Propaganda of the Name: The Meaning of 'Islamic State'.

'we believe the media, civic society and governments should refuse to legitimise these ludicrous caliphate fantasies by accepting or propagating this name. We propose that 'UnIslamic State' (UIS) could be an accurate and fair alternative name'-'Islamic State' is a slur on our faith, say leading Muslims. Observer, Saturday 13 September 2014

The complaint by British Muslim organisations and imams that the Prime Minister should stop using the words 'Islamic state' to describe the self-proclaimed Islamic State takes the absurd to new levels. For a start, Obama and Cameron have been at pains not to call it IS or ISIS or regard it as truly Islamic.

In countering the threat which is a threat to the US and Britain but not yet, it seems the threat does not even have the name is has as 'Islamic State' because President Obama, and so David Cameron, call it 'ISIL'. Cameron referred to a 'so-called Caliphate' and 'nihilists'.

It is understandable why British Muslims would not want to be associated with what they call the 'Unislamic State'. But by denying the neo-caliphate could be 'islamic' and demanding it is called the opposite of what it calls itself they run the risk of being ridiculed and giving more publicity to the idea of its being Islamic or not.

More than that, by acting childishly and petulantly by demanding the media calls Islamic State the 'Unislamic State', the Muslim organisations invite the sort of response which would delight in countering, with malicious glee, that Islamic State really is the 'real face' of Islam going back to its authentic and true 'medieval' origins.

The grotesque irony of all this is that IS would get exactly what they want in the aftermath of the first online public beheading of of a British hostage, captured aid worker David Haines, by reinforcing the attitudes of those who see that act at the hands of a British jihadist either as 'real' Islam' or as 'nothing to do with it'.

There are those who see the beheading as a warning that this is the sort of act that 'you have coming' from a British jihadist 'near you'. Then there are those denying that such an action could ever be committed by anyone professing to be Islamic, to which the answer is going to be like the panto refrain 'oh, yes it is !'.

IS knows that the beheadings are so gory and vile that the western media would whip up outrage of the sort media obsessed politicians such as Cameron thrive on when bigging up the terror threat, the better to increase their self important need to 'do' something as well as playing for votes and 'looking tough on terror'.

By talking up the 'global terror threat', IS gets precisely the necessary response. They are intelligent enough to know how useful their threat is in forcing politicians in media dominated democracies to make out the threat to be a unified one so as to better justify any military interventions they would need to take.

The reasons for that are that IS realises the western nations in Britain are bound to need to intervene militarily to protect oil and gas supplies from control or else sabotage by jihadists across the regions which is claimed as part of a new revived caliphate stretching from sub-Saharan Africa through to the Greater Middle East.

By portraying disparate jihadi-Islamist threats across these different nations as one seamless 'global threat', and using that to intervene militarily, with drones, air strikes or 'boots on the ground' IS would be able to spread its franchise operation out of its core base in Syria and into Iraq into Egypt, Libya, Yemen or Nigeria.

The ultimate ambition, of course, is to be the threat that Cameron is portraying IS as being, that is, one that reaches its sinister tentacles into the heartlands of Britain, something already played on by celebrity jihadists Anjem Choudary who are as media savvy as establishment politicians playing on fear. 

Though appearing a buffoon, Choudury is already knows how to play up to his useful media role in linking the outrage over the execution of hostages to the fact there is less outrage over the way western foreign policy means "hundreds of thousands of people have been beheaded by drones and daisy cutters".

IS online beheadings are meant to stir things up in Britain by opening up a discussion on British foreign policy why Britain is uncritically following the US as 'lapdog' and why it is condemning the execution of one British hostage claimed by ISIS to have been in the British army rather than the foreign policy for 'causing' it.

This gloating and gory propaganda of the deed which is intended by IS to be what Cameron calls 'pure evil' compared to the 'greater evil' against which ISIS is ranged: the Hypocrite Sunni Muslim regimes that made their state possible by bankrolling jihadi efforts against Assad's regime and their Infidel allies.

