No, British Muslims are NOT neutral bystanders. We are at war – they must join us
THE mindless, random violence of Beirut, Benghazi or Baghdad has come to a European capital. The murder of more than 100 people is profoundly shocking, and not just to the Parisians who have already suffered the assaults on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket this year.
Yet this new assault is a step beyond. It is an attack more profoundly serious than anything seen to date and with echoes that will reverberate for many years.
Highly organised, apparently directed from abroad, supremely difficult to defend against, this may well be the beginning of a long wave of assaults, as a Europe that is already in deep crisis grapples with the collapse of Muslim societies on its doorstep. We must grasp this, and grasp it fast.
Chaotic migration is one consequence as the Middle East unravels, but a campaign of destruction by Islamist fanatics who hate our way of life is altogether more terrifying – as it intends to be. This is war, said Francois Hollande. This is total war, added Nicolas Sarkozy. This is no exaggeration. THE techniques used by the murderers are not new. Islamist terrorists work to a limited tactical playbook. Attacks on aircraft are the most prized because the media spectacle is dramatic and they trigger pervasive underlying fears of flying.
Since the killing spree in Mumbai in 2008, however, such groups have also mounted marauding urban gun attacks, in which roving shooters target hotels, bars and, always, anything identifiably Jewish. They reckon on the police not having equivalent firepower to AK47 assault rifles and grenades.
It is the level of organisation that takes this to a different level. Eight or more gunmen/suicide bombers were involved. They were not encumbered with the large backpacks used in London on 7/7, but were wearing belts or chest packs filled with high explosives rather than cruder, more voluminous materials cooked up from fertiliser, magnesium and peroxide.
Since a car linked to them has Belgium number-plates, dealers in the murky netherworld of drugs and guns behind Brussels’ Gare du Midi station may be where they acquired military-grade assault rifles. Belgium has a long history of gun-running and mercenaries. It is also home to many Islamic extremists, hence the many arrests yesterday.
Attacks like these almost always result in the deaths of the perpetrators, for both Al Qaeda and Islamic State are ‘death cults’ (a term I coined). That makes it likely that they have undergone infantry- style training, firing short bursts, moving swiftly and calmly, pausing to reload their guns several times.
Someone has also spent weeks drumming into their minds that violent death is just a momentary blink as they enter heavenly paradise. This would have happened in jihadi training camps. ONE of the men had a Syrian passport, another an Egyptian one, but at least one was a French national. They may be among the 250 French jihadi volunteers who have returned from Syria, or an experienced core could have been bulked out with recruits from the dismal immigrant banlieues of Paris.
Maintaining 24/7 surveillance on 2,000 suspects is almost impossible, since it requires about 30 agents to keep one person under constant observation. Which ones do you choose to follow? Where do you find intelligence agents who do not stick out in the banlieues? WHY France – again? There are many factors making it unusually vulnerable. For a start it is impossible to ignore the large, mainly North African Muslim population, which includes many alienated and disaf- fected youths. With an already bloody history of involvement in North Africa, the French state made matters worse by allowing young men of Algerian and Moroccan heritage to fester in almost self-contained suburbs beyond the bustling prosperity of Paris’s central heart. Employment there evaporated long ago, and firms tend not to hire people called Mohammed, especially if they dropped out of school.
Then there is the fact that France remains a player on the world stage. Fearing for the future of Francophone West Africa, Hollande despatched thousands of troops to combat Islamists who tried to take over Mali, and has Rafale aircraft bombing IS in Iraq and Syria.
We cannot, though, imagine that an angry critique of French foreign policy is the only driving force behind this atrocity and the people who executed it.
While IS explicitly says in yesterday’s communiqué that these murders were in response to French air attacks, it also uses the emotive language of a holy war. It refers to ‘chief crusader’ Hollande, and says the bloody attack on the Bataclan concert venue was about killing ‘hundreds of pagans’ gathered for a ‘concert of prostitution and vice’.
Whether the West is attacking IS or whether it is not, such people hate our way of life and values and it is vital to understand that fact.
A minority of those who have chosen to live among us, or their alienated children, also share the view that our societies are really moral cesspits. This is hard to swallow coming from people who encourage boys to shoot prisoners in the head, or who behead and crucify people on the streets of Mosul or Raqqa.
The attacks were probably timed to coincide with, and send a message to, the summit of G20 leaders this weekend, not least because it disrupts their agenda. But that is not all. Paradoxical as it might seem, it coincides with an increasing number of successful attacks by Western forces and may indicate that IS is reeling under battlefield reverses.
The drone strike on Mohammed Emwazi, aka Jihadi John, was routine. The US and its allies are killing middle-echelon IS personnel every other day. On the ground, IS’s momentum has not just been checked, but is going into reverse.
Kurdish fighters and their Syrian Kurdish confederates liberated Sinjar yesterday as IS fighters fled through the only open front around them. This cuts a crucial IS supply route. In Iraq, Iranian-backed Shia militias and the Iraqi National Army are gearing up to retake Ramadi and Iraq’s second city Mosul.
The only thing holding them back is the conundrum of how to administer and police a huge city that IS has run for more than a year, and where the Sunni majority may (justifiably) fear reprisals for alleged ‘collaboration’. YESTERDAY, much of France remained in lockdown. Cinemas were closed. In Paris, the Printemps and Galeries Lafayette department stores were shut. Five Metro lines stopped working, and France closed her borders. This is what fear feels like in a modern society, beneath the expressions of social solidarity.
It is very likely the UK will undergo a similar attack, even if assault rifles may be harder to acquire than in France (although criminals seem to acquire Uzis with alarming ease). My particular fear is of a hijacked tanker filled with liquid chlorine being rammed into a Tube station entrance. Everyone in the station would be killed as the gas drifted down the escalators. IS has already experimented with toxic gases.
If we are, as President Hollande says, at ‘war’, then we should conduct it with utter ruthlessness both here and abroad.
We must grasp the nettle of foreign policy, however painful or embarrassing it might feel. In the face of this threat, we must be practical. And if that means forging a Grand Alliance with Iran and Russia in the manner of the Second World War, then let’s do so.
If it means postponing a reckoning with the ‘butcher’ Bashar al-Assad, then fine. He is not the main threat.
But there are some more home truths too. We must ditch this Government’s academic, post-modern froth about ‘counter narratives’.
It is no substitute for a zero tolerance approach to Islamist radicalism in any context, and zero tolerance for the dupes who find excuses for a death cult.
Jeremy Corbyn’s suggestion that we should have tried to arrest Jihadi John is risible. We should ban all Salafist mosques, often funded by Qatar or Saudi Arabia, which promote unreconstructed, medieval Islam. If it means telling British Muslims that they are not neutral bystanders when their young people join or support IS or equivalent groups, then better some plain speaking than the usual evasive multicultural garbage.
That guff rings especially hollow this weekend, not just in Paris, but in every European capital with people dreading the next hammer blow. According to IS, this is ‘the first storm breaking’. There may be decades of nihilistic violence to come.