The president has a point about Islamist terror
Donald Trump should be given his state visit because we need Washington’s help to fight terrorism
Ihave some sympathy with Robert “Woody” Johnson, the American Ambassador to the UK, when he claims that Donald Trump’s recent Twitter-spat with our Prime Minister has been “misinterpreted”. One of the great frustrations of trying to engage with serious issues on social media, I find, is that all too often people rush to judgment without proper cognisance of the more profound point being made.
Thus, when the president illadvisedly retweeted videos originally posted by Britain First, all the media outrage generated by the liberal Left focused on his use of material provided by the far-right political group. In so doing, this overlooked the perfectly valid point Mr Trump was trying to make about the threat home-grown Islamist extremists pose, both to our security and to that of our allies.
When I interviewed Mr Johnson for The Daily Telegraph back in September, shortly after his appointment to the Court of St James, he was at pains to stress that the twin pillars of Mr Trump’s approach to foreign policy were “prosperity and security”.
The fact, therefore, that this year Britain has experienced the largest number of terrorist plots since the height of the Troubles in the Seventies is clearly going to be an issue of great interest for a president who has been vociferous in his condemnation of Islamist-inspired terrorism.
As if to justify the point the president was trying to make about the threat Britain faces from such extremists, no sooner had the furore over his tweets subsided than Andrew Parker, the director-general of MI5, revealed that the security service had foiled an Islamist plot to murder Theresa May in Downing Street. Mr Parker also said that British intelligence had foiled nine further terror plots in the past 12 months – and these do not include the attacks that have been successful, such as the suicide bombing of the Manchester Arena in May, which killed 22 innocent concert-goers.
Mr Trump might have been clumsy in the manner in which he tried to make his point – some of the videos posted online by Britain First are fictitious propaganda. But he is right to be concerned about the growth of Islamist terrorism in Britain.
Furthermore, the US has already been on the receiving end of a number of terror attacks that originated from Britain. Consider the infamous attempt by Richard Reid, a petty criminal from south London, to detonate a bomb concealed in his shoe on a flight to Miami in 2001.
US intelligence officials have also taken a dim view of Britain’s lenient attitude towards so-called hate preachers like Abu Hamza al-masri. Following his extradition to America, he is now serving a life sentence in the same maximum-security jail in Colorado as Reid after being convicted by a New York court of a number of terror-related offences.
Put in this context, Mr Trump’s concern about the activities of Islamist extremists in Britain does not look so misplaced after all. And those, like Labour MP Stella Creasy, who are demanding that the Government cancels its invitation to Mr Trump to make a state visit, would do well to remember that long-standing cooperation on defence and intelligence between London and Washington is vital to preventing further terror attacks.
For, whatever you might think about the way the American president likes to conduct himself, maintaining Britain’s alliance with the US is as important for our national security as it is for safeguarding the nation’s future prosperity.
As Mr Johnson pointed out in his interview on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, one of the president’s first acts on entering the Oval Office was to restore the bust of Winston Churchill, which had been removed by Barack Obama and confined to a White House corridor. Mr Trump’s admiration for our wartime leader is said to reflect his own warm affection for Britain, a sentiment the Government would be wise to exploit as it enters a crucial phase in the Brexit negotiations.
Mr Trump is about the only world leader of note who is openly enthusiastic about Britain’s decision to leave the EU, arguing that it will allow parliament to take responsibility for decision-making while at the same time giving the country control over its borders. Currently the US has an estimated $1trillion invested in Britain, with around 7,000 US companies doing business here, and that figure could rise dramatically if the Government succeeds in negotiating a good settlement from the EU.
But the outcome of any future trade deals with the US will depend, to some extent, on the strength of relations between Downing Street and the White House. So if we want to maintain good relations with our most powerful ally, we should spend less time on the faux outrage of Left-wing politicians, and more on getting the red carpets ready for a proper presidential welcome.