Known in Spain as El Pelirrojo (“the Ginger”), Suri was not the sort of ginger jihadi Britain produced, the kind who chased you around Whitechapel distributing leaflets proclaiming “sharia-controlled zones”. Instead, he belonged more in a Joseph Conrad novel. Living a quiet life in Neasden, he fused Islamist ideology, Marxism and modern insurgent tactics into a worldview whose legacy has colored countless later terrorist campaigns. For while bin Laden became famous for the hierarchy of al-Qaeda, Suri quite deliberately, wanted its opposite. As such, modern violent Islamism, with its lone-wolf protagonists and random stabbings, takes from Suri, not bin Laden, even as the Syrian’s legacy continues to loom large.

Born in 1958, into a conservative Aleppan family with a strong Sufi tradition, Suri came of age as Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and Syrian dictator from 1970, was tightening his grip on power — and crushing the Islamist opposition as he went. As a young man, Suri joined an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood known as the Fighting Vanguard, and which concluded that the only way to overthrow the regime was through armed struggle. Trained in explosives, Suri was part of a campaign of bombings and assassinations against the Assad regime, culminating in a massacre of army cadets in 1979.

The confrontation reached its climax in 1982, when the Fighting Vanguard, joined by local supporters, rose against the regime in the western Syrian city of Hama. Hafez’s brother Refaat crushed the rebellion with  brutal force, effectively ending the Muslim Brotherhood as an organized force inside Syria and scattering the survivors of the Fighting Vanguard. Many, including Suri, made their way to Afghanistan to fight the USSR.

Suri found himself in Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan, alongside Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric often described as the godfather of global jihad. In the rugged mountains abutting Afghanistan, he also met a wealthy Saudi benefactor — Osama bin Laden. According to Suri’s own account, he spent three years training bin Laden and other so-called “Afghan Arabs” before traveling to Madrid, acquiring Spanish nationality by way of marriage, then eventually settling in London in 1994.

In the Nineties, London had become an unlikely haven for Islamists, to the late 20th-century Muslim world what Paris, Istanbul, Cairo and Beirut had been to political dissidents in the 19th. The city’s cosmopolitan character made it the intellectual center of the Anglophone Muslim world, teeming with bookshops, activists, Afghan war veterans and assorted other political exiles — all trying to make sense of their movement’s future.

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It was in London, too, that Islamists began developing a bewildering range of political philosophies. At one end stood Tunisia’s Ennahda movement, looking to Britain’s parliamentary democracy for inspiration. At the other were those who dreamed of planting the black flag over 10 Downing Street. It was in this extraordinary milieu that Suri started turning the lessons of Syria and Afghanistan into a theory of global insurgency.

That theory marked a radical departure from the way Islam’s martial tradition had long been understood. Traditionally, anti-colonial figures in places like Algeria had conceived of jihad as a form of resistance. To them, noble means led to noble ends. The rules were simple: the enemy was the Western invader. No women. No children. No priests. Only combatants.

Suri threw those assumptions aside. Instead, he asked a wholly different set of questions, the sort that anarchists and Marxists wrestled with in the last century. Does terror achieve political aims? How should asymmetric warfare be waged? Are Muslim governments legitimate targets, as the Algerian military junta had become for Islamist militants? In many ways, Suri reimagined jihad into what the American writer Robert Taber called “war of the flea”: a strategy of guerrilla warfare, terror and asymmetry designed for the weak against the strong.

For a brief moment, following a series of terror attacks in France, Suri was noticed by MI5. But that was about it. The British security services largely turned a blind eye to Islamist activity throughout the Nineties, partly because they had yet to grasp the problem of blowback. There was also an understanding, as the infamous Abu Hamza of Finsbury Park Mosque once put it, that Islamist dissidents were free to agitate against their own governments so long as they did not bite the hand that fed them.

There was another calculation too. Some of these dissidents might one day overthrow the regimes they opposed, so it was better to keep them close than drive them underground. Indeed, some of the sons and daughters of Syrian Muslim Brotherhood exiles, who themselves grew up in London, are now advising the government in Damascus. Suri, however, always had far more global ambitions. In 1991, he attended the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress in Sudan, where he mingled with everyone from Hezbollah militants to Afghan mujahideen to Carlos the Jackal. Another attendee recalls meeting Suri there, describing him as intensely angry and confrontational.

Back in London, Suri helped publish the influential Islamist magazine Al-Ansar, publishing letters from leading jihadist figures, including al-Qaeda’s future deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Suri also arranged for Western journalists to travel to Afghanistan to interview bin Laden, becoming one of the unlikely intermediaries between Britain’s Islamist exile scene and the emerging leadership of al-Qaeda. Suri was also an advocate of the Taliban, and its leader Mullah Omar, encouraging bin Laden to fall in line and preserve the nascent emirate.

By the late Nineties, Suri had returned to Afghanistan, settling in the outskirts of Kabul. Talha Ahsan, a former jihadist and Dulwich College alumnus who met Suri at this time, remembers him as “one of the smartest people” he had ever encountered. His vision foreshadowed practices that later became commonplace among groups such as ISIS. As Ahsan tells me, Suri believed in recruiting criminals, men with the courage to do things that bourgeois kids like himself could not. It was precisely these sorts of men, alienated from ordinary life, who would later carry out many of the atrocities that scarred Europe during ISIS’s heyday.

Suri’s 1600-page magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which appeared online in 2004, was a hard-nosed articulation of what modern jihad should look like. In it, he anticipated the lone wolf and the autonomous cell, each operating without a rigid hierarchy. The destruction of the Fighting Vanguard had convinced Suri that formal organizations were too easily dismantled. Jihad, then, had to become leaderless, to exist beyond any single group. In modern parlance, he wanted the fight to go viral.

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To that extent, Suri was not opposed to the objectives behind 9/11 — so much as the way al-Qaeda was organized. He well knew that charismatic leaders could be hunted down, leaving the movement in disarray. Bin Laden’s death and the subsequent decline of al-Qaeda, followed years later by ISIS’s struggles after the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to prove him right. All the while, Suri argued that jihadist organizations wasted too much energy on theological infighting, instead of concentrating on what he saw as their wider struggle against the West and its allies.

Though Suri remained in the fringes during his lifetime, his ideas nonetheless seeped into the Islamist discourse via the internet and radical preachers. There are doubts as to how far he masterminded the Madrid bombings of 2004 and 7/7, yet both attacks were certainly Suri-esque. “[In my teachings] I have mentioned vital and legitimate targets to be hit in the enemy’s countries,” he remarked later. “Among those targets that I specifically mentioned as examples was the London Underground. [Targeting this] was and still is the aim.”

Beyond outrages like 7/7, Suri’s decentralized approach helped inspire other atrocities: including Nidal Hasan’s shooting at Fort Hood, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to bring down an American airliner in 2009. The countless stabbings, vehicle attacks and small-scale acts of terror carried out over the next 15 years would become the most enduring and disturbing expressions of Suri’s ideas.

Suri himself spent his last years hiding from the Pakistani authorities, before being captured and transferred to a Syrian prison around 2005. Widely believed to have died there, he disappeared into the same system of repression that had shaped him decades earlier.  But his ideas did not die with him. For if bin Laden is remembered as the face of global jihad, Suri may prove the more consequential figure in the long run, especially as warfare is becoming increasingly asymmetric and unconventional. Besides all that, the Syrian who once edited magazines in London, and took British journalists to meet bin Laden, bequeathed his successors something more durable than an organization. He left behind a method, one that continues to echo wherever individuals kill not in the name of a group — but, in vivid Conradesque fashion, in the name of an idea.

These different aspects don’t always work in tandem. Indeed, the Brotherhood sometimes finds itself on different sides of political conflict. But such ambiguity can work to its advantage, creating leverage to maximize its interests and undermine its real enemies: to turn them against themselves and each other.

After decades of large-scale Muslim immigration, the Brotherhood as a movement, ideology and style is now firmly established within Western countries. Its positions on such things as decolonization, Islamophobia and Palestine-Israel are now mainstream positions in the West. But the Brotherhood itself, as a body, remains under the radar, clearly present but rarely overt. It operates in the shadows, with assertions about its influence easily written off as conspiracy-mongering.

Yet sometimes this influence becomes visible. In November 2015, former prison governor Ian Acheson wrote to the Ministry of Justice about how a review team he was leading had found numerous examples of Islamist extremist texts in British prison chaplaincies. In evidence to the Commons Justice Committee the following July, Acheson said the books contained “sometimes sectarian, homophobic and incendiary information that was freely available to vulnerable prisoners in many prisons with no obvious control over it”.

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Acheson’s review team looked at eleven prison chaplaincies and found inflammatory texts in nine of them, including titles from some of the main ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood: The Way of Jihad from Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna; Milestones by Sayyid Qutb (also author of Our Struggle with the Jews); and The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Acheson submitted his final report to Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Justice, in March 2016, with a stripped-down summary released in August of that year. Behind the scenes, he had also written to Gove highlighting what he calls a “significant finding”, beyond his terms of reference. This concerned the Senior Muslim Advisor to the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which makes sure convicted criminals serve the sentences and orders carried out by courts. The advisor was Ahtsham Ali. Acheson stresses now that he was not making any specific allegations. However, he noted that Ali had appeared on platforms with extremists and had attracted complaints from Sufi imams who felt unfairly discriminated against in the prison appointments process.

Following Acheson’s warning, Gove launched an investigation into Ali. According to the Sunday Times, it found that 140 of the prison imams Ali had overseen the appointment of (around 70%) were from the Deobandi tradition, a conservative Sunni denomination prevalent in British Pakistani communities that has influenced the Taliban and has significant ideological commonalities with the Brotherhood. However, by the time the investigation process was completed, Gove had been sacked and Acheson’s term had ended.

Following the investigation, Ali was exonerated and he remains in his position today. The Ministry of Justice now issues the statement: “There is no evidence that Ahtsham Ali was responsible for extremist texts identified in some chaplaincies.”

But he certainly has strong ‘links’ to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. Sheikh Abdullah al-Judai, Ali’s long-term teacher and guide, was a founder of the European Council of Fatwa and Research (ECFR), part of the inner network of Brotherhood institutions in Europe. Qaradawi, author of one of the texts that Acheson’s team warned about, was a co-founder of the ECFR and led the organisation for many years. The Iraqi-born Judai is involved in other institutions of that network too: the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), also formerly led by Qaradawi; the charity Islamic Relief, recently deselected as an aid partner by the Swedes but retained as such by the UK; and the European Institute of Human Sciences (EIHS), the main branch of which was dissolved by the French government last year for promoting radical Islamic ideology and justifying armed jihad. Signaling that you are a longstanding pupil of someone with such connections sends quite a message to those in the know.

It is worth taking a moment to discuss Qaradawi, the foremost Brotherhood ideologue of recent times, who died in 2022. Qaradawi acquired a certain notoriety in the West for stating that Islam will conquer Europe via “da’wa [the Arabic term for proselytizing] and ideology” and for advocating a “jihad of necessity” against Israel, including civilians and the “innocent child” as legitimate targets. He also praised violent jihadists in the West for their aims if not their means, for their love of truth and the concern they show for Muslims.

Qaradawi’s The Lawful and the Prohibited In Islam, one of the texts found in British prisons, is an interesting case. Effectively a handbook of Islamic law for Muslims and potential converts in the West, most of it is emollient and even ecumenical, far from being inflammatory. However, this stance emerges from a standpoint of necessary Islamic supremacy. As Qaradawi says, “Islam came to be followed, and not to follow; to be dominant, and not subordinate.”

Among non-Muslims, Jews and Christians at least deserve protection and even love from Muslims, he says, drawing extensively on the Qur’an and hadith — but only if they defer to Muslim dominion. “Neither rabbis nor priests, kings or sultans, have the right to prohibit something permanently to Allah’s servants; if someone does this, he has certainly exceeded his limits, usurping the sovereignty which, with respect to legislating for the people, belongs to Allah … alone.”

Jewish people present a difficult case here. On one hand, Qaradawi says, they deserve respect as People of the Book. But he also condemns them several times for their “rebelliousness”, their deviousness and a tendency to inveigle wealth from others.

Notwithstanding its generally peaceful tone, the book contains a clear threat. If non-Muslims resist the imposition of Islam and its codes of halal (lawful) and haram (prohibited), the latter including such things as the consumption of alcoholic drinks, homosexual marriage and uncovered women in public, then they may be fought against.“In order to keep the Muslim society purified,” he says, “a continuous war must be waged against all belief-systems which originate in man’s ignorance of the divine guidance and in the errors of idol worship.” And it is imperative, he adds, for the Muslim Ummah “to muster military power to the utmost extent of its capacity in order to defend itself.” This is the responsibility of every Muslim, not just governments.

Here we might see the origins of what some observers call the Brotherhood’s “double discourse”; also its “obfuscation” and “dissembling” on such matters when challenged. On one hand there is plenty of generous, peaceful language in Qaradawi’s book to demonstrate how Islam is not a threat to non-believers. On the other hand we find exhortations to violence against those who fail to submit to it.

Whether or not Ahtsham Ali had anything to do with this and other Brotherhood texts being present in British prisons, it is remarkable that someone with such links maintains an overseeing role in those prisons, including over the appointment of imams (leaders) who minister to prisoners.

Ahtsham Ali and Sheikh Judai were both offered the right to reply to the facts and assertions above which concern them, the former via his employer the Ministry of Justice. However, no response was forthcoming from either.

In recent decades, British prisons have become notorious for the domination of Muslim gangs. A Ministry of Justice report in 2019 noted that staff and inmates referred to the gangs as the “Muslim brotherhood”, with former prisoner Steve Gallant, hero of the 2019 London Bridge terrorist attack, describing it as “less an organisation than a network, one fusing Islamist extremism and grievance with the gang discipline of existing prisoner groups”.

This reflects a wider reality of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, as a style and source of inspiration as much as anything. The organisation has grown some serious wings.

***

The Muslim Brotherhood was originally founded by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in Egypt, 1928, which was then nominally independent but dominated by the British. Banna was consumed by the colonisation of his homeland and much of the Muslim world by Western powers and Western modernity. He attributed this partly to non-Muslim strength — but also to Muslim weakness, which he attributed to the abandoning of Islamic principles. Real Islam, he said, was about fighting and defeating non-believers.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian nationalist, revolutionary and President from 1954 to 1970, was briefly a member of the Brotherhood in the Forties. A friend and associate of Nasser’s in the Free Officers movement recounted their initiation into the “secret apparatus” of the organisation: “We were taken into a totally darkened room where we heard a voice and, placing our hand on the Quran and a gun and repeating after the voice, we took an oath of obedience and total allegiance for better or worse, to the Grand Master [Banna], swearing by the Book of God and the sunna of the Prophet.”

Nasser soon turned against the Brotherhood (Ikhwan in Arabic), rejecting its insistence on shari’a law in favor of secular nationalism. In response, a Brotherhood member shot at him in 1954 as he was celebrating the withdrawal of British forces from the country. He was not hit. But the pattern was set for Egyptian politics: on the one side, secular nationalists who could draw upon the backing of the military; on the other, the Brotherhood, who drew their strength from within Egyptian society as de facto representatives of Islam. At times, the two forces have cut pragmatic deals with each other. However, their visceral opposition meant this never lasted: witness the coup that overthrew the Brotherhood-led government of Mohamed Morsi in 2013 — and the Rabaa massacre of protestors that followed.

Meanwhile the Brotherhood expanded internationally. Under Nasser’s rule, some members fled: to Saudi Arabia, where they began to exert particular influence in the universities, on Osama bin Laden among others; and to Europe and North America, where they started to pitch up in the Fifties and Sixties.

The institution-building they engaged in on arrival is one of the defining traits of modern Islamism, going to the heart of the Brotherhood’s style and success. For it is fixated on achieving things: on power, strength and winning. In The Way of Jihad, one of the books found in British prison chaplaincies, Banna wrote: “Jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be ignored nor evaded.” In another text drawing parallels between Islamic law and Italian fascism, he presented jihad as “the highest goal of humanity in this life.” Islam, he said, “urges its followers to be imbued with the military spirit in war and peace … Therefore, Signor Mussolini is not the only one who calls for this, and these are not the principles of fascism alone.”

A military-style approach to both war and peace has certain implications, including treating those who discard Islam like deserters and encouraging deception, a crucial tactic in war. Such traits don’t mean that the Brotherhood is against peace; nor that it won’t compete in elections — and win them, as it has in Egypt and Tunisia. It is more that peace appears for Islamists in its tradition as a situation that occurs after Islam has won, following the submission of its enemies. Until then, they are always pushing, always contending, seeking to increase their power.

Interpersonal and family relations are as important to this struggle as anything. Qaradawi’s The Lawful and the Prohibited In Islam describes how Muslim women are prohibited from marrying non-Muslim men, yet Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women, just as long as their wives’ beliefs do not influence the rest of the household. This law, if implemented, ensures that Islam prevails in the family environment wherever at least one partner is a Muslim, continuing through the generations.

Needless to say, this is not the law of a private faith that lets everyone choose their own path in life. Such law, if followed, effectively mandates that Islam can never decline; it can only grow. If followed consistently in the West, as it appears to be for the most part in Muslim communities, then the West will become more and more Muslim over time, making Qaradawi’s prophecies come true.

As founder of the Brotherhood, Banna had developed an ideology with a simple and effective good-and-evil dichotomy, whereby Islam is “the solution”, the source of good which must triumph. Western modernity, by contrast, is the source of evil, which should — and will, inevitably — be defeated. This framing was attractive for many — and the Brotherhood’s reach grew rapidly in the years following its founding. In the Indian subcontinent, it greatly influenced Abu Al-A’la Mawdudi and the Jamaat-e-Islami movement. Two of Jamaat’s members set up the Islamic Foundation, which named one of its halls in Leicester after Banna. Ahtsham Ali of the Prisons Service has spoken there, on the subject of converting prisoners to Islam. The then Prince Charles opened a part of its campus in 2000.

“Banna isn’t talking about a religion in the sense it’s understood in the West,” Shadi Hamid, writes in  Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World, “but about a program to be applied and implemented.” There is no separation between religion and secular politics here like that which emerged out of the Christian tradition. One serves God by maintaining one’s devoutness, but also by winning territory, imposing Islamic law and drawing converts. As Hamid says, the Brotherhood recognized that achieving these things would require patience. “They believed that history — and God — moved with them, and so it was never a question of whether but when they would prevail.” Here we can see the apparent paradox of “Islamo-progressivism”, in which an Islamist movement that appears to be anti-modern is also consumed by “that most modern of assumptions: that history moved with purpose and that progress was inescapable.” As Banna put it, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Like other revolutionaries, the Brotherhood learned to protect itself through secret methods, establishing the usra (“family”) cell structure and being careful about introducing new recruits. Lorenzo Vidino, who has written two books on it, says: “We have to remember that the Brotherhood is a very selective organization. No one applies to be a member. You are selected based on a variety of skills that the spotters within the Brotherhood identify — and being extremely clever, extremely well-educated, extremely driven are some of the key features they look for. It’s an elite group.”

Once a potential member has been selected, he (always a he, it seems) is given tasks to fulfill in his specialist area — whether in education, politics, finance, media or, nowadays, social media. As recruits prove themselves reliable and trustworthy, they rise up through the different layers of the organization, becoming more distanced from everyday operations. The organizations that members create in turn establish centers of expertise to advance the purposes of the center, operating in unison but without public deference to an orchestrating force. This in turn conveys a crucial appearance of strength and weight — as if its objectives are shared by all Muslims when in fact, a relatively small group of people are behind it all.

It is worth emphasizing the scope and sophistication of this approach. Indeed, Banna even showed signs of digesting Gramscian political ideas, writing of the need to change al-rouh al-’am alazi uhaimin (the hegemonic public spirit) in Muslim countries before targeting state power. The Brotherhood’s aim is to maximize its freedom and therefore the power of Islam wherever it finds itself. It has learned to be flexible and make alliances which help to consolidate its position. As a result it has thrived in the countries that it saw as its principal enemies.

***

On 7th June 2016, just a few months after Ian Acheson submitted his report on Islamism in British jails, Dr Ibrahim Mounir, the elderly Deputy Supreme Guide of the global Muslim Brotherhood, sat in front of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in Westminster as part of its investigation into political Islam. The Brexit referendum campaign was in full swing. In his native Arabic, Mounir told the committee, “What we are hoping for is to achieve Islamic unity. A parallel of that is European unity.”

The Committee investigation came shortly after David Cameron’s Government published the main findings of its review into the Brotherhood. Within 24 hours of Cameron announcing that review in 2014, the Brotherhood had appointed a legal team including the former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord (Ken) Macdonald and threatened legal action against “any improper attempt to restrict its activity”.

Sitting alongside Mounir in Portcullis House were three others with associations to the Brotherhood: Dr Anas al-Tikriti, chief executive and founder of the Cordoba Foundation; Dr Radwan Masmoudi of the Ennahda party in Tunisia; and, in hijab, Sondos Asem, who used to serve as media advisor for President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and is now a senior news editor for Middle East Eye.

When pressed on how the Brotherhood legitimates and uses violence, each of the witnesses pushed back. Tikriti said there was no evidence for it. Asem stated that such claims were “unsubstantiated” and “misleading”. One might counter that the fact that Hamas was formed as the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, or that the Brotherhood’s logo features two crossed swords, or that its leading ideologues like Banna and Qutb frequently invoke violence, speak for themselves. But the four held the line, not giving an inch.

Step forward to the present day, Britain looks like something of a redoubt for the Brotherhood and its wider movement. Salah Abdel-Haq, acting leader of the whole organization, has reportedly been resident in London since 2023. Highly-organized marches and protests for Palestine and against “Zionism” have attracted large crowds ever since Hamas’ attack on Southern Israel in October that year. On one occasion, organizers celebrated their success in being allowed to march down Whitehall again with the statement: “We are pleased to report that the police have yielded”: a telling way of framing it. Among the signatories of this statement, we find the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), founded by Tikriti, who described it to the Select Committee as “the closest there is to the Muslim Brotherhood” in Britain. Another signatory was the Palestinian Forum of Britain, one of whose officials was Zaher Birawi, a Palestinian-British journalist who was recently sanctioned by US authorities for his role “clandestinely acting on behalf of Hamas.”

Tikriti, who described the mass slaughter and rape of Israeli citizens on 7th October 2023 as “a lie” and the taking of hostages “a very important part” of any “act of resistance”, has also been advising The Muslim Vote (TMV) organization. He and his sister both signed an open letter released by TMV before the 2024 election, urging Muslims to “unite behind the single Muslim vote candidate” that it had chosen. The organization came from nowhere to back four Muslim “Independent” MPs who were elected to Westminster, also backing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and various candidates from other parties.

London’s Metropolitan Police recently noted that the marches have “routinely seen arrests for racially and religiously aggravated public order offenses, for stirring up racial hatred and for supporting terrorist organizations. It is not normal to see criminality of this nature or on this scale at what are billed as peaceful protests.” Nevertheless, they have been a significant success for the organizers, mobilizing support from way beyond Palestinian and Muslim diasporas, keeping Gaza at the forefront of public attention, and bringing in support and resources for Muslim Brotherhood causes.

Primarily, the Brotherhood’s influence can be seen in British Islamist networks, which link its own predominantly Arabic speakers to Urdu-speaking and other Muslim groups in Britain. Bodies like TMV and the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) share the Brotherhood’s emphasis on Muslim “unity” and on using the weight of Muslim presence to influence and dictate public policy. They have had considerable success. The Labour Government’s long-promised definition of Islamophobia, rebranded as “anti-Muslim hatred”, is a case in point, seeking to protect Islam and what we might call “Muslimness” from negative sentiment. The former Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who chaired the working group that developed the definition, previously carried out a review on behalf of Islamic Relief, a charity in the Brotherhood network, following an anti-Semitism scandal. This last Ramadan, Islamic Relief has been soliciting “zakat” charitable donations via adverts featuring the slogan “Zakat is our Sacred Duty”: striking messaging that suggests a religious obligation to give them money, not far away from taxation — and in line with Qaradawi’s instructions on the using of charities where an Islamic state doesn’t exist.

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The French anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who says she has received death threats for her work, has developed the notion of “frérisme” to describe how the Brotherhood’s influence works. Translating as “Brotherism”, it describes “a blend of ideological coherence and collective identity formulated around a specific vision of global Islamic hegemony, to be pursued with a strategy of slow infiltration that leverages [all] possible allies.” In a report for the ECR group in the European Parliament, she and Tommaso Virgili suggest that these allies “may include individuals and entities that are not part of the MB in any structural sense but are influenced by its ideology and operate accordingly, as well as individuals completely unaware of their role in the plan and even coming from very distant ideological backgrounds, such as the materialist left.” They point out that the Brotherhood has established religious and cultural institutions all across Europe, claiming to represent the Muslim faith and community before the state and public authorities. It has also founded numerous charities, think tanks and trusts that ostensibly have nothing to do with religion, while training a network of professionals “to penetrate all sectors of public life, including education, health, development, business, law and justice.”

Brotherist politics matches what is sometimes called the “radical flank effect”, by which the more moderate wings of a political movement benefit from the presence of more radical elements. This dynamic is on constant display in Islamist politics, as older, more respectable representatives maximize their bargaining power by emphasizing their ability to prevent street violence and terrorism. In this way, some think the emergence of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State has benefited the Brotherist tendency. Alain Chouet, the former head of France’s counterintelligence service, the DGSE, has even said: “Al-Qaeda is only a brief episode and an expedient instrument in the century-old existence of the Muslim Brotherhood. The true danger is in the expansion of the Brotherhood, an increase in its audience. The wolf knows how to disguise itself as a sheep.” We might also note the Brotherhood’s pragmatic alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially via Hamas, currently bringing terror to the West as well as the Middle East.

***

V.S. Naipaul described Islam as “an imperialism as well as a religion.” Its followers are duty-bound to God to impose the ways of their religion wherever they go. Brotherist movements have articulated this commitment through modern ideology and political method. Founded in opposition to Western imperialism, they are now imposing themselves on the West, assisted by naive, unthinking and sometimes self-interested liberals and Left-wingers, including in the present-day Labour Government.

How do you counter something like this, that is both ubiquitous and intangible, that works within the system while eroding it? Some want to follow states like the UAE by banning the Brotherhood itself. However, you might respond: “Ban what?” The Brotherhood’s methods of organizational secrecy hobble such an idea from the start. There is no official organization to be banned. There are individuals who are either likely members of the Brotherhood or have previously been identified as members elsewhere; and then there are the organizations formed by these people, which operate within the letter if not always the spirit of the law.

The strength of Brotherism means something more comprehensive and joined-up would be required. Governments will have to recognize that these movements threaten the foundations of Western civilization, including liberalism, social democracy and conservatism. The Islamist scene is so large, so active and international that it is difficult for even dedicated researchers to keep track of what’s going on even in single countries, leaving policymakers and public in the dark about the organizations and individuals that approach them. In 2020, the Austrian government set up the Dokumentationsstelle Politischer Islam (the Documentation Centre on Political Islam, or DPI) to remedy this, to document and scientifically analyze political Islam, its networks and structures, to raise awareness about religiously motivated political extremism and its threat to democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights. We could do with a similar institution in Britain, with strong links to other countries and, if possible, the EU level, where Brotherhood network institutions are prominent lobbyists.

