Muslims would want to go and fight their jihad and to import the terror back home, once IS turned against the FSA and was bombed by the US, is due to the fact their ideology teaches them see Western foreign policy as the sole reason for the chaos in the Middle East.

Britain's security from terrorism depends upon developing a new foreign policy away from cooperating too closely with powers such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar which promote fanatical jihadist groups and developing energy alternatives to fuels such as imported gas which Qatar supplies.

At a domestic level, preventing terrorism means focusing on the goal of integration, curtailing population numbers created by mass migration the better to integrate those already living in Britain and closing off the funding for militant organisations that promote Saudi-exported Islamist doctrines and practices.

"A Greater and Deeper Threat to our Security than we have Known Before".

"It was clear evidence, not that any more was needed, that this is not some foreign conflict thousands of miles from home that we can hope to ignore. The ambition to create an extremist caliphate in the heart of Iraq and Syria is a threat to our own security here in the UK.

In Afghanistan the Taliban were prepared to play host to al Qaida, the terrorist organisation. With IS we are facing a terrorist organisation not being hosted in a country but seeking to establish and then violently expand its own terrorist state.

"With designs on expanding to Jordan, Lebanon, right up to the Turkish border, we could be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a Nato member.

The ambition to create an extremist caliphate in the heart of Iraq and Syria is a threat to our own security here in the UK.

The terrorist threat was not created by the Iraq war 10 years ago. it existed even before the horrific attacks on 9/11, themselves some time before the war.

This threat cannot be solved simply by dealing with perceived grievances over Western foreign policy. Nor can it be dealt with by addressing poverty, dictatorship or instability in the region - as important as these things are.

The root cause of this threat to our security is quite clear. It is a poisonous ideology of Islamist extremism that is condemned by all faiths and faith leaders."-Prime Minister David Cameron.

The threat that Islamic State poses would most likely not have existed had it not been for Western foreign policy as it could not have exploited the chaos in northern Syria to gain power and declare the coming of the Caliphate both there and in Sunni parts of Iraq, a land destabilised by the 2003 US-UK invasion.

The tissue of untruths spun by Prime Minister Cameron, in reaction to the barbaric beheading of US journalist James Foley, shows how leading politicians are prepared to use the power of media images to put the case for unending and permanent intervention, even of a military kind, in the Middle East.

MI6 is there to advance geostrategies and manage the attendent risks. As Patrick Cockurn made plain, MI6 was involved, alongside the CIA, in channelling weapons to Sunni jihadists such as Jabhat al-Nusra from Libya and setting up a 'supply chain' of weapons provision across the Turkish borders into Syria.

Britain should never have backed the strategic policy of Qatar and Turkey in backing Sunni militants against Assad through groups such as 'Friends of Syria'. The reason why Britain's security has been comprimised is because this policy of backing regional powers in the Middle East who were prepared to back jihadists.

Britain should have been putting far more pressure on Turkey to tighten up the borders to prevent Western jihadists entering. Certainly, Turkey would need have to prevent IS militants crossing back into its territory so if it could acheive that, as Turkey is an IS target too, they could be detained there.

Ramping up the terror threat level to "highly likely", of course, is a way of preparing Britain for an attack if it happened. It also serves to deflect attention away from the fact that Britain's foreign policy helped empower IS by supposing that 'moderate' Sunni forces could be backed to oust Assad.

It was clear that both Qatar and Saudi Arabia were locked into a competition throughout 2012-2013 to back the most effective ( i.e ruthless ) jihadi groups so that they would be able to determine a post-Assad Syria. That and the chaos of the war created space for IS to gain ground and flourish.

In 2013 ISIS was fighting with the Free Syria Army against the Kurds which are now being supported by the US and Britain. Until late 2013 and 2014 little was done by London or Washington to put greater pressure on Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to stop the transfer of funds from private donors to Sunni militants.

All these prevention of terrorism policies are reflexes to to the consequence of a failed foreign policy strategy that was even more fundamentally foolish that the one in which the US and Britain backed the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, splinter factions of which went on to become Al Qaida.

Syria has become a failed state in the north as a consequence of the policy that 'Assad must go', a demand pushed for by Qatar and Turkey to check Iran and to expedite the possible construction of a gas pipeline from the South Pars gas field to Turkey and an energy hungry EU.

At the core of the West's problems and the terror threat is its energy dependency upon gas from unstable lands which makes it bound to look for energy diversification no matter what the consequences and risks could be. Qatar is a major supplier of LNG to Britain and France.

The foreign policy agenda was clearly set out by Philip Hammond in April 2014, when mulling the possibility of a British base being constructed in Qatar

“The West is crucially dependent on a stable energy market above all else, Our economic recovery is fragile. Anything that calls for a spike in the oil price would derail it. The mostly likely scenario to cause that up spike is a surge in tension in this region, particularly in the Strait of Hormuz. It is very much in our interest to have a stable situation in the Gulf. That is why Western countries are prepared to invest so much in this region and supporting the Gulf states to maintain that stability.”

With Russia and Ukraine almost in a state of war and Libya haven fallen to Islamist jihadists, Britain and Europe's energy security looks more fragile than ever before and this has been factored in to the need to take risky foreign policy decisions such as continuing to back Sunni militants in Syria.

Until Britain, and other European powers, find energy alternatives to oil and gas, the dependency dillemma is always going to drag Western powers into meddling in the Middle East and causing the sort of potentially very dangerous problem of terrorist 'blowback' on a permanent basis.

