Why do we tolerate the jihadis in our midst?

MORE than 400 suspected jihadis have returned to the UK from Syria. More than 100 are being ‘monitored’ by police in London alone, we are told.

‘Hundreds more’ are under surveillance nationwide. Yet only eight have been prosecuted so far, it’s reported. Why so few?

The fact that they will enjoy robust defence advice — paid for out of public funds, of course — is a factor. The police will be reluctant to bring cases that are not watertight. Some civil rights campaigners feel that returning jihadis should not be prosecuted at all.

The argument is made that these prodigals might redeem themselves by providing valuable information about their erstwhile Islamic State commanders — a somewhat Walt Disney-like scenario. Does it seem believable to you?

Some returning fighters will claim they had joined Syrian opposition groups fighting President Bashar al-Assad. Can we prove otherwise?

Their lawyers can point out that, until recently, at least, Assad was also regarded as our enemy by the Prime Minister, David Cameron. So aren’t Assad’s enemies — the jihadis — the PM’s friend?

In Belgium and France, armed police are busily breaking down doors and dragging alleged Islamic State conspirators off to prison. Soldiers are patrolling the streets of Paris and there’s a three-month state of emergency.

When the fear and anger following the Paris slaughter dies down, as it surely will, we’ll hear again about the great British virtue of tolerance which sets us above cruel and backward peoples elsewhere.

But as the great philosopher Sir Karl Popper — himself a foreigner accepted by the UK and knighted by the Queen after a distinguished career — said in his book, The Open Society And Its Enemies: ‘If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’

Popper suggests: ‘We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law. And we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.’

We accept the State’s suppression of intolerance when it involves racism. We are emphatically not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, creed or religion.

Muslims here are protected by such laws like everyone else. It’s why some of them came to the UK in the first place. So why is it so difficult to prosecute those who live here — often claiming welfare benefits — who plot with likeminded fanatics abroad to do us harm and destroy our way of life? We parrot meekly that Islamic State’s murderous discrimination against non-Muslims is a perversion of Islam. But is that entirely true?

In Arab countries such as Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, non-Muslims are openly discriminated against. Not believing in Islam is a crime punishable by death, in law if not always in practice.

Do they hope that we’ll be terrorised into coming around to their point of view one day, which boils down to ‘accept Islam or die’?

Bombing Islamic State terrorists in Syria is justified, but pointless on its own. ISIS has to be encircled and destroyed, in Syria and everywhere else it proliferates.

The nations which have acted as its ‘enablers’ must be tackled, too. Lord West, a former Sea Lord, says: ‘We should confront states such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which have financed ISIS and bought its oil supplies on the black market.’

And here in Britain, surely it isn’t enough to ‘monitor’ those who actively support the aims of Islamic State? Or must we wait until they commit an atrocity before rounding them up? It’s in the interests of the overwhelming Muslim majority here who mean us no harm to remove those in their midst who give active support to Islamic terrorists.

That majority must understand — as Sir Karl Popper put it — that unlimited tolerance leads to its disappearance. Isn’t escaping intolerance the reason they, or their ancestors, came here in the first place?