Western governments also need to offer a more convincing, attractive alternative to Islamic rule, re-founding their own weakened polities by gathering around core principles like individual freedom, legal equality and what we might call “civilized tolerance”. State bodies will have to refocus on core tasks, enforcing the law without fear or favor and dismantling the special carve-outs that multiculturalist structures have facilitated — and which undermine the state’s authority. They will also have to recognize that large-scale immigration has a negative impact.

Our governments should say they won’t work with, engage or financially support Islamist-related groups. They should also make it illegal for public bodies to give public goods — including public space — to them. They should reinforce the duty of public sector employees, such as those who work for the prisons service, to serve all citizens, not giving preference to certain identity groups.

Then there is the question of charitable status. In Britain, charities receive Gift Aid from the Government, since religion is recognized as a public good. Mosques, Muslim groups and even individuals exploit this widely. According to some researchers this helps Islamists to engage in political work full-time, giving them a major advantage over secular political movements. We should legislate to change this. Either Islam should be disqualified as a beneficiary of charitable status, or all religions should be.

Qaradawi, as the premier Brotherhood ideologue of recent decades and a keen advocate of using charities to exert Islamic power, called his approach wasatqiyya or the “middle way”, suggesting moderation. Yet this apparently moderate form of Islam explicitly calls for the Ummah to see itself as a military force wherever they find themselves, waging a permanent war against alternative beliefs and lifestyles. There is a clear ideological link here to violent attacks committed in the name of Islam. We are fools to not recognize and act on it.

Western democratic states should not be subsidizing movements that are encouraging war-like attitudes to groups other than their own while working towards their destruction. Unfortunately, unbelievably to many, this is what the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to do.

***

A previous version of this piece wrongly named Sheikh Abdullah al-Judai as an author of one of the texts Ian Acheson warned about. We apologise for the error.

Despite today’s headlines about officers being sacked or jailed for illicit relationships with prisoners, none of the underlying dynamics are new. Across the 16 years I spent in custody, I saw it all first-hand, from furtive tenderness to outright corruption. But if base human impulse will endure until our jails turn to dust, the prison environment has changed. With austerity undermining the workplace structures that once controlled interactions between inmate and guard, hormones — and self-interested cynicism — are now far harder to constrain.

A recent surge in misconduct cases has dragged prison romance into public view. The media focus has fixed largely on women, partly because several cases have been unusually sensational, from the explicit footage to relationships that fused emotional dependency with criminal compromise. The HMP Wandsworth case, where an officer was jailed after being filmed having sex with a prisoner, illustrated how quickly fantasy, contraband and security failure can collapse into public scandal.

The figures reflect this trend. In the year to June 2024, a record 165 prison staff in England and Wales were dismissed for misconduct, a 34% rise on the previous year. The offenses ranged from inappropriate relationships to smuggling phones and drugs. Across the wider Ministry of Justice and its agencies, dismissals for misconduct have more than doubled since 2022. Increased detection doubtless plays a role here, but so do the cumulative effects of structural degradation. Ironically, the very contraband used to sustain secrecy — mobile phones — has helped expose wrongdoing so publicly that the state has been forced to respond.

In truth, though, this is about far more than a smuggled iPhone. There was a time, after all, when such relationships were contained by experience. Older officers understood prisoner behavior instinctively. They spotted manipulation early. They knew when a conversation lingered too long, when grooming had begun, when a colleague needed to be rotated off a wing. Their presence acted as the prison service’s immune system. I remember one senior officer who ran the wing I lived on. He was firm, sometimes abrasive, but effective. “It’s his train set,” a fellow prisoner once joked, and in a sense it was. He understood the environment and how to keep it stable.

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That authority wasn’t abstract. One officer I knew, who become involved in an intimate relationship with a prisoner, was working under exactly this kind of robust leadership. Once the early signs were identified, there was no slow drift, no tolerated ambiguity. She was removed from the wing and marched off-site within hours. As it was relayed to us later, a superior told her simply: “This job is not for you.”

These protections were stripped away after 2012, when ministers replaced a planned privatization drive with “public sector benchmarking”: doing more work with fewer staff. From 2011 to 2017, frontline officer numbers fell by roughly 30%, and the service has never recovered.

When that senior officer I knew took redundancy, some were glad. Within a year, though, the cost was obvious. The atmosphere loosened. Boundaries blurred, and with them the everyday authority that had kept the wings stable. What followed was a power vacuum, one swiftly filled by violent criminals, organized gangs and Islamists. Authority, in other words, isn’t withdrawn from the landings, nor does it disappear. Rather, it’s ceded: to those most willing to impose it, arbitrarily and often violently.

And for every experienced prison guard who retires, their replacement is almost invariably worse. I saw this first hand, as landings were filled with inexperienced recruits, some barely out of college, and all with minimal training and weak supervision. A vicious circle soon followed, as staff with little life experience were dumped into some of the most brutal environments in the country. I witnessed this shift personally, when a new female recruit arrived on my wing. She was keen and professional, but inexperienced in reading her surroundings. That is not a criticism of her; it’s an obvious risk when 22 year olds are stationed on wings holding around 100 men, and where they’re routinely left to patrol landings alone. High on the third floor, the guard was dragged into a cell by a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder, with no colleagues to assist her. Intervention came only after other prisoners heard her screams.

By late 2023, the scale of this collective inexperience was stark. 41% of prison officers had fewer than three years on the job, compared to just 2% a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the proportion with over 10 years’ experience had fallen from two thirds to less than a quarter. Knowledge that once passed informally between generations of staff — how to read a wing, how to set boundaries — had largely disappeared.

As my memories from HMP Gartree imply, secret relationships between inmates and guards have always existed. Falling in love is human nature, more so in the cramped psychological conditions of prison. Jail distorts ordinary emotional patterns. It compresses isolation and allows human instincts to slip their usual restraints. All this is doubly true for prisoners, starved of intimacy and connection, with deprivation turning small acts of kindness into oxygen.

Yet seasoned criminals hardly forget their methods at the prison gate. They cultivate familiarity, test boundaries — and wait. Once a line is crossed, leverage follows. A favor today becomes expectation tomorrow. Then exception becomes routine, and emotional access hardens into material extraction: contraband, prohibited communications, the “one-off” that last for years.

For officers, particularly young women placed on volatile landings with predatory men, environment and emotional reflex combine with dangerous force. There is the urge to nurture, easily triggered by displays of distress or vulnerability. There is the pull of charismatic alpha males who command status among dangerous peers. And there is flattery, the illusion of being uniquely trusted, understood or “liked”. Some slip into the role without quite knowing when the ground gave way. Others exploit it knowingly, sometimes for financial gain.

Whatever the reason, falling into crime, especially when your duty is to maintain professional boundaries and protect the public, is a choice. Yet when these forces collide with inadequate supervision, thin staffing and relentless exposure, they harden into risk — and the consequences can be severe. Intelligence leaks. Contraband circulates more freely. Debt and violence intensify. Informal power shifts. I have known officers disclose offenses, identify informants or pass on sensitive information, sometimes to ingratiate themselves, sometimes out of hatred for a particular crime. The consequences were predictable: prisoners attacked; debts enforced through beatings; men removed from rehabilitative pathways because trust, once broken, could not be restored.

Of course, not every case crosses the threshold into criminality. Some drift into genuine emotional partnerships. A small number of staff resign to continue relationships openly once prisoners are transferred. In lower-category prisons, this drift has sometimes been rationalized rather than challenged. At HMP Warren Hill, where I was held for over two years, one such relationship involving a charity worker was tolerated on the basis that it acted as a “protective factor” ahead of release, provided it remained “non-intimate”.

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Still, just like in the real world, many of these staff-inmate relationships founder, and when they do, officers tend to suffer more. If the breach involves improper contact but no contraband, the (often female) officer is removed, barred and sometimes shamed in the press. The prisoner, however, may face little consequence beyond a file note. When criminality is involved, the imbalance widens further. Messages, footage, and entry logs usually sit with the officer. When it collapses, it does so brutally: prosecution, reputational ruin, shattered families and the realization that the promise of love was often as empty as the cell she now occupies. He, practiced in the art of concealment, may simply continue serving his sentence, his network and status enhanced.

His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service has acknowledged part of this reality, expanding its Counter Corruption Unit from 2019 to detect and disrupt wrongdoing. The rise in dismissals reflects that effort. But enforcement alone cannot repair a degraded system. This, too, reflects a wider failure across Britain’s criminal justice system: risk is managed procedurally rather than structurally. Scandals are treated as isolated lapses rather than symptoms of institutional weakening. Responsibility is pushed downwards onto individuals, while the conditions that made failure predictable remain largely untouched.

Honest reform would begin by honestly diagnosing the problem. This is not just a morality tale about individual weakness, but the predictable result of stripped-out experience, supervision and authority. From there, the authorities must re-professionalize the job. That means restoring experienced staff on wings, and ensuring training addresses the ethical and psychological hazards of prison work, all while rotating staff off high-risk landings. The watchword here should be prevention — not punishment.

Aligning incentives with reality is crucial here. Stabilizing violent, drug-saturated prisons is skilled, risky work. Until pay and progression reflect that, the service will continue recruiting for numbers and losing experience. And finally, the Ministry of Justice should improve design and culture, not just detection. Better sightlines and smarter CCTV both matter here, as do schedules that discourage isolation.

Ultimately, this is not about romance or scandal. It is about safety. Yet until prisons are rebuilt as safety-critical institutions — properly staffed and properly supervised — the same quiet patterns will persist: the light footsteps on the landing, the whispers at the door, the lines crossed just out of sight. And the consequences will not remain inside.

It is this Australia that my parents, like hundreds of thousands of migrants in various waves, came to in search of a better life for themselves and for their children. Because this Australia gave them a home, in spite of hardships, they dedicated themselves and their deeds to their new country.

There are many such stories. Dai Le, a Vietnamese refugee who escaped Saigon with her family in 1975, now sits as a member of the Federal Parliament in Canberra. In her maiden speech to Parliament in 2022, Ms Le stated, emotionally: “I remember the moment when we were accepted to be resettled as refugees in Australia […] the feeling of acceptance and gratitude. We were filled with hope as we looked out onto the horizon of endless possibilities. Australia, you welcomed my mother, my family with open arms. You gave us comfort, food, and a warm bed to sleep in.”

How is it, then, that in successful, tolerant Australia, on a balmy summer’s eve on one of the country’s most famous beaches, 15 people (at the time of writing), including a 10-year-old girl, were slaughtered, and scores more critically injured, because of their religion?

This was once a proud, egalitarian nation, with a “fair go” for all. It was a country in which, in the words of former prime minister Bob Hawke, there was “no hierarchy of descent… no privilege of origin”. But that country is gone, its demise overseen by a government, led by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, which has done nothing but increase division.

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As a result, since October 7, 2023, with antisemitism rising, the likelihood of a terrorist attack taking place on Australian soil has been intolerably high. The warning signs could hardly have been clearer. On 9 October, 2023, there was a gathering of thousands at the Sydney Opera House who rejoiced at the atrocities a couple of days earlier, with one Islamic preacher calling it “a day of celebration”, egging on the mob who shouted, repeatedly, “Where’s the Jews?”. This vile episode, along with other Islamic preachers who called for “death to the infidels”, or the pro-Hamas protestors who have called for “global intifada” and aggressively disrupted cities by closing down key intersections, have been met with lukewarm condemnation from Albanese or his ministers. Figures from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) show that, since the October 7 attacks, antisemitic incidents in Australia have increased threefold. The ECAJ report documented more than 2,000 such incidents — ranging from verbal abuse to arson, vandalism and physical assaults — in 2024.

Yet, while equivocating over condemning such hatred, Albanese consistently decries “Islamophobia”, even though no mosques have been attacked in Australia since 2016, even though a Christian bishop was stabbed in his own church by a Muslim fanatic, even though a synagogue was bombed in Melbourne by extremists linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Meanwhile, Albanese’s Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, has displayed a consistent recklessness in his immigration policy, settling 3,000 Gazans without security checks and overseeing the repatriation of the so-called ISIS brides. One of the shooters at Bondi, Sajid Akram, who was shot dead by police, first arrived on a student visa and then on a partner visa, and it seems he traveled several times to Pakistan. His son, Naveed Akram, who was born in Australia, was on an Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) watchlist in 2019, but it “found no indication of any ongoing threat” as far as he was concerned. Rather than address the risks of immigration and consider the threat of rising radicalism, politicians here seem keener to talk up the advantages of “multiculturalism”.

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Meanwhile, the plight of the Jews is deemed secondary as Foreign Minister Penny Wong refused to visit the site of the October 7 atrocities and supported a UN motion for a permanent Palestinian state. It’s hard not to detect a moral relativism at work here.

In their press conference today, Albanese and Burke did not announce they were canceling the visas of hate preachers, nor that they intended to charge them with incitement to violence. They did not announce stricter immigration controls, in particular from countries where jihadist Islamic ideology is rife. Instead, they announced increased firearm controls for Australians.

In the coming weeks and months, we can expect announcements of new “hate speech” laws, new police powers, new surveillance mechanisms, new ways to monitor what ordinary Australians say and share. We can expect politicians to line up for cameras, pay lip service to unity, and then go back to the same failed settings that have splintered Australia.

And in the meantime, successful, tolerant Australia will have to come to terms with the fact that the most deadly attacks on Jews since October 7 happened here, on a Sunday afternoon, at the beach.

As the great Australian writer Xavier Herbert put it: Poor fellow, my country.

The prisoner sprawled on the floor was no ordinary inmate. In 2003, during a counter-terrorism raid in Manchester, Bourgass stabbed four police officers; Detective Constable Stephen Oake later died of his wounds. Convicted of murder and given a life sentence with a minimum term of 22 years, he was later handed another 17-year sentence for his part in the so-called “ricin plot”. He was, in every sense, a defining figure of that early wave of al-Qaeda-linked offenders.

Two decades later, Bourgass is reported to be on the cusp of his first full parole review. The precise timings are unclear, but the decision may already have been made; Bourgass might walk out of prison as early as this month. The Parole Board’s role is not to punish retrospective horror, but to weigh current risk: it must assess the man before them, not the man he was. And yet, as Bourgass’s minimum tariff is now expiring, the country is left with a more uncomfortable question: what does “rehabilitation” really mean when the beliefs behind the violence are so hard to change?

I pose that question not as a distant commentator, but as someone who spent 17 years inching through every category of the prison system, after being convicted of murder in 2005. Along the way, I lived alongside some of the most dangerous men in the country and, eventually, sat before a stern-faced parole panel myself.

The Parole Board is one of the few parts of the justice system that still works with forensic calm. It takes nobody’s word for “change”. Before any file reaches a panel, the Public Protection Casework Section (PPCS), inside His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), manages the referral and compiles the core dossier, coordinating the required reports from prison and probation. The Board then conducts a first-stage review of that dossier, and decides whether the case can be settled on the papers alone or needs an oral hearing, with witnesses called and challenged.

But terrorism cases expose the profound limitations of this process. Everything is documented, but not everything is meaningful. The ERG22+ risk tool, for instance, measures behavioral and psychological indicators linked to extremism — factors such as grievance, identity needs, susceptibility to influence and capability for violence. It can, therefore, help flag patterns, but can never reveal what someone truly believes. The Healthy Identity Intervention (HII), meanwhile, is designed to challenge extremist thinking and help offenders build up a non-violent identity. Yet its success depends entirely on honesty, while ideologically committed prisoners can learn the jargon without ever changing their core beliefs. And that is the central difficulty: the system is designed to reward behavioral compliance, not to test ideology’s durability. The file may glow; the risk may remain.

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I saw early signs of that tension when Bourgass first entered Frankland. Days after he was felled in that dinner line, he went looking to settle scores and picked the wrong target — a 21-year-old who had once been kept in a cage used for Charlie Bronson. As he made his move, the younger man clamped his hands around Bourgass’s head and bit his face. Bourgass was quickly moved to the wing next door, but the atmosphere remained tense.

Months later, Bourgass’s cell was set ablaze after claims that he and a handful of fellow Islamists had boasted they would “run the wing” once enough of “the brothers” arrived. What followed was sharp and ugly: a white prisoner was slashed across the face, followed by a small riot that left several prisoners and staff injured, one officer with a broken arm.

Those early years should have been a moment of clarity. Instead, the danger was consistently downplayed, and a new dynamic took root. With similar flare-ups happening across Category A prisons, there soon emerged what prisoners called “the brotherhood”: less an organization than a network, one fusing Islamist extremism and grievance with the gang discipline of existing prisoner groups.

In practice, these Islamist groups came to operate with a subtle but unmistakable authority, their days revolving around small acts of domination. They often isolated themselves from non-Muslim inmates, for instance, deciding who cooks in a jail’s communal kitchen. Pressure often arrived as a “friendly chat”, an offer of protection, a meal placed on a new arrival’s bed or even a copy of the Quran — gestures that looked charitable but carried an unspoken price. Refusal meant isolation, threats, or the quiet sense of eyes following you around the wing, sometimes ending in violence.

For some men it was easier to blend into the group — to “convert” for safety — than stand outside it. Their routines blended the swagger of a jailhouse thug with the absolutism of jihadist doctrine: instilling the most literal interpretations of scripture, holding cell sermons, debating conflicts in the Middle East, always framed as proof that the West was at war with Islam. The impressionable gravitated toward this intensity; the harder cases used it to justify enforcing discipline. Ideology gave the violence meaning; violence gave the ideology weight. In the dark corners of a prison cell, simple grievances hardened into hate.

And that ideology didn’t stay contained on a single wing. The brotherhood’s strength lay in its reach — often vengeful. A slight against a brotherhood-aligned prisoner in one jail might be “answered” months later in another, by different hands of the same network. I witnessed the results of that cold logic when the man who had floored Bourgass arrived at HMP Long Lartin. A decoy question at his door — “Where you from, mate?” — before a brutal rush from behind. He woke with stab wounds dotted across his face. “I was lucky not to lose an eye,” he told me later.

To anyone who hasn’t lived it, this sounds like exaggeration. It isn’t. In 2016, former prison governor Ian Acheson, in his report on prisons, told ministers to separate the most dangerous ideological influencers — men who radicalized others or used violence to enforce Islamist discipline — into dedicated units. Jonathan Hall KC’s 2022 review went further. He found that the service had long under-appreciated Islamist gang-type activity and the “perverse esteem” enjoyed by terrorist prisoners, noting how “brotherhood” groupings dominated wings and exerted coercive control. Both Acheson and Hall urged governors to take clear ownership of terrorist risk.

The uncomfortable reality is this: poorly managed prisons can entrench ideology more readily than they can challenge it. When a group holds authority and the cultural high ground on a particular wing — through numbers, status, and a ready-made sense of belonging — the incentive to change almost inevitably vanishes. Hall’s point, and Acheson’s before him, is that treating this as mere “prison culture” is how control is lost — and how the rest of us inherit the risk.

Bourgass himself later spent months in segregation at HMP Whitemoor amid concerns about his influence over others. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that parts of his extended segregation had been unlawful on procedural grounds: decisions to keep him isolated beyond the initial 72-hour limit had been repeatedly renewed by prison managers rather than the Secretary of State, as the law requires, while he had also not been given enough information to meaningfully challenge these decisions. They might sound arcane, but these details matter: it shows how long the service has wrestled with the question of what to do with ideological leaders who make already-violent places more dangerous. That tension now sits at the center of Bourgass’s parole bid.

A case like this rarely reaches a parole hearing without formal evidence of risk reduction. As always, PPCS coordinates the referral and dossier; on life sentences, the Parole Board review begins as the minimum tariff nears, and considers whether the case should go to an oral hearing. Yet terrorism cases unsurprisingly don’t sit in a silo: counter-terrorism police and MI5 both contribute, and any release plan runs through what’s known as a “Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangement”. Parole management, for its part, falls to the Probation Service’s National Security Division — a specialist unit created to handle the most complex, high-risk cases — if the Board agrees to release a convicted terrorist.

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Paperwork, though, is not certainty. I learned that on my first day out of prison, when I helped restrain Usman Khan on London Bridge, an act for which I received a Royal Prerogative of Mercy and later a Queen’s Gallantry Medal. Khan, too, had “done his rehabilitation work”, had sat on a de-radicalization program in custody, and was under tight license conditions. But none of this was enough to prevent the murders of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones. As the coroner’s subsequent report lays out, a man can look “compliant” yet remain ideologically primed.

That is the paradox the Parole Board now faces with Bourgass, if it hasn’t faced it already. Ideology disrupts the usual calculus. A stable workplace, supportive housing, a curfew, an electronic tag, a conscientious probation officer — these are all important. But they do not neutralize an extremist belief system. HII may genuinely shift thinking for some, but for the most committed, it becomes a vocabulary lesson, a guide on what to say, not a mechanism for change. The Board knows that and will probe it.

When Bourgass is ultimately released, the next question becomes whether the state can safely manage him outside. Probation will model scenarios; police will develop contingencies; MI5 will again contribute its view. But someone must ultimately sign a license and believe it will hold. Risk can be managed or mismanaged; it cannot be eliminated. And even if release were judged manageable, the question of deportation introduces a different kind of difficulty. Terrorist offenders like Bourgass, who entered the UK unlawfully, cannot simply be removed at the end of their sentence. Deportation requires the receiving state’s agreement, and a court must be satisfied there is no real risk of torture or degrading treatment on their return. Algeria has repeatedly resisted forced returns, and British courts scrutinize diplomatic assurances with caution, often finding them insufficient.

My hunch? Bourgass is unlikely to be freed on his first attempt. The Parole Board tends to be more conservative in cases where ideology intersects with violence, and where deportation complications muddy the supervision picture. But whether now or the next time, his return to public life is no longer a distant abstraction. It is approaching.

And that is where the deeper national problem lies. For years, parts of the high-security prison estate have served as incubators, raising up the most committed ideologues and silencing more moderate Muslim voices. The brotherhood, for its part, understood this dynamic long before the institution recognized what was happening. Until we confront that internal culture — not with euphemism, but with honesty about who commands influence on prison landings — we will keep returning to cases like Bourgass: underplaying the risks, and hoping they don’t spill back onto the streets.

In 2005, the author of this piece was convicted of murder, and sentenced to 17 years in prison. In 2019, he was was involved in stopping the London Bridge terror attack, and is now a writer and speaker. 

Soon enough, the basic facts became clear. On 13 November 2015, 10 years ago today, ISIS-inspired terrorists brought death to the city by the Seine. Three suicide bombers struck outside the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, killing one. Yet it was the roving commandos in the city’s heart that were most shocking. Spreading havoc from a rented SEAT Leon, one group of gunmen killed dozens of innocents in cafés and restaurants. Worst of all, though, was the Bataclan, the music venue where 1,500 rockers were attending a concert. Ninety were mown down in the theater as they danced; 132 died overall.

Now, a decade on from the massacre, the killings still seem unreal. Naturally, France does its best to memorialize the slaughter. Last Sunday, some 2,000 runners wended their way from the Stade de France to the Bataclan for the so-called Marche de Liberté (“Course for Freedom”). That’s been shadowed by more official homages. Today, Emmanuel Macron and Mayor Anne Hidalgo will unveil a memorial garden at the Town Hall, and the Eiffel Tower will be bathed in the colors of the tricolor. Yet if all this happens under the rubric of Paris se souvient, Paris remembers, that barren bewilderment endures. For all the official homages, the attacks of November are still barely understood, and closure seems a very long way away — bad news for the Republic and the capital both.

In some ways, of course, France has found closure. Quite aside from the commemorations and vigils this week, there have been innumerable films and books covering the mayhem from every possible angle. One striking recent example is Paris, 13 Novembre 2045, written by the sociologist Amélie M. Chelly. Her novel follows the survivors of the attacks and the nightmares that haunt them. More prosaically, the Abécédaire du 13 Novembre, edited by Catherine Brun, covers the atrocity from a kaleidoscope of different directions, covering everything from songs to poems to graphic novels.

Then there were the trials of 20 people charged with involvement in the 2015 attacks, an epic affair lasting 10 months from September 2021. The longest criminal trial in modern French history, it encompassed over 300 lawyers and represented 2,500 plaintiffs, and was greater in scale than even the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer and infamous “Butcher of Lyon” during the Second World War.

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Beyond their simple vastness, the trials exposed France to countless tales of tragedy. Among the stories was that of Maia, a young architect, who was sitting that fateful night at an outdoor café with Amine, her Moroccan husband. When the attackers came, Amine was killed instantly; Maia was stunned by the sudden silence when the firing finally stopped. Then she heard the gasping and wheezing of a young man she did not know. He was leaning on her, squeezing out his last breath. Maia later said that she would never forget him, but also that she would never know his name.

Beyond these stark personal revelations, incomprehension arguably endures on a societal level. In part, this is explained by the subsequent direction of French politics. For sure, there have been further Islamist attacks, yet the full-scale confrontation between France and jihadi, promised by ISIS among others, never materialized. This was partly due to the hard-headed police and military response to potential threats. A much-improved intelligence service doubtless helped too. Among other things, that involved tightening communications with other agencies, especially the Belgians whose laxity had created a security “black hole” exploited by the terrorists.

All this has arguably meant that France has yet to fully reckon with the ideology that underpinned the 2015 attacks — an ideology which, as an article in the ISIS magazine Dabiq paraded in the aftermath, involved sharing photos of semi-naked corpses. Perhaps more telling was the article’s English headline: “Just Terror!” Amid the gloating, this represented a genuinely new slant on terrorist violence. What ISIS announced here was that indiscriminate murder was not merely a weapon of war, but also a perverted form of justice. It represented a shockingly direct challenge to both Western morality and the West’s conception of justice, based as it is on secular and utilitarian principles.

France, for all its secular earnestness, has yet to truly level with this fact. Certainly, political Islam remains a question to which no one has provided an adequate answer. For the far-Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, it’s simply a matter of integrating Islam into a non-sectarian Republican program: an impossibility given Islamist extremists violently oppose the very concept of the Republic. The far-Right, for its part, talks openly of “a war” against “foreign religions”: specifically targeting Islam. But, again, this is mere shadow boxing. Actually tackling France’s internal enemies would, among other things, involve targeting a sophisticated propaganda network and a prison system that fosters the formation of Islamist cells. Stuck in the middle, Macron applies more and more hardline secular principles, even as senior civil servants lately warned of Islamist “entryism” into the French state.

Yet amid these high-flown political tensions, it’s perhaps Paris itself that has most struggled to come to terms with the Bataclan. At the end of the last century, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo wrote an influential essay called “Paris, Capital of the 21st Century”. Following Walter Benjamin, he argued that Paris could regain its Belle Époque position as “Queen of the World” — by opening itself to outside, non-European cultures. The massacres of 13 November shattered such heady utopianism, revealing the multi-ethnic capital as riven by hatred, especially in its forgotten banlieues where the French-born terrorists lived. This lays bare the identity crisis as the heart of modern France: how a secular, democratic Republic can contain the factions that loathe it.

To be fair, some are still trying to grapple with the attacks. One good example is “Programme 13/11”, an interdisciplinary research program under the auspices of the Sorbonne. Directed by the historian Denis Peschanski, it is gathering first-hand testimony for future generations. Peschanski himself has called the scheme a kind of “living monument” — even as he believes that, somehow, the savagery of the terrorists can be met with the “sciences” of the French academic system.

Perhaps: yet there is scant evidence to show that many radical French Muslims have been “deradicalized” by such initiatives. That’s shadowed by other traumas: a so-called “French Intifada” may not have happened, but the country has continued to be wracked by jihadi terror, from the 2016 Nice truck attack to the 2020 beheading of teacher Samuel Paty. It all points in the same direction: towards a deepening trauma across France’s collective memory.