Postscript: A Note on Britain's Gas Imports.

It uses an increasing amount of LNG from Qatar which prevents it making up for declining North Sea gas reserves by having to purchase more gas directly from Russia, as was confirmed in a Reuters report in March 2014,  in accordance with an agreement dating back to 2012.

'Britain will begin this year to import gas from Russia under a formal contract for the first time, just as European calls to loosen Moscow's grip on energy supply mount because of the crisis over Ukraine.
The country's biggest utility Centrica signed a deal in 2012 with Russian state-controlled Gazprom to import 2.4 billion cubic metres of gas over a period of three years, and the supplies will begin flowing in October.

The next fact is that Britain and the EU's energy network is interconnected and, of course, a surge in oil or gas prices would affect the British economy if it were to have an impact upon the economies of its European partners. A report from the New Scientist made the energy dilemma clear,

The situation in the UK is less clear. Gas imports account for around 70 per cent of supply, but because of the complex European network of pipelines and interconnectors that we rely on, it's difficult to say exactly how much of that imported gas is Russian. Some reports claim that Russia supplies around 15 per cent of that total and others put this figure much lower. Russian energy giant Gazprom estimates that it sends 11 to 12 billion cubic metres to the UK each year, out of an overall UK consumption of around 84 billion cubic metres.

Whatever the figure, if Russia cuts gas supply to Europe, the knock-on effect would be felt as keenly in the UK as in many other parts of Europe. The crisis may also affect a deal made between Centrica (which owns British Gas) and Gazprom to begin importing 2.4 bn cubic metres of Russian gas via a pipeline from Holland in a couple of months' time.

Energy security is national security for high octane consumer societies which need dependable supplies of oil and gas to uphold the energy intensive lifestyles the great majority of citizens in Western nations have come to take for granted. The search for alternatives ought to be a matter of urgency.

The Call of the Caliphate in Britain: Why British Jihadists Fight in Syria.

The rise of IS in Syria and Iraq and the evident barbarity it revels in, from social media depictions of  enemies being machine gunned into open death pits, the beheading American journalists and threatening to exterminate or convert Christians and killing Yazidis, has caused some to be 'bewildered'.

Yvonne Ridley certainly claims to be 'baffled'. When asked about ISIS, Respect Party member and Islamist propaganda hack opined, as if knowing her exact stance was going to be a matter of pressing public importance in Britain,

'There are many reasons why I've not spoken out against ISIS. For a start, I'm not sure who it is, where it came from or how it is funded. I've not seen such a militarily- and strategically-savvy fighting force emerge in the Middle East before, other than the highly disciplined and much feared Hezbollah. I, like many others, want to know a little bit more about ISIS before making public comments'

So Ridley wasted hundreds of words 'taking her stance' and switching the topic to Israel half way through when IS has nothing to do with Israel. For someone who, like George Galloway, is a champion of Hizbollah it's odd that she so clearly wants President Assad removed when Hizbollah is a staunch ally of Assad.

The laughable thing about Ridley is that Galloway, the Respect MP for Bradford West, is actually a strong backer of Assad against the Sunni jihadists ranged against him, mostly because of the idea that the US created ISIS by supporting Sunni militant fighters against the Alawite Shia dynasty Assad belongs to.

Ridley cannot resist a conspiracy theory though. One of the most popular is that ISIS is part of a devious plot by the US and Israel to 'destabilise' Iraq ( as if it was not unstable enough without the US intervening once more in Iraq ), part of a CIA/ Mossad scheme to divide and rule Iraq against Iran.

Ridley has an alternatibe plot scenario 'The former head of the British Army says that the West should sit down and negotiate with Assad to get rid of ISIS, but what if ISIS was created by Assad and his ally Iran, which has members of the elite Republican Guard in parts of Syria?'

'As crazy as it sounds, that would explain why Nouri Al-Maliki's Iraqi army fell away so easily in the face of ISIS leaving behind a massive arsenal of weapons for the militia to use. It is virtually inconceivable for a trained fighting force to leave all of its kit behind before doing a runner, just as it's virtually inconceivable that a crack fighting force like ISIS could emerge from a rag tag bunch of ill-disciplined rebel fighters buoyed-up by disaffected youngsters from Europe and beyond'.

It sounds insane because it is insane and has no basis in reality. However, if the task is to try to rationalise away the depth and extent to which the Islamic State is a direct reflection of a strand of Islamist thinking and practice, then it is clear that Ridley would want to pretend ISIS has no basis in the world view she holds.

Mona Siddiqui, a professor of Islamic studies and public understanding at the University of Glasgow, writes on British jihadists in Syria that 'we in the west feel bewildered by their ferocity and brutality' and then goes on to write, a very uneasy way, the following,

'In the UK, the fear that Isis have attracted hundreds of British men to fight in the region has reignited the question of integration and radicalisation among younger British Muslims. But perhaps what is more chilling this time is the way many of these men, who have gone over to fight, have unflinchingly assumed the role of thug and tyrant given the first opportunity....Their narrative may well be wrapped up in the familiar language of jihad and "fighting in the cause of Allah", but it amounts to little more than destruction of anything and anyone who doesn't agree with them'.

This is obfuscation again. The barbarism of British jihadists comes from the ideology and is reinforced by the barbarism of war. This experience leads them towards enacting a  greater depravity that was within them as a consequence of the ideology that firstly allowed them to rationalise the impulse towards killing and death.

