Cameron has been bold – but are Britain’s young Muslims listening?

It is their separation from the mainstream of society rather than Islam itself that is the problem

When I was a student in the 1970s, the politics tutors were mostly hard-Left, agitprop types of the sort lampooned by Malcolm Bradbury in The History Man. Their heroes were Mao Tse-tung, whose little red book could be ordered from the Chinese embassy (I can’t remember where mine now is); Ho Chi Minh for facing down the Americans; Che Guevara, for being the epitome of the guerrilla fighter killed by the CIA; and George Jackson, a founder of the Black Panthers who was shot dead trying to escape from San Quentin prison. These were the shock-troops of Leftist ideology, their memory and achievements invoked in the pernicious promotion of neo-Marxist, anti-Western beliefs to impressionable, open-minded, wideeyed youngsters just out of school, like me.

A small number responded to these noxious teachings in a violent way, perhaps joining anarchist organisations like The Angry Brigade, which conducted a bombing campaign in the early 1970s. Its targets included the homes of Robert Carr, then home secretary, and other Tory MPs, though no one was killed. Overseas, the threat was far nastier: the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhoff gang in Germany bombed, killed, kidnapped and maimed throughout the 1970s and beyond. The Red Brigades abducted Aldo Moro, the former Italian prime minister, and murdered him after 55 days of captivity.

So, my question is this: were the Left-wing lecturers whose opinions dominated discourse in university campuses complicit in this urban terrorism? Should their courses have been closed down? They were not, of themselves, violent people and nor were they advocating direct action. But by hawking an anti-Western, antidemocratic creed they were fomenting juvenile grievances that would potentially turn students against the country that nurtured them. They were producing the seedcorn of terrorism.

Speaking in Birmingham yesterday about his five-year plan to counter non-violent extremism, David Cameron said those who stir up antipathy to the West in response to perceived historic injustices or involvement in Middle East wars must be confronted. “We face a radical ideology that is not just subversive, but can seem exciting, that has often sucked people in from non-violence to violence, that is overpowering moderate voices within the debate and can gain traction because of issues of identity and failures of integration.” The same could be said about the Leftist rabble-rouser in the Seventies, with one fundamental difference: integration. The impressionable students of the Seventies were assailed by other views that challenged the Spartist garbage they were being spoon-fed in the lecture halls. Moreover, the derision of their friends rapidly turned most budding Citizen Smiths away from the revolutionary road.

By contrast, young Muslim men – and, increasingly, women – have few counterpoints to the warped world view they experience on a daily basis, whether at home, in school, on TV or through the internet. It is their separation from the mainstream rather than the ideology itself that is the problem. Essentially, this has a lot to do with a shared religion, which is why those who say Islam is not the issue miss the point: it is not that its teachings are necessarily at fault, but Islam provides an impenetrable ethical and cultural carapace that repels liberal ideas. Add in the supposed “glamour” offered by organisations like Isil and the misplaced sense of injustice that is continually invoked by Muslim spokesmen and you have a toxic cocktail that may manifest itself in violence.

It may well be true that some young Muslims feel angry and alienated but that is only because they are fed a daily diet of resentment that other settlers – Jews, Chinese, Indians etc – do not feel. These communities have also often congregated together ( just as expat Brits do) but they are more open to the influences of the wider community and much more likely to embrace the values and support the institutions that underpin the nation.

The key conundrum Mr Cameron is struggling to answer is what, specifically, makes a young Muslim susceptible to extremist ideology but not a young second-generation Indian or, for that matter, a young British Christian bombarded with the quack nostrums of Marxist collectivism. To ignore the cultural confines of Islam and say this is really a political, not a religious, issue is to miss the point entirely, as Mr Cameron conceded for the first time in his speech. Breaking down these barriers is the real challenge, just as it has been for 30 years. We are reaping the whirlwind of the multiculturalist experiment that the Left championed and the Right were too cowed to denounce until the baleful consequences of segregation became apparent.

Mr Cameron said it was wrong to say Islam was incompatible with British values; yet at the same time he insisted that those who follow minority faiths must subscribe to mainstream progressive views on gay marriage and gender equality. How do those two statements come together when attitudes to homosexuality and women’s rights – and even democracy in places like Tower Hamlets – are so out of sync with the tolerance and values shown by the majority?

The Prime Minister said that to face down extremism we all must change our approach; but since support for violent jihadism is confined to the Muslim community, it is patently not true that everyone has a role to play. To pretend otherwise is to perpetuate the cultural cringe that got us into this mess in the first place.

Just as with subversive Marxism, the counterweight to this ideology must be provided by an everyday repudiation of its nonsensical tenets from within the society where its allure is strongest. Mr Cameron has clearly thought long and hard about this matter and has gone far further than any previous Prime Minister in identifying where responsibility for tackling it must lie. But all his bold statements about cohesion, and the counter-terrorism strategy now being devised, will be immaterial if the Muslims he needs to convince are simply not listening.