Yesterday, every Paris resident received a special edition of À Paris, the city’s listings magazine. Inside, Anne Hidalgo addresses her public, proclaiming a message of “liberty and hope”. But as a Parisian myself, I can say that few of us really believe this — the wounds are still too raw.

Trump, it would seem, has detected an opportunity to enthuse his evangelical supporters. But Nigeria’s troubles are about more than Trump, American politics, or simplistic “West versus Africa” narratives. Nigeria is a state that is failing at its most basic duty: protecting its citizens.

Tens of thousands have been killed in recent years by jihadist groups and various militias. In the past year alone, thousands more have died; 3.6 million Nigerians are internally displaced — more than the entire population of Qatar. Another 400,000 have fled the violence to neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

Whole villages have been razed, farms and schools abandoned for fear of violence. A kidnapping economy has metastasized into one of the most lucrative industries in the country; in some regions, families now expect to pay ransom as routinely as school fees. The violence is not episodic. It is systemic, grinding and national in scope. Life in vast swathes of the country is lived under constant threat.

Trump has characteristically oversimplified the crisis by framing it solely as Christians besieged by Islamist extremists. Yes, many Christians have been murdered for being Christians, in churches. But the violence is often, if not always, indiscriminate, and Muslims have also been killed in large numbers. Many attacks are driven by resource disputes and opportunistic criminality wrapped in religious rhetoric.

In Nigeria’s northwestern region alone, there are over two dozen major criminal groups whose activities involve violent robberies, the extortion of motorists, kidnappings for ransom, and illegal mining. As the African Center for Strategic Studies has noted: “Even though they sometimes call on God during attacks or while making propaganda videos, these criminal gangs do not discriminate against their targets based on religious affiliation.” For these particular groups, Islamism is more of a useful rallying cry to lure recruits than their core activity, and Muslims are just as likely to suffer violence at their hands. Moreover, considering 46% of Nigerians — 133 million people — live in extreme poverty, scarcity is a defining feature of everyday Nigerian life. This fuels a fierce competition for resources that can sometimes spill into intercommunal violence that is more driven by socioeconomics than identities. And the Nigerian government cannot, and will not, bring an end to the anarchy. Nigeria is not simply living through religious war — it is living through state abandonment.

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In fairness, the Nigerian government faces immense challenges in combating insecurity. With a population of 230 million, four times that of Britain, Nigeria is policed by some 370,000 underfunded, under-equipped officers. For comparison, Britain has 170,000 better equipped officers. Nigeria’s military, meanwhile, is stretched thin, fighting jihadists and various armed militias across the country. Even the most capable government would struggle under these conditions.

Still, acknowledging these challenges does not absolve Nigeria’s rulers of responsibility. There is something revealing about the reflexive response from some Nigerian officials and Western media eager to “correct” Trump by emphasizing that Muslims are also dying. The implication is perverse: that a representative distribution of victims somehow redeems the Nigerian state. That Trump is exaggerating. “Yes, thousands have been killed,” the BBC reports, “but there is no evidence Christians are disproportionately targeted.”

Imagine that logic being applied to Britain: that mass murder is somehow less of a crisis if all faiths are represented in the body count. This is the modern version of the old racist shrug: “Just the usual violence in Africa.” Regrettable but normal, nothing to get all worked up about.

The Nigerian government’s official response to Trump’s threat has been to invoke Nigeria’s “sovereignty.” The problem is not with the principle itself, but with how it is being invoked as a shield not for Nigeria’s people, but for its rulers.

It is an easy tactic: the principle of sovereignty retains a quasi-religious aura despite the sometimes questionable outcomes of its practice for regular people. It brings to mind autonomy, dignity and resistance to foreign domination. That is why corrupt elites enthusiastically exploit its emotional power to divert attention from their negligence. Sovereignty has been used as a license for governments to neglect or, in extreme cases like North Korea, even kill their own citizens: after all, the argument goes, no one outside has the right to question what happens inside our borders. Meanwhile, the ordinary Nigerian buries children, pays ransoms, flees farms, and lives with the terrible knowledge that their government will not come to save them.

The contrast between Nigerian rulers’ rhetoric of sovereignty and their actions would be comic if it were not tragic. They decry Western meddling while sending their children to Western schools, stashing the funds they have looted in Western banks, and jetting off to Western hospitals after a sneeze. Nigeria’s current president Bola Tinubu prefers French hospitals, which he regularly visits, over those he oversees in Nigeria. His predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, favored London hospitals, eventually dying in one of them earlier this year. Nigeria’s rulers don’t trust Nigerian hospitals with their own care because they know they have grossly neglected and underfunded them. Where is their patriotism on this front? Can anyone imagine a French president or British prime minister jetting off to a foreign country anytime they needed medical care? What would that say about the seriousness of French or British “sovereignty” Nigeria’s political rulers, who have usually built fabulous levels of wealth through corrupt practices in politics, speak of reliance and national pride while moving around in heavily-armored convoys that speed past the insecurity endured by the citizens they govern.

In healthy democracies, mass killings trigger reckoning — inquiries, resignations, reform. In Nigeria, they trigger wooden statements of condolence from the government and little more. Nigerians complain that sometimes even these perfunctory presidential condolences take a while coming after mass killings. The political classes accept the violence because it does not touch them. They are secure behind their layers of security. And the consequences of their hypocrisy are visible in polling that would alarm the leaders of any genuine democracy: 83% of Nigerians today say they have little or no trust in President Tinubu’s government; 82% say the same of the legislature while 79% distrust the judiciary.

Nigeria’s institutions have been hollowed out by state capture and patronage. Elections are routinely rigged and manipulated. The system is not corrupt; corruption is the system. A democracy becomes a “shadow state” — to borrow the phrase of the political scientist William Reno — when informal power networks and elite interests override institutions. The corruption directly fuels insecurity: funds designated for counterterrorism efforts are often embezzled by senior military officials, undermining the entire exercise. In such systems, insecurity is not an aberration; it is a constant. And it is treated as a crisis only if it threatens the survival of elites.

So why, among the general indiscriminate violence, are Nigerian Christians so often attacked, with impunity, for being Christians? It is because the country’s rulers calculate that Christians are less likely than Muslims to respond to violence with more violence and large-scale violence. Conventional wisdom in Nigeria has it that the country’s Muslims, especially its more fervent faithful concentrated in the northern regions, are volatile if they perceive any threat to their faith. So, if the situation were reversed, and Christian terrorists were regularly slaughtering Muslims in Mosques, Nigeria’s government would be seriously concerned that a full-scale religious war could erupt. They would move more swiftly to apprehend the Christian attackers to placate Muslims, if only for the self-preservative motive of fearing they might lose control of the situation completely.

Nigeria’s Christians, meanwhile, are seen as less likely to respond with mass violence to attacks on them by jihadists, and so in the brutal arithmetic of Nigeria’s rulers, their killings are more ignorable. They are not seen as representing a threat to elite survival. Life is disturbingly cheap in the eyes of Nigeria’s ruling class — especially when that life belongs to the poor and the powerless. Contrary to their rhetoric, they simply do not place the same premium on human life as Western, and many other governments do. This is often the case in too many other African states.

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Tinubu, Nigeria’s current president, once forfeited $460,000 to US authorities to avoid further investigation into his alleged links to drug trafficking. He once famously told his supporters, “Power is not served à la carte. Fight for it, grab it and run with it.” This is hardly the language of a guardian of noble principles. It is high time the world started distinguishing between the people of Nigeria and a political class that claims to speak for them. This is especially true if that political class often attains its positions of power through manipulated and sometimes openly rigged elections, as Tinubu himself is accused of doing. Elite sovereignty without accountability is but impunity draped in a flag.

None of this means the answer lies in American boots on Nigerian soil. Military interventions in Africa usually produce more damage than solutions. The 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya which led to the overthrow of the government of Muammar Gaddafi and subsequent disintegration of Libya readily comes to mind. Nigerians and Africans generally are rightly allergic to paternalism masquerading as humanitarianism. But the rejection of foreign intervention cannot become the acceptance of perpetual slaughter. That is why it is good that Trump is ramping up pressure on Nigeria’s rulers to tackle insecurity more energetically. He should bring maximum pressure to bear on them in this regard, including personal sanctions. They need to believe that not acting could potentially trigger US actions that would cost them their power and privileges. Their self-preservative instincts are the only plausible pathway towards making them take action to properly fund and equip Nigeria’s security forces, curb the corruption that fuels insecurity and address the socioeconomic deprivation that makes recruitment into violent groups so easy.

Nigerians deserve the same safety as Britons or Americans. If “sovereignty” is to mean anything, it must begin with the right of citizens not to be hunted in their own homes. States do not exist to be sovereign. They exist to provide their citizens an environment that is safe and enabling of their prosperity. Sovereignty is merely supposed to be the best means to achieving those ends.

For too long, cynical leaders in Nigeria have used the language of national pride while behaving as though the state is their personal estate. They invoke the ghost of foreign domination to deflect attention from domestic plunder. Yes, Trump’s comments were self-serving. Yes, they were framed to please an American evangelical constituency. Yes, one can question why he is not considering US intervention to stop the larger-scale slaughter currently ongoing in Sudan, for instance. But to downplay Nigeria’s ongoing crisis because one dislikes the messenger is not going to help the four million Nigerians currently too afraid to return to their homes. Their suffering will not be eased by diplomatic platitudes, nor by misguided military intervention. One need not trust Trump or American foreign policy to recognize that a government not protecting its citizens should not be able to hide behind flags and slogans indefinitely. From this point of view, anyone putting unignorable pressure on the Nigerian government to finally do its job is doing a good thing.

France, after all, has descended into chaos. The national debt has hit record highs. No budget has been voted for 2026. And the government is unlikely to last more than a week.

Prime Minister François Bayrou is on track to lose a confidence vote on 8 September. Since there is no majority in the National Assembly, no one knows what comes next. President Emmanuel Macron could try to appoint a new prime minister — if anyone can command enough support — or call snap legislative elections.

Not if Mélenchon gets his way. The founder of the La France Insoumise party (LFI) wants Macron’s head. The President must resign. “We are in a regime crisis,” he declared, channeling his inner Robespierre. “What is on the agenda now is moving to a Sixth Republic.” Since Macron won’t oblige, he has ordered his MPs to file a motion to impeach the President. It stands no chance of succeeding, but that doesn’t matter to Mélenchon. He has also supported a mass strike on 10 September.

These aren’t just the hijinks of an aging Trotskyist longing for the revolutionary frissons of his youth. Mélenchon is a leading personnage on the French political scene. He ditched the Parti Socialiste to form his own outfit in 2008. Nearly 20 years and a few name changes later, LFI is a force to be reckoned with. It holds 71 seats in the French Parliament, making it the third largest group after Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble.

But Mélenchon has loftier ambitions than parliamentary democracy. His obsession is the presidency: he has run three times. He posted his best result in 2022, finishing third in the first round with 22% of the vote, just behind Le Pen at 23.2%. Fear not, though, the révolution was merely postponed. Everyone in Paris knows he’s gearing up for another run in 2027 — or sooner if Macron throws in the towel.

Mélenchon is unlikely to become president — and he probably knows it. He is too radical to win over the majority of voters at the ballot box. But that’s not his real concern. A revolutionary at heart, Mélenchon wants to foment chaos and become the uncontested leader of the shambolic French Left. The LFI as well as the Communists, Greens, and Socialists came together at the last election under the umbrella of the Nouveau Front Populaire. But the alliance exists only on paper. Its leaders can’t agree on anything. Mélenchon wants all of them to follow him. Only then will the Left be saved.

But far from being the savior of the French Left, Mélenchon is its executioner. His craving for power has led him to betray every principle the Left is supposed to uphold. La France Insoumise runs counter to Republican ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité. It is the mirror image of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. Both parties are built on exclusion. They just disagree about who is to blame for France’s troubles.

To even call LFI Left-wing is to besmirch the long tradition of French socialism as a force for progress. Mélenchon’s party spurns the animating ethos of the French Left: universalism. All citizens are equal in the eyes of the Republic. Race and religion aren’t important. That’s not to say the French Left ignores discrimination — it doesn’t — but the fight against discrimination is ultimately a fight for everyone to be treated the same.

Not so in the eyes of LFI. The party is openly sectarian. It flirts with Islamists — including groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood — and exploits religious grievances. Look no further than its attacks on laïcité (secularism): the Republican principle that religion belongs to the private sphere. When Macron’s government banned the traditional Muslim abaya robe from schools, LFI was up in arms. Mélenchon accused the government of being “obsessed” with Islam. His sycophantic sidekick, Manuel Bompard, fumed that secularism was being exploited “to stigmatize one religion in particular”.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Banning teenage girls from wearing the abaya in the Republic’s schools is no more anti-Muslim than banning the kippa is antisemitic or banning the turban is anti-Sikh. To pretend otherwise is a deliberate provocation. In a country scarred by repeated Islamist attacks, including the beheading of a school teacher, that’s indecent.

Indecency, however, is hardwired into the DNA of LFI. Any greatest hits compilation would have to include its press release on 7 October 2023. “The armed offensive of Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes in a context of intensification of Israel’s policy of occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” it began. “We deplore the Israeli and Palestinian dead.” It ended by calling for a “ceasefire” and “the end of colonization”. Nowhere does it mention that the Islamist group had killed more than a thousand Jews in a pogrom of medieval barbarity.

Believe it or not, it’s only gone downhill from there. Mélenchon and his henchmen have refused to call Hamas terrorists. For them, the plight of the Palestinian people is just a political weapon. The target: anyone who expresses even a modicum of support for Israel. In many cases, it reeks of antisemitism.

And in this respect, Mélenchon leads the pack, of course. He accused Yaël Braun-Pivet, the Jewish President of the National Assembly, of “camping in Tel Aviv to encourage the massacre”. He also attacked his former friend, the Jewish Socialist Jérôme Guedj, for “pleading for an ‘in-between’ between genociders and supposed supporters of the ‘erasure of Israel’.” In reality, Guedj is a steadfast supporter of the two-state solution and a vocal critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-Right government. His only crime: defending Israel’s right to exist — and being Jewish.

But there’s no low Mélenchon won’t stoop to. “What’s interesting,” he added about Guedj, “is watching him fidget around the post where the leash of his affiliation keeps him tied.” Guedj’s response says it all: “I must say of the man I deeply loved that he’s become an antisemitic bastard.”

How did that happen? And how did LFI become so toxic? To figure that out, you have to go back to the very beginning of Mélenchon’s political career.

Mélenchon started out on the far-Left in the Seventies. But he wasn’t just on the far-Left, he was a Trotskyist. And he wasn’t your milquetoast Trotskyist either, he was a Lambertist. Lambertists took their name from Pierre Lambert, the leader of the revolutionary Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI). Mélenchon spent three years in the OCI. Although he doesn’t like to talk about them, he has admitted they were “very important years in my intellectual formation”.

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Mélenchon learned operating principles in the OCI that still guide him today. For one, the leader is always right. Lambert was domineering and distant — there was no internal democracy at OCI. What the red godfather said went. Mélenchon runs LFI the same way. It’s his fiefdom. When talking to the media, he likes to portray himself as a mentor to fledgling progressives. “We never had youth organizations for one reason,” he said recently. “The young people were the ones who were running the show!” Ever the altruist, he added: “I’m just one element.”

But that’s propaganda even Pravda wouldn’t have run. “La France Insoumise is me!” he once exclaimed. According to La Meute, a new exposé by French muckrakers Charlotte Belaïch and Olivier Pérou, Mélenchon runs his party like a “cult”.

“This isn’t about the angry outbursts of an authoritarian man, but about domination and submission,” Belaïch and Pérou write. “It’s not about the discipline needed to win power, but about control.” As one LFI MP told the reporters: “Normally, you wouldn’t let anyone treat you the way Jean-Luc treats you. Not even your mother or your father could make you crawl like that.”

Like his old boss Lambert, Mélenchon loves nothing more than a good purge. Every few years, he “renews” the movement and promotes the youth. Supposedly, it keeps his finger on the pulse of the masses. In truth, it’s a smokescreen. Mélenchon can’t stand anyone stealing his limelight. Far from mentoring a new generation, he crushes anyone who shows promise. Even if that means dissing collaborators who have stood by him for decades.

Instead, Mélenchon has packed LFI with dunces, charlatans and fanatics. They’ve turned the National Assembly into a crèche. The breakout star has to be Sébastien Delogu — a trade union representative and Mélenchon’s former driver, now MP for Marseille North. “Mélenchon is God, and me, I am the son of God,” Delogu likes to say.

The 38-year-old speaks five words a minute, so profound are his thoughts. He once admitted on live radio that he didn’t know who Philippe Pétain was. “I’ve heard about him, and I know that apparently he’s a racist,” Delogu said.

Mélenchon learned another important lesson from his time with Lambert: you must be willing to do anything to gain power. What set Lambertists apart on the far-Left was their duplicity. Lambert realized it would be impossible to stage a revolution. It wasn’t 1789 anymore. He had no popular support. So, instead, he adopted a strategy of entryism. He planted undercover agents in other Left-wing movements, such as the Parti Socialiste. Mélenchon joined the party in 1976, shortly after leaving the OCI.

Some Socialists now speculate that Mélenchon was one of Lambert’s moles. “With hindsight, I think: he looked every inch the mole,” said Claude Germon, the former mayor of Massy in the Paris suburbs who hired Mélenchon as his chief of staff in 1978. Julien Dray, a prominent Socialist strategist and erstwhile ally of Mélenchon, agrees. In his book Qui Est Mélenchon, he suggests the latter played a double game for years.

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Yet it didn’t pay off: Mélenchon never gained power in the Socialist Party. He spent 20 years as a senator, a marginal post in French politics, and never held a major cabinet role. The best he could manage was a short stint as Minister Delegate for Vocational Education. Whatever Mélenchon did, others did better. He had neither the intellectual heft of Dominique Strauss-Kahn nor the killer instinct of François Hollande. Doomed to be an extra, he quit the Socialists, high on his own ressentiment.

At first, Mélenchon tried to build a traditional Left-wing movement. His objective was to win back the working class from Le Pen’s far-Right. In 2012, he ran to be an MP in the industrial wastelands of Northern France for the Front de Gauche, the precursor of LFI. But, there too, he failed. “It’s the worst campaign I’ve ever had,” he reportedly said, complaining he couldn’t connect with poor white voters. “You understood nothing they said… They were sweating alcohol from morning… They smelt bad… Almost all obese.”

Five years later, Mélenchon failed again: he didn’t qualify for the second round of the presidential election. He was 600,000 votes short. And so he abandoned his plan to compete with Le Pen. That wouldn’t catapult him into power. His new base would be the banlieues — those forgotten corners of the Republic. As Dray explains, “the 600,000 missing votes could be found… in these relegated areas that have gradually become ethnic ghettos with large immigrant populations, where Islam is settling in an endemic way, becoming the only active political force.”

Like a true Lambertist, Mélenchon shed his old skin and reinvented himself. If that meant forsaking his core beliefs, so be it. The end justifies the means. He once waxed lyrical about secularism. He once loathed Islamism. He once called the burqa “degrading” and compared women wearing it to “ghosts”. No matter. The new Mélenchon will play footsie with Islamists and defend the abaya.

The irony is that Mélenchon poses as the defender of French Muslims, but his strategy betrays how little he must think of them. He seems to believe they will be won over with sectarian dog-whistles. Rather than speaking to French Muslims as French citizens, he speaks to them as Muslims. In this respect, he resembles Le Pen.

Herein lies the fatal flaw of Mélenchon’s electoral strategy: it underestimates a diverse Muslim electorate. Yes, it might get him the handful of votes he needs to qualify for the second round of the next presidential election. But it risks alienating many Muslims — and large swathes of the electorate.

Mélenchon doesn’t care. A theory making the rounds in Paris is that Mélenchon doesn’t seriously believe he can be president. If he faced a far-Right candidate — either Le Pen or Jordan Bardella — in the second round, they would trounce him. Where he has pursued a strategy of radicalism, they have pursued one of “de-diabolisation”. In the eyes of the majority of French voters, the devil is now Mélenchon. That suits him just fine: deep down he remains a Trotskyist. His bet is simple. If the far-Right wins, civil war will erupt between the state and the banlieues. You can guess who will lead the Résistance.

This down-at-heel cosmopolitan community, home to immigrants, artists and students, had always been poor but peaceful. Yet on that afternoon 20 years ago, something had changed. The atmosphere was tense: the familiar sounds of Asian music, reverberating from youthful sound systems, had been replaced by a chorus of police sirens, and the colorful aura of the storefronts was lit up by flashing blue lights.

It was 12 July, and earlier that morning residents had been forced to evacuate their homes following the discovery of a bomb factory in a nearby flat at Alexandra Grove. The unkept hovel in question could have been any student digs. But instead of alcohol and pizza boxes, the rooms contained enough explosive material to devastate this entire neighborhood. The rudimentary devices which had brutally torn through the lives of 52 victims in London the week before had been made here.

The strong police presence was met with mixed emotions. You could sense the hostility as both Makkah Masjid and the local Leeds Grand Mosque were ransacked by investigators seeking to understand the teachings and instruction which had radicalized four men from this city. This, in turn, was met by the fear of reprisals against local Muslims.

Like many of my generation, I had watched the televised violence of 9/11 in horror. Yet while that act of terrorism marked all our lives, it was still a tragedy that had played out over there. What was taking place in Leeds on that summer morning for years later, was the “War on Terror” coming home. As Zygmunt Bauman put it, that which was global, was truly local — especially the new forms of violence it was creating.

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Acts of terror have always been about communication. The images of destruction carry a powerful message, and the acts rely heavily on symbolism. If the abiding image of 9/11 was that of the planes striking the Twin Towers, in London, it was the pictures of the ripped-apart bus which left an indelible scar on Britain’s collective consciousness.

Terrorism, as 7/7 showed us, wasn’t just about a fear of the unknown. It was about weaponizing the familiar and intimate — turning the everyday into the source of nightmares.

Even though this played out all those years ago, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it could all happen again. Similar forces and dynamics are still at work amid our communities, and are arguably more dangerous still. The processes required to prevent such violence are being lost within our divisive political landscape. The Prevent Strategy, for example, launched by Labour in response to the 9/11 attacks, has been met with criticism from all sides for failing to stop radicalization, instead alienating minority communities. And governments, from Tony Blair onward, have struggled to get to grips with community alienation and failure to integrate.

Blair, who was PM on 7/7, left office tainted by his entanglements in the Middle East. Today, the United Kingdom risks being ineluctably drawn into an even more fraught conflict with Iran, even as events in the region remain our most divisive political concern. We only have to look at the continuing protests in London to see how explosive the issue has become, with Keir Starmer struggling to deal in a constructive way the debate on Palestine.

Things were quite different at the turn of the 21st century. We were only just realizing we had entered into an age marked by the catastrophic actions of individuals, to say nothing of the worrying limits of liberal multiculturalism. It no longer took an army of millions to bring about a global security crisis, just a handful of radicalized individuals. Their ability to disrupt was amplified by the power of the media and the attention it permitted.

In some ways, we have learned how to address these acts of violence, seen again at Manchester Arena in 2017, and not treat it as a threat to our entire way of life, as Tony Blair did. In an article for Foreign Affairs, the then PM explicitly linked the “War on Terror” to a battle for global values. Today, we more readily see these as the acts of deranged individuals.

But is the focus on lone wolves naive? The radicalization of potentially dangerous individuals is arguably a deeper problem than ever before across the political spectrum. Back in 2006, don’t forget, mobile phones were still primitive, and Facebook had only just carried out its first pilot roll-out. Twitter was yet to be launched. Yet if the early years of the War on Terror fostered a “with-us-or-against-us” mentality, part of the official doctrine, the tribalism of our social media-enabled politics today is far more divisive, dogmatic and assured.

The subsequent penetration of smartphones and social media into our every day has enabled a politics of immediacy that exacerbates divisions and amplifies calls for violence, even as it further hampers social solidarity. The first decade of the War on Terror placed too much importance on simplistic “Clash of Civilizations” narratives — which ended up in the widespread demonization of Islam. But the calamitous corrective to this has been to insist there is no correlation between Islamic teachings and violence and oppression.

We have only to look at the disastrous response to the Southport attacks, and the catastrophic mishandling of the investigation into grooming gangs, to see how the politics of correctness fuels the rise of counter-parasitical movements feeding off similar feelings of anger and resentment. If it is ridiculous to claim, for instance, that all followers of any belief system fully advocate violence, it is equally absurd to claim it has no relation whatsoever to acts of slaughter and the quashing of basic rights. No political or religious project or identity should be immune from criticism: they can all become violent and oppressive.

The problem here is that when it comes to Islam, the Labour Party still doesn’t know how to deal with it, happily promoting social liberalism while also making criticism of the more violent strands of Islam still harder. All the while, cities such as Bradford and Leeds are becoming increasingly segregated, in terms of lives, religion and politics. All across Britain, meanwhile, identity politics is more divisive than ever. Battlelines have been drawn and are fought over by those who insist they are on the right side of history.

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Twenty years on, then, we have far less confidence in our leaders and a feeling of despair surrounds the idea of multiculturalism — a feeling that politicians on both sides of the political divide will be inclined to weaponize. Indeed, while the War on Terror simply withered away, we are none the wiser as to why youngsters are radicalized. This was spelled out in the Government’s official report into the attack. It stated: “What we know of previous extremists in the UK shows that there is not a consistent profile to help identify who may be vulnerable to radicalization”. This, too, has been borne out in Prevent’s continued failure to target and defuse potential suspects.

Today, then, political positions are hardening. We have a far more organized far-Right movement, and on the Left, we see the new divisions forming, as with the rise of the Independent Alliance, which will once again place identity and the question of foreign policy front and center. Meanwhile, the possibility of further terrorist attacks can’t be ruled out. It is amid such moments of political febrility that the idea of civil war doesn’t seem so fantastic. We should remember that, as we remember those who perished 20 years ago.

A few days ago, I found myself on Tavistock Square in London. There is no sense that such a horrific event took place on these sun baked streets. Nor, as I traveled through Edgware Road Station, did I suspect that others on the train would be remembering those images from within the blown out carriage, as the smoke billowed from a smoldering blackness. It is all too easy to forget such appalling horrors: the victims, their families, the rescue workers who had to confront the unimaginable.

If we are to do justice to the memory of 7/7, then, it is not only to follow a ritual of remembrance. It is to remember that the forces that led to the detonation of those bombs 20 years ago aren’t extinguished. And that Britain today is contending with rising disenchantment. We need political leaders who will defuse this dangerous moment, not light the touchpaper. We don’t want to become the unwitting authors of another catastrophe.

In its ventures, according to a report by an all-party group of MPs, MPAC would use extremist rhetoric and circulate radical material, including articles from neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial websites. It described Zionism as an “octopus that penetrates every western nation and pushes it to start World War Three upon Muslims” and used antisemitic smears in its attempt to unseat Lorna Fitzsimons, then MP for Rochdale. One of MPAC’s leaflets falsely claimed that she had done nothing for Palestinians because she was a “Jewish member of Labour Friends of Israel”. It also claimed it was Allah’s will that Muslims vote Liberal Democrat. MPAC was forced to issue a public apology for the false claim about Fitzsimons, but she was still ousted by a Lib Dem at the 2005 election. Though Ahmed was its spokesperson back in 2005, he told me, via his lawyers, he now regrets being involved with the group and abhors “any antisemitism”. He also stated that his sole motivation for joining the group was in relation to an anti-war campaign against those supporting the Iraq War.