The fact 'John the Jihadist' beheaded the American journalist is hardly surprising: it is meant to be shocking but it's not if the purpose of the murder is understood, that there is a 'method to the madness' and that it lies within the need to use a maximum of terror to instill submission or awe in the enemy.

The demonstration of ISIS savagery is meant to show that this is a form of revenge for the war that the US and the West started against the Muslim World, to make plain that these sorts of killings are an inevitable consequence of Western foreign policy just as much as Lee Rigby's murder in London was.

So Siddiqui has ignored the deep emotional appeal of ISIS's ideology to obfuscate the role of Islamist discourse within Britain, a form of 'political religion' that indeed does pit a "purified" and purifying version of Islam against both the West and its legacy through secular leaders and the West's allies in the region.

The irony is that IS has gained ground because of its finance came from private donors in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia as part of a quest to defeat the Shia Alawite Syrian leader Assad. Now they make money from illegal oil sales and robbing banks. It's a combination of gangsterism and deranged ideology.

But the West and anything associated with it in the Middle East are thus Infidels ( e.g the Christians being subjected or slaughtered ) and or else Hypocrites and both are targets for the foot soldiers of IS. This appeals to young British Islamists who regard the West as the root cause of all global problems.

To a certain extent, this idea is propagated by non-Islamist organisations that eschew the complexity of world politics and reduce complicated problems down to the idea the West is the Big Evil , the demonic 'system' that needs to be fought against until its power is destroyed.

The so called 'anti-war' movement in the form of the Stop the War Coalition is actually a front for revolutionary activists who would regard IS as wholly a product and reaction to Western Imperialism: whether Al Qaida operatives or IS foot soldiers all are denied an agency of their own.

It is this denial of moral responsibility that enables radicalised militant Islamists to regard themselves romantically as dark avenging angels, committed to kill not because they have bloodlust but because the sheer iniquity of the Western dominated world order evil made them do it.

There's a need to face facts. IS reflects a 'retrograde discourse' within Islam as regards the Caliphate, an idea that acts as a sort of ideological utopia for alienated Sunni Muslims and that in Syria and Iraq has gained ground because of the weakness of state authority in the northern parts of both lands.

ISIS has realised a Caliphate that has transcended the boundaries created by the France and Britain back in 1916. The reason semi-educated Islamists without ego security went to Syria to fight is because it offers a strength of purpose and certainty, freedom from the meaningless freedom of the West.

In the large cities and conurbations of Western Europe, there is no formative experience and no experience of membership beyond consumerism and the identification with consumer branded goods. With a mediocre education system, Islamists gain knowledge and membership from radical groups.

'Islam is the solution' is a regular placard slogan: the Caliphate is a standard part of Islamist discourse. The appeal of this is similar to those of the secular utopias of communism in the 1960s, whether Castro's Cuba or some Trotskyist alternative to the disappointing reality of 'actually existing socialism'.

The new Caliphate has the appeal of the communist utopia promised by the Russian Revolution of 1917. The paradise was postponed only by the hideous plots to destabilise it by the Western imperialists. So too the Caliphate was abolished after the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Arab lands partitioned.

The Caliphate is posited as a mythological entity that would unite all Sunni Muslims once more and its rise is seen as the death knell for secularism, Godlessness and the Western imperialism that brought it all about. Fighting in Syria or within the belly of the beast are apiece with the same jihad.

The nihilism of those supposedly educated at British universities and going to fight in Syria has not seen them transform from naive idealists into brutalised psychopaths by the war alone. It was inherent within the ideology that posits the Caliphate as a realisable Utopia here on earth and that demands blood must be shed.

Baroness Warsi, Qatar and Why Her Resignation Over Gaza is Not Entirely a Matter of Principle.

In Britain, politicians in the Conservative-Liberal government started off repeating the stock phrases about Israel's 'right to defend itself' and the need for an unconditional ceasefire on both sides. Clearly, of course, it was Israel that rejected diplomacy with Hamas backed by Qatar and Turkey.

The resignation of Baroness Warsi, the Muslim Tory peer and Senior Foreign Office minister, Mark Wallace in the Guardian opines

'Lady Warsi’s resignation over Gaza is undoubtedly one of principle. Like many of her principles, it is different from the prime minister’s – eventually that divide evidently became too much'.

One reason why statesmen and diplomats are starting to issue denuciations of Israel is,in part, due to the fact Israel's foreign policy is opposed to that of another key regional ally and business partner in the form of Qatar. Qatar backs Hamas in a struggle for regional power dominance in the Middle East.

Israel clearly rejected all possible diplomacy involving Hamas and two of its regional backers are also Western allies ( Turkey as well as Qatar ). Israel remains a large trading partner and and a potential supplier of liquefied natural gas in the course of this decade to EU energy markets.

Warsi, however, was a close defender of Qatar and aligned with certain policies and outlooks put forth by the gas rich state and appears at conferences in Doha alongside Al Jazeera journalists. When tensions between her and Prime Minister Cameronflared up over the use of the face veil in 2012 it was reported

'Organisers say that Lady Warsi, who posed in traditional Islamic dress on the steps of 10 Downing Street after the general election in May, had been booked three months ago to speak at the Qatar Foundation Doha Debate on Oct 11.

She was given free Qatar Airways business class tickets and had a complimentary room booked for two nights at the five-star Four Seasons beach hotel in Doha, the capital of the Gulf emirate of Qatar'.