Islamic State is, in reality, the Islamist State of Syria and Iraq. This would be a far better designation which distinguishes between Islam and the ideologisation of Islam into a set of political tactics and doctrines adapted to the modern world which owes much in its ideas to thinkers such as Maududi and Nabhani.

Maududi used the word 'Islamic State' to mean one in which all aspects of public and private life in a perfect society would be determined by a select Godly elite who would slowly infiltrate their way into institutions and take them over from within and purge kuffars from positions of power.

Maududi put forward a non-violent path to create an utopia. Other thinkers such as Qutb, an influence on Al Qaida, stressed modernistic ideas such as a vanguard elite bent on destroying a decadent world and creating a new world through acts of apocalyptic violence and terrorism.

None of those ideas exist in the Qu'ran. Islamist ideas such as Al Qaida's at one extreme. Those groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir which have an ambiguous attitude towards violence demand a Caliphate as an Islamified version of the sort of utopia longed for by, for example, the Bolsheviks in Tsarist Russia.

Islamic State is no more necessarily Islamic than the the Soviet Union was a true union of republics based on the control of worker's councils or even truly socialist. However, few socialists in the west, even those who rejected the Soviet Union would have called it the 'fake union of unsocialist unfree pseudo-republics'.

Malise Ruthven puts it well when he refers to Islamism as,

'the ideologization of Islam at the political level, the construction of a political ideology using some symbols culled from the historical reperiore of Islam, to the exclusion of others. This ideology, sometimes refered to as 'Islamic fundamentalism', is better described as Islamism: the Latin suffix attached to the Arabic original more accurately expresses the relationship between the pre-existing reality ( in this case a religion ) and its translation into a political ideology, just as communism ideologizes the reality of the commune, socialism the social, and fascism the ancient symbol of Roman consular authority'.

The difference is that socialism or communism were not words with a necessary cultural resonance for those identifying with a religion and civilisation such as Islam does imply. This is why not colluding in the portrayal of Islamic State at face value is vital and why 'Islamist State' would be the right name.

One advantage, is that those following or tempted to identify with Islamist groups in Britain would see that the necessary outcome of trying to create a caliphate based on an enforced and extreme version of sharia law ends up creating a hell on earth for other Muslims first and foremost in the lands under its control.

On message politicians in Britain, however, insist on 'ISIL' for reasons of 'public diplomacy'. One reason is 'ISIL' sounds more pointedly sharp and sinister, far more deadly and dangerous than ISIS which is also the name of an Egyptian Goddess. It sounds more evil and vile like SPECTRE in James Bond.

Another handy use of ISIL, is it avoids serving to remind those who opposed air strikes against Syria in 2013 that the last 'S' in ISIS means 'Syria' which could be entered targets there bombed. ISIL sounds more like a bacteria or lethal virus, a truly 'poisonous ideology' that can seep unguarded into any 'community'.

ISIL could be borne back to 'the homeland'. Having said that, some criticised the use of ISIL because the 'L' means Levant, that is the power claim made over Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq , Southern Turkey, or even Israel. Yet that would serve to create a greater sense threat in the region too as well as the US.

The calculation could be that nobody actually knows that 'L' means Levant or what Levant means apart from sounding a bit fragrant. Of course, ISIL and ISIS are both better than IS which means 'Islamic State' and it could not be admitted that Islamic State is either a real state or that its really Islamic which is what IS wants.

The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Reflections on Just War and Just Terror

Propaganda about the Israel-Palestine conflict often falls into two versions. One is that Israel only uses such means as is strictly necessary to defend itself against Hamas, a dastardly group of terrorist fanatics that wants to wipe Israel off the map as stated in their charter.

The second is that, on the contrary, Hamas are a dedicated resistance force representing the true will of the Gazan people against an agressive colonialist terror state and that Israel is an alien entity in the Middle East founded on a form of 'state terrorism' far worse than anything offered by the PLO or Hamas.

Neither of these two propaganda tropes lead to an understanding that there is, in fact, a dark and pyschopathological link between Israel's politicians and the Hamas rocketeers who both need the aggression and terror of the other in order to advance their respective power claims.