MPAC was only one of several organizations advancing Islamist agendas. Some worked via more delicate means. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), for instance, vehemently opposed UK support for Israel and the invasion of Iraq. It also boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day, and in 2009, its deputy secretary-general Daud Abdullah signed a declaration supporting Hamas. Gordon Brown responded by banning all “engagement” with the MCB, a policy followed by subsequent Tory and Labour governments. Nonetheless, it is still the largest Muslim organization in Britain, and it still wields influence.

Inevitably, other organizations were spawned. With the MCB denied access to Whitehall, another Islamist lobbying group, Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) emerged in the 2010s. For a time, senior figures from both main parties attended its events. But MEND’s star began to fade in 2017, after a young fanatic killed five people and injured 50 by driving a car into them outside Parliament, and one of its directors claimed this was “not terrorism”. In 2023, its chief executive Azhar Qayyum reaffirmed his support for the Palestinian people and their right to armed struggle after the October 7 attack and called for Israel to be “dismantled”.

When the Tory communities secretary Michael Gove told the Commons that MEND was to be assessed for extremism, Labour responded by announcing that it, too, would not engage with MEND. But when one avenue is shut down, another opens. MEND is now part of a powerful coalition that today is increasingly applying pressure on the Labour government. The Muslim Vote (TMV), of which more later, includes several existing groups that openly supported the right to Palestinian armed struggle after the October 7 massacre, and which last year used its significant power to affect voting patterns. No wonder Labour is listening.

*

But what do these groups want? Along with demanding a tougher line on Israel, the MCB and MEND have been making the same demand for many years: government acceptance of an official definition of Islamophobia, supposedly a unique form of prejudice. According to MEND, this would “provide much-needed clarity in legislation and policies that are intended to protect vulnerable minorities”.

But Khalid Mahmood, a Labour MP unseated by a TMV Islamist in 2024 — a man who had questioned whether women were raped on October 7 and dedicated his win to the people of Gaza — believes there is a deeper motive. Islamists, he said, see a wide-ranging definition as “a way of extending their control over the young in schools and universities. If they start to blame every mishap on Islamophobia, it will induce a victim mentality, and isolate them from the mainstream — so making them more vulnerable to Islamist influence”.

Under the Tories, the Islamists inched closer to success. A report issued in 2018 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, whose co-chair was the current health secretary Wes Streeting, stated that “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. The former Tory attorney general Dominic Grieve wrote the foreword, saying Islamophobia was “undermining integration”.

The APPG’s definition was attacked from both ends of the political spectrum. But some of those now close to Starmer welcomed it — including Muddassar Ahmed. In 2019, the Corbyn-led Labour Party endorsed the APPG definition, and this, said Ahmed, was a “momentous achievement driven by determined, visionary and indefatigable leadership”.

When, in 2024, Starmer attended Ahmed’s iftar, they also discussed how Islamophobia should be tackled and the Labour leader gave a speech in which he, too, pledged to deal with the “sickening rise in Islamophobia”. One guest felt sure that the evening marked a significant, political shift. Nafeez Ahmed wrote afterwards that Starmer’s speech revealed a new, more critical attitude to Israel and Islamophobia. Starmer had promised that a “Labour government will never turn a blind eye to that prejudice”.

Muddassar Ahmed insists that he regrets being involved with MPAC and doesn’t share the Islamist views of some of those who were involved. He also wrote an article in 2015 in which he was critical of MPAC and accused it of being disagreeable and problematic. But he is now the head of an international network of Muslim leaders called the Concordia Forum — and this network has controversial alliances.

In 2020, for example, the Concordia Forum hosted a series of online interviews. One was with Nelson Mandela’s grandson Mandla, who has since been banned from entering Britain for supporting Hamas and spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories. Another interview featured the Pakistani-American theologian Yasir Qadhi, who has defended the Holocaust denier David Irving and claimed that the American John Walker Lindh, who was captured after 9/11 fighting for the Taliban, was guilty of “youthful naivete, not treason”. Earlier this year, references to these talks vanished from the Concordia website, although they are still available on YouTube. And when I asked Ahmed’s lawyers, they told me neither he nor Concordia were aware of Mandela’s and Qadhi’s views, and did not “support or even tolerate any form of antisemitism or pro-terrorist sentiment”.

But Muddassar Ahmed still has other controversial friends. Last year, he spent time in London with a man he called a “renowned American Muslim scholar”, the Islamist Omar Suleiman. Suleiman’s accomplishments “speak for themselves”, Ahmed gushed, praising his “leadership” and “heartfelt dedication”. He did not mention the fact that Suleiman has also called for a violent “third intifada” and cursed Zionists as “enemies of God and humanity”. Speaking in January, Suleiman asked Allah to give “victory to our brothers and sisters in Gaza over these evil Zionists”. (Suleiman has said he is “not antisemitic”. Ahmed’s lawyers said his praise for Suleiman applied only “to his recognized work on interfaith dialogue and social engagement”.) Ahmed also has close ties to the repressive Islamist regime in Turkey led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Last month, he met some of its senior officials, and presented a “spirit of humanity award” to Erdogan’s deputy foreign minister Burhanettin Duran, praising his “principled leadership”.

With Starmer now in Downing Street, Ahmed has found further opportunities to lobby Labour. On 17 February, 2025, as the grooming gangs scandal raged through the press, Ahmed unveiled a Concordia opinion poll that found most British Muslims thought grooming gang victims should be given more support and were “deeply concerned” about them. So far, so uncontroversial. But Ahmed went on to express sentiments that appear to have no basis in the poll’s data: “These findings reinforce the reality that misinformation about Muslims in Britain is rife and unjustified… The recent attacks conflating Muslim communities with grooming gangs is simply unfounded.” (His lawyers said he “stands by” this statement, and was voicing “caution against the harmful and inaccurate conflation of entire communities with the actions of a criminal minority”.)

Launching the poll, Ahmed was flanked by disabilities minister, Stephen Timms, and the Labour MPs Naz Shah and Afzal Khan, both past recipients of Concordia Forum hospitality worth thousands of pounds. (The previous month, defying the official boycott, Timms had attended the MCB’s annual dinner, at which the Labour MP Abtisam Mohamed, who was later blocked from entering Israel, made a speech.) Ahmed also said the poll revealed that Muslims were “experiencing record levels of discrimination and hostility just for practicing their faith”. The Government, he urged, must do more to “engage British Muslims and ensure their voices are heard.”

Astonishingly, the very next day, Ahmed’s voice was heard in the state dining room at No 10. At a “round table” meeting between Muslim leaders and Starmer, Ahmed was pictured sitting two places to the PM’s left. The meeting, wrote another of the Muslim leaders present, marked a “reset” that would see the Government build “stronger partnerships” with Muslims.

Reset it was, for 10 days later the deputy prime minister and communities secretary Angela Rayner announced she was setting up a five-person “working group” to “provide the Government with a working definition of anti-Muslim hatred/Islamophobia”. Its chair would be the liberal Tory Grieve, veteran of the 2018 APPG report.

The backgrounds of its other members were rather different. One, Asha Affi, stood as an east London council election candidate in 2010 for George Galloway’s far-Left, Islamist-friendly Respect Party, whose policies included rejection of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. (Asked about this and other radical Respect policies, she told me she had not supported them.)

Another member, Akeela Ahmed, is a longstanding associate of Muddassar and the wife of Nafeez, with whom she attended Muddassar’s pre-election iftar. In February, Akeela urged Starmer to end the boycott of the MCB, despite the fact it remains highly controversial: its deputy chief until January had visited and venerated the Hamas leadership in Gaza, while its new secretary-general says Muslim parents should teach their children to identify “primarily” as Muslims. (Akeela told me she knew nothing of Muddassar’s work with MPAC, nor his friendships with Islamists, and had a long record of interfaith dialogue.)

Akeela’s husband, Nafeez, has lobbied, with the help of Muddassar, for journalists to be forced to undergo training on how to cover Islam and Muslims. This lobbying came in 2012, when Lord Justice Leveson was conducting an inquiry on the ethics of the press. Muddassar Ahmed’s PR firm, Unitas Communications, submitted a document, drafted by Nafeez, to Leveson’s inquiry. It said there should be a statutory press regulator with powers to enforce “mandatory training” to journalists on how to cover Islam and Muslims, to levy “meaningful sanctions or penalties” and ensure more Muslims got media jobs. (Nafeez told me he thought the document was “an important contribution” that would make sure “the media does not engage in promoting inaccurate racist reporting against Muslims as a group”. Muddassar Ahmed’s lawyers said he still supported the document’s central demand, for “a more robust regulatory system capable of holding the British media to account for instances of inaccurate, racist anti-Muslim reporting practices” without “compromising the fundamental right of freedom of speech”.)

A third group member is the cross-bench peer Shaista Gohir, who has also previously expressed highly controversial opinions on the Middle East before the October 7 attacks. One of her tweets read: “The only reply to a murderer is resistance. #Free Palestine.” Another proclaimed: “The US are not much of a superpower when they are ruled by another country – Israel.” Others suggested Israel deliberately targeted Gaza’s children, that Israel’s power was so great that US elections were pointless, and that Hamas bore no responsibility for triggering Israeli airstrikes by firing rockets. Those who claimed it did should “go over and live one day of Palestinian life”.

Though her tweets date from 2014, and she insists that she is not antisemitic and opposes antisemitism, more recently, her son Faris, who is also her parliamentary assistant, has claimed that Israel fabricated evidence of the October 7 atrocities. In one instance, he posted a photo of dried blood caking the floor of a home where civilians were murdered, commenting: “Because they were caught with pink fake blood they’ve now done the opposite and got black paint or some shit,” following this with a laughing face emoji. (He told me: “I strongly condemn all forms of prejudice and discrimination, including antisemitism.”)

Meanwhile, Shaista previously downplayed the role of Muslims in the grooming gangs scandal. In 2013, she authored a report that deplored claims the gangs were a “Pakistani, Asian or even a Muslim problem”. This meant “right-wing populist groups have used this issue to fuel racism and Islamophobia, ignoring evidence… that the majority of offenders are White.”

Her study focused on victims of Asian heritage, and found most of those who preyed on them were from their own communities. However, she reassured readers she was “not suggesting that sexual exploitation is more of a problem in Asian and/or Muslim communities”. Her work was echoed in a report from MEND in February, which said the claim that grooming gangs were predominantly Muslim was a “myth” that reflected an “Islamophobic narrative”.

Lost in all this, meanwhile, is the view shared by many Muslims that there is no need for an Islamophobia definition at all. According to Mahmood, whatever comes out of Rayner’s group will harm, not help, British Muslims by “deepening their isolation and encouraging a victim mentality”.

Today, though, with Labour under existential threat from Reform on one side, it is hemorrhaging votes and seats to candidates backed by Islamists on the other. It therefore finds itself under significant pressure to appease that lobby. Much of this is being applied via MPAC’s spiritual successor, TMV. Much as Ahmed did in 2005, last year TMV mobilized the now far larger Muslim electorate in the General Election. After months of vigorous campaigning, the group issued an appeal to all Muslims on the eve of the poll, asking them to vote for candidates it backed.

The results were spectacular. In the 21 constituencies where Muslims make up more than 30% of the electorate, Labour’s vote share fell by an average 29 percentage points. The safe seats held by Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and other ministers became marginals. Prominent MPs such as shadow cabinet member Jonathan Ashworth were turfed out, and TMV helped the ex-Labour renegade Jeremy Corbyn return to Parliament. One of the TMV coalition’s leading members is MEND — the organization with which Labour had severed its links. MEND had now had its revenge.

Khalid Mahmood, whose 15,000 majority was wiped out in Birmingham Perry Barr, tells me that in its anxiety to staunch the loss of votes, Labour has failed to exercise due diligence. “People have got through to the leadership without any vetting,” he says. “I’m shocked by some of the stuff they’ve been involved in, and yet they’re going to be determining important areas of policy, especially on Islamophobia. How does a government minister appoint people with these connections?”

According to Mahmood, the challenge from Muslim radicals also explains why Starmer has refused to hold a national inquiry into the Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs. Islamists, he points out, often claim that the attention paid to the gangs’ ethnicity is itself driven by Islamophobia: “They like to say that overall there are more white abusers, but real, horrendous crimes have been committed by Pakistanis and Bengalis. There have been key gangs in these communities, and this has got to be dealt with.” Thus Labour’s “trepidation” over TMV may increase the future risk to vulnerable girls.

Back in 2012, when Starmer was director of public prosecutions, there seemed to be no such trepidation: Starmer said there was “clearly an issue of ethnicity that has to be understood and addressed”. But in April, his safeguarding minister Jess Phillips made clear there would be no national inquiry into grooming gangs. It is worth noting that in 2024, a TMV challenger slashed her majority from more than 10,000 to just 769.

Meanwhile, the lobbying continues, with familiar faces cropping up at the new organizations replacing those which have been barred from Westminster. In March, Akeela Ahmed — one of the five members of Angela Rayner’s Islamophobia “working group” — launched a new British Muslim Network (BMN) which promises to ensure that “British Muslim perspectives and experiences can engage with and shape policy”, and its supporters include the ex-Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi, who has often appeared at MEND events and reportedly once advised it on a “makeover”.

What might those perspectives be? They seem unlikely to be amenable to free speech. Akeela’s BMN co-chair is the Leeds imam Qari Asim, who met King Charles at Buckingham Palace in February after signing “reconciliation accords” with Jews. Asim was an adviser to Michael Gove until he was sacked after an argument over free speech and blasphemy involving the screening of a film about Mohammed’s daughter, The Lady of Heaven.

This is not the only question mark on his record. Asim also has ties with Pakistani imams who revere Mumtaz Qadri, who was executed in 2016 for assassinating the Punjab governor Salman Taseer. Taseer had spoken out against the use of the death penalty for blasphemy — thus incurring the wrath of hardliners.  Asim has visited Qadri’s supporters in Pakistan and hosted others at public events in England praising them as “incredible”, “remarkable” and “insightful”. (Akeela Ahmed told me she did not know of Asim’s links with Qadri’s supporters, and does not share their views. Asim, for his part, said he is opposed to blasphemy laws, does not share the imams’ views of Qadri, and regards Taseer’s murder as a “repugnant crime”.)

Today, though, the Islamist lobby is in a far stronger position than when Brown excommunicated the Muslim Council of Britain. Exercising its religious muscle, TMV has toppled Labour MPs, is the biggest electoral threat to survivors such as Jess Phillips, and has scored significant wins in the recent council elections, including in Lancashire where there were victories for Maheen Kamran, who wants to prevent “free mixing” between men and women, and Azhar Ali, the Rochdale by-election candidate dropped by Labour last year for antisemitism.

So while many moderate Muslims reject Islamism, TMV can call on a growing voting bloc to drown out those moderate voices. And even though individuals such as Muddassar Ahmed reject these radical organizations, they nonetheless owe their access to the corridors of power to the sectarian vote marshalled by TMV, putting them in hoc to the actions of a group with radical connections.

And they are convinced their day is coming. On the day after the 2024 General Election, TMV boasted: “This is just the beginning, not the end. This has always been a five-election campaign… To all the naysayers who said the Muslim community can never unite, can never coordinate — tonight you had your answer. We take one step towards The Almighty, and then His help comes raining down.” 

America put Jabbar together, America took him apart.

Domestic terrorism is frightening precisely because it incubates within the body politic. If a terrorist is a foreigner, it can be said that he failed to appreciate the resplendent magnitude of America’s promise. He had never donned a beer helmet. He didn’t understand the glories of Must-See TV. Or else he understood it all too well, swelling with murderous resentment. But the domestic terrorist is an autoimmune disease, assailing the very system that nurtures him. Jabbar hardly spent the last several months training at some terror camp in the Hindu Kush; until recently, he had worked at consulting firms such as Deloitte, where, according to The Wall Street Journal, “he was paid the equivalent of nearly $125,000 a year.” This guy’s network was LinkedIn, not Al Qaeda.

After each mass shooting or terror attack, we begin the collective actuarial task of apportioning cultural and political blame. After the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon, Salon published an article under the remarkable headline: “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” The author, David Sirota, is no fool: He was trying to make a point about how Muslims are unfairly blamed en masse after paroxysms of Islamic fundamentalism. And, yes, his outlet was going for clicks. But he and his editors were also playing the game we always play.

In Jabbar’s case, the blame game is deceptively straightforward. He was a convert to Islam and adorned his truck with an ISIS flag. To commentators on the political right, this was the “globalized intifada” that the most ardent pro-Palestinian activists have been calling for. It’s notable, though, that he seems to have turned to jihadism only recently, as personal disappointments and financial obligations piled up. Islamism was the last, deadly stop on his journey to all-American loserdom.

It is, of course, of paramount importance to investigate Jabbar’s ties to extremist groups. But those determined to tether him to radical Islam miss the point. Jabbar had far more in common with Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, than with Osama bin Laden: A quiet rage builds over the years. Marriages fail. Ventures collapse. 

Just watch the 2020 video Jabbar recorded to promote his real-estate business. He is crisply dressed and uses all the right corporate lingo. His office is neat, with a poster touting “discipline” behind his right shoulder. But there is no enthusiasm to his voice, no light in his eyes.

There was a time when the military was a route into a decent life, especially if followed by a college degree. Jabbar was a veteran and college graduate, but these institutions didn’t provide him with stability — or a sense of community. And if his social-media feed is anything like yours, or mine, it was full of glamorous people living their best lives, shifting the paradigm, crushing it, leaning in. It isn’t difficult to imagine the widening gulf between the real and the digital becoming intolerable.

His military service is a notable and alarming indicator, one he shares with another recent attack. Shortly after the carnage in New Orleans, a man later identified as Matthew Livelsberger blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, killing only himself while wounding at least seven. Both Jabber and Livelsberger served in the US Army and had received multiple commendations. They served their country before turning sharply against it. And though we all think we know why — Palestine, the manosphere, guns, Trump, video games, Soros, vaccines — the truth is that the breakdown is more complicated, and more perniciously institutional, than such narratives permit.

Abandoned by elites over Vietnam — a war engineered by so many of our best and brightest that they should have held the 1965 Yale-Harvard football game in Saigon — the armed forces have never really recovered their standing. Nor, it’s worth noting, has the US military won a major conflict outright in nearly a century. Today, the military reflects American pathologies instead of expunging them—and those issues are far deeper than whatever “wokeness” exercises Trump and his nominee to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth.

Other cases are even harder to fathom. Just hours before the slaughter in New Orleans, the FBI arrested a Virginia man who was in the possession of “the largest cache of ‘finished explosive devices’ ever found in the FBI’s history.” According to The New York Times, the suspect, Brad Spafford, had a #NoLivesMatter insignia on his backpack. He wasn’t a social-justice activist (#BlackLivesMatter), nor a pro-police conservative (#BlueLivesMatter). Spafford was a nihilist. He simply wanted to kill. 

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The loss of institutional integrity is everywhere, and you can plainly see it. A few years ago, Tablet editor Alana Newhouse wrote an essay headlined “Everything Is Broken,” in which she advised readers to “give up on our current institutions,” since “they already gave up on us.” That is perhaps possible if you have sufficient social capital, as well as capital in the bank account. But if you are Jabbar, already living on the margins, dragging failed businesses and failed marriages behind you, giving up isn’t going to look quite so easy. 

What I mean to say is that Jabbar didn’t “fall through the cracks,” as the cliché goes. The cracks have widened into canyons spanning entire sectors of society. Sure, maybe a social worker missed obvious warning signs. But what ails the people, no social worker can fix. That is not to malign programs that help veterans suffering from PTSD, women escaping abusive relationships, or those struggling to pay their mortgages. These are necessary in a country that makes mere existence into a savage free-market contest. But perhaps we should think about what it is that we exist for, other than mere animal survival. 

It takes no great leader to condemn a killer like Jabbar. But it will take an exceptional figure to name, let alone address, the societal ills that he and Livelsberger and Spafford embody. Doing so will not be politically expedient. But it is also necessary. We can’t go on much longer treating the Dow Jones Industrial Average as the true index of our collective health.

After the attack in New Orleans, there was some discussion among the relevant parties over whether the Sugar Bowl — a high-stakes football game — should still take place at the Superdome. The decision was made to postpone until Thursday night, whereupon fifth-ranked Notre Dame blunted second-ranked Georgia’s formidable air assault, the Fighting Irish beating the Bulldogs, 23 to 10.

The question of whether a football game is to be played after a national tragedy is truly one of the great modern quandaries of our time. Two days after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the Dallas Cowboys played the Cleveland Browns in Cleveland. It wasn’t a happy contest. “This was a game that nobody was interested in playing, coaching, watching, or writing about,” a columnist observed.

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And yet the show must always go on. There is a relentlessness to American life that foreigners perceive more readily than those born here. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” D.H. Lawrence observed. “It has never yet melted.” In the decades since that observation, it has only become more true, not less. When, in 2001, the NFL cancelled a weekend of games in the wake of 9/11, Brian Billick, who coached the Baltimore Ravens, disagreed with the decision. “I don’t want cowards to dictate what we do in this country,” he said, “That’s where my anguish is right now.” 

If we had real public intellectuals, perhaps they could help make sense of the moment. But they ceased to matter long ago. Now, you head to X (the app formerly known as Twitter), which will give you the take you already had, just a few notches angrier. The same huge and impersonal forces that ripple through all of us can crack some. If you have the material and psychic armaments needed to survive a moment such as ours, consider yourself lucky. Fewer and fewer people do.

And yet, the show goes on. Before the rescheduled game, NPR ran a segment about the Sugar Bowl and the people who attended despite the attack. An on-the-ground correspondent spoke with a man from Cincinnati who had come with his son, both “decked out in Fighting Irish gear.” The fan said that he had been watching the news and had come to the conclusion that it was safe to be there. “So, I have no issues,” he said, failing to understand that he was being asked a moral question that went beyond his own safety.

As if to help him along, the correspondent explained that the fan had been “a senior at Notre Dame back in the 1981 Sugar Bowl, when the Fighting Irish played Georgia and lost big time.” Back in the studio, the host chuckled. “OK, so he’s looking for payback,” she said.

That isn’t the only parallel between the massacre last year and its precursors in New York and Paris. As with 9/11, the horrors of 7/10 were initially marked by shock, then calls for huge retaliation. As after 9/11, a backlash swiftly followed. Over the past 12 months, campuses and city streets have been swept by anti-Zionism, just as anti-Americanism became the rage on the Left in the early 2000s. Two decades ago, moreover, there were massive protests decrying America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and calls for the troops to stay home, much like today’s demands for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. And as after 9/11, the backlash proved impotent. The US hung on in Afghanistan until 2021. Today, Israel is busy expanding its war to Lebanon — and perhaps soon to Iran as well.

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Yet surely the strongest parallel between those earlier atrocities and October 7 isn’t the bursts of violence, or the reaction, or the escalation. It’s that term I started with. It’s Islamism, and the way the West consistently refuses to name its true enemy. I mean the Muslim Brotherhood, which created Hamas, along with those other barbarians at the gates. On September 12, 2001, after all, we declared a war on “terror”. But terror is a tactic, not an ideology. In later years, as the enemy started to strike us at home in Western towns and cities, we called it “violent extremism” and lumped it together with fascism and other forms of homegrown zealotry.

This happened first, and most importantly, because the enemy told us it was fighting in the name of Islam, and we refused and still refuse, categorically, to wage war on one of the world’s great faiths. Second, we thought we could use our vast military and intelligence resources to weaken and destroy the enemy without being trapped into starting a war with a fifth of humanity. We failed to understand the difference between Islam and Islamism — between Muslims and the Muslim Brotherhood.

By failing to name Islamism as our enemy, we allowed it to prosper. Consider, for instance, what happened in Afghanistan. After 20 years of fighting that enemy without a name, spending trillions of dollars and wasting thousands of lives, we abandoned the country to the Islamist thugs of the Taliban. It was one of the most disgraceful retreats in American history, cloaked by shabby political expediency. We looked away as the Islamists catapulted Afghan women and minorities back to another Dark Age.

There have been other consequences too, often much closer to home. As we remained silent, the Muslim Brotherhood and its many offshoots quietly entrenched themselves across Western cities, from Australian universities to Manchester suburbs. Enabling them to build mosques and take over schools, moreover, our silence has allowed them to proclaim themselves as spokespeople for every Muslim in the West.

This continued reluctance to see the enemy before us allows it to burrow into more and more hearts. As increasing numbers of desperate people arrive upon our shores from war-torn lands, many are finding solace in a new community in those same mosques and schools, as well as online. And for those of us unwilling to turn a blind eye, our Islamist enemies are ready with their tried-and-tested accusations of Islamophobia, carefully deployed to shut down discussion of the true nature of their threat. Any critics of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots are defamed as racist and intolerant — as purveyors of “hate”.

In this effort to freeze discussion the Islamists are aided and abetted by the ideological Left. In Europe, they proclaim their faith in multiculturalism. In America, social justice warriors do the work on campuses and adjacent institutions.

And so, for the moment at least, we find ourselves at an impasse. More than 20 years after 9/11, and only one year after October 7, we are still refusing to name our enemy. The irony is that not everyone struggles as we do in the West. Consider Saudi Arabia, Islam’s foundational home, the protector of Mecca and Medina, yet which has nonetheless banned the Muslim Brotherhood. A host of other Muslim countries have managed something similar: Syria, Jordan, the UAE, Egypt. This has been a startling transformation. Back in the last century, the Saudis welcomed the Brotherhood, put them in charge of schools and mosques — and funded the Islamists to spread their ideology right across the region and beyond. I witnessed this firsthand, in Kenya. They came to my home when I was only 15, and seized control of our local mosque. One reason I understand the Muslim Brotherhood is that, as a teenager, I was recruited to it.

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At first, the Saudis thought they and the Brotherhood were ideologically aligned. But the Brotherhood eventually turned around and tried to overthrow them. At that point, the Saudi princes, capable of ruthlessness as well as generosity, rounded them up and expelled them from their schools, their mosques, their newspapers — and their soil.

Today, a year on from Hamas’ heinous attack on Israel, we should welcome Israel’s war against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and most importantly, against Iran. Yet Israel must also learn from America’s mistakes. Remember that the war isn’t over until the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is destroyed. And for that to happen, we must first recognise our enemy in our midst, and that begins by naming it.

Last Friday, at about 11:30am, a 25-year-old Afghan went on a knife spree at a rally in Mannheim. He stabbed Michael Stürzenberger, the convener of the rally, along with a policeman and four others, before a second policeman shot him. Two days later, the officer succumbed to his wounds.

We still don’t know everything about the incident. What we do know, though, is that it is a deeply sad — and obvious — metaphor for the way Western countries function. People protest Islamic violence. The press smears them. Islamists attack. The state tries to subdue the protestors. The Islamists continue attacking. Rinse and repeat.

It isn’t even the first time Stürzenberger’s protests have been attacked. He has been assaulted twice before by Islamists, in 2013 and in 2022. Why? Well, according to the mainstream media, he is a far-Right extremist. As Euronews puts it: he has been “previously linked to Pegida, a xenophobic extreme-Right group with a strong neo-Nazi following, prompting an investigation by the German federal state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution”.

And what did this investigation uncover? Little more than the fact that he’s a relatively normal man who condemns Islamic violence — and who, like many such people, including some of my friends, has now ended up being stabbed. Yet Stürzenberger’s normalcy hasn’t stopped the German legal system from persecuting him. One of his convictions was for sharing a photo on Facebook of a Nazi shaking hands with an Islamic cleric, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Not a doctored photo. Just a photo. After all, photos reveal facts — but in Germany, even sharing the government’s own statistics can get you a criminal record.