Even so, self interest has started to dovetail with a genuine sense Israel is acting too unilaterally and ruthlessly in its determination to use military force to impose its own solution on Gaza. Politicians are divided on what position to take but it should not be thought voices criticising Israel are wholly about principle. 

Islamism, Free Speech and the Great Power Game

'In Britain...a majority of Muslims have, one way or another, clearly accepted the basic rules of peaceful coexistence in a liberal pluralist society. They no longer say, as a British Muslim called Iqbal Sacranie did in 1989, while some of his co-religionists were burning copies of The Satanic Verses, that death might be "a bit too easy" for Rushdie'.We still don't know who'll win the global battle for free speech , Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian, May 9 2014

Certainly the basic rules of free speech have been mostly accepted. Yet it's not clear whether 'preaceful coexistence' is one accepted by militant Islamists without imposing certain terms and using the threat of terror as a means to try and change Britain and its foreign policy.

They may well not say such things as Sacranie did in the heat of the moment in 1989. Instead Islamists have learnt public relations and how to craftily deploy language to insinuate the idea of a 'community under siege'. That was quite evident during the Birmingham Islamist 'school takeover plot'.

They include former psychotherapists such as the sinister Salma Yaqoob. Media savvy and manipulate, she was able to spin the reaction to allegations of an Islamist takeover as part of a "narrative" to demonise Muslims who are 'in denial' and complicit if they "challenge" it.

Unless the Ofsted Report is part of a choreographed state plot, then it has to be accepted that Islamists did put into practice institutional discrimination against non-Muslim pupils. Even so, the point is that Yaqoob is trying to exploit these events for propaganda purposes.

The insinuation is always that Muslims are facing persecution, harrassment and discrimination in Britain so as to whip up sectarian militancy. As Yaqoob puts it 'Muslims feel under siege, while being accused of besieging an unwitting and overly tolerant majority who in turn will be fearful and mistrustful'.

Since 2001, free speech has been lauded by Islamists because it was no longer beneficial to call for a novelists or writer to be killed publicly. It was better to use the undoubted overreaction to the 9/11 attacks to put forth the idea of the myth of the umma as under armed threat across the globe.

In Britain throughout the 2000s a form of shadow boxing has since gone on between British governments wanting to ramp up the threat of terror as a pretext to intervene militarily in 'the Muslim world' and domestic Islamists who portray that as global war of terror against the umma.

That was seen in the Birmingham School 'plot' where Michael Gove deliberately blew out of all proportion the attempts to Islamise schools by sending in counter terrorism officials. Such shoddy attempts to exploit the fear of Islamism are designed to win votes and look 'tough'.

In Britain, free speech is not so much on the wane. The reason there are few people willing to satirise Islam or Mohammed is partly because it is simply so much easier to stick to the routine targets such as Christianity and due to the mendacious use of the word 'Islamophobia' to mean a form of 'racism'.

If anything free speech has become superfluous in an age of image and spin, one where Britons living in a bored and atomised consumer society have their politics and view fed to them by mass media machines, oily spin and ideologues trying to 'frame debates' through their use of politically correct language.

Blair, Islamism and Planetary Plots

Seumas Milne is right that there is a lot of mendacious propaganda flying about in an age when 'public diplomacy' consists of 'framing devices' put forth by the political class. The aim of Blair's speech was to shape perceptions about both his policy towards the Middle East and the course of foreign policy.

It could not have gone amiss that Blair gave the speech at Bloomberg's London HQ. For those fearful that the future could involve Britain being involved in endless conflicts and interventions, with the looming threat of terror hanging over its cities and town, this speech was a propaganda template for that.

So Blair's speech is important because a significant part of the political and media class In London value Blair's ability to stake out a position that can be used by politicians in need of an alarmist way in which to connect Britain's foreign policy with the need for domestic protection.

So it is odd that Milne opines that the reason why Blair's views are taken so seriously 'isn't immediately obvious'.On the contrary, it is immediately evident that Blair did not set out any real policy but was concerned with drawing up the correct battle lines, the propaganda framework for some cosmic struggle.

The substance of Blair's speech was less signification than the way language was used. When Blair referred to 'extremist Islamism' he meant the sort that threatens Britain's interests and so conflated the Muslim Briotherhood In Egypt with malign and openly terroristic forces such as Al Qaida.

However, Milne, himself no stranger to propaganda riffs, then claims,

'..he ( Blair ) also demanded military intervention against Syria – backed by Russia – along with more "active measures" to help the armed opposition, which is dominated by Islamists and jihadists. It's a crazy combination with an openly anti-democratic core'.

The 'Opposition' ( Blair's term for the anti-Assad insurgents ) may be dominated by Islamists and jihadists but the official line of the Coalition government until late 2013 was that the 'rebels' in the Free Syrian Army were mostly democrats fighting against Assad's tyranny and that he 'must go'.

However, if it is clear that the many of the insurgents in Syria are not democrats but many affiliated to Al Nustra and Al Qaida, it raises the question of whether Milne agrees with Blair that the Muslim Brotherhood should be supported or not ( or, at least, in word if not deed ).

After all, it's deeply contradictory of Milne to complain that Blair is demanding 'active support' be given to 'Islamists and jihadists' in Syria while supporting their being crushed in Egypt, unless the supposed purpose of that foreign policy is made plain.

After all, it could be argued that the opponents of the interventionist foreign policy in Britain such as Milne often use doublethink in lauding Islamists when they are being oppressed and condemning them as tools of imperialism when the same Muslim Brotherhood members are against a government Britain dislikes.