Terror cuts both ways. Israel is a state in which its government is ready to deploy terror tactics to advance their strategy for dealing with Hamas. Likewise, Hamas is an organisation dedicated to an armed insurgency against Israel using rocket attacks and that is also a tactic of terror.

The brutal reality is in previous confrontations in 2012, 2008-9 and, further back to the period that followed on from the war which created the Gaza Strip and Israel back in 1948, terror has been used by fanatics both sides just as it was from the outset.

The Likud government pursuing the war in Gaza at present, though termed a 'ground incursion', is directly connected to the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group in many ways similar in its tactics to the PLO and even Hamas. That Israel is a succesful democracy tends to obscure this.

The irony, however, as historian Mark Almond pointed out during the 2008 Israeli-Gaza conflict is that it is precisely democracy that has ratcheted up the tensions and led to a belief on both sides that the terrorism of the other justifies being tough and intransigent so as to shore up domestic support.

As Almond puts it ' both Israel and Gaza are among the few democratic parts of the Middle East. But democracy makes peace more difficult to come by. few Israeli would-be prime ministers want to appear ‘soft’ on terrorism. And Hamas won the election in Gaza by voicing its bitter resentment of Israel'.

The Israel Palestine conflict of 2014 is, as with others before it, in reality a regional conflict. Yet it tends to get portrayed as the theatre of some cosmic global struggle between good and evil. As with other conflicts it is about ethnicity and religion but also about control over resources such as water and offshore gas.

Though Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel condemns the rocket attacks as terrorism ( which they are ) the fact is that they are designed as provocations to get Israel to retaliate in precisely the way it is doing and for Hamas to portray Israel as a terrorist power ( and it is carrying out war crimes ).

The difference, of course, is that the balance of terror in 2014 more than in any previous conflict is stacked in Israel's favour due to the development of the Iron Dome defence system in 2011-2012. And this has been decisive in Israel going for outright victory and to military means to force Hamas into submission.

The usual criteria of 'intentionality' and 'proportionality' when considering whether a hostile action is just war or terror has become blurred entirely. On both sides the emphasis has been on just terror, even if the the decisive advantage lies with Israel which wants to now finish off Hamas permanently.

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.

'You People". Thoughts on the Woolwich Murder and a Perverted Theology of Violence.

"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".

Michael Adebolajo's brutal hacking to death of an off duty soldier was done in clear day on 22nd May 2013 in a street of south London. While reports claim the murder was a frenzied attack, Adebolajo seemed quite calm and composed when he delivered there his deadly message to the British public via camera footage.

Much immediate media coverage was irresponsible. When ITN claimed Adebolajo had brought 'Baghdad violence to the streets of London' it could only have been exactly what he had wanted as a response. Such a lurid comment was typically one that had no relation to Adebolajo's statement when he blamed Afghanistan.

In reality, of course, a perverted theology was at work in Adebolajo's mind that many have not yet taken seriously on its own grounds. They tend to think Adebolajo was 'radicalised' or that his statement must be taken as the true, if regrettable, statement by a violent jihadi Islamist objecting to foreign policy.

The obvious fact is that it cannot be known to date whether there were greater forces behind Adebolajo or whether he acted from his own initiative or as 'part of a team' or both. Yet the words, despite the clinically spiteful banality of their message revealed a certain mindset that it is interesting to explore.

Few have actually really looked at what the killer said in relation to why he did it with any coherence because they are afraid these may well be his words and that he meant it. So he can be written off as 'brainwashed', 'indoctrinated' or just 'pure evil' or the supposed true face of radical Islam' or 'fanatical religion'.

Adebolajo's act was pure form of propaganda of the deed amplified by the immediate recording of his acts and words via instant media and the Internet. By all accounts, Adebolajo made no attempt to escape and according to one eye witness seemed to be want to be caught.

The purpose of this act is to make a statement and to terrify people by the idea he means everything he says and to insinuate there will be more in store from those who may or may not be supporting him. As investigations are continuing, it is too early to have a clear perspective on that.

Even so, part of the pose he presented is meant to get people to assume he was otherwise decent but 'driven' to these 'acts of desperation' by British foreign policy. Adebolajo states he believed so. It's no comment on the foreign policy at all since he seeks to punish less the government but "You People".