Last week’s attack prompted the standard response from the German political establishment. The Chancellor condemned it. He expressed sadness. His government promises to investigate, to defend “against Islamist terrorism with determination”. But did anyone buy it? Though there are exceptions like Hungary, these attacks seem to happen regardless of national borders, and regardless of whether the country in question has a Left-wing or a Right-wing government.

The more cynical among us are inclined to claim that they keep happening because no one really cares. But that is lazy thinking. Not all of these politicians are feckless monsters, however temporarily gratifying it may feel to say so.

So why do they seem to do nothing? Part of the answer — a significant part of the answer — lies with the cluster of policies and assumptions that all mainstream European countries have written into their rules regarding immigration.

The first concerns treaties. These governments are signatories to international treaties that inadvertently leave them with no option but to leave their borders unprotected and to allow unwanted migrants to stay put. The Geneva Convention on Refugees. The European Court of Human Rights. As long as these are in place, national governments can do little to stop Islamists from entering — even if they wanted to.

The second concerns constitutions. Western nations abide by constitutional laws that leave them with no alternative but to allow the Islamists to recruit operatives and establish networks, mosques, schools and charities devoted to the spread of political Islam. Again, there is nothing they are able to do, because Islam is not singled out in their constitution as a singular cause for concern. If it were, the lawyers for these institutions would sue, saying that it is illegal to treat Islam differently. And, infuriatingly, under the current system, they would be right.

The third concerns perceptions. Our governments assume that anyone — citizen or organisation; journalist, politician or academic — critical of the government’s way of handling Islamism is a dangerous bigot who must be shamed into silence. Maybe such attitudes were forgivable half a century ago, but it is pretty obvious now that there is nothing bigoted about fearing Islamism. Islamists make that clear with increasing regularity. Nonetheless, it is not as if any human is immune to the effects of the echo chamber. The elites swim in a pool where everyone believes that racism underlies opposition to open borders. This is particularly true of Germany’s elites, who are still so focused on stopping the re-emergence of Nazism that they see it everywhere, and are blind to any other threat.

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What this means is that, without a seismic shift, there is actually very little that can easily be done about the first two problems. Even if he wanted to, the Chancellor of Germany does not have the authority to change Germany’s basic law, let alone an electoral mandate. And while the Bundestag could just about get Germany out of some of its international treaties, because those treaties underwrite Germany’s international relations, they underwrite the trade her economy needs for survival.

The constitutional problem is broadly similar. All constitutions lack perfect foresight. Of course, it’s true that, when these documents were written, states had no business treating religions differently. But that was before Islamism arrived. Once Islamic migration really began in earnest, the days of procedural neutrality should have ended. And while none of this is to say that peaceful, patriotic Muslims should be targeted, Islamism — as I well know — is plainly different.

We do not yet know whether Mannheim’s second attacker, who stabbed an AfD politician on Tuesday night, was an asylum-seeker. He may have just been an ordinary immigrant, or even a German-born citizen. But if I were a betting woman, I would bet he came in on one of the many schemes designed to help threatened people, in very small numbers, in a previous era. Most conventions around refugees were drawn up just after the Second World War or the Cold War, with those conflicts’ problems in mind. Things are different now, and the change is killing our nations.

What is the cure? It certainly doesn’t involve electing a centre-right government. As the past 14 years in the UK have shown, centre-right governments do nothing. Instead, what is needed is a shift in international and constitutional law, or events like those in Germany will just keep happening until the nations of Europe collapse.

No doubt I’ll write this article again in a year. And the year after that. But if we think big, and enough of us wake up, then one day, I’ll be able to stop. Until then.

“Was it performance art?” Rushdie wondered. Or a case of magical-realist memory? It had been, in August 2022, 33 years since Ayatollah Khomeini’s call to kill Rushdie, well beyond the bounds of Matar’s lifetime. Or a hair-raising exercise in irony? Rushdie was at the Chautauqua Institution, in upstate New York, to talk about “writer safety”. Matar’s own mutterings suggest nothing quite so sophisticated. The picture that emerges from his interview with New York Post is that of a bumbling Four Lions type completely out of his depth. What of his politics? “I respect the Ayatollah. I think he’s a great person.” And Rushdie? “I don’t think he’s a very good person.” Why? “He’s someone who attacked Islam. He attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.” Their beliefs? It doesn’t sound like Matar cared much for them himself.

Matar evidently isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer (Rushdie missed a trick there). I suppose he would react to a subordinate clause in much the same way as a deer would to headlights. Schooled in sunny California before settling in suburban New Jersey, Matar’s locutions are to me yet another reminder of how the American education system is failing its citizens. He grew up in a comfortable $700,000, four-bed home with his twin sisters and mother, and saw no reason to earn a living until a few months before the botched assassination, when he took up a gig at Marshalls, America’s version of Poundland. For most of his late teens and early 20s, Matar led an inverted life, “sleeping during the day”, and, at night, “playing video games, watching Netflix, stuff like that”. The Italians would have called him a bamboccione, the quintessential man-child, eking out a lumpen existence in his mum’s basement.

He was, in short, hardly an unreconstructed, ideologically driven Islamist. He had no contact with the Revolutionary Guard. Nor was he of Iranian heritage. His parents were in fact from Yaroun in southern Lebanon — Hezbollah heartland. His mother, who has since disowned her son, wanted nothing to do with that world, to which his father returned after their divorce. In 2018, the young Matar visited him in Yaroun, where he developed a heightened awareness of his cerebral shortcomings. Indeed, he chafed at this on his return. “He was angry that I did not introduce him to Islam from a young age,” his mother would later say to the Daily Mail.

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Still, the Koran and Hadiths were not for him. He instead sought identification with a couple of Hezbollah militant apparatchiks, two of whose names he fused to adopt the nom de guerre Hassan Mughniyeh, the alias under which he arrived at Chautauqua. In Knife, Rushdie recounts a doctor’s remark: “You’re lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife,” as clueless about murder as he was about Rushdie’s oeuvre or Islam. Clearly, his motivations were less theological and more political. Notice how he has nothing to say about the sharia or the actual beliefs of Muslims. Rushdie’s sin rather seems to be that he “attacked their beliefs”. This is not the language of Islamists, but rather the impeccably liberal — if you like “Western,” even “woke” — language of minority rights and safe spaces, of hate speech and minoritarian victimhood.

Matar has given his grievance an adventitious, exotic colouring, but the truth is that his sense of wounded entitlement is of a piece with the general hostility to free speech we see around us in the West. There is, no doubt, something deeply illiberal about this declension of liberalism — with its stress on silencing those cruel children of the Enlightenment, with their unfeeling, universalising, secularising ways — but I suspect its votaries aren’t over-bothered by the contradiction. Contrary to what critics of wokery think, this isn’t a new development. As Faisal Devji has argued, much the same was true of the original controversy around The Satanic Verses. Rushdie’s critics, then as now, were not Islamist fundamentalists but woke — avant la lettre — Western Muslims. As Devji put it, their grievance turned more on “secular hurt than sin”.

Indeed, Rushdie’s book was burned in Bradford and Bolton and banned in Delhi long before it was noticed in the Muslim world. Khomeini was late to the party. Then again, his fatwa against Rushdie (properly speaking, a hukm since fatwas are juridical pronouncements made by religious authorities to clarify points of Islamic law, whereas hukms are ordered by government figures in a purely secular capacity) had more to do with his geopolitical wooing of Sunnis invested in the Prophet (the Shias by contrast revere Imam Ali more) in the wake of the First Gulf War than “Islamist” outrage. Meanwhile, British Muslims were using the thoroughly modern language of blasphemy — ironically a concept of Christian vintage. In the Muslim world, as Sadakat Kadri reminds us in Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Sharia Law, “prosecutions for blasphemy” have been “extremely infrequent in the historical record”. Indeed, in their last 1,400 years of existence, Muslim societies have for the better part done without them. It is no accident that the first time blasphemy rears its head in the Muslim world is in Eighties Pakistan, under the Islamicising rule of General Zia-ul-Haq; Bradford, and Yorkshire more generally, boasts a significant Pakistani Muslim population.

The very first year of Zia’s rule — 1978 — saw the release of a hagiobiopic celebrating the carpenter Ilm-ud-Din, widely regarded as South Asia’s first modern blasphemy murderer. Hung aged 20 in 1929 for killing a Hindu publisher who brought out a book apparently blaspheming the Prophet, Ilm-ud-Din languished in relative posthumous obscurity until Zia passed a slate of blasphemy laws. These days, Ilm-ud-Din is revered as a martyr, as I recently learnt at his Lahore shrine. This was the milieu that bred resentment, not the real theological dispute at heart of Rushdie’s novel — the titular “Satanic verses”. Of doubtful historicity, in this narrative of early Islam, Muhammad proclaims a revelation demanding the adoption of three polytheistic deities, but later recants as having been of “Satanic suggestion”. But it was not this, nor the two other prosaic but blasphemous details in Rushdie’s novel (that the Prophet Abraham was called a bastard, and that his wives were depicted as prostitutes) that mobilised Yorkshire’s Muslims.

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What they really wanted was to have their country’s blasphemy laws extended to Muslims as well; at the time, they only covered Anglican beliefs. It was, in short, a very British demand. The debate has since died down, if only because blasphemy laws were abolished in 2008 in England and Wales, and in 2024 Scotland, where they were replaced by a hate crime law that is, by all accounts, as ecumenical as it is Orwellian (the lineage is telling: hate crime laws are, properly speaking, the blasphemy laws of today). Across the pond, too, it is the new lexicon of hate speech that has animated the most sustained assaults on the First Amendment — some of it with good reason (in a world of swastikas and fasces, it would be churlish to be a free speech absolutist), some of it patently not. Hadi Matar only represents the more extreme, extrajudicial end of the hate speech spectrum. But distrust of the marketplace of ideas is a common enough reflex in our time.

The current obsession with hate speech and cancel culture owes to two developments. The first is the retrenchment of the authoritarian state, the second the retrenchment of the church in the West. Both effectively passed the business of policing opinions from the hands of Big Brother-style governments and God’s earthly mediators to crusading individuals. This is just as John Stuart Mill predicted would transpire in the age of democracy. “Society can and does execute its own mandates,” he wrote, by imposing conformity on the non-conforming — or the “eccentric” as Mill called them. And the cancelling of “eccentricity” isn’t a singularly Left-wing phenomenon. Take the cancelling of Palestinian novelists, artists, and musicians on both sides of the Atlantic since the war. Or, for that matter, the Kulturkampf playing out in American universities. One study has revealed that out of 1,080 attempts made to cancel academics since 2000, just over half — 52% — were made by the Left. The rest were the work of Right-wing snowflakes.

If the likes of Hadi Matar are more visible in this intolerant landscape, it is for two reasons. The first — the obvious — is the act itself. Knifing novelists is both unusual and unhinged, so newsworthy on at least two counts. The second is his chosen idiom. That he plumped for Islam tells us more about the poverty of 21st-century radicalism than anything else. Time was such energies were channelled into avowedly progressive causes. Think the Weather Underground, Brigate Rosse, the Baader Meinhof Group. These days, a young chap itching for the violent overthrow of the ruling dispensation isn’t exactly spoilt for choice. To some migrant youths, or more accurately some youths of migrant extraction, the attraction of Islam isn’t feasibly resisted. It helps that their communities are often the only pious holdouts in an increasingly godless world: West Africans and South Asians in Britain; Maghrebis in France. For French orientalist Olivier Roy, what we have witnessed since the end of the Cold War, then, is the “Islamicisation of radicalism”, and not, as it were, the radicalisation of Islam.

Rushdie, poor chap, has fallen victim to the zeitgeist. His efforts to fight so valiantly against it are, of course, nothing short of heroic. Now, more so than ever, he has become the metonym for free speech. Yet one wonders how justified this honour is. “Language was my knife,” he observes in Knife, “the knife I could use to fight back.” A great sentiment, surely, though in the paragraph that follows Rushdie lets on that he’s unsure of its efficacy: “but was that just a consoling lie I was telling myself?”

The “intimate encounter” with Matar prompts some tormented reflection: “Why didn’t I fight? Why didn’t I run? I just stood there like a piñata and let him smash me.” These are questions that ought to have dogged him much sooner. In 1990, far from being a martyr for free speech, Rushdie rushed to apologise to Khomeini, loudly affirming his Muslim faith. Later, he went as far to implore his publisher, Viking, to halt the publication of The Satanic Verses in paperback. It’s only because none of this cut any ice with the Iranians that Rushdie returned to free speech. It was left to others to take one for the team. The following year, Rushdie’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death in Tsukuba; his Italian translator, too, was stabbed in Milan, though he survived. Rushdie meanwhile got to make jokes about “fatwa sex” on Curb Your Enthusiasm, as he set about accruing a bevy of spouses, as if a male Zsa Zsa Gabor.

If Rushdie hasn’t quite lived up to the hopes invested in him, his liberal critics have even less to recommend them. Indeed, compared to them, Rushdie shines like a beacon of moral clarity. Liberal uneasiness with free speech is proverbial. The Royal Society of Literature, for instance, refused point blank to condemn Matar. Here’s Bernardine Evaristo, its president: “the society cannot take sides in writers’ controversies and issues, but must remain impartial”. Rushdie spelled it out with greater clarity: “Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is ‘impartial’ about attempted murder?”

It would be too simple to pin down liberal equivocation to a generational quirk — that the young are woke and spineless, whereas the old are unwoke and tough as nails. Not so. Just a cursory glance at the roll call of Rushdie’s detractors at the time of The Satanic Verses should disabuse us of such notions. John Le Carré in the Guardian: “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.” Jimmy Carter in the New York Times: Rushdie’s book was “a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated.” Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Independent: “I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit, and literature would not suffer.” George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury: “we must be more tolerant of Muslim anger.”

None of them, it hardly needs saying, were Islamists. Yet they were, on balance, more sympathetic to Rushdie’s “Islamist” detractors than to Rushdie himself. Perhaps there is nothing “Islamist” about the Rushdie-hating Islamists in the first place. Perhaps this was never really a battle between Western liberalism and intolerant Islam, but rather between — as Rushdie puts it in Knife — “those with a sense of humour and those without one”. And the latter, it must be said, are a homegrown menace.

In that same summer, Charles Krauthammer responded to Senator Moynihan with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He acknowledged Senator Moynihan’s point but said it was only one side of the story. Deviancy was defined down for one category of society: the lower classes and black communities. For the middle classes, who are overwhelmingly white and Christian, the opposite was true. Deviancy was in fact defined up, stigmatising and criminalising behaviour that was previously regarded as normal. In other words, there was a double standard at work.

But Krauthammer went further: he reckoned that this double standard makes us feel good. A society must feel that it is policing its norms by combatting deviancy. And once we have given up fighting it in one section of society, we move to concentrate on another.

This sociological pathology is now pervasive, contributing to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that forms part of modern identity politics. And, as foreign policy becomes increasingly entangled with the culture war, this pathology has now extended to a new terrain. The result is that the application of progressive moral double-standards is now seen at the level of geopolitics, most specifically over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. We have produced a discourse in which deviancy is defined up for Jews and Israel, and down for Arabs and Muslims.

Immediately, for instance, it was forgotten that the greatest display of deviancy in this conflict came from Hamas. More than anything, October 7 illustrated in a single day how swift the descent from civilisation to barbarism can be. On that day, the heinous acts themselves were manifested in the massacre of innocent, unarmed and totally unprepared civilians. These were young people at a music festival, many of them peaceniks. Family members were shot, stabbed and mutilated in front of one another. Women were raped, homes were burned, and the perpetrators revelled in their acts. Their GoPro cameras were set to record, for they knew large audiences at home awaited that footage.

Celebrations ensued, not only by Palestinians but also by many Arabs, Muslims, and fellow travellers on Western university campuses. Top university administrators displayed a shocking level of moral confusion in response. The three Women of the Ivies could not even take courage before Congress simply to say: “This is not who we are. We condemn this.”

The ensuing demonisation of Israel for waging what is historically a standard siege, and the relentless calls for a ceasefire, have followed. And these calls have been so effective that now Israel’s great allies in the UK and the US are twisting Israel’s arm to concede. But even without the appeasement of a complete ceasefire, we know full well that it is only a matter of time before Hamas and her helpers reorganise and repeat the atrocities of October 7. We know it because this has been Hamas’s pattern. Attack, provoke a retaliation, complain of disproportionality. Then acquire the world’s sympathy, and negotiate ceasefire, aid, and the time to plan the next attack.

This is only possible due to several common false assumptions about the conduct of this conflict, all of which define deviancy up for Israel and down for Hamas. Chief among these is that Islamic terror is only a monstrous creation of the Israeli Frankenstein. We are frequently told that if Israel continues to pursue her mission to destroy Hamas, then Israel will create the next generation of Islamists and terrorists, not just in the Middle East but across the globe. As a result, Israel should agree to a ceasefire and hold to it even if, as would certainly be the case, the other side does not. But this assumption is plainly false. The overwhelming evidence of the last 75 years is that Islamist extremism is unaffected by what Israel does or fails to do. The extremists are created in the classrooms, sitting rooms, and neighbourhoods of Muslim and Arabs countries, in madrasas and mosques — many of which are half a world away from Israel.

Nevertheless, we are still enjoined to blame Israel for Islamism, with the crimes of the former often personified by its prime minister. A standard refrain has developed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions and failures were the cause of Hamas’s savage attacks. But whatever the truth behind the portrait of Netanyahu as the belligerent, uncompromising, democracy-undermining monster, the trope shifts attention away from the core issue, which is the belligerent uncompromising Palestinian intransigence backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since 1947, the Arabs have remained fixed in their determination to eliminate the state of Israel, in part by preventing peace from ever coming about. Were the failed peace attempts in 1973, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2008 all the fault of Netanyahu? Was no Arab agency involved? Take the Oslo Accords and their follow-on at Camp David in 2000. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin offered “a separate Palestinian entity short of a state”, and an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, PLO leader Yasser Arafat left the negotiating table.

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In a similar vein, we are often told that the classic human dynamic of war and peace does not apply to this conflict. The standard dynamic is that the winner takes all so that a lasting peace can occur. But this logic has never been applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Up until 1967, a conflict was waged called the Arab-Israeli war. And Israel won that war, defeating the Arab countries in 1967, and then again six years later. Only at that point was its name changed to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the territories Israel had acquired in defending itself against aggression were declared to be “occupied” and therefore illegitimate. In war, if there is no winner, and no truce holds, then peace can never prevail.

Amid this moral confusion, though, there are rays of hope. Within a few hours of the October 7 massacre, the Moroccan regime condemned the violence against civilians. The UAE called the event “barbaric and heinous” and demanded that Hamas immediately release the hostages. This is not nothing and it shows that one source of the rot — Gulf funds for indoctrination of Palestinian children — may one day dry up. The United States should help this along by applying the same standards of conduct to Muslims and Jews, the same standards of statecraft to Arab nations, Iran, and Israel. Regimes like the UAE’s need to be helped and rewarded. Conversely, when Arab states promote the death cult of political Islam, they must be condemned and shunned.

Everything eventually ends, but not all things must end in failure. In the West we have a choice to uphold our moral vantage point, or let it crumble away. But in doing so we should recognise that every lowering of standards to appease extremist Arabs and Muslims is racism dressed up as compassion and disdain masquerading as kindness. It is moral confusion and it is dangerous — suicidally so.

***

Adapted from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s 2024 Russell Kirk Lecture delivered at the Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., and co-sponsored by Alliance Defending Freedom, on March 12, 2024.

Britain had been caught completely off-guard by Islamist extremism, and reasserting fundamental British values appeared to be the answer. In fact, extremism was even defined by the Government as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. The only problem: the reassertion of fundamental British values against this threat never really came. Many schools were confused and just did their best to keep Ofsted inspectors at bay. I saw “fundamental British values” hall displays made up of portraits of semi-obscure Royals and pictures of fish and chips. Elsewhere, the use of the word “British” before “values” made the mainly Left-leaning public and education sectors expected to promote them squirm. And so, in the absence of any revitalisation of British democratic values, Islamists largely just carried on going about their business.

Almost a decade later, Britain has once again been caught off-guard by Islamism, with the Government expected to unveil a new practical definition of extremism today. But this will always prove a very difficult task: “extremism” is a fundamentally subjective notion, and is open to an inherent risk of politicisation and abuse, particularly at a time when there seems to be less and less agreement on what our shared values actually are.

It is by now a cliche in academic circles to point to Britain’s lack of written constitution, a problem not shared by our European neighbours. France, for instance, has dissolved both Islamist and far-Right groups for being contrary to Republican principles, while Germany has a Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which monitors and produces public reports on far-Right, far-Left and Islamist subversion. The UK, however, has no such luxury, and, as a result, the Government’s efforts to define “extremism” have left two of the most significant Islamist movements largely untouched: the Muslim Brotherhood and their South Asian equivalent, Jamaat-e-Islami. This has allowed individuals connected to these movements and their front groups to continue growing in power, through official appointments and even through the receipt of taxpayer money. Indeed, the logic behind renewing the definition seems to be exactly this — to provide clear rules for government departments for how to engage with organisations that are not merely opposed to the current government, but agitate against liberal democracy altogether.

When it comes to this brand of “non-violent” Islamism, British authorities have been incredibly lax. But even if they had been vigilant, tackling their influence would have been far from straightforward. To start with, Muslim Brotherhood networks in Britain are obsessively secretive (indeed, one formerly prominent member left because of this), which makes debating and defeating their ideas in the public square almost impossible. The resulting obscuration of their political programme means that these groups are unlikely to fall foul of the British values definition of extremism. On democracy, for instance, their representatives talk a great game: they are happy to work within existing democratic frameworks and even make pragmatic alliances in unlikely quarters, such as with Jewish and LGBT groups to advance their agenda. The ends (an eventual Islamic state) justify the means. Jamaat-e-Islami’s founder, Abul A’la Maududi, for instance, detailed how their agenda to reshape society should be so gradual as to be imperceptible to the host country, making it impossible to identify, much less confront.

To counter this, attempts have been made to position extremism in close proximity to “hate”. But “hate” doesn’t best describe the public face of these Islamist groups, whose members are mainly professional, educated and expert communicators — a far cry from the stereotype of a snarling hate-filled thug. And even for jihadists, this framing is not clear-cut: in 2015, before he murdered them, Amedy Coulibaly chatted calmly with his Jewish hostages in the Hypercacher supermarket, telling them he had “nothing against Jews”. His massacre, he explained, was ideologically — divinely — ordained.

According to reports, the new proposed definition will — like the definition before it — still be values-based. The Times suggests that it will take in those who promote or advance “an ideology based on intolerance, hatred or violence that aims to undermine the rights or freedoms of others”, with a second rung of the definition targeted at those who seek to undermine or overturn Britain’s parliamentary democracy. On the face of it, this proposal seems better equipped to tackle the complex challenges posed by the aforementioned Islamist movements, while bringing Britain closer to how European states perceive their own constitutional threats. Within the Conservative Party behind it, however, there are fears that the definition will be used against social conservatives or gender-critical feminists. It’s not hard to see why there is concern, especially at a time when various political tribes are busy accusing one another of supposed extremism. Revelations that training materials and briefings under Prevent and other counter-terrorism efforts have expanded so far as to include the likes of Brexit voters, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Douglas Murray and Joe Rogan show that this alarm is far from unfounded.

A convincing alternative approach is offered by philosophy professor Quassim Cassam, who argues that any definition of extremism should be focused on behaviours, rather than beliefs. Cassam does not deny the central role of ideology, but warns of the dangers of a definitional focus: “It’s not that a person’s ideology is irrelevant or that extremism doesn’t have an ideological dimension. Rather, the main focus should be on what extremists do. What they think matters to the extent that it influences their actions.” He continues: “An extremist, then, is someone who engages in politically or religiously motivated intimidation, threats, or violence for political or religious ends.”

As sympathetic as I am to this argument, it nonetheless begs the question: how do two of the most significant Islamist organisations fit into this configuration? And not only that, but two Islamist organisations that are central reasons for the renewed Government concern.

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Cassam is right to point out the unfairness of penalising a group or individual simply because their beliefs fall outside of the Overton window, but neither the Brotherhood nor Jamaat operate within these constraints. They are not open about their actual political agenda and so neither supporters nor opponents of their front groups in Britain can test or debate their actual ideas. To make matters worse, criticising the activities or policies of these fronts is often met with socially and professionally ruinous Islamophobia allegations, or financially ruinous legal threats. In other words, they are not playing by the rules of the game.

It’s for these reasons that the UK Government is also reportedly establishing a “centre of excellence” to tackle extremism. The lack of information relating to non-terroristic Islamism has made it tricky for officials and institutions to make informed decisions about engagement and funding, leading to repeated blunders. It remains to be seen how such a centre would be protected from the Islamist scene’s aggressive litigiousness — or, perhaps even more so, how it can be protected in the long term from meandering towards figures such as Andrew Tate instead of the various movements genuinely wielding the freedoms afforded under British democracy against itself.

It is in this context that a new definition of extremism will emerge. Striking the balance between protecting people’s essential liberties and marginalising the unique and subversive challenge posed by domestic Islamism — or at least ensuring that we are not paying for and legitimising that subversion — will be the key to whether we are here again in a decade, clamouring around for yet a new definition. In this eventuality I propose a simple test. Would I trust my political opponents with this definition? If the answer is no, then it’s back to the drawing board.

During highly sectarian Celtic-Rangers football matches, Palestinian and Israeli flags are regularly seen in the stands. I would wager very few of these people have been to either Ramallah or Tel Aviv. I bet they know next to nothing about Islam or Judaism or care about them very much; they just want to co-opt someone else’s conflict and make it a part of their own. And viewing the politics of the Middle East through the lens of The Troubles is a recipe for confusion. As if the politics of Northern Ireland weren’t difficult enough, to see it refracted through another fiercely complicated rivalry thousands of miles away is just crazy. You hijack all the emotion and contribute nothing towards understanding.

The current unrelenting back and forth about Islamophobia between the Labour and Conservative parties represents something depressingly similar. The Tories know that the Left has a structural weakness when it comes to antisemitism. Jeremy Corbyn’s friendship with Hamas and all the “from the river to the sea” raging on the streets mark a horrendous blind spot, where those who pride themselves as anti-racists also align themselves with one of the most racist ideologies in history. The Left fires back, tit for tat, accusing the Tories of Islamophobia, but also rightly pointing out that much of the Right’s anxiety about immigration is cast as a suspicion of Islam and of being replaced by some threatening Other. If you squint, this is what you see: the Tories as Team Israel, and Labour as Team Palestine. It’s about as insightful as an Old Firm derby. A plague on both their houses.

Part of the problem is that modern secular politics wants to reframe all religious and historical differences as divisions over race. Thus, anxieties over the presence of Islamic fundamentalists on our streets are too often cast as a form of racism. Of course, there may well be racism at play in how some people describe Muslims of Middle Eastern origin — but, in and of itself, pushing back against those who wish to promote a radical form of Islam, sometimes intimidating those who think differently, is not a question of race but of ideology, or indeed theology. Race is not always the foundational moral category.