British foreign policy does have blatant double standards and has demonstrated a weird Orwellian schizophrenia, supporting the anti-Assad insurgents when it was clear they were dominated by bloodthirsty fanatics who elsewhere would have been portrayed as the existential enemy at home and abroad.

However, it is curious that 'anti-war' activists often demonstrate the same double standards without the even the excuse of being in government. They have the luxury of having things both ways, that when Britain accepts Egypt's coup against Islamists it's evil and when it supports them in Syria it's evil too.

Evidently, the best foreign policy would be one where Britain would not interfere or meddle in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern states, in which case the policy of realpolitik would be preferable (but that's condemned as well ). It which case no attempt should be made to have a foreign policy at all.

When it comes down to it, Western states are embroiled in the affairs of the Middle East because of geopolitical concerns and the fact it contains huge supplies of oil and gas. Until energy independence is aimed at, the region is going to be the site of intense geopolitical and Great Power rivalries.

There are certain 'anti-war' journalists, such as Milne, who prefer the Cold War period and who praise the Soviet Union in retrospect as a check on Western power in the Middle East and its support for the secular dictator Assad. But its not clear why they have the pretence of being concerned with democracy.

The "Islamist Plot" in Britain-The Domestic Impact of Foreign Policy.

It's possible fanatical ideologues such as Education secretary Michael Gove have tried to exploit the existence of a plan to push school academies towards 'Islamisation' for political gain and to try to steal votes from Ukip and co-opt support for an interventionist British foreign policy against 'extreme Islamism'.

But it does not follow that Milne is corrrect in this,

'In Britain, the campaign against Islamist "extremism" is once again in full flow. In fact, it is open season on the Muslim community. For the past few weeks reports have multiplied about an alleged "Islamic plot", code-named Operation Trojan Horse, to take control of 25 state schools in Birmingham and run them on strict religious principles'.

Even if the the Operation Trojan Horse statement comes from a shadowy anonymous source, the evidence of the DfE Report does seem to prove there is a serious basis to the allegations that cannot be routinely dismissed as part of an 'Islamphobic' propaganda campaign.

Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph writes,

'A separate report, by inspectors from the DfE, has substantiated many of the allegations. The report, disclosed in The Telegraph on Friday, accused Park View, Nansen and Golden Hillock of illegally segregating pupils, discriminating against non-Muslim students and “restricting” the GCSE syllabus to “comply with conservative Islamic teaching”.The report said girls at Park View and Golden Hillock were made to sit at the back of the class; some Christian pupils at Golden Hillock were left to “teach themselves” and at Park View a supporter of al-Qaeda was invited to speak at assembly. Aspects of the GCSE curriculum were ignored as un-Islamic, even though needed by pupils for exams..'

More than that radical Islamists such as Salma Yaqoob , formerly of George Galloway's Respect Party, has tried to use the language of the Iraq War in calling the Operation Trojan Horse statement a 'dodgy dossier' and part of a campaign of 'McCarthyism”

So it is not only Gove that is trying to score political propaganda points by linking plan to 'Islamise' schools to foreign policy and a global threat. Yaqoob is simply doing the same but spinning the narrative the other way; that this is part of a plot to 'demonise' Muslims and so justify interfering in Muslim lands.

That claim is handy is if the political agenda is to compare the Ofsted inspectors 'interference' with Brimingham schools with an interventionist foreign policy and so put forth propaganda about a plan to order Muslims about and so create a siege mentality and swell supporters for Islamist organisations.

The claims in the Ofsted Report are either true or they are not true and trying to put a spin on them one way or another cannot change that, unless it is supposed that the report itself was part of a 'political witch-hunt' and ordered to find out what they wanted to to back up the allegations of an Islamist plot.

The danger with this foolish shadow boxing between politicians in government and Islamists is that it could indeed polarise British society. In that sense ideologues such as Milne, who backs any movement or force so long as its anti-Western, and Yaqoob are part of the problem no less than Gove.

After all, Gove in his appalling Celsius 7/7 writes of Islamism as 'one seamless totalitarian threat', one that extends from Afghanistan and the Middle East into Europe and Britain, a vast planetary struggle between Good and Evil that actually sounds quite as paranoid as the ideology of radical Islamists.

British Jihadi Islamists and the Syrian Conflict.

'Counter-terrorism officers, fearful that some of those fighting in Syria will return to Britain radicalised with the ability to carry out violent acts on British soil, hope that female family members will curb the numbers of people intent on taking up arms against the Assad regime'.( Syria crisis: stop your sons joining war, urges Met police, Guardian 24 April 2014 )

Much about the Syria-related terror threat does not add up. The Metropolitan Police may have though 'counter terrorism' depends on educational campaigns and social work 'in the community' to prevent Muslims going to Syria. Yet this depends on the bizarre notion they have not been radicalised already.

By definition, British Muslims who went to fight in Syria or are intending to join the struggle, are radicalised. In the Age of the Internet, British Muslims have access to information and have been able to cross the border from neighbouring Turkey with ease.

The Metropolitan Police are wasting their time. If British Muslims have decided to go and fight along with jihadists, then it is supposed to be the task of MI5 and MI6 to monitor those involved in terror plots before they go, meaning they could be stopped on the border, or to keep tabs on them if they return.

Should British citizens get killed in Syria fighting against Assad, it is the responsibility of those who decided to go. If they join Al Nusra or other groups of fanatics, the chances are they will get killed (in which case they pose no danger to Britain ) or they can be monitored on their return.