By that he means the people who don't do enough to stop their government and so it is his job to ratchet up the death tally on 'your side'. The pathetic and maudlin hypocrite's tear is there: if only you would have done something, "You People" would not have received this being visited upon "You".

Adebolajo, in that absurd light, is thus merely an extreme protester, the man just forced to kill by the spectacle of fellow Muslims in a land being killed that he's never travelled to or connected to by his parents country of origin-Nigeria. This is' transferable greivance' (*)  mongering on a cosmic level.

For Adebolajo comes from a strong moralistic Nigerian Christian background. He was converted to Islam only later after having fallen into bad ways with the 'wrong sort' in Romford. This confirms the fact that the terror threat can come from a sort of hatred at the emptiness of Britain's consumer society and anomie.

There is not much to "integrate" into in London. Large areas consist of no binding social fabric much beyond shopping and consuming, a freedom that is considered to blind "You People" to the fact this lifestyle diverts 'them' from looking at what happens abroad in their name.

To bring this point 'home', the terror that Muslims feel in Afghanistan then must be brought home too. You must learn to feel their pain. The failure to act, the failure to stop whatever you are doing right now and think of Him means the Godless shall and must be punished.

The very fact "You People" haven't actually done anything wrong is precisely why you must be punished and why he believes he is an Agent of Allah bringing down His Wrath upon those who turn away from the True Path and merely exist like a mere collection of docile domesticated farm animals.

Hence "You People" are fit only for slaughter until you change both the error of 'Your Ways' and 'Stop the War'. To pretend there is not some perverted form of an Islamic idea of God the Avenger, just as he is in the Old Testament, is to pretend to ignore that this form of outrage is caused by he who is bereft of real faith.

Adebolajo believes he can only force people to ask 'Why? ' through bringing death down on people from out of nowhere as judgement upon them. The twisted logic is that You must be terrified into acting because nothing else will force you to feel the suffering of Muslims in other lands.

This is the sort of sentiment rationalised by hard left apologists for violence in the Leninist tradition. It is a form of nihilism. Only when faced with terror, death and nothingness can unbelievers be forced to face the abyss he alone has faced and to either back his cause, or do what he demands you do-or to die.

Unfortunately, Adebolajo's actions and words were quickly swallowed by hard left apologists for murder and violence at face value. The reason is that because Adebolajo effectively claims he disliked British foreign policy and was prepared to kill and 'suffer' for his crimes, it can be harnessed to other's propaganda.

A crude example of that is Lindsey German of the farcically named Stop the War Coalition that includes support from many on the ex-communist left in Britain who have morphed into apparent pacifists while still using atrocities to ramp up crude hatred and propaganda as opposed to reflection.

After the Woolwich attack, German stated "Unlike with most terrorist attacks or indeed other crimes, we have been able to see film footage of the perpetrators, hear testimony from the witnesses who saw or talked to them. So we know what these men say motivated them".
.

German  accepts what he says because it benefits her point. And her status  just parrots the line ( effectively ) 'war is wrong so this what you must expect ' while this terrorist fed her that line ( effectively ) word for word. Though not able to justify murder those like German use it to hammer home the points they want.

The ideology in action here comes from some cosmic calculus of death in which innocent people are never innocent and the universe is dominated only by killing or being killed. The "real killers" and those killed who must be avenged.
.

If that ratchets up the arithmetic of death , agony and pain, then, in the higher scheme of things, this is a matter of indifference. The cause is all and those who are to die 'in the name of Allah' have been predetermined to do so once the Evil was started-always, of course, by 'the West'.

NB *The phrase 'transferable greivance'  comes from the philosopher Roger Scruton in The West and The Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat.

Why Glenn Greenwald Rationalises Jihadist Terrorism.

A certain Mr Gunnison has challenged my view that Glen Greenwald is responsible for rationalising terrorism. He states bluntly

Can you put your finger on, and link to, a statement he's made which justifies the suggestion that he holds US foreign policy alone to be the sole causative agent for "jihadist violence" against the US?