Consider the recent case of Lee Anderson. The MP for Ashfield has been suspended by the Tories for saying that “Islamists” had “got control” of London and its Mayor, Sadiq Khan. The script in response, carefully written by Tory spin doctors, is not to answer questions about whether this was Islamophobic but simply to admit that it was wrong. “We agree it was wrong,” said Nick Ferrari, interviewing minister Michael Tomlinson yesterday morning. “But why was it wrong?” The following exchange was highly instructive. “Nick, it was wrong,” replied Tomlinson. Ferrari quickly interjected: “Why was it wrong?” Tomlinson wouldn’t answer; he just repeated himself. In the end, after several attempts to ask the same question, Ferrari cut him off. All seemed to agree it was wrong — but why?

Khan himself tried to explain. It was a trope, he said. Now, we all know the trope about Jews controlling the world and being puppet-masters — that is an old and familiar one. But I must admit I hadn’t come across that same trope about Islamists, or even Muslims, controlling the world. So I had a little rummage around the internet, but couldn’t actually find anything. The familiar tropes are that Muslims are inherently violent, oppressive to women, intolerant, medieval and so on. Perhaps “Muslims are taking over” is a kind of trope, but nonetheless, I couldn’t help thinking that Kahn was himself just borrowing a trope well known to Jews and just applying it to Muslims. So, back to Ferrari’s question: what was wrong with it?

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Perhaps it has something to do with Anderson stirring up a fear of the Other? There was little sensitivity or nuance in his comments. And yet, the fear seems to be real. After all, wasn’t that precisely the reason the Speaker of the House of Commons gave for accepting the Labour Party’s amendment during the recent Gaza debate — that Labour MPs feared intimidation if they did not back the call for an immediate ceasefire? And those of us who have Jewish relatives are all too familiar with their very real fear of going into town and travelling on the Tube when there are pro-Palestine demonstrations in central London.

But I also suspect the inability of some to say exactly what we find so problematic about Anderson’s comments does not stem from the desire to conceal something, but instead is a result of the intrinsic and often unacknowledged complexity of moral categories that have been continually refracted through very different political concerns — like in Northern Ireland. Our categories have become muddled. Moreover, surely the tenor of the current debate surrounding Islamophobia says a great deal more about the fact that there is a general election coming, and that the different parties are looking for ways to make the other side look bad.

But concern about radical Islam is real and we have to find a decent and intelligent way of speaking about it. Our mainstream political parties are supposed to offer moral leadership. And that means helping to create a space in which we can discuss some of the most difficult issues of our day without dripping poison into the wound. But for many of our elected representatives, the temptation to take an easy swipe is just too hard to resist. And the more they do, the less we understand.

We might see this as a cautionary tale for our times. After all, it isn’t only Turco-Mongol conquerors who find themselves punished for Quran-burning. Last week, the Danish parliament voted to ban the desecration of all religious texts following a spate of protests in which copies of the Qur’an had been destroyed. Inevitably, the new law has been couched as a safety measure. This burning of the book, claims justice minister Peter Hummelgaard, “harms Denmark and Danish interests, and risks harming the security of Danes abroad and here at home”.

He has a point. Even unconfirmed accusations of Quran-burning can be sufficient to prompt extremist violence. In 2015, being accused of defiling the holy book, Farkhunda Malikzada was beaten to death by a ferocious mob in Afghanistan while bystanders, including police officers, did nothing to intervene. Many filmed the brutal murder on their phones and the footage was widely shared on social media. In 2022, a mentally unstable man called Mushtaq Rajput was similarly accused and tied to a tree and stoned to death in Pakistan. Earlier this year in Iran, it was reported that Javad Rouhi was tortured so severely that he could no longer speak or walk. He was sentenced to death for apostasy and later died in prison under suspicious circumstances.

But while we might anticipate that the desecration of the Quran would be proscribed in Islamic theocracies, it is troubling to see similar laws being passed in secular nations such as Denmark. The government had not been so faint-hearted when faced with similar problems in 2005. After cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were published in Jyllands-Posten, a global campaign from Indonesia to Bosnia demanded that the Danish authorities take action. The government stood firm and the judicial complaint against the newspaper was dismissed.

In a free society this is the only justifiable response, albeit one that takes considerable courage. And the climate of intimidation that has descended since is a product of our collective failure to defend freedom of speech against the demands of militants. When the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, one would have hoped for a unified front on behalf of one of our finest writers. Instead, much of the literary and political establishment abandoned or even censured him. In the Australian television show Hypotheticals, the singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, implied that he would have no objections to Rushdie being burned alive.

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That a work of fiction such as The Satanic Verses could not even be published today gives us some indication of the extent to which we have forsaken the principle of free speech. If we are so squeamish about the burning of Qurans, why were so many of us indifferent to the burning of Rushdie’s book on the streets of Bolton and Bradford? Yusuf Islam’s remark about the author’s immolation might have been flippant but, as Heinrich Heine famously wrote: “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.”

The ceremonial burning of books in Germany and Austria in the Thirties has ensured that the act will always have a unique charge, and a disquieting, visceral effect. It is why, for instance, the most memorable scene in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan is when the villain Steerpike sets fire to his master’s library. It is a gesture designed to repudiate the very heights of human achievement, to hurl his victim into a spiral of despair. When Rushdie saw his own novel publicly incinerated, he confessed to feeling that “now the victory of the Enlightenment was looking temporary, reversible”.

The burning of the Quran leaves many of us similarly troubled. We do not need to approve of the contents to sense that the destruction of a book is symbolic of a desire to limit the scope of human thought. When activists post footage of themselves gleefully setting fire to copies of Harry Potter, one cannot shake the similar suspicion that they would happily substitute the books with the author herself.

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But while many of us find the burning of books instinctively rebarbative, to outlaw this form of protest is essentially authoritarian. And to reinstate blasphemy laws by specifying that only religious books are to be protected is fundamentally retrograde. Of course, such laws already exist in most Western countries in an unwritten form. In March, a 14-year-old autistic boy was suspended from his school in Wakefield, reported to the police, and received death threats after he accidentally dropped a copy of the Quran on the floor, causing some of the pages to be scuffed. He may not have committed a crime, but many people behaved as though he had.

And the same unwritten laws are in force in the fact that few would be brave enough to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed after the massacre at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Five years later, the schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on the streets of Paris simply for showing the offending images during a lesson on free speech. Closer to home, a teacher at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire is still in hiding after showing the images to his pupils and stirring the ire of a righteous mob.

The failure of the school’s headmaster, as well as the teaching unions, to support this man against the demands of religious fundamentalists is revealing. Why must those who claim to be defending the dignity of Muslims treat them as irascible children? At the same time, as Sam Harris recently pointed out, there is an oddity in the fact that so many Muslims do not appear to be alarmed that “their community is so uniquely combustible”.

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The bitter reality is that terrorism works, particularly when so many governments across the Western world are seemingly willing to fritter away our bedrock of liberal values. This has been actuated, in part, by an alliance of two very different forms of authoritarianism: ultra-conservative Islamic dogma and the safetyist ideology of “wokeness”. The latter has always claimed that causing offence is a form of violence, and the former has been quick to adopt the same tactics. This is why protesters outside Batley Grammar School asserted that the display of offensive cartoons was a “safeguarding” issue, and the Muslim Council of Britain criticised the school for not maintaining an “inclusive space”. The same censorious instincts have been updated, and are now cloaked in a more modish language.

In a civilised and pluralistic society, the burning of a holy book might provoke a variety of responses — anger, disbelief, or just a shrug of the shoulders — but it should never lead to violence. Back when The Onion still had some bite, the website satirised this “unique combustibility” through the depiction of a graphic sexual foursome between Moses, Jesus, Ganesha and Buddha. The headline said it all: “No One Murdered Because Of This Image”.

Freedom of speech and expression still matters, and if that means a few hotheads and mini-Tamburlaines might burn their copies of the Quran then so be it. It is unfortunate that we have reached the point where Islam must be ring-fenced from ridicule or criticism, whether due to fear of violent repercussions or a misguided and patronising effort to promote social justice. But for this state of affairs we ultimately have only ourselves to blame, and in particular our tendency to capitulate to religious zealots when they seek exemption from the liberal consensus.

The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They had done it in the name of my religion, Islam. I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that justified the attacks was religious, after all: the idea of Jihad or Holy War against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for many members of the Muslim community, simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?

At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West — politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts — who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama Bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi.

This excuse-making was not only condescending towards Muslims. It also gave many Westerners a chance to retreat into denial. Blaming the errors of US foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war. We have seen a similar tendency in the past five weeks, as millions of people sympathetic to the plight of Gazans seek to rationalise the October 7 terrorist attacks as a justified response to the policies of the Israeli government.

When I read Russell’s lecture, I found my cognitive dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed. Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.

Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me. While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as something of a relief: “When I die, I shall rot.”

To understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been. I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated my community in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. I don’t think I had even understood religious practice before the coming of the Brotherhood. I had endured the rituals of ablutions, prayers and fasting as tedious and pointless.

The preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood changed this. They articulated a direction: the straight path. A purpose: to work towards admission into Allah’s paradise after death. A method: the Prophet’s instruction manual of do’s and don’ts — the halal and the haram. As a detailed supplement to the Qur’an, the hadeeth spelled out how to put into practice the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, God and the devil.

The Brotherhood preachers left nothing to the imagination. They gave us a choice. Strive to live by the Prophet’s manual and reap the glorious rewards in the hereafter. On this earth, meanwhile, the greatest achievement possible was to die as a martyr for the sake of Allah.

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The alternative, indulging in the pleasures of the world, was to earn Allah’s wrath and be condemned to an eternal life in hellfire. Some of the “worldly pleasures” they were decrying included reading novels, listening to music, dancing, and going to the cinema — all of which I was ashamed to admit that I adored.

The most striking quality of the Muslim Brotherhood was their ability to transform me and my fellow teenagers from passive believers into activists, almost overnight. We didn’t just say things or pray for things: we did things. As girls we donned the burka and swore off Western fashion and make-up. The boys cultivated their facial hair to the greatest extent possible. They wore the white dress-like tawb worn in Arab countries or had their trousers shortened above their ankle bones. We operated in groups and volunteered our services in charity to the poor, the old, the disabled and the weak. We urged fellow Muslims to pray and demanded that non-Muslims convert to Islam.

During Islamic study sessions, we shared with the preacher in charge of the session our worries. For instance, what should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to but who refused to accept our dawa (invitation to the faith)? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet’s instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty towards the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.

Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of unbeliever: the Jew. We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offences he had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.

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You can see why, to someone who had been through such a religious schooling, atheism seemed so appealing. Bertrand Russell offered a simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people. For him, there was no credible case for the existence of God. Religion, Russell argued, was rooted in fear: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.”

As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun. 

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

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That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.

And so I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.

For instance, he gave his lecture in a room full of (former or at least doubting) Christians in a Christian country. Think about how unique that was nearly a century ago, and how rare it still is in non-Western civilisations. Could a Muslim philosopher stand before any audience in a Muslim country — then or now — and deliver a lecture with the title “Why I am not a Muslim”? In fact, a book with that title exists, written by an ex-Muslim. But the author published it in America under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq. It would have been too dangerous to do otherwise.

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

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Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

***

Watch and read Ayaan respond to her critics here.

When I first embarked on an academic career 20 years ago, I became friends with Geras after reading his blog, which he launched in 2003. What I most admired about him was his moral clarity and unerring political judgment, as well as his congenital aversion to bullshit. If I was ever uncertain about a political issue, or couldn’t articulate why I felt the way I did about it, Norm’s blog, which he assiduously kept right up until his death from cancer, would invariably supply the answers. The world has changed dramatically since he left it, but his thinking, especially on evil and political atrocity, provides an essential guide for navigating its darker fringes.

Long before BLM and Harvard students were siding with the murderers of partygoers and children in Israel, Geras was contending with the same diseased mindset that saw the September 11 attacks and subsequent jihadi atrocities in the West as a form of retribution for the crimes of imperialism. The dean of this school of casuistry was Noam Chomsky, who is now lauded by some on the Right as a champion of free speech. He responded to 9/11 by changing the subject: he compared it to far worse atrocities that the US had committed, according to his calculus.

“Nothing,” Chomsky remarked, “can justify crimes such as those of September 11. But we can think of the United States as an ‘innocent victim’ only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret.” Howard Zinn similarly argued that 9/11 served as a reminder of “the resentment all over the world felt by people who have been the victims of American military action — in Vietnam, in Latin America, in Iraq”. And Tariq Ali, another prominent figure on the Left, was even more forthright: 9/11 was first and foremost an act of anti-colonial resistance. “The subjects of the Empire had struck back,” he declared.

Christopher Hitchens famously and acrimoniously broke with the Left over 9/11. But Geras remained within the fold, forensically criticising its worst excesses in the hope that he could salvage what honour it still had. He wrote scathingly of the callousness of those comrades whose grudging acknowledgment of the horror of 9/11 contrasted starkly with their extravagant efforts to “contextualise” it. “Half the world stood aghast,” he observed, “but in no time at all there was a great chorus of Left and liberal opinion… saying, ‘Yes, terrible, appalling, but…’; the ‘but’ following so close upon the ‘yes’ as to squeeze out any adequate registration of either the significance or the horror of what occurred.”

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Geras was no less scathing about the unwarranted slippage inherent in the rhetoric of the apologists. “For it was not American imperialism or the US government that they struck at,” he noted, referring to al-Qaeda. “It was a large number of (mostly) American citizens.” He continued: “It is no more a response to imperialism and its effects to massacre thousands of civilians at random, than it would be a response to bad conditions in some inner-city for a person aggrieved about them to rape the child of a wealthy family or kill a few passers-by.”

I don’t need to wonder what Geras, who identified as a “non-Jewish Jew” and had a deep concern for the future of his people, would have made of Hamas’s recent war crimes against thousands of innocents in Israel. He would have vehemently repudiated them, along with any efforts to minimise or excuse the horror that was inflicted on the victims and their families. While he opposed the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, he was categorical that nothing justified the indiscriminate murder of Israeli civilians. And he would have been outraged by Hamas’s barbarism, knowing full well of the group’s genocidal ambition to destroy Jews.

But, especially, he would have been taken aback by the ghoulish howls of support emitted by some progressives in the West. Najma Sharif, who describes herself as “a Somali-American writer based in the digital world”, tweeted: “What did y’all think decolonisation meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” Zareena Grewal, an anthropologist at Yale University, proclaimed on the same platform: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” She was criticising the idea that Israeli civilians are entitled to non-combatant immunity from murderous violence. Among this contingent, not even the most perfunctory throat-clearing was considered necessary. Indeed, to read their pronouncements, you wouldn’t have had the slightest idea that a terrible and monumental crime had been committed against innocent Israelis, because they made no reference to it.

It is an irony that many of those who gloried in Hamas’s attack on Israel see themselves as anti-racists whose goal is to create a more just and equitable world. And it is a further irony that many of them have condemned and sought to cancel their political adversaries for using speech that was somehow “violent”, even when it incontrovertibly wasn’t. Perhaps these people are unaware of this and of Hamas’s explicit and genocidal racism towards Jews, or perhaps they just don’t care. But their indifference to the systematic slaughter of innocents by Hamas suggests a grotesque devaluation of human life that borders on evil.

Geras knew all about evil and the all-too-human capacity for it. Evil, as he saw it, wasn’t some metaphysical entity that mysteriously ebbs and flows into the world, but is something that men and women do to one another. Like Dostoyevsky and Conrad, whom he had closely read, Geras was acutely alive to the darker emotional forces that animate not a few of us: resentment, greed, spite and the horrible allure of bloody vengeance and violence. It is hard to imagine how he could not have been so attuned, having spent so much of his academic career thinking and writing about the Holocaust and crimes against humanity.

Although he saw much of value in Hannah Arendt’s work on the “banality of evil”, he was aware of its explanatory limits, because it failed to capture the sheer bestiality and sadism that marked so much of the killing in the Holocaust. Arendt’s emphasis on the “social and administrative structures” that facilitated the industrial slaughter of the Jews, he wrote, “gives insufficient weight to — where it does not altogether deny — those human-natural impulses of cruelty, the actual enjoyment of the misfortunes of others, regularly unleashed when the usual restraining circumstances allow them to be”. Anyone who has followed the reporting and testimony coming out of Israel over the last few days will be hard-pressed not to use the word “evil” in trying to make sense of the horror that was inflicted there. But it’s obviously not the kind of evil that Arendt had in mind when she described Adolf Eichmann as “neither perverted nor sadistic…[but] terribly and terrifyingly normal”.

From an ethical perspective, anyone who goes door to door machine-gunning defenceless civilians, including babies, and kidnapping women and children, forgoes that descriptor. What they emphatically are not, as Arendt had described Eichmann, is “thoughtless” with an “inability to think”. On the contrary, these Hamas murderers can and did think. And they had no doubt spent a lot of time wolfishly fantasising about how they would inflict maximum degradation on Jews. And they would have been able to entertain these demonic thoughts because they were raised in a culture that is saturated in a genocidal hatred toward Jews.

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Despite this, Western liberals tend to be uncomfortable using the term evil, unless they’re applying it to the historical record and foreign policies of their own governments. Geras was a trenchant critic of that schizoid impulse — not because he thought Western societies were above criticism or had not done terrible things in the past, but because he found it dangerously reductive. Not all the ills of the world stem from the West, he argued, just as not all resistance to the West is driven by a humanistic impulse to change it for the better. Geras warned that Islamist fanatics had no such impulses and that, in an Islamist utopia, progressive liberals would be the first to be cleansed from its dominion. Unlike so many of his colleagues on the Left, he had no illusions about the purity or sanity of the underdog.

At the same time, he never lost hope in the idea of a better social order free of the familiar horrors of human history, although he was always more of a “pessimism-of-the-intellect” type himself. He worried that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would worsen, and that, as he put it, “it may yet turn into a further great catastrophe for the Jews, one way or another”. Optimism is certainly hard to cling to these days, but in a political climate poisoned by tribal division and creeping nihilism masked as progressive activism, Geras’s voice — sane, humanistic and proportionate — is now more urgent that ever.

It seems almost certain that more blood will be spilled in the West over blasphemy. Meanwhile, with each new “affair”, the noose around expression is tightened, and people take greater pains to err on the right side of the assassin’s veto. This means that, in effect, well-meaning people and institutions come to accept the logic of the fatwa, but the more we accept it, the lower the bar for extremist allegations drops and, perversely, the more likely violence becomes.

As a new blasphemy controversy bubbles away in Sweden, I wanted to isolate and examine the particular strand of Islamist violence aimed at those perceived to have blasphemed. For the Counter Extremism Project, I identified 71 successful attacks, plots and threat campaigns against individuals or institutions believed to have insulted Islam or the Prophet. (It’s likely there are more.) There are distinct phases to the violence, starting with the years-long global campaign of assassinations and bombings connected to The Satanic Verses. Like a pharaonic curse, catastrophe strikes those connected to the book one by one: bookshops are bombed in London, California and New York; an imam is assassinated in Brussels; a man blows himself up preparing a bomb in a Paddington hotel.

The recurring theme of this first wave of violence is the complete abyss of information. Few suspects are ever charged and, despite the ferocity of the incidents, this suggests there is a professionalism to the attacks, rather than mere anger and opportunism. The CIA was under few illusions about who was behind it, in 1992 reporting that “Iran has shifted from attacking organisations affiliated with the novel — publishing houses and bookstores — to individuals involved in its publication, as called for in the original fatwa”.

In 1991, the novel’s Italian translator was stabbed multiple times but survived, while the Japanese translator was not so lucky: Hitoshi Igarashi was killed in a stabbing frenzy outside his office at Tsukuba university. In 1993, Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher and defender, William Nygaard, was shot and left for dead, requiring months in hospital. The single worst act of violence unfolded that same year, in Turkey, where a secularist activist who translated excerpts of the novel was targeted by a riled-up mob, which set the Madimak hotel ablaze. Their target, Aziz Nesin, escaped the inferno, but 37 innocents did not.

Later, in the early 2000s, Europe’s emerging jihadist movement took up the mantle of the defence of Islam and the Prophet. The first warning signs were the targeting of San Petronio Basilica in Bologna, home to a 15th-century depiction of Muhammad. In Amsterdam, in 2004, one of Europe’s very first dealings with domestic jihadist terror was also the continent’s first exposure to jihadist blasphemy violence: the murder of Theo van Gogh. With Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he had created a film that portrayed verses from the Quran on the naked bodies of women. For this, he was stabbed, shot and nearly decapitated in broad daylight by a 24-year-old named Mohammed Bouyeri, who afterwards plunged a letter saturated with religious fury into his victim’s chest.

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Bouyeri was part of a Dutch network of Salafi jihadists, which, according to his contemporary Jason Walters, was gripped by internal division over whether to focus on proselytising at home, travelling to fight American occupiers in Iraq, or launching attacks in Europe. Bouyeri unilaterally ended the debate with van Gogh’s assassination, after which authorities broke up the network. Walters tells me that even among those who opposed attacks, the murder of van Gogh was deemed legitimate (if strategically disastrous): the filmmaker had insulted Islam.

The following year, Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in an experimental commentary on freedom of speech relating to Islam. Global unrest ensued, claiming some 200 lives. Closer to home, the impact of the cartoons affair cannot be overstated. As the data shows, plots and attacks targeting Jyllands-Posten or individual cartoonists in Denmark lasted almost a decade, until civil war in Syria grabbed the attention of Europe’s Islamists and jihadists. In fact, during the mid-2000s to 2010s, Denmark, with just six million inhabitants, was targeted more often than the United States, the traditional enemy of al-Qaeda. Denmark and Sweden were also disproportionately affected by departures for Islamic State, years later — a fact that dismantles the myth that Scandinavian countries do not suffer homegrown jihadist radicalisation due to their egalitarianism and lack of either colonial history or adventurist foreign policy.

Some of these plots were directed from overseas, such as the 2009 plans by Pakistani-American 40-something David Headley. Headley, who previously helped orchestrate the 2008 Mumbai massacre, wanted to take hostages inside Jyllands-Posten and throw severed heads from the windows to the street below. But plenty of plots were homegrown: domestic jihadists deemed the “covenants of security” with their host nations were null and void, because the cartoons constituted acts of war against Islam.

This interpretation of blasphemy is recurrent: addressing the Danish cartoons, Osama bin Laden declared that the West’s killing of Muslim women and children paled in comparison to Jyllands-Posten’s crimes: “This is the more serious tragedy,” he said in an audio message, “and the reckoning will be more severe.” Likewise, the first issue of al-Qaeda’s English language magazine made clear that killing one of the cartoonists would be an even “greater cause than fighting for Palestine, Afghanistan or Iraq”.

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Similarly exaggerated equivalences have reappeared in later affairs. The man who led the campaign of accusations against Samuel Paty, the teacher who was beheaded after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class on free speech, warned that “tolerating” Paty’s actions could lead to a Srebrenica for French Muslims. Indeed, even a UK-registered charity mentioned the genocide of Rohingya Muslims and a Batley schoolteacher showing a Charlie Hebdo cartoon, in the same breath.

Delving into the nature of the plots is revealing. As much as jihadist violence is associated with mass casualty attacks, discriminate violence targeted at blasphemers or other perceived enemies of Islam account for a large share of total terror plots, prior to Isis. When those targets are identified, the violence is excessive and notably vicious, even by jihadist standards. Theo van Gogh was, to use the words of Ian Buruma, “slaughtered like a sacrificial animal”, for instance.

In these attacks, the violence goes well beyond the infliction of death, which can just as well be achieved by a single bullet. It is designed to humiliate, degrade and punish transgressors through extreme violence and dismemberment. For all the apparent “tradecraft”, the same characteristics can be observed among Iranian assassins in the early Satanic Verses campaign. In Britain, the pitiless stomping to death of a former imam in Rochdale accused of black magic, and the knifing of a Glaswegian shopkeeper by a follower of Pakistan’s spiralling anti-blasphemy movements, are results of the same frenzied violence.

It is this increasingly animated blasphemy fervour, emanating from Pakistan, that Britain cannot afford to ignore, given that Iranian operations and jihadist plots continue on British soil. It is the underlying force behind the controversies involving the Batley schoolteacher; last summer’s protests outside Cineworld screenings of The Lady of Heaven, a British-made epic that became the first film to show the “face” of the Prophet Muhammad; and the more recent “Quran-scuffing” incident in a Wakefield school.

In fact, clashes like these, as well as highly discriminate violence, may come to characterise the post-Isis era. Compared with the model of violence unleashed at Manchester Arena and the Bataclan, violence against “blasphemers” inspires a much wider constituency of sympathisers, apologists and relativists — precisely the oxygen terrorism needs to survive. This apologia has, at times, even extended well into the Western media. Terrorists learn, and they will not have overlooked the massive global controversy which followed the killing of Paty. In short, blasphemy violence is not only righteous and obligatory, it better serves the interests of the various extremists competing and jostling as defenders of Islam.

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What's so blasphemous about free speech?

By Helen Dale

Admittedly, the story of blasphemy violence is not limited to attacks, which are merely the most visible and visceral part of the equation. Nor is the story of blasphemy violence simply one of intentionally vulgar and offensive cartoons, the loss of which from the public square few commentators will mourn. The Jewel of Medina was a historical novel, which lost its publisher. The Lady of Heaven was a film made by Muslims for Muslims, yet was pulled from British cinemas. The professor who lost her job was teaching a masterpiece of Persian art.

And these are just the cases we know of. Every book never written, every painting never painted, every critique never voiced and every historical inquiry never made: that is the true story of blasphemy violence.

Pakistan needs friends, but they are in short supply. Since Partition in August 1947, the Government has fabricated a national identity hinged around despising India. Delusions of grandeur followed — and now they are starting to shatter.

The secession of Pakistan’s eastern wing in 1971 after war with India should have been a rude awakening. It should also have binned the narrative that India is trying to annex its territory, since New Delhi facilitated the transition of East Pakistan to an independent Bangladesh, instead of gulping it down as war spoil. The creation of Bangladesh should also have disabused Pakistan of the farcical notion that adherence to Islam can forge a single national identity — if indeed that weren’t obvious from the presence of two separate Muslim-majority states along Pakistan’s western border.

Instead, under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who led the country post-1971, Pakistan Islamised the constitution, propelled jihadist groups towards Afghanistan in search of more geopolitical influence, and invited investment of freshly-minted Arab petrodollars. Since then, Pakistan’s leaders have enabled the establishment of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the Talibanisation of Pakistan itself, and the radical Islamisation of Kashmir, as well as multiple jihadist attacks on India. Yet even after decades of jihadism backfiring on Pakistan, the country’s leaders still won’t rethink their extreme, religionist narrative on India. Incumbent Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari doesn’t hesitate to use Islamist rhetoric in discussing Kashmir; Imran Khan confidently urges Indian Muslims to pick up arms against the state.

The trouble is that Islamist policies created Pakistan, rather than the other way around. Hostility towards India, therefore, is not temporary opportunism on the part of Islamists, but the consequence of centuries-old political and theological narratives. Once the British Raj took over, the Muslim elite of India became increasingly apprehensive about the possibility of eventually living in a Hindu majority nation, and struggled for religionist separation. This became the ideological raison d’être of Pakistan, in the form of the Two Nation Theory: “Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations that cannot live together.” For the past 76 years, “Muslim” Pakistan let this narrative direct its relations with “Hindu” India.

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Today, the nations’ differences are most obvious in the economic realm: Pakistan and India have foreign reserves of $3 billion and $600 billion respectively. While pointing this out might have been met with accusations of treason in Pakistan until a couple of years ago, recent events have led to the beginning of a massive rethink. After Imran Khan’s government became the latest to be ousted by the military’s machinations last year, anti-army sentiments have been simmering. But even more critically, the extent of Pakistan’s ongoing fiscal crisis has made people question the army’s grandiose rhetoric, including the gross impracticality of any ambitions for Kashmir, given the economic strides India is making. Pakistan is missing out on at least $37 billion worth of potential trade with India annually, owing to its obstinate fixation with self-inflating Islam-centric narratives.