The probability is that the British secret services are playing the usual power game in using British born jihadists as 'assets' in order to gain more intelligence or, in fact, to use them as proxies in the struggle to remove Assad. This has been the pattern since the Bosnian War in the 1990s.

This extremely dangerous game, where known Al Qaida affiliated operatives have been allowed to pass across the borders and not arrested, was once part of the Covenant of Security, the policy of permitting exiles and jihadists to settle in Britain so they would not attack it but could be used by MI6.

Since the 'war on terror' got going after 2001, that policy was formally dropped. Even so, the shadowy power game has continued. The security services most likely want British born jihadists in Syria so they can gain intelligence and have agents within groups espousing violent Islamist ideology.

Some radical groups patronised by the British establishment as part of a 'counter-extremist' strategy have, according to historian Mark Almond, have acted as a conduit for Islamists to go and fight in Syria and that the strategy of collusion could lead to blowback.

Since the threat of Al Nusra has grown disproportionately, the British government by late 2013 seemed to have grasped the fact that their strategy for Syria was counter productive and could risk bringing terrorism back directly into the cities and towns of Britain and other backers of the Syrian insurgents.

The threat of terror is, however, always of utility to British governments that have wanted to harness jihadists to destroy states controlled by those hostile to Britain's geopolitical interests and over pipeline routes ( e.g Syria ) and regions with copious oil and gas.

British citizens are going to have to get used to the fact that Britain's high octane consumer society depends on these hazardous strategies for control over pipeline routes from Eurasia and the violent consequences of being locked into a struggle for mastery over diminishing natural resources across the globe.

Woolwich Attack: Rationalising Terror and Propagating Ideology.

There is a difference between journalists attempting to explain why terrorists or assassins believe they are justified in carrying out attacks and using those justifications as a means to rationalise them as a mere reflex action to foreign policies that are said to be bound to cause a response.

Senior Guardian journalist Seumas Milne is an example of the latter as clear from the headline accompanying his reactionto the verdict in sentencing soldier Lee Rigby's killer Michael Adebolajo-Woolwich attack: If the whole world's a battlefield, that holds in Woolwich as well as Waziristan.

Essentially, Milne's attitude towards to Adebolajo's assassination is to use it to hammer home hard propaganda points by quoting the words of terrorists and assassins as if their justifications were self evident and not to be 'condoned' because 'counter-productive'.

This Leninist approach to terrorism regards such violence as Adebolajo's as bad because bad for 'the cause', an 'infantile disorder' to use Lenin's words when criticising 'pointless' anarchist violence in Russia before the Revolution of 1917 that fails to yield results.

Milne opines,

'Quite apart from morality, the impact was violently counter-productive for the Muslims that Rigby's killers claimed to be defending, as Islamophobic attacks spiked across Britain.'

That is why Milne loftily writes off morality as something 'quite apart' from the 'counter-productive' nature of the attack. That, in any case, matters less because a soldier who had served in Afghanistan was hacked to death in the streets of London but because it led to a backlash against 'our side'.

The use of language to hint and insinuate that message is clear to anybody who knows anything about how propaganda works. Milne is claiming that what assassins such as Adebolajo must be taken at face value and not to even bother looking in detail at what he actually said.

"We swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. The only reason we have killed this man this is because Muslims are dying daily. This British soldier is an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth ... We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth...I apologise that women had to see this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments. They don't care about you. Do you think David Cameron is gonna get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think the politicians are gonna die? No, it's gonna be the average guy – like you, and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so you can all live in peace. Leave our lands and you will live in peace. That’s all I have to say. Allah’s peace and blessings be upon you. Salaam alaikum".

Milne completely discounts the nature of the threat was aimed at the British public, that if 'You people' failed to stop the war then 'You' would become next. The fact it was a soldier who was targeted was intended to give Adebolajo a sort of equivalent status as a foot soldier in a war.

'Rigby was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations in Afghanistan. So the attack wasn't terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians'.

It was a discriminate attack on a soldier that was meant to get the public to think that they would be next because they have not prevented a war in Afghanistan being fought. Adebolajo was not even a born Muslim nor from Muslim lands ;attacked' but someone who converted in order to have a creed to fight for.

In that sense, Adebolajo's actions are quite in line with a tradition of political terrorism and assassination that has a pedigree going back to the Russian tradition that culminated in Lenin's bloodthirsty use of mass terror during the construction of the Soviet Union.

The idea that there are no innocent people in this world once the scale of the oppression is so clear means that either people are either for the right cause or against it. By failing to 'do' anything to change governments that carry out oppression in their name they are objectively supporting it and targets.

To mechanically write off all consideration of the psychopathology behind acts of terror and assassinations and killings for political and religions reasons is the gambit of those who have no problem with the idea of murdering their opponents so long as it gets the result they want.

If that means using outrages and atrocities for bolstering one's own propaganda, while affecting a distaste for that killing as 'counter productive', then that's simply the way it has to be in order to wake people up to the killing done in 'our name'. Sp Milne, as a prominent figure in the Stop the War Coalition claims,

'Only the wilfully blind or ignorant can be shocked when there is blowback from that onslaught at home. The surprise should be that there haven't been more such atrocities.'

'You People' had it coming in other words. The position is Stop the War or else expect more bloodshed. This is far from being a pacifist position. But then again, one problem with the 'anti-war' groups in Britain is that they are not led by well meaning people but, alas, cold blooded totalitarian ideologues.

