Is Britain really safe from Islamist terror?
All terrorism is atrocious, but the notion of two Islamist criminals going into a church and cutting the throat of an 85-yearold priest seems to set a new standard of wickedness. Various authorities, such as the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, come out with fatuous bromides aimed at having us believe this is not a religious war. As a lifelong atheist, even I struggle to accept that. One imagines that those Islamists who decided to enter a Christian church, take Christian worshippers hostage and murder a Christian priest would struggle with it too. This wave of terrorism is not motivated by the evils of capitalism, that is for sure.
I have been trying to imagine, too, what would have happened had two Christians been so evil as to go into a suburban mosque in a French town and murder a harmless old imam. Shame and self-flagellation would have gripped Christian France, and quite right, too. One wonders whether the country’s Muslim community would have responded with the passivity their Christian brethren have shown since the murder of Fr Jacques Hamel. Last week it was reported that British Muslims felt outrage when a page of the Koran unintentionally appeared in an episode of the notoriously offensive and racist television programme
Outrage, yet nobody even got hurt. As the saying goes, there are two sides out there, and only one is playing cricket.
There is much to worry us all about in the recent wave of random violence in France and Germany. The rate at which young Muslim men are being radicalised to the point where they will commit the most repellent crimes is deeply alarming. France has been appalling at integrating its Muslim population, and is now paying the price. Germany, on the other hand, has held out the hand of friendship to Muslim refugees in a way few other countries have, yet is being terrorised too. It is the stunning absence of reason in all this that makes it so impossible to cope with.
France and Germany are groping towards ways of dealing with the threat. In France, the hapless government of François Hollande applies sticking plasters – proposing to form a national guard, for example, or cut off foreign money to certain mosques – while its opposition demands round-ups, shutting borders and a relaxation of human rights laws: both Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans and Marine Le Pen’s Front National are advocating measures inconsistent with France’s continued membership of the European Union. At least Mme Le Pen is honest enough to advocate full withdrawal; M Sarkozy’s party pretends the changes can come whether Brussels likes it or not. The fact is that, given the toxic history between the French establishment and the Muslim minority, any hint of special measures against that community could cause civil unrest on an unmanageable scale. France’s hands are tied, unless it wants something approaching an urban civil war to break out. And mainstream French politicians are in denial about Brussels’s effect on France’s security.
What lessons can, or should, Britain learn from this? We have a far smaller Muslim community than France, and the vast majority abides by British laws and lives side-by-side with our customs. Unfortunately, it only takes a small minority to wreak terror and havoc – and our security services tell us such a minority is active in Britain. Yet politicians brief that the security services lack the personnel to monitor every known suspect here, never mind the unknown.
A sensible society would take action long before young Muslims become radicalised. We have little idea how many British nationals are fighting for Isil in the Middle East, or trying to join them; a year ago it was suggested that 1,600 had left this country to fight, and that 500 had returned. There must be more by now. The Terrorist Prevention and Investigation Measures, designed to monitor people such as returned jihadists, are hardly used at all: only one suspect in the United Kingdom is subject to one. They are remarkably similar to measures used against one of the murderers of Fr Hamel, who slaughtered the priest while out wearing his electronic tag for the morning, so are not necessarily effective even when implemented. Added to our porous borders, this suggests we are not taking the threat of the 500 or more returned jihadists as seriously as we might.
Also, the Police Firearms Officers Association has said that if an attack were carried out in Britain of the sort that happened in France, it could take armed police 45 minutes to respond: time to cut an abominable number of throats. Is our police force, which we recently learned is busily engaged in the life-and-death matter of pursuing “hate criminals” who wolf whistle women, really primed to protect the public against a terrorist threat and to detect and arrest potential perpetrators? The police themselves do not seem think so.
It is far from clear that the Government is dealing effectively with schools where the radicalising of young men begins. There also seems to be a fear of intervening in those mosques where such things happen, and prosecuting the imams responsible; why? And, also last week, it was reported that a book described as “the Islamist was circulating in our prisons, extolling the virtues of violent jihad against unbelievers, railing against homosexuals and attacking the Jews for destroying society. Prison imams had replied that they were “too busy” to monitor religious literature before it was given to inmates.
There are too many signs that we are not taking the threat from jihadminded Muslims sufficiently seriously. These people are often pariahs in their own communities; we must act with the support of Muslims who feel the same about these extremists as the rest of us. That we have not recently experienced an act of terror such as our French and German neighbours have endured may be more by luck than design. We cannot rely on that luck to last indefinitely.