With the already limited trade with India largely frozen since the border skirmishes of 2019, Pakistan has instead looked to China. The $62 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is Beijing’s biggest-ever overseas investment. Part of the Belt and Road Initiative, CPEC was supposed to be a fiscal lifeline, but it has instead metamorphosed into a debt trap, owing to skewed agreements predominantly dictated by Beijing. CPEC is starting to seem more like a neocolonial venture, a front for the Chinese takeover of Pakistan, which is leading to human rights abuses and mass appropriation of resources. The Chinese stranglehold has left Islamabad with little choice but to continually express gratitude to Beijing over partial loans to pay import bills issued mostly, of course, by China.

For Pakistan, which has persistently chosen to alienate all its neighbours, the only rational way forward would be to actively work towards regional cooperation — beginning with the subcontinent’s largest country. The longer Pakistan takes to come to this conclusion, the harder it will be. Today, better ties with India aren’t something that Pakistan can simply ask for; Islamabad would need to offer some incentive. It would have to right those wrongs that leaders in Pakistan have openly confessed to: the provocation of wars, the facilitation of India-bound jihadist groups such as the JeM or the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which orchestrated, among others, the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Gaining India’s trust will be very, very difficult.

Moreover, Pakistan will face internal resistance from the jihadist superstructure it has buttressed for years. Every time there are ostensible steps towards initiation of peace with India, that structure responds with a coordinated manoeuvre. After the 2001 Agra Summit, there was an attack on the Indian Parliament; after Narendra Modi’s visit to Pakistan in 2015, there was the Pathankot raid. If Pakistan is to develop strong, productive ties in the region, it must stop supporting jihadist outfits of any variety. Pakistan will also have to start acknowledging the simple reality that the Indian subcontinent has a shared history spanning millennia — and hence overlapping cultures, languages, and customs. Finally, Pakistan’s economy would have to reinvent itself as growth-oriented, rather than heavily militarised and reliant on foreign aid. These steps could usher in a future of better politico-economic collaboration — and put an end to the submissive, extractive alliance with China.

Unfortunately, the supposed peaceniks in Pakistan have instead been fixated on their own anti-India agenda. For them, the recent surge in Hindutva nationalism driven by Delhi, and the targeting of Muslims, vindicates Pakistan’s separation. They tend to gloss over the fact that religious minorities are disproportionately looking to leave Pakistan for India, while Indian Muslims aren’t exactly queueing up to move in the other direction. They ignore, too, the fact that, despite Hindutva ambitions to reconvert disputed mosques into Hindu temples, there are over 300,000 mosques in India, with numerous under construction or renovation. By contrast, not a single Hindu temple has been constructed over the past 76 years in Pakistan.

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Even leaving aside the possibility that the increasing marginalisation of Indian Muslims could be a side-effect of Pakistan’s creation, a country founded and sustained on Muslim nationalism has little grounds to criticise Hindu nationalism. And besides, all this bickering over whose nationalism is more toxic, and whose treatment of Kashmir is worse, pales into insignificance when one considers the glaring difference in the two nations’ global standing.

More than anything else, the success of Pakistan’s “bleed India with a thousand cuts” policy can be gauged by the volumes of blood the country has shed of its own people. More than 80,000 Pakistanis are direct victims of jihadist attacks. But where glorification of death in the name of “martyrdom” has belittled the colossal loss of life, Pakistan’s rapidly emptying coffers might leave the nation with no choice but to surrender — especially with Saudi Arabia pulling the plug on jihadi funding. The still-rising defence budget suggests that the Pakistan army is refusing to let go of its delusions of grandeur. It is only a matter of time, though, before it caves. At the end of the day, governments need money to run a country, and for that they need allies. A nation cannot live on stories alone.

The scene painted by the footage is both horrifyingly perplexing and peculiarly British. The sky is overcast. No one seems to be running or screaming, or trying to confront and overpower the killers. A consolatory moment is provided by the “Angel of Woolwich”, the woman who calmly conversed with and challenged the killers before taking off to catch her bus. In the background, there is a bundle in the middle of the road. It is the body of Lee Rigby.

Michael Adebolajo grew up and went to school in Havering, where East London spills into Essex. Nevertheless, he addresses bystanders as “you people”, telling them they will “never be safe” before warning that British soldiers must leave “our lands”, meaning Iraq and Afghanistan. To his mind, he is no longer a British man born to a Nigerian-Christian family and schooled in Romford, but a member of the global Ummah, which is under existential attack from the West.

The murderers never attributed their attack to al-Qaeda, but in many ways it fit the al-Qaeda bill. It was a highly specific act of violence, targeting a member of the enemy’s armed forces. It was the kind of attack the group’s Yemen branch had directly called for in their English-language magazine less than a year beforehand. It was so discriminate that Adebolajo was careful to assure bystanders they were not his targets, even going so far as to apologise to nearby women for the bloodshed. Two years later, the al-Qaeda trained Charlie Hebdo killers would similarly — and impatiently — remind a journalist that they had only killed blasphemers; that they hadn’t harmed “civilians”. This was honour, jihadi-style.

In other ways, Lee Rigby’s murder was the kind of gruesome spectacle that al-Qaeda’s leadership would later warn against, but which Islamic State would make their hallmark. A gruesome spectacle, but a shoddy and amateurish one, too: Adebolajo and Adebowale rammed Lee Rigby with a Vauxhall Tigra before trying, and failing, to behead their victim. The rusty antique revolver they had acquired malfunctioned, and they were denied martyrdom by arriving armed police.

By contrast, the Charlie Hebdo attackers came clad in all black tactical gear, wielded Kalashnikovs and raised their fists having avenged the Prophet. They looked the business, and they went down in a hail of bullets. Adebolajo, in his Stone Island beanie and Primarni toggle jacket, did not. Adebolajo and Adebowale didn’t pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda in their attack, but perhaps notably, al-Qaeda never claimed them either.

Still, this did not stop others from imitating them. As Raffaello Pantucci notes, it served to “lower the threshold of what constitutes a terrorist attack, suddenly making the act much more accessible”. It showed other extremists that neither a cell, explosives nor serious weaponry were necessarily prerequisites to action. In the days to follow, a soldier was stabbed in the neck in Paris, while a year later another young extremist convert was apprehended en route to behead a British soldier. Brusthom Ziamani, the would-be copycat who thought Michael Adebolajo a “legend”, has since emerged as a leading and troublesome figure among imprisoned jihadis. In 2020, while he was eight months into a deradicalisation programme, he attempted to murder a prison officer.

The fact that Adebolajo and Adebowale were careful to target a soldier — and only a soldier — reveals much about the evolution of jihadism and the ideological divides within it. While mass casualty attacks are associated with jihadist terror, prior to Isis, discriminate plots were more the norm in Europe: against Jews, military personnel and alleged blasphemers. There were even bitter divides within Adebolajo and Adebowale’s networks: some believed that attacks at home were illegitimate due to a covenant of security with Britain, while others came to view the covenant as null and void since UK participation in the invasion of Iraq.

The 7/7 bombers deemed Britain a legitimate target, but it was not until Lee Rigby’s murder that jihadists were able to successfully attack again — an eight-year wait. Some observers assumed the jihadist threat was a thing of the past: Bin Laden was dead and the London Olympics came and went without a hitch. But it was the same year as the Woolwich attack that British extremists were trickling into Syria to fight — a trickle that became a flood in 2014 when Isis declared it had restored the Caliphate.

In the eight “quiet” years between attacks, Salafi-jihadist activity did not cease. The Islam that Adebolajo and Adebowale had converted to was the Islam of Omar Bakri Mohammad, Anjem Choudary and their acolytes in al-Muhajiroun. Its activity during the 2000s and early 2010s consisted of proselytising, attention-grabbing stunts, establishing European offshoots, and more proselytising. On a day-to-day basis, it also meant living according to the incredibly strict, incredibly demanding lifestyle of a Salafi-jihadist activist, which often involved cutting oneself off from friends, family, jobs and many of life’s pleasures — from football to television. It was to enter a totalitarian pact voluntarily.

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Because of his closeness to these networks, Adebolajo had flirted with the attention of security services on several occasions, but never enough to warrant intervention. In 2010, however, he was apprehended by Kenyan authorities; he was most likely on the way to join al-Shabaab in Somalia, with whom a number of Britons were already fighting at the time. Despite this, a Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee report determined MI5 could not have prevented the attack. Instead, it blamed an unnamed American company — Facebook — which had closed several of Adebowale’s accounts without informing British authorities. Five months prior to the attack, Adebowale had even graphically communicated his desire to kill a British soldier. The trouble was the offending content was picked up algorithmically and closed automatically — no human being ever laid eyes on it.

At the time, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, determined that Facebook was the “one party which could have made a difference” in preventing the murder of Lee Rigby. In some quarters, particularly among civil liberties groups, this conclusion was viewed as all too convenient for the security services, as well as paving the way for more anti-terror legislation and more government control over the internet. The drumbeat for tech companies to act on terrorist and extremist content online would grow louder the following year, as Isis flooded social media with gore and Silicon Valley could no longer refuse to act. Today, it is nongovernmental groups as much as governments leading the charge for more control over the internet.

And yet, despite the infamy of Michael Adebolajo’s image, neither he nor his accomplice live on in the annals of jihadi lore. Although I’m told security services would cast doubt on these claims, Adebolajo allegedly regrets his act and the Jihadist worldview, a fact which is of no consolation to the family of his victim. Instead, it is Lee Rigby’s name and image which lives on — while his killers, denied their martyrdom, must live out their days anonymously and forgotten, somewhere in the bowels of His Majesty’s prison estate.

For years, they targeted me, calling me an “Islamophobe”. I am a Muslim. But I had had the temerity to call out Muslim establishment leaders who won’t acknowledge the Islamic extremism lying at the heart of crimes such as those of the Boston Marathon bombers. I am far from alone in suffering harassment on LoonWatch. Other Muslim reformers — such as Syrian-American physician Zuhdi Jasser and Pakistani-Canadian writer Raheel Raza — were also targeted; so, too, were ex-Muslims — including Somali-American author Ayaan Hirsi Ali — and agnostic thinkers such as comedian Bill Maher and scientist Richard Dawkins. Indeed, LoonWatch has denounced conservatives in general, as well as the FBI, the US military, the state of Israel and, more recently, Hindus and the state of India. I wondered: who was behind this network?

After a decade of research, I have revealed the architects of LoonWatch in my new book, Woke Army. They are none other than officials at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which presents itself as the face of American Islam and the nation’s largest Muslim “civil rights” organisation. It is anything but. Rather, CAIR is a front for an extremist form of Islam. (The organisation didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.) I also discovered that it is not acting alone. Although the internet often makes cancellations seem like spontaneous uprisings, the kind of character assassinations taking place on LoonWatch are targeted attacks by a loosely organised coalition of leftists and Islamist sympathisers. They seek to destroy, in the court of public opinion, anyone who strays from the “progressive” party line.

You’ve heard their catechisms: racism, not freedom, is America’s bedrock; white people are oppressors and black people are oppressed; meritocracy is white supremacy. And, as my own trolls so often implied, it is unconscionable to link Islam to the ghouls who murder in the name of Allah. Opinions straying from these principles cannot be tolerated.

These puritans are prolific beyond LoonWatch. I first encountered them after the beheading of my friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in 2002. He was kidnapped in Karachi and then killed for being American, Jewish and of Israeli heritage. Danny’s savage murder in the name of Islam propelled me from the news pages to the opinion pages, where I rejected the extremism of my friend’s killers and advocated for an Islam compatible with human rights, women’s rights, and secular governance. For this, I was pilloried, labelled not only an “Islamophobe” but also a “Zionist media whore”. I was accused of being an agent of Israel, and of having sexually transmitted diseases. My son, born after his father abandoned us, was called a “bastard”.

The creation of LoonWatch — a watering-hole for these extremists — presented an opportunity to unmask some of the individuals enabling this hate. In 2018, I filed a defamation lawsuit, Nomani v. John Doe et al., winning the power to subpoena internet service providers for the real identities of 48 “John Doe” anonymous attackers. This led me to a treasure-trove of files, including one that revealed the identity of “Zuhair Thomas”.

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His order was recorded in GoDaddy’s internal “Shopper Info” files with the note: “Verified by Fraud Dept — Customer OK”. But data in the documents makes it possible to identify “Zuhair” as Muhammad Tauseef Akbar, a staffer at CAIR’s Chicago chapter, who used the moniker “Garibaldi” to harass critics of the organisation. Over the years, the bills for the account he set up were paid by the credit card of Ahmed Rehab, a longtime official with CAIR’s national headquarters and the executive director of CAIR Chicago. Rehab’s email, home address and work phone number appeared on the documents, although he used “Emperor” as his fake name on LoonWatch. This GoDaddy account also bought other websites on which CAIR critics were anonymously attacked — including IslamophobiaToday.com and IslamophobiaSucks.com.

Akbar and Rehab didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, but an attorney did respond on behalf of the anonymous “John Doe” defendants. She wrote little more than: “My name is Lena Masri, and I represent persons affected by the subpoenas you have issued against GoDaddy and Twitter.” Lena Masri is the National Litigation and Civil Rights Director at CAIR.

It’s clear that Muslim ideologues have allied themselves with leftist activists to exploit the freedoms of the West. Their aim, which they are pursuing relentlessly and often viciously, is to utterly discredit Muslim reformers, in order to promote a system of beliefs that runs counter to democratic values. These individuals, and the organisations they work for, seem determined to eliminate as much discussion of Islamic extremism as possible; the actual enemies of civilisation, in this twisted narrative, include the “Israeli apartheid state”, “white supremacists”, and more recently “Hindu extremists”. And these anonymous trolls have borrowed one of the most pernicious tools of the American Left to fuel their propaganda machine: critical race theory, which divides the world into white oppressors and oppressed people of colour. In the LoonWatch world, any criticism of Islam is a racist ploy to harm all Muslims. This framing is a diabolical co-opting of civil-rights language aimed at protecting people who are in fact determined to stamp out the civil rights of their critics. But we have reached a turning point.

Establishment Muslims and their far-Left sympathisers strike more openly now. Earlier this month, on the floor of the Virginia Senate, state Senator Ghazala Hashmi, a Muslim American from India (no relation to Javad Hashmi), hurled the “white supremacist” smear at another Indian-American woman of colour, albeit a Hindu one. Her name is Suparna Dutta. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed her to the Virginia Board of Education last year. On January 31, this year, the Virginia Senate Privileges and Elections Committee voted unanimously, 14-0, for her nomination. Every Democrat was on her side. But when the issue arose in the state Senate, a cohort of allegedly “progressive” Democrats derailed her appointment, in a 22-18 vote straight down party lines.

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What had Dutta, an advocate for meritocracy in education, done to deserve this? She had had the gall to call out the educrats who were behind the illegal dismemberment of the merit-based admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) — replacing it with a race-based process that, a federal judge ruled, discriminates against Asian students. In other words, in the name of “anti-racism”, real racism is being practised. With Dutta, in 2020, I got involved in the campaign to oppose this new “progressive” policy at TJ, where my son was a pupil. At one point, a school board member promoted the anti-Israel, antisemitic narratives of CAIR officials. At another point, teachers were instructed not to call the 9/11 hijackers “terrorists”.

Just as Dutta was labelled a “white supremacist”, I, too, was labelled a bigot for protesting against these policies. In September 2020, Virginia Education Secretary Atif Qarni, a Democrat, barred me from speaking at a town hall meeting he was hosting, though I was there as the TJ parent-teacher association representative. He claimed I belong to an “extremist” organisation: the Muslim Reform Movement, which advocates for women’s rights, human rights and secular governance.

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Over the past several days, I have worked with Dutta through the night to trace the roots of the campaign against her. The day after the Select Committee approved her nomination, February 1, Dutta got into a back-and-forth with fellow board member Anne Holton, the wife of powerful Democratic Senator Tim Kaine. Dutta was supporting an effort to remove divisive ideology from Virginia’s history curriculum. Holton advocated for socialism and said the US Constitution wasn’t “remarkable”. Dutta, referencing her experience as an immigrant from India, begged to differ. This enraged her critics.

On the night of February 5, the Twitter account @RedForEdVA — a teachers’ union group that self-describes as supporting socialism — posted grainy photos from a parents’ rally that took place in Fairfax County, Virginia, in October 2021, which far-Right activists had tried to hijack, unbeknown to Dutta and other parents. By the next morning, activists on Twitter were equating the protest to the infamous Charlottesville Unite The Right rally and and the riots of January 6. Shortly afterwards, a Facebook account, Herndon-Reston Indivisible, shared an online campaign, led by the “Virginia Grassroots Coalition”, which includes about 51 far-Left groups; it declared: “Don’t let the Virginia Senate Confirm a Far-Right Extremist to the Board of Education.”

In six days, Dutta had gone from unanimously approved to being a pariah, because of beliefs and events that have nothing to do with her. Plenty of Muslim leaders publicly trashed Dutta, including Raheel Ahmed, a Pakistani-American mosque leader in Manassas, Virginia, and Atif Qarni, the former education secretary who smeared me as an “extremist”. Democrat leaders apparently accepted their criticisms unquestioningly. After Dutta was rejected, Democratic lawmaker Chap Petersen told constituents that “mosque elders” with important connections had called him. Those familiar with the calls say that one was from Rafi Ahmed, the Pakistani-American chair of an organisation representing northern Virginia mosques, and that his message was: “Vote no on Suparna Dutta. She belongs to an anti-Muslim extremist Hindu organisation.” Ahmed shared no evidence, and didn’t respond to requests for comment. He is part of a network of Muslim establishment organisations. It includes CAIR.

This network is dangerous. It purports to stand for the admirable principles of racial justice and equality. But it is distracting the public from illiberal Islamism by loudly and perpetually accusing the institutions, history and people of the United States of blanket racism. Claiming to have the moral high ground, the Woke Army attacks anything and anybody that stands in its way. It’s time to see this project for what it is.

Many of them had travelled to the capital from the coastal towns where al-Shabaab was most active, and where all the structural “push” factors one could imagine are present: poverty, boredom, marginalisation, corruption — and extrajudicial killings. Perhaps that’s what enabled them to diagnose one of the central shortcomings of the policies generally known as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), of which Britain’s Prevent Strategy is a part. In his independent review of Prevent, published last week, William Shawcross came to the same conclusion: the overemphasis on vulnerability in the process of radicalisation strips individuals of their agency, obscures reality and sucks the politics out of political violence.

This framing is inadvertently written into the policy from its birth in 2011: according to Prevent’s foreword, one of its core objectives is to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism” (emphasis mine). In this model, the individual is a passive participant in their own descent into terrorism, sometimes manipulated by mysterious online recruiters or pushed by socioeconomic circumstances beyond their control. Over time, the strategy moved into more and more safeguarding settings, and this notion evolved further. As one practitioner told me: “radicalisation is just another form of grooming”.

Such thinking has seeped into broader counterterrorism discourse, but perhaps worst of all it has allowed now-stranded jihadists in Syria to play back Western tropes for domestic consumption. In their versions of events, they were groomed, manipulated or brainwashed into joining Isis, just as they were only ever cooks or engineers in the Caliphate. It’s “only following orders”, updated for the therapy era. The type of people Prevent interacts with has helped to crystallise this notion. No doubt many of those referred to Prevent have various sources of instability in their lives, but this should not be surprising for a policy which relies on local authority services such as mental healthcare as some of its main vectors of delivery. Drawing conclusions about radicalisation based on Prevent referrals and interventions tells us about the type of people referred to Prevent, not necessarily those joining terrorist movements.

Likewise for the increasing concern over the radicalisation risk to children and young people, particularly online. Of course children make up large numbers of referrals for a strategy which is a legal duty for schools. But the involvement of children in political violence is exceptionally rare: the majority of Isis recruits were in their 20s (many much older), and most terror attacks in Western countries to further a racist worldview are being perpetrated by, as Naama Kates puts it, “grown-ass men”.

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Prevent may well be doing a fine job of diverting genuinely vulnerable people away from extremism, but it should be just one part of the strategy’s function. What of the people unlikely to appear on the radar of local services — those who are stable and confident enough in their convictions to justify violence? The man considering killing a human being for eternal reward or the survival of his race is not simply misled or a walking checklist of needs and vulnerabilities; he has never been more assured. It’s not clear Prevent has an answer.

Another concern identified by the review has proven the most controversial — and already the most mischaracterised. Shawcross found that there is a disproportionate focus on the far-Right, and that while Islamist extremism is defined so narrowly as to only take in the likes of Isis, far-Right extremism is defined so loosely as to sometimes include Brexit, populism and garden-variety conservatism. To explain this, it’s necessary to describe the Prevent sector as a whole, which extends well beyond the civil servants, local coordinators or police officers it employs. It includes Prevent-funded civil society organisations, academic centres, NGOs and think tanks (one of which I belong to). Not all of them have a formal connection to Prevent, but all of them help to shape and guide the discourse on extremism and terror. And where the discourse goes, policy praxis follows.

It’s easy for a headline to blame “woke civil servants” for not wanting to talk about Islamist extremism, but the reality is: delivery is bent out of shape by parts of the Prevent sector which have nothing to do with government at all. These are the institutions which churn out paper after paper on the video game-extremism nexus or the trauma of their own work, but which are deafeningly silent when a schoolteacher is decapitated across the Channel and another is forced into hiding closer to home. Some of the organisations which influence thinking are based in North America, which has an entirely different threat picture, but the online discourse flattens this distinction. The effect is clear in Shawcross’s observation that, inside Prevent, resources are distributed concerning organisations with no actual presence in Britain.

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Those delivering Prevent are also subject to external pressures which help pull the strategy “out of kilter” with Britain’s counterterrorism apparatus, as one senior official put it. On one school visit, I was anxiously informed by the concerned headteacher that some of his students’ parents are Daily Mail readers. I have seen third-sector organisations show slides of Mail headlines immediately after Dabiq — Islamic State’s blood-soaked propaganda rag. Others I worked with had slides counted by audiences to ensure equal time was given to the EDL as to ISIS. This was in 2014-15 when hundreds of Brits were travelling to the Caliphate, and in parts of London with no far-Right presence whatsoever. These are the external pressures, but in other cases the call is coming from inside the house, such as the suspicion and accusations identified by Shawcross against those who focus or specialise on Islamism. I’ve seen this for myself, and it’s not clear the strategy can ever function properly while this persists.

Given these pressures, it is not hard to see why some will opt for the easy life or go along with the mantra that the far-Right and jihadists are simply two sides of the same coin. They are of course worthy of a response, but the street hooligans of Britain First or the EDL (let alone the Daily Mail) simply do not exist in the same tactical or moral universe as the present-day génocidaires of Isis — in that they are not orchestrating the mass killing of civilians or exterminating minorities in the Middle East. Since my own experiences some years ago, this trend of equivalence has accelerated and entirely new categories of extremism have come into the Prevent sector’s purview, in what one insider described as the “Andrew Tate-ification of counterterrorism”. Any strategy which concerns itself as much with the EDL as with Isis is probably suffering a lack of conceptual clarity, but any strategy which concerns itself as much with adolescents watching Andrew Tate’s videos as Anwar al-Awlaki’s is probably so broad as to be rendered meaningless.

It means, for instance, that in the past week, violent demonstrations in Knowsley have been used to discredit the Shawcross review and its alleged dismissal of the far-Right threat. Having slugged through all 188 pages, I can confirm no such dismissal is made. In fact, this narrative rather makes the review’s point: that there is a clear difference between unrest — even law-breaking and violent unrest — and the bombing of children at a pop concert or the assassination of an MP. After all, if there is no such distinction, then to remain ideologically fair, Prevent must consider the frequent law-breaking and unrest perpetrated by Left-wing environmentalists. But it largely doesn’t, and nor do I think it should.

While some of the findings of the review will be shocking to many on the outside, the actual demands made of those delivering Prevent are hardly earth-shattering. In fact, amid years of controversy, the review is potentially a lifeline. Shawcross’s only demand is that it returns to its core purpose: preventing the next Thomas Mair or Salman Abedi, not the next online shitposter or Andrew Tate.

In 1979, furious Iranians marched in towns and cities across Iran, holding up pictures of Khomeini. Now they march once more: equally as enraged, equally as determined to bring revolution.

It’s been six weeks since protests broke out after the murder of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman, at the hands of Iran’s brutal and sinister morality police, uniting different parts of society across age, class, and ethnic boundaries. Women now burn their hijabs daily and cut off their hair. Parents boycott schools. Protestors continue to line the streets. All the while, Iran continues to be strafed by international sanctions, a failed nuclear deal, and spiralling inflation and unemployment. The people have had enough.

The regime, though, fights back. It has cut off the internet, desperate to strangle coordination between protests and to stifle the flow of information out of Iran. But that’s impossible: with the help of VPNs, social media is driving international awareness, with protests breaking out in solidarity across dozens of countries. Yet still the crackdown continues. Iran State TV and its various News Agencies are pumping out regime narratives almost 24/7. Forced “apologies” by protestors who have supposedly seen the error of their ways — after, I would guess, much torture — are now a daily feature on evening TV. And, of course, the killings never cease; the Norway-based Iran Human Rights organisation estimates that more than 200 Iranians have been murdered to date.

When I look at the Iranian protests in 2022, I cannot help but compare them to 1979. There are clear parallels: the fact the protestors just want the mullahs gone; the centrality of the hijab; a background of economic decline; rumours of Iran’s leader being weakened by cancer. But there is one difference this time: speed.

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In January 1979, just a month before the revolution, Khomeini was still in exile, as he had been since 1963. From a cottage in Neauphle-le-Château, in the French countryside near Paris, Khomeini continued the work he’d begun in Iraq: recording revolutionary sermons, speeches, anti-Shah rhetoric, and the ideology of the Islamic Government onto cassette tapes, which were then sold in Europe and smuggled into Iran. These were then broadcast and duplicated by mosques and distributed — illegally, of course — throughout the country. It was through this system that Khomeini, who was obviously barred from appearing on Iranian media, was able to mobilise Iranians to action. It took him years.

Today, however, the thousands of Iranians pouring onto the streets are likely to have been mobilised in the space of just a few hours by communications technologies that did not exist in 1977-79. Yes, it is now harder than at any other point since internet came to Iran to access it properly. But the government’s ban is not total. Email providers, including Yahoo Mail and Mail.com, are blocked, but, for some reason, Gmail, iCloud, and ProtonMail are not. It’s tricky for the protestors to mobilise, but it’s not impossible.

On the face of it, this can only be good. A popular revolution can only succeed if it’s, well, popular. But digitally powered protests carry as many disadvantages as advantages and, when it comes to turning them into successful revolutions, counterintuitively, perhaps even more. Here, the benchmark is the ultimately unsuccessful 2011 Arab Spring, which took place in the age of early social media: when Facebook was already established and Twitter was booming, but Instagram was in its infancy. It has been called the Facebook Revolution and it bears comparison to Iran today — in particular the case of Egypt. There, protestors hoping to overthrow the dictator Hosni Mubarak endured many of the hardships Iranians have faced over the last decade or so: police brutality, electoral fraud, lack of political freedom and liberty, and economic turmoil.