Syria: The Potential for Terrorist Blowback"

Historian Mark Almond on how and why European Muslims are going to Syria to become battle hardened jihadists and on how certain groups funded by European governments have themselves forwarded Islamists 'along a pipeline' to Syria to fight against Assad. 

There is an element of collusion between the government in Britain and jihadists dating back to the 1980s in Afghanistan designed to further geopolitical and oil and gas interests, one that has and can and will lead to violent 'blowback' in the form of domestic terror attacks.

Syria : The Danger of Energy Geopolitics.

Back in September military action by the US and France over the alleged chemical weapons attack by Assad's forces on a suburb of Damascus seemed inevitable. Dossiers were being produced and ministers were waxing indignant about the need to 'punish' Assad.

The rapid climbdown by the US was forced upon it by  Russia's brilliantly timed diplomatic intervention when they struck a deal in which Assad would allow both  Russia and the US to oversee the destruction of the chemical weapons arsenal. The US was thereby allowed  to save face and claim its coercive diplomacy had worked.

War was averted. Yet the issue, of course, was never completely about chemical weapons, though the hardline on 'weapons of mass destruction' was also designed to send out a message to Iran that their alleged programme to build a nuclear bomb was of a piece with the dangerous rogue state of Syria which is its stalwart ally.

The reason why the US and France were drawn to the brink of intervening with missile strikes and aircraft carriers had been sent to the Eastern Mediterranean was the dangerous New Great Game over gas resources and pipeline routes, one that explains Western double standards over Syria and Egypt.

After the Egyptian army had mown down protesters and their barricades with bullets and bulldozers  in the streets of Cairo who were against the military coup, Western diplomats made weasel comments about the need for dialogue. When Assad was alleged to have used poison gas in Syria, the call was to remove him.

From the US perspective, there was far less to gain in intervening to try and put pressure on Assad than certain EU powers such as Britain and France. The US felt it needed to act because it was tied to the rhetoric about Assad's use of chemical weapons being a 'red line' that once, when crossed, necessitated action.

True, the US still has energy interests in the Middle East better served by shoring up the regional powers that are backing the Sunni insurgents seeking to overthrow Assad's Shia regime, most obviously Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But the shale gas 'revolution' in the US reduced dependence upon the other enemy of Assad-Qatar.

All three external powers backing and funding the insurgents against Assad decided to do so in order to get a new regime that would not oppose their energy interests, in particular the plan to build more gas pipelines to EU states, to export Qatari liquefied natural gas ( LNG ) and reduce dependence on Iran and Russia.

Energy geopolitics is a prime determiner of  the relations between states in the early twenty first century as the race is on to control supplies that are not keeping pace with the burgeoning demand. States haunted by the prospect of their decline such as Britain and France have been the most aggressive in struggling to retain influence.

Part of this is post-imperial hubris but that ties together with both these states role as large arms providers to Middle Eastern states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The BG group has major interests in exploiting Egyptian gas reserves ( hence the mealy mouthed denunciations of SCAF for their bloody coup d' etat ).

The problem with Syria, from France and Britain's perspective, is that he occupies a piece of strategic land through which Iran wants to extend its energy interests no less than Russia which has leased a naval port in Tarsous through which it can protect its energy interests in the Levant with new discoveries of undersea gas.

But Russia also seeks to guarantee the potential "Islamic pipeline' that would, in any post-civil war Syria, be built from the South Pars gas field that Iran shares with Qatar through Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. That would cut the power of Qatar and Turkey as energy providers to the EU.

Despite the immediate crisis having diminished since September 2013, the longer term potential for intractable conflict remains. More than that, there is evidence that radicalised Muslims are going to and fro from Western nations to Syria to become hardened jihadists and who might carry out attacks there.

There is evidence that the secret services have been prepared to use these jihadists as 'assets' in the past from Afghanistan, to Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Kosovo in order to further energy interests. The prospect of 'blowback' being visited upon Britain and France is a lethal consequence of this New Great Game.

On the Norwegian Terrorist Attacks

The rise of far right pan-European nationalists bent on defending Western civilisation from 'Islamo-fascist' threats is a serious one that needs to be looked at without certain groups or stands of opinion trying to make political capital out of it to advance their own agendas.

To understand why Breivik exterminated 60 young Norwegians on a social democratic youth camp should not lead to crude rationalisations of the sort offered by Islamists: that if the West did not pursue its foreign policy in the "Muslim World" then these attacks would not happen.

Likewise there are those in the EDL with which Breivik was in ideological tune with that if it were not for the mass immigration permitted and encouraged by Western governments this sort of attack, a "cry of despair" would not have had to happen.

In that sense, the far right understand the value of 'propaganda of the deed'. Such attacks are intended to raise the question of "why" and Breivik's claim that there are other cells working towards his end is intended to intimidate what are considered governments who ignore 'the people'.

For the far right has copied the grievance culture of the Islamists and the model of identity politics and tap into the notion of the poor white former working class who have been left behind by de-industrialisation and 'betrayed' by Metropolitan elites prefer to import immigrant labour than aid the native population.

Another problem is that many on the liberal left tend to assume that racism is an aboriginal sin and that 'other extremists', i.e Islamist fanatics, are not racist but merely fanatics when, in fact, both certain forms of Islamism and the new far right are both what Michael Burleigh calls "political religions'

The idea that 'cultural Marxists' and 'multiculturalist traitors' or the 'liberal left' are directly responsible for degrading Western civilisation and pandering to Islamists has led many on the far right to develop an ideology that has 'the people' as something akin to the politicised Islamist version of the ummah.

