Illiberalism spawns Jihadi John and Co
With parliamentary election due in May, James Cameron’s government is at its wits’ end on how to control the upsurge of support for Islamic terrorism among young Britons of both sexes. True, this affects only young people whose parents or grandparents came from Muslim countries in Asia and Africa, but race is a taboo word in this politically correct society. As is always the case, in the true home of all lost causes where every criminal finds an apologist, there are explanations even for the vicious crimes of 26-year-old Mohammed Emwazi, the masked and hooded assassin nicknamed Jihadi John.
The British identify youth with idealism. As a reader says in The Independent newspaper, “When I was 14 in 1956 the Russians invaded Hungary and I had my bags packed to go to Budapest to fight.” As a student in England at the time, I well recall the outraged excitement that swept through university campuses not only over the plight of Hungary, but also when Anthony Eden, then prime minister, invaded Egypt. Young Britons were similarly outraged when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. The Spanish Civil War in the 1930s drew hundreds of people from labourers to aristocrats to defend (as they thought) freedom against Fascism.
The added complication this time is that almost all the converts to jihadi fervour are of Arab, Somali, Pakistani or other subcontinental Muslim origin. They may have been born and brought up in Britain like the young suicide bombers in London some years ago, but some had attended doctrinaire madrassas on the Afghan-Pakistani border. While the 1.1 million Pakistani-origin settlers are generally poor, the Economist calls Somalis “among Britain’s most desperate migrants.”
They are especially susceptible to the campaign by the extreme Sunni so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to recruit warriors for Islam and brides for them. According to British Police, the Syrian civil war has had a “galvanising” effect on the radicalisation of young Britons. They arrested 125 people last year in connection with the war but there were only 25 such arrests in 2013. There are reports that 60 young British women have left the country to marry jihadis.
Ironically, they are all good students with straight As in their school-leaving exams. Most fly to Turkey and take a bus to Urfa town near the Syrian border. Organised people smugglers take them across the border. Most of these girls are under 20 years of age. “The last five who have travelled were aged 15 or 16” says the senior national co-ordinator for counterterrorism, Helen Ball, “so this is a growing problem and one of real concern.” The three names released were Shamima Begum, Amirra Abase and Kadiza Sultana. Apparently, Kadiza Sultana was following more than 70 extremists on Twitter.
Young men who are courting death for their religion exert romantic attraction on impressionable young female minds in search of sexual adventure. The boys believe they are dying for their faith. It has been like this ever since George W. Bush wantonly invaded an inoffensive Iraq and devastated the country. His aggression against Afghanistan could have been explained in terms of 9/11, but Iraq was a victim of megalomania. The world is still paying the price of that criminal folly. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Britain is part of the cost although none of this can exonerate ISIS’s savagery.
People have pointed out that the Jihadi John nickname for its masked headsman with a British accent trivialises atrocity. As someone wrote, the nickname gives Mohammed Emwazi “celebrity and credibility when he is a sadistic murderer.” Others complain that John is a hallowed Christian name not to be insultingly degraded. Now the public is told that Jihadi John whose mother recognised him in the TV portrayal of the beheading of James Foley, one of the two American journalists (the other was Steven Sotloff) whom Jihadi John killed, harboured a sense of paranoia and sympathy for a jailed scientist linked to Al-Qaeda. Apparently, ISIS wanted to exchange the scientist, Aafia Siddiqui, for Foley. A British aid worker, David Haines, was also similarly murdered in full view of the TV cameras.
Each of the three dead were forced to say a few words before being killed blaming his country’s leader for his death. In each instance, Jihadi John called out the leader’s name, Barack Obama and David Cameron. Making a dying man accuse someone is obviously contemptible propaganda. It did not win ISIS any sympathy or support. But it did draw attention to the grim game for global control that lies behind these human tragedies. US militarism in the cause of democracy has destroyed Afghanistan, Pakistan (to some extent), Iraq, Libya and most of Syria with the help of obscurantist oilrich kingdoms, led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Many Iraqis compared the Anglo-American invasion of 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein with the destructive Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Some estimates claim that nearly two million Arabs have died throughout West Asia and the Muslim Maghreb as a result of these US-led wars. More chaos can be expected if the US persists in its aim of removing Syria’s embattled president, Bashar alAssad. Washington has reportedly earmarked $500 million for his elimination and officially describes him as a “brutal dictator”. That term was previously applied to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi who was murdered.
The personal attenuating factor might be Jihadi John’s earlier involvement with MI5, the British Intelligence agency. He believes he unknowingly sold his laptop to an undercover MI5 agent via an online selling site called Gumtree. He also complained in an e-mail of being harassed by the agency before he joined ISIS. In fact, the British campaign group Cage, which opposes the UK’s anti-terrorism laws, accuses MI5 harassment of driving Emwazi to terrorism. According to Cage’s director Asim Qureshi, Emwazi is an “extremely gentle” and “kind” man. Kuwait-born Emwazi, who came to Britain at the age of six, went to school and university in this country. His former headmaster says he was a hard-working and aspirational boy who was bullied at school. Emwazi was identified as a potential terrorist in 2009 but travelled to Syria four years later, sparking a national debate on the effectiveness of Britain’s security agencies. He gained international notoriety after the public screening of Foley’s murder.
Some Britons like the Liberal Democrat politician, Alex Carlile, argue that restrictions on the movements of suspects could have prevented Emwazi from joining ISIS. But Ed Miliband, the Labour Party leader, strongly opposes such controls, while Cameron’s coalition partners in the Liberal Democrat ranks are uneasily sitting on the fence. Several newspaper editorials have insisted that locking up suspects and banning fundamentalists from university campuses can only be counter-productive. Cameron’s government doesn’t want to appear illiberal. It doesn’t want to alienate the Afro-Asian vote on the eve of elections. Those sensitivities could be its undoing and play into the hands of the extreme right, led by the United Kingdom Independence Party.