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Their response was clear: revolution, powered by social media. As Fawaz Rashed, an Egyptian protestor, described at the time: “‎We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.” The demonstrations kicked off on 25 January 2011, known as Police Day in Egypt, and never looked back. Facebook pages such as “We are all Khaled Said” — which gained 100,000 followers in three days after spreading images of a man murdered by Egyptian police for exposing on-duty drug taking — were key fora of the revolution. The #Jan25 hashtag became collective, digital rallying cries, unifying the people around the first protests before the Egyptian government blocked the internet for five days. It was all too much. Three weeks later, Mubarak resigned. The revolutionaries had won.

Or had they? Mubarak was gone. But who would replace him? Social media had enabled Egyptians to mobilise hundreds of thousands onto the streets. This gave Mubarak a choice: cling on to power through massacres of a scale unknown even in Egyptian history or back down. He chose the latter. But the structural strength of social media — its ability to transform every Egyptian protestor into their own mini-broadcaster, amplifying messages and helping to mobilise others — proved to be the revolution’s downfall. Social media is, by nature, diffuse. It is not built around the architecture of central nodes, be it states or, in the case of revolutions, leaders.

So, when Mubarak fell, there was no one to replace him. Millions across the world watched in awe and triumph as he scuttled from power. But the job was only half done. The revolutionaries had no one to replace him. They had no leader — only thousands of Facebook accounts that were incredibly effective in getting the message about Mubarak out, but obviously unable to govern in his place. The revolutionaries had meandered into a void, into which Muhammad Morsi and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood gratefully stepped. A few years later, after attempting to make himself a de Facto Pharoah, he was overthrown by the former General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — in essence a Mubarak Mark II.

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Now contrast this with 1979. Many date the beginning of the 1979 Revolution to the January 1978 student protests in defence of Khomeini, after the government newspaper Ettela’at labelled him a “British Agent” in an article entitled “Iran and Red and Black Colonization”. Simply put, the revolutionaries built their protest around the figure of Khomeini. Indeed, the revolution was said to have succeeded when his plane from Paris touched down at Tehran airport on 1 February 1979.

Fast forward to today, and Mahsa Amini’s name has become shorthand for Iranian revolutionary aspiration; her hashtag has been tweeted millions of times. But she can never be more than a martyr. No leader has yet emerged. Instead, the protests are organised by different people or groups in different cities and towns on an almost ad hoc basis.

The truth is that if the mullahs were to collapse tomorrow, there are no signs that a democratic movement would sweep to power. Opposition groups such as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq have their supporters, but they remain far from being a government-in-waiting. It is far more likely that the security state — led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps — would step into the void and make apparent what is already largely a fact: that Iran is no longer a clerical state but is now ruled by a Praetorian Guard.

In 1979, Iranians held up images of Khomeini. In 2022, they tear them down. They know they want the regime gone but they have no one to hold up in its place. For a revolution to succeed, it’s not enough to be against someone; you have to be for someone else. It’s not enough that Khamenei loses. Someone else must win.

Until that time, the mullahs will continue to cling on as murderously and barbarously as they always have, and Iranians will continue to die. For years Palestinians would say they needed a Saladin. They were wrong. What they need is a Ben Gurion. What the Iranian revolutionaries need now more than anything else is a Khomeini. Until that happens, this will only ever be half a revolution.

This isn’t the siege of Aleppo, it’s a scene from Romain Gavras’s Athena, set in one of France’s burning banlieues. Amid the smoke grenades, police and Athenians engage in brutal fighting at close quarters, with metal rods and batons. Later, the police use fire ladders to scale the walls of a tower block. Athenians on wheels circle around a beleaguered police testudo, firing makeshift mortars at point blank range. Men on both sides are visibly shell-shocked.

Athena, a fictitious banlieue, has taken up arms following the death of 13-year-old Idir, apparently at the hands of local police officers. A viral video seemed to confirm it. But rather than being just another anti-cop movie protesting police brutality, Athena never makes it clear whether the police did actually kill Idir. The audience is denied a clear, anti-racist, political message. We are left to choose our own villains.

While the police lay siege to Athena, Idir’s three brothers select very different paths. Karim, the youngest, becomes Athena’s general and messiah, railing against police brutality, masterminding the looting of a nearby police precinct, and manning the defences of Athena. Mokthar, the eldest, is just trying to save his drug empire amid the chaos. The middle brother, Abdel, is a decorated veteran who fought with the French army in Mali, and wants justice for Idir but without bloodshed. The movie is driven by this central tension: between the vengeful idealist, the violent cynic and the honour-bound poster child for French assimilation.

Athena is a dramatisation, shot in Évry-Courcouronnes, just south of Paris — but it could be a documentary set in any of France’s toughest neighbourhoods. Over the past few years, the police have been expelled from these areas (only to come back in massive numbers, for short periods of time, and preferably never at night). Évry-Courcouronnes itself has been rocked by a series of gang-related murders and unspeakably violent clashes. Across France, newspapers overflow with stories of ambulances, firetrucks and police cars being bombarded with fridges, pétanque balls or Molotov cocktails in similar neighbourhoods. The authorities are powerless, just as they are in Athena. As one Athenian boasts while looting the police precinct: “we are the police”.

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The banlieues are ruled by drug cartels, which thrive where economic opportunity is lacking. They generate an estimated €4.2 billion annually in France (the publishing industry, for comparison, generates €3.75 billion) and employs a total of around 21,000 full-time workers. Over the last four decades, successive French governments have poured tens of billions of euros into extraordinary plans banlieues and other “Marshall Plans” to renovate these neighbourhoods and attract businesses, but these territories remain deeply segregated and unattractive. Drug-dealing remains one of the few steady jobs.

Take Kassim from a Marseilles banlieue, interviewed for the BFMTV documentary “Marseilles, the drug war”: he describes his stable, well-paying job as a chouf (who keeps an eye for the police or rival gangs, from the Arabic “to watch”). He is adamant that he is not a gangster, and is proud of the long hours he puts in: “I work just like everyone.”

The cartels are not the only separatist force in these neighbourhoods. The rise of radical political Islam has further alienated parts of the banlieues from the French state. According to the scholar of Jihadism Hugo Micheron, more than 2,000 individuals in France are considered to constitute a direct Jihadist threat, while another 20,000 are closely monitored by French intelligence. But there’s a much larger group of up to 750,000 who sympathise with radical Islamist ideas, according to the pollster Jérôme Fourquet. The Islamist movement is far from united, but it nevertheless educated a significant portion of the next generation to defy the infidel (French society) — a rejection tracked by polls over the last decade.

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In Athena, as in reality, the rebels’ attachment to France fluctuates. After looting the police precinct, a young Athenian in a stolen van proudly waves the tricolore, hinting that the young insurgents seek to do more than avenge the slain Idir. It’s tempting to see the insurrectionists as heroes fighting for a fairer French Republic. But later in the movie, some rebels with a taste for war reinforce the “us and them” narrative. Karim calls his war-hero brother Abdel a “whore in uniform for France”. For having fought for the French army in Mali, Abdel is accused of being an Uncle Tom, a traitor to his “real” community — which sees itself as outside the nation. Are the banlieues even part of France?

French culture seems obsessed with this question. There is currently a proliferation of movies depicting civil wars in banlieues. One of France’s top-grossing movies in 2021, Bac Nord — based on a true story — depicts a confrontation between police and local gangs in the rough north of Marseilles. And Athena itself grew out of 2019’s Les Misérables, which staged a similar banlieue uprising, from the cops’ point of view. It was directed by Ladj Ly, one of the main screenwriters on Athena, and although the confrontation between the police and the locals does not escalate into an all-out war, Gavras has explained: “The idea with Athena was to start with the next riot” — following the events of Les Misérables — “the spark of a confrontation that has not yet happened and that could unfortunately lead to the beginning of a civil war.”

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The French are haunted by their history of civil war. The last one was only 60 years ago: its embers are still warm — something Gavras alludes to by including the occasional Algerian flag in Athena. Some on the French Right, notably Eric Zemmour, have long capitalised on this anxiety, by predicting a new civil war between the “true” French and the Islamised youth. More recently, such fears have spread beyond the far-Right. The country has been seriously rocked by a series of brutal attacks by Islamist terrorists. Last year, polls showed that while only 45% believe that France will soon have a civil war, 86% believe that in some cities and neighbourhoods, the laws of the Republic no longer apply, and 73% that French society is disintegrating.

A year ago, two open letters, written by dozens of retired general and then-anonymous serving soldiers, warned of the looming civil war. They called for the government to reinstate the authority of the state in these neighbourhoods — or, as they called them, these “lost territories of the Republic”. While most officers remain strictly apolitical, the letter got sizeable public support, with 58% of the French backing its authors.

Even centrist politicians wield this kind of rhetoric these days. “Separatism” or “Islamist separatism” are terms commonly used to express concern about these territories. Macron’s former minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, delivered a resignation speech in which he worried that while the French were currently living “side by side”, they might soon be “face to face”, given that in many banlieues, “the law of the drug dealers and of the radical Islamists replaced that of the Republic”. Former President François Hollande admitted that he believed there is a “problem with Islam”, and that France is on the path towards “partition” because of the nation’s inability to integrate a “never-ending” flow of migrants.

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Macron himself, once more of a centre-Left multiculturalist comparable to a young Tony Blair, has steered significantly to the Right on matters of identity and immigration. In a controversial attempt to win support from voters to his Right, he gave an interview in the staunchly Right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles, in which he suggested a need “deport those who don’t belong here”. Following the assassination of Samuel Paty, the Macronist-dominated Parliament passed a bill which, among other provisions, considerably enhanced the state’s capacity to oversee the organisation and financing of religious associations. It was soon dubbed the “separatism law”.

While some fear civil conflict, others desire it and prepare for it. In Athena, the threat of far-Right groups is ever-present, waiting to capitalise on the chaos. The French state claims that such groups ran a false flag operation to frame the police for Idir’s death. In real life, these cells seem currently too disorganised, or embryonic, or under too much surveillance, to pose a real threat in the short-term. But there’s a distinct possibility that under-the-radar groups or individuals will decide to blindly assassinate those they consider a threat. In 2019, an 83-year-old man tried to burn a mosque in Bayonne, only to get caught red-handed by local parishioners. He shot them on the spot. Gavras did not have to invent much to depict a French society caught between the anvil of Jihadis and the hammer of the far-Right.

It’s hard to imagine any immediate improvement. In fact, things are likely to get much worse, as inflation and the cost of living crisis put even more pressure on France’s poorest neighbourhoods. Politicians on the Right and far-Right will exploit the crisis and imitate the recent successes of Giorgia Meloni and the Swedish Democrats. But policy ideas are few and far between. For a country that spends so much producing stunning civil war narratives, there’s a distinct lack of potential solutions in play. Those being offered range from the laughably insufficient — limiting immigration flows by opposing international trade deals — to the horrifyingly drastic — creating a ministry for “re-migration”.  Athena will not be the last movie of its kind: under a flailing government, the French will continue to fear, and fantasise about, civil war.

The last time Begum hit the headlines it was because she’d had a makeover. This was exactly a year ago: gone was the bulky black burqa, and in were the skinny jeans, Nike baseball cap, sunglasses and pink nail-varnish. Had a new beauty salon opened up in Al-Roj, the arid and austere holding-pen in north-east Syria where Begum is housed, alongside other former female Isis members and their children? It seemed unlikely, but Begum had somehow got her hands on a new bit of clobber and wanted the whole world to know about it.

Subliminally, the message seemed to be: I’m not one of them – them being the burka’d ghouls she’s detained with and who routinely throw dirt and blood-curdling insults at visiting Western journalists. No, she was saying: I’m one of you, a normal British girl who you wouldn’t look twice at in the street. The sort of girl her former comrades-in-arms want to blow up in nightclubs.

Begum has again returned to the block caps of front-page news. This time it is because the Sunday Times journalist Richard Kerbaj has a book to flog: The Secret History of the Five Eyes. The book, which is about Western spycraft and was published this week, claims that Begum was smuggled into Syria aged 15 by a Syrian man who was leaking information to the Canadian security services about Western Isis recruits. Begum, with her legal team, has also been working with the BBC on a 10-part podcast series that is due to air any day now: you’ll be hearing a lot more about her in the coming weeks and months.

In his book, Kerbaj recounts how Mohammed al-Rashed, a people-smuggler who worked for Isis, helped Begum and her two schoolmates, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, cross from Turkey into Isis-controlled territory in Syria shortly after they flew from London to Istanbul on 17 February, 2015. According to Kerbaj, al-Rashed had photographed the girls’ passports and sent the images to his handler with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) at the Jordanian embassy. But by the time the handler had received news of the girls’ travel, it was too late — they were in Syria. Al-Rashed is thought to have helped many more Britons migrate to Syria to join Isis.

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This revelation about Begum is not actually all that revelatory: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ran a story on it in March 2015. But it didn’t attract much interest at the time. Kerbaj, the BBC and Begum’s legal team and her apologists want to change that, refocusing the story on how Begum was trafficked and how the West had a hand in it.

According to the Begum family’s lawyer, Tasnime Akunjee, one of the main arguments he expects to marshal in an forthcoming legal hearing to challenge the removal of Begum’s citizenship rests on her putative status as “a victim of trafficking”. It was “shocking”, he said a few days ago, that a Canadian intelligence asset was involved in the smuggling operation that facilitated her travel to Syria. Joshua Baker, the producer of the new BBC podcast on Begum, seems to agree with this rhetorical framing: “Shamima Begum was taken to Syria by a highly organised smuggling network and at the centre of it was Canadian Spy,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

The podcast, I’m Not A Monster: The Shamima Begum Story, is yet to be released, but it doesn’t bode well that its producer is flagrantly misleading the public about Begum’s passage to Syria in an effort to promote it. Begum was not “taken” to Syria, if by “taken” it’s meant that she was kidnapped or coerced into going to Syria by others against her will. On the contrary, she went under her own steam with Sultana and Abase, both now thought to be dead.

Of course, and in a very trivial sense, Begum and her schoolmates were “taken” to Syria by the pilot who flew the commercial jet that transferred them from Gatwick to Istanbul, where they were then “taken” to southern Turkey by a bus driver. And from there they were “taken” across the border into Syria in a car driven by a smuggler. But this isn’t what Baker means by “taken”: he means it in the Liam Neeson sense of a staged disappearance organised by shadowy criminals.

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In reality, Begum was not the victim of human traffickers, but a willing client and beneficiary of their criminal services. Her decision to go to Syria was stupid and short-sighted, but it was still her decision. And let’s not pretend that she was a vulnerable and clueless little girl, as she is now incentivised to retrospectively claim that she was. Far from it: she was a smart, brave, bolshie and precocious teenager. It took a lot of guts and cunning for her to go to Syria, and no one made her believe that the caliphate was a glorious idea. She enthusiastically believed in it, because she needed or wanted to, and because when she traded Raqqa for London, ISIS was a revolutionary political movement in the ascendant. She volunteered to join it and then paid for the services of a smuggler by stealing jewellery from her family, as did the other two girls she went with. This cannot, in good faith, be categorised as “trafficked”; to try to do so is an insult to the real victims of human trafficking, who are sexually enslaved against their will.

And here’s the thing about the younger Begum that unthinking journalists like Baker can’t or won’t comprehend: she wanted to submit to the sexual enslavement of a god-fearing jihadi husband because the logic of her ideological-belief system commanded it. Far from being trafficked to Syria against her will, Begum wanted to go there because she felt it was a divine duty to join Isis and help build the nascent caliphate. To see Begum as groomed is to catastrophically fail to see the attractions of violent political movements, especially to the young who are impassioned and recklessness enough to join them.

None of this, however, is to say that Begum should be abandoned and that Britain should expect the Kurdish authorities in northern Syria to indefinitely house her. That would be callous and irresponsible. Begum’s detractors say that she is a security threat. But the evidence for this isn’t very strong: yes, she was once a supporter of ISIS and had joined the group to help advance the caliphate project as a baby-making machine. But there’s no credible evidence to show that she fought for the group or that she learned how to use weapons or make bombs. Begum’s fighting ability is thus in serious doubt.

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In the absence of any credible evidence that she’s a threat, Begum’s detractors revert to the argument that she’s a monstrous traitor who doesn’t deserve a second chance. She’s dead to us, and nothing she does or says matters. There can be no repentance; she should rot in Syria. This, I think, is not only profoundly illiberal but pathologically harsh, and wholly disproportionate as punishment for her actions. It exhibits the sort of catastrophic hurt and wounded pride that one would expect of an Islamist who wishes death on all apostates.

The strongest way of defending Begum isn’t to say that she was trafficked, but to acknowledge she did a bad thing and that it’s time to forgive her for it. She has endured over three years of suffering and sorrow in conditions that would test the resilience of the most hardened jihadi jailbird. This ought to be enough punishment to cleanse her of the imperious arrogance and idiocy that animated her to join Isis.

Imagine her despair, her uncertainty over her fate, her risk of capture and abuse by militants, and her knowledge that she is loathed by so many. Britain must now forgive her and allow her back. In return, Begum should take responsibility for her actions and not cloak herself in denial and evasion.

Will Begum ever fully reckon with her actions and acknowledge the full scale of the horror that Isis unleashed in Syria and Iraq? Will she reflect in an open and honest way on why she was once so passionate about joining the group? Will she properly recognise the crucial role that she and all the other Isis women played in helping the group expand? This seems unlikely, because no one is really interested in hearing Begum’s unfiltered thoughts about all this.

For her defenders, she is a wretched victim of circumstance and abuse by sinister outsiders, so she must speak only to this and to the broader question of how evil, Islamophobic Britain radicalised and then abandoned her. For her detractors, she is simply an untrustworthy villain who deserves zero sympathy, so she shouldn’t speak at all. She is a symbol of everything wrong with weak, Islamist-friendly, woke Britain.

I, for one, relish the day when Begum will speak for herself, neither spoken over by her critics, nor shackled to a script prepared by her cynical yet naïve supporters.

Many of Britain’s most dangerous jihadists are imprisoned, perhaps affording us this false sense of security. But the sporadic information we get from behind the prison walls is anything but reassuring. While much hope is pinned on the largely uncharted territory of “deradicalisation”, its targets are making a mockery of these efforts. As the Chief Inspector of Prisons made clear a few weeks ago, the highest-risk prisoners in the country are outright boycotting these interventions, with some offenders listening to music or pretending to sleep during their one to one sessions.

On the other hand, even those who appear to comply may pose a threat, as Usman Khan’s slaying of those who sought only to help him tragically demonstrated. While participating in an educational course or qualification can be taken by authorities as a sign of progress, it is no objective measure of deradicalisation, not least when the knowledge gained can be put to use for the cause, to better proselytise or wage war.

Prisons are not isolated and cut off from the world, their walls are porous: people, information and material come and go. Meanwhile, the jihadists inside do not see imprisonment as an end to their struggle — so nor should we. The West’s experience with jihadism, now into its fourth decade, shows how its adherents often see their incarceration as a rite of passage and opportunity: to better prepare for jihad, to gain qualifications and skills on the taxpayer, to forge crucial connections and relationships, to proselytise among the prison population, and to test their faith.

Prisons around the world have proven integral to the global jihadist movement’s remarkable resiliency and regenerative capability, but so has naivety. In 2005, a jailed Parisian named Chérif Kouachi led his social worker to believe he had been “tricked” into associating with extremists busy funnelling fighters to the insurgency in Iraq. On the inside, however, Chérif fraternised with jihadi veteran Djamal Beghal, who had helped recruit “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in London in the Nineties. Exactly a decade after being “tricked”, Chérif and his brother Saïd burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine to massacre the writers, satirists and illustrators inside.

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Today, no longer pick-up riding or passport-burning, the Islamic State’s jihadists are marooned in the dilapidated camps and makeshift prisons of Northern Syria, where — like the Islamists in Bosnia and Afghanistan before them — they play back our own tropes about their manipulation and vulnerability for the domestic audiences they once threatened on social media. Some even offer to help deradicalise or prevent radicalisation in future, while lying about their own trajectory into terror.

Inside the British prison system though, a more bellicose extremist subculture appears to be developing. According to a recent review, among the imprisoned extremists an Islamist gang culture has developed. The counterterrorism lead at HMP Whitemoor, the site of Britain’s first attack inside the prison walls, told an inquest that terror offenders are held in a kind of “perverse esteem”. while Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Johnathan Hall QC, wrote how some offenders enjoy a “distinctly heroic profile”.

The risk, though, is not just of attacks. The failed state-building project of Isis should have made clear there is an ideological endgame, an all-encompassing worldview, a way of living and a revolutionary overhaul of state and society which jihadis seek to usher in. In their own microcosms, imprisoned jihadists are trying to live their lives in accordance with this endgame from the inside. There are cases of extremists intimidating staff and prisoners who do not comply with their interpretation of Sharia and holding crude Sharia courts which mete out floggings. Self-styled ‘emirs’ exert such influence over prison wings that authorities sometimes appeal to them to help restore order.

Surrounded by like-minded practitioners of their faith, they are living pure, virtuous and rigorist lives in accordance with God’s will. To them, this life of belief is the straight and narrow, while the rest of us are morally decayed hypocrites and criminals. For them, the idea they need deradicalising or rehabilitating is a bad joke and worthy of scorn. Just a few hours a week of mentoring and interventions stands little chance of competing with the offender’s entire social circle, the moral universe which colours it, the norms which govern their every action and interaction, and the status they enjoy as a terrorism offender on the inside.

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This is not to say that there is no hope, but that it will take an almighty effort to dismantle a worldview that we don’t seem able to fully comprehend, or at times even discuss out of misplaced sensitivities. Being realistic about the scale of the challenge and treating the extremists as intellectually serious and rational beings, rather than unthinking vessels driven to terrorism by circumstances beyond their control, gives the best hopes of averting tragedy like at Fishmonger’s Hall.

As we have seen, when the chips are down, jihadists have historically pleaded innocence or ignorance. But the reports above suggest this is not how Britain’s imprisoned extremists are behaving. Far from it. This indicates that they do not perceive themselves to be in a state of weakness but in one of strength. After living their lives as close as possible to the ideal Islamic state from inside the prison walls, it seems likely that upon release, many will continue to try to do so while they wait for the caliphate or divine reward they are assured will eventually arrive.

I have written before about the possibility of the jihadist movement in Europe evolving into a belligerent and destructive social force, rather than one merely focused on mass-casualty attacks, which were only ever a means to an end. The subcultures developing in prisons translating to the outside world would see these extremists creating micro-communities which reject and withdraw from the surrounding unbelief of society, in order to instil their own norms and values in line with the principle of “loyalty and disavowal” (al-wala’ wa’l-bara’).

Of course, the problem should not be overstated: the numbers being discussed here may be unprecedented, but they are nonetheless small. There are graver threats and societal issues facing Britain and her allies. But at the same time, being prepared to combat the threat, not just through security or intelligence, but intellectually, is critical. In certain locations, a mere handful of extremists have already been able to multiply their followings into several hundred over the course of a decade. The networks — perhaps better thought of as micro-communities— they fostered would go on to fill the ranks of Isis.

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Far from radicalised online and overnight, many of those who migrated to Isis’s Caliphate project were extremist activists who were already, as Bernard Rougier put it, “living in an imagined caliphate” from inside the unbelief of the West. Through the barrel of an AK-47, Isis transformed their fantasy into an irresistible operational reality, so they merely diverted their energy from practice and proselytising in the likes of Brussels, Trappes, Portsmouth or Gothenburg towards migration to Islamic State.

The risk is that the genie is again out of the bottle. 9/11 resulted in al-Qaeda’s decimation but nonetheless succeeded in advertising jihadism to the entire world on live television. ISIS, by contrast, declared itself a caliphate and invited confrontation with the West which reduced it to rubble, but nevertheless succeeded in advertising not just attacks, but the Salafi-jihadist endgame to the world. We do not yet know who and how many were paying attention.

With the time they are afforded in British, European and Kurdish prisons, the movement is currently assessing the mistakes and shortcomings of that episode so as not to repeat them. Some will conclude the attacks of Bataclan or Manchester Arena were counterproductive, so will channel their energies into other means but remain believers. Others will no doubt remain committed to more of the same. Despite its apparent medieval rigidity, jihadism is a constantly mutating phenomenon which adapts to its own time and place. How the movement evolves and re-emerges from its current ailing condition depends on the discussion and debate happening right now inside cells and on prison landings. It’s time to start paying attention.

These fanatics were the night-time ogres of my childhood, the threat that never stopped growing, one that came closer and closer, became more and more visible. During the Nineties, on Moroccan campuses, the Islamists took power. The battle of ideas was being lost. On the news, we got used to that now-familiar word: “attack”. In Paris, Luxor, Algiers. In my family, we didn’t underestimate them. We knew that the more educated among them were ready to do anything to defend their vision of the world. My parents implored me to be prudent — me, who didn’t know how to shut my mouth and who played at being the rebel adolescent. No one asked me to stand my ground, to defy them. On the contrary: I was told that you had to fear them — bend the knee, keep a low profile, shut up. How do you answer parents who love you and warn you: “Don’t take risks, don’t provoke them, stay safe from their violence”?

I was 15, I was living in Rabat, and I learned to keep quiet and accept. You accepted that you had to hide when eating during Ramadan, to be afraid that somebody might smell food on you. You accepted that you had to roll up empty wine bottles in opaque bags and drive a few miles to throw them in the dustbin. You accepted that you had to listen in silence to the furious speech of a professor of religion who claimed that Jews and Christians could never go to Paradise, and you wept inside for all those you loved who weren’t Muslims, and so were exiled from Paradise. You accepted being insulted by a customs officer in Casablanca because in your suitcase, in the middle of the New Year holidays, there were things he’d identified as Christmas presents. You accepted being treated as a slut and a sinner on the beach where you’d played as a child, because now your body was an offence to God.

You accepted, and you lived both in fear and in shame. The shame of our cowardice, of the denials that fed and grew on it. The shame of not being able better to defend the Islam of my grandfather, who is in Paradise with his Christian wife. “A thousand little stings of self-reproach that add up not to remorse but to a vague unease.”* That’s what you felt. You felt ugly and small. For reassurance, you said to yourself that it’s we who have right on our side, that we know the frontiers of Good and Evil, of reason and barbarism, and it doesn’t really matter if you don’t dare defend them at the top of your voice. We have to save our skin. Our limp, feeble, losers’ skin — but our skin all the same.

Suggested reading

The infidels will not be silenced

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There was one moment when I didn’t feel afraid. One moment when I felt brave. It was enough for me to close my office door, open up my computer — it was enough for me to start to write, and the fear vanished. That was why I became a writer. To purge my nightmares, to calm my terrors. When I write, I feel capable of anything. I’m no longer a polite little girl, a virtuous woman. I’m not trying to please or to seduce. I’m not afraid of provoking anger or scandal. For me fiction is the terrain of total freedom, the place where you can give expression to ambiguity, fuzziness, uncertainty, where you can contradict yourself and voice bad thoughts.

Tomorrow, at my work table, will I feel as free as before? Tomorrow, taking the stage for a discussion, will I be thinking of Salman and will I fear being attacked myself? Today, a lot of Muslim writers are afraid, and censoring themselves. I don’t judge them; I understand them, and I too think of my family and children. But fear and shame have to switch sides. We have to speak more loudly, become more persuasive, become the voices of Enlightenment, the voices of liberty and dignity. As writers, it’s the only way to be: stifle fear as soon as it appears; have faith in the intelligence of readers; be insolent and irreverent. Write, write, write. Do not submit; do not get down on your knees.

*From Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” (Translator’s Note).
Translated by Boyd Tonkin. The original French can be read here.