Such ideologies have gained traction in places such as Luton and Oldham, away from London, and are made worse by the fact that outside the capital there are entire parts of cities where former working men are left to do menial temporary jobs without any long term stability.

In a deracinated and bored consumer society based on the idea of constant satisfaction, those who feel they cannot get it and need something more to believe in or some higher purpose have turned to political religions to rationalise their anger and to feel some form of 'belonging'.

The rise of new creedal ideologies based on collective and shared victimhood are inadvertently encouraged by groups such as Searchlight focusing obsessively only on race and making reference only to 'extremists' as Nick Lowles did in the Evening Standard ( Monday 25th July 2011 ).

By 'extremists', those such as Lowels mean Islamists but they and organisation such as Unite Against Fascism have gone on street marches in alliance with those who use 'Islamophobia' as a pretext to vent hatred no less that organisations such as the EDL.

True, Lowles has condemned 'Islamist extremism', not least those of the Muslims Against Crusades which he sees as the equivalent of the EDL and the BNP. Yet to single out this group instead of looking at the pronouncements of spokesmen for the MAB is a dereliction of duty.

The reason is that when one leading woman of the MAB and RESPECT, Salma Yaqoob, claimed that the July 7 Bombings of 2005 were a "reprisal attack", this form of rationalisation is not put on a par with Stephen Lennon's comment that what Brievik did was what happens when men in despair are driven to it by mass immigration.

Though it could be said that Islamist terrorism is a reaction to the state terrorism meted out by the USA and UK on Muslim lands, the terrorist response to that in attacking civilians has been replied to by associating the existence of a new non-nationalist form of terrorism with a pan-European terrorist response aimed at those deemed guilty of facilitating the violence.

The double standard is not addressed by many on the left no less than those on the right who warble on about Islamism being 'one seamless totalitarian threat '( Michael Gove ) in order to expedite the propaganda that the wars to in Iraq and Afghanistan were about defeating a civilisational threat and not oil.

There is ample scope for misunderstanding within Britain because of the way politics has become about 'framing' , about propaganda, lobby groups and smug complacency. There is a need to understand that hatred, greed, fanaticism and self interested rationalisations are universal human flaws.

Diary.

Pondering on terrorism this morning on Facebook.

The original just has to be read to understand why Henning Mankell represents those who rationalise terror attacks in order to overcome their terror of them as opposed to understanding that some people are, in fact, evil and crazy. The "western world" had not humiliated Muslim countries. How did Sweden do that ?

Perhaps that's not so generous. As a crime writer he is obliged to plunge into the darker recesses of the human psyche. But he did not distinguish between the idea that these are the thoughts that can be thought and "this is what I think".

With these sorts of issues it's necessary to be careful in the language you use. Yoking together Afghanistan with the reason why this "lone wolf" terrorist tried to blow himself up is unnecessary.

I don't like the Afghanistan War either but it's bad form to try and use the potential threat of terrorism to register opposition to the war, as if Swedish presence was the clear motivating factor, or a crucial one. In which case there would have to be an explanation as to why no Serb has tried to kill people after the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

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The fact is that it should be possible to criticise the war in Afghanistan without being seen to be siding "objectively" with fanatics. A position made difficult by neoconservative rhetoric-"you're either for us or against us" .But that hardly applies to Sweden which is in Afghanistan to help with the humanitarian operations. In reality, the war is about a pipeline, regional reconstruction and geopolitical control in Eurasia.

It might be that 'some' Muslims perceive Afghanistan as a war against fellow Muslims in intention. If so then this shows an ideology and form of identity politics at work and a refusal to look at facts. But its one reason why "humanitarian wars" are pointless and in Afghanistan's case it was never going to be won quickly, in fact never.

The problem with this new form of terror might be that it is just the reflection of a society in the higher realms of boredom.

For those confronted with a society based on total consumerism, the loss of identity, felt hard by those from religious backgrounds and where there is still an affinity for the lost "Muslim World", then out and out violence is one way of punishing docile consumers and society that reduces people to mere 'economic animals'. Not least if that consumerism is based on the car economy that derives from oil, most of which comes from lands living under dictatorships or repressive regimes that are dysfunctional e.g Saudi Arabia. A way of making consumers pay a blood price in this deranged scheme of things?

The mistake being made is that Al Qaida style violence is not organised by some hierarchy or chain of command. It is carried out by those who willingly buy into the psychopathology or accept the one I've outlined here. There are too many rationalisations of this violence by those trying to make partisan political points about aspects of "the system" they dislike. Mankell is somewhat like Sartre in this sense who used the terrorist protests of the Baader Meinhof to make points about the alienation under capitalism. Because he did not like capitalism and the USA's global power.

As for Mankell, his ability to "understand" the motives of the suicide bomber was not made clear because he linked it to Afghanistan. As a crime writer he was trying to probe the psychopathology of those who commit such acts.

The danger comes with rationalising terror in order to express one's own political viewpoints. Understanding criminal minds is one thing, using that to express a dislike of foreign policy ignores the fact that a new hyper identity has been created throughout Europe is about a power game. "We" are here and "we" will make you change this foreign policy.

Only the problem is that the foreign policy is based on easy supplies of cheap oil which are procured only through collusion with repressive regimes. With Western nations seen as complicit in that, only bringing terror into the belly of the beast is seen to provide the will force some change.