Yes, it is possible to quote Greenwald's position in this sense exactly. As here,

In the last several years, there have been four other serious attempted or successful attacks on US soil by Muslims, and in every case, they emphatically all say the same thing: that they were motivated by the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies to the Muslim world - violence which routinely kills and oppresses innocent men, women and children..

The claim that Mr Greenwald has rationalised terrorism stands. The claim they are acting "rationally" is a rationalisation, as if they were involved in a form of asymetric warfare with attainable goals. And no ideology or aims of their of their own.

The fact is that jihadists suscribe to ideologies. There is almost no mention of their ideology in what Mr Greenwald writes At the moment, nobody knows exactly what the motivations of the Boston Bombers is. Do you ? Or is it a predictable response ?

Just because they claim that US foreign policy made them resort to terrorism is to take at face value the legitimacy of their seething rage and anger. It does nothing to understand that with the Boston Bombings were carried out by deracinated Chechens.

If anything, most Chechen terrorism has been aimed at Russia. For the obvious reason that it was Russia that fought a war with Chechnya and not the USA. But Greenwald merely accepts that US foreign policy in Afghanistan would lead Chechens to bomb Boston.

As regards Mr Greenwald rationalising of terrorism as a rational response ( it's never justified but merely "explained" etc etc ) it is true it's a conscious choice to resort to terrorism.

But terrorism is the method by which jihadists wish to punish the civilians in a democracy for not doing enough to stop their governments pursuing foreign policies they do not like. Other Muslims who are angry do not murder civilians.

Yet a conscious choice can be a reflexive reaction based on nihilistic anger and hatred. This is precisely why the idea of intentionality is important in this debate.

Then Mr Greenwald sententiously lectured me after I challenged him on his rationalisation thus,

..it's natural for people to want to view their own side as good and noble and the designated enemy as evil and savage: every population in every war is trained to think in such tribalistic terms. No war could be sustained without this propaganda: Our violence is noble and Theirs is evil.

It is simply not natural for Chechens to want to mass murder citizens in Boston when the USA has not even attacked Chechnya. If the premises of Greenwald were taken seriously, then the USA could just as well retaliate by intentionally murdering Muslims everywhere.

It would just be, well, retaliation, would it not? Another form of mass murder that they might as well indulge themselves in without any attempt at all to minimise civilian casualties. The outcome of such logic is universal pyschopathology.

But of course such considerations were of no consequence to Greenwald who then argued against my position with an tone of airy condescension,

...none of this is relevant to the discussion. Regardless of its motives, the US is continuously killing innocent people in multiple countries around the world, and the results of that behavior (returned violence) are both predictable and rational.

To Greenwald it is central to the discussion even if you want to frame the debate only in ways that suit the 'Chomskyite' propaganda that wish to peddle. There is nothing "predictable" about terror attacks ( um, did he predict the Boston Bombings ? ).

The random psychopathological nature of terrorist attacks is part of the reason they call it terrorism. It is meant to instill terror. Al Qaida's original demand was US troops out of Saudi Arabia. The US is in Afghanistan not to kill Muslims but for geopolitical reasons.

To suggest that jihadist terrorism is merely a form of retaliation ( both predictable and rational ) is a rationalisation based on not taking Islamist terrorism seriously on its own terms and comes close to remaining aloof from the violence with a certain callous indifference.

Which contradicts his very real concerns about the futility and bloodshed caused by Drone Bombing. Even so, if jihadist violence were mere retaliation, then that would not explain why irate Serbian nationalists after the Kosovo War in 1999 did not try to bomb Britain.

Nor why there have been no terrorist attacks in Poland, a staunch ally of the USA in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the reason is that there virtually no Muslim minorities in such countries of whom a minority have been taught to detest Western Civilisation entirely

A Rationalisation of Bin Laden's Terrorism.

Let that be it. The killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is a fork in the road of world politics.

One way lies a fundamental rethink of US and British policy towards the Arab and Muslim worlds, a chance to drain the swamp that bred 9/11.

That way is the end of the "war on terror" launched in the aftermath of Bin Laden's atrocious crimes of September 2011. His act of violence became first the cause and rapidly the pretext for many more such acts, vastly more costly in terms of lives lost.

Andrew Murray, ( Bin Laden's death is a fork in the road The Guardian, 2 May 2011 )

Murray, chairman of the "Stop the War Coalition" in Britain has used the killing of Bin Laden to trot out the usual line that Al Qaeda terrorism is merely a reflex action to US and British foreign policy. Despite the fact Al Qaeda fighters have been active in places outside the Arab and Muslim World such as Indonesia and Chechnya.

There is no need to take the propaganda claims of the Bush administration and the "war on terror" at face value, for if 9/11 was a pretext to go in to Afghanistan and, partly, into Iraq, Al Qaeda's commitment to terrorism and the USA/UK's quest for energy security pre dates both what are essentially resource wars.

The same is true of Russia's role in the war against Chechen insurgents with connections to Al Qaeda. In fact, the assassination of 'Moganned', Al Qaeda's main Saudi born militant in Chechnya occurred recently on April 22nd 2011 and who had entered the Northern Caucasus since 1999 and by 2005 emerged as the handler of foreign funds for the jihad.

Hence Andrew Murray's crude "either-or" interpretation of the relationship between "the West" and "the Muslim World" is an inversion of the clash of civilisations idea: that Al Qaeda is simply the most extreme and violent form of reaction against Western Imperialism in Arab and Muslim lands.

This crude Leninist propaganda line denies the agency of Arab peoples themselves unless they fit into the notion that they are anti-Western as opposed to against the autocrats that dominate them e.g decayed secular dictatorship of Egypt was created by military power under those such as Colonel Nasser.

The absurdity is that one of the greatest admirers of Nasser is none other than George Galloway, an erstwhile ally of Murray in the myriad of groupuscules that try to hi-jack anti-war sentiment amongst British people into support for fanatical ideological agendas-including that of Respect.

Galloway's hero in Nasser executed Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual progenitor of modern militant Islamism in 1966, one reason the alliance between the hard left and the MAB, influenced very much by Qutb, is based only on hatred of the West as opposed to a principled criticism of Western foreign policy.

Al Qaeda has its own history and agenda: it's original raison d'etre under Bin Laden was less to do with Western foreign policy as such but with antagonism to the corruption of the Saudi regime and not being permitted to fight in the First Gulf War of 1991 against Saddam Hussein and which was blamed later on the US and it's 'occupation' of the Holy Land.

Murray is active in campaigning against the governments cuts: but the British economy and hence living standards would collapse without a steady and secure supply of oil from Saudi Arabia, one reason why the British government simply cannot give decisive public backing to democracy activists in Bahrain.

Obviously, as Malise Ruthven wrote in A Fury for God on 9/11 the long term interests of the Western powers are in having stable democratic regimes across the Middle East. The Arab Uprisings at least provide an opportunity that this could be brought about.

Ruthven also sensibly argued that Islamist solidarity always works negatively: the interests of Arab nations and the political groups within them from Bahrain to Libya and Saudi Arabia to Palestine and Lebanon are diverse and to yoke them all as "anti-Western" is to accept precisely the narrative of Al Qaeda.

This narrative accepts the concept of an Islamic hyper identity in which "the Muslim World" and the ummah is largely united in opposing Western "crusades", a term used repeatedly by neurotic and self promoting radical journalists such as John Pilger who want to motivate Muslim youths as new force for militant challenge to Western power from within.

The rationalisation of terrorism that has continually been offered since 9/11, whether by Pilger, Milne or Galloway, has acted as a ruse to ramp up militancy against the system in Britain as a substitute for the decline of the forward march of the labour movement which has petered out and fragmented.

It is true that it is both vital and justified to criticise the foreign policy and the dangerous over dependence upon the oil that fuels Western high octane car and supermarket societies and that leads to contradictory and botched entanglement and meddling in the Middle East.

But equally so, it is necessary to understand that Al Qaeda was not caused wholly by "the West" but as a spin off from the dysfunctional Saudi regime's investment in the Arab Afghan campaigns against the Soviet Union and an ideology that has an existence in its own right, one rejected in the recent Arab Uprisings.