Boris told us that terrorism in the UK was due to Islam…he said this in the same article that Corbyn’s fans use to defend Corbyn’s policy of outsourcing Britain’s foreign policy to Al Qaeda or its branch office IS…naturally that part of the article does not get quoted.
Corbyn and his supporters, the BBC as well, claim the Iraq War was the catalyst for British Muslims to become radicalised and that we should therefore alter our foreign policy to suit these terrorists…they use the words of ex-MI5 chief, Eliza Manningham-Buller, to back them up as she made the assessment that the Iraq War did give British Muslims a pretext to attack Britain. What the likes of Corbyn don’t say is that that pretex was based upon an entirely false narrative…that the West was attacking Islam completey ignoring the reality that Saddam was a secular dictator that nearly all Iraqis wanted removed. [and most Iraqis hate the foreign Jihadis who have invaded their country…they like Sykes-Picot thanks very much] They also conveniently forget to mention that Manningham-Buller made no judgement on the rights and wrongs of going to war, merely warning government of a potential threat….a threat which she said did not mean we should change our behaviour….something Corbyn ignores as he seeks to do just that…..
You could say that even if terrorism increases, that shouldn’t stop you doing what you believe, as the government believed, to be right.
She also stated that even if we had not gone to war it is likely we would have been targeted anyway as looking on ‘favourably’ at a US invasion of Iraq…
I think even if we had supported the United States in sentiment but not militarily, we would still have been seen as supporters so it probably wouldn’t have altered it.
She states the obvious about the root cause…Islam…and the narrative of Muslims under attack…and of course that it pre-dated not just 2003 but 9/11 as well….back to the 1990’s….
A few among a generation who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam. An increasing number of British-born individuals living and brought up in this country, some of them third generation, who were attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the west’s activities in Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their fellow religionists and the Muslim world.
It is part of what we call the single narrative, which is the view of some that everything the west was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to the Muslim world and to Islam, of which manifestations were Iraq and Afghanistan, but which pre-dated those because it pre-dated 9/11, but it was enhanced by those events.
It is important to say that threat from Al-Qaeda did not begin at 9/11. My Service was already engaged in concern about the threat posed by Al-Qaeda from the late — mid- to late 1990s; after all the fatwa by Fawwaz from Osama bin Laden was issued in London in 1996. We had various operations at that time, some of which had connections to Afghanistan, and well before 9/11 we were anxious and worried and doing investigations. We were far from relaxed about the threat from Al Qaeda, which again, if I can refer to that open document, said back in 2001 the UK was a target. There was increasing information around the world of that.
Now of course the narrative is that the Iraq War caused terrorism in the UK…but again that’s not true….in 2000 British Muslims were arrested and jailed for a plot…and plenty of Muslims were being ‘radicalised’ in the UK pre-2003….Siddiq Khan of 7/7 infamy was radicalised before the war.
We had had a operation to which David Omand referred in his evidence, which was a case in Birmingham in 2000, where we retrieved and prevented the detonation of a large bomb. David Omand said he thought that was related to Al-Qaeda. That was the case at the time I thought I retired. We now think, I gather from my colleagues, it probably wasn’t. But those were British citizens of Bangladeshi origin planning an attack.
Certainly the Iraq War was used by Al Qaeda as propaganda, helping them create a narrative of Islam under attack, but that is a narrative that should be easy to dispel. However it was one adopted enthusiastically by many, including the BBC, who added fuel to the fire by claiming we went to war on a lie.
The BBC has run an anti-Iraq War campaign from the start, it was John Humphrys and Andrew Gilligan on the Today show that really gave an impetus to the terrorist narrative though as they falsely declared that Tony Blair had lied in the Iraq Dossier and thus Humphrys and Co gave the terrorists a pretext to attack us.
The BBC has maintained that attack after being brought to heel, Greg Dykes removed from office and the Gilligan/Humphrys story shown to be false, fake news, very dangerous fake news. The BBC has never forgiven this chastisement and has spent the last decade rewriting history so that now you will hear BBC presenters telling us that ‘Blair lied’ without any thought that they are themselves lying.
We had Marr yesterday adding Libya into the mix blaming Cameron for the terrorist attack in Manchester and going on to attack May for having the nerve to criticise Corbyn’s speech on foreign policy…a narrative Marr himself supports as his words on Libya show.
‘And of course it has to be said Libya collapsed into a failed state on David Cameron’s watch. It was our intervention there that knocked out the Gaddafi regime and unfortunately left a failed state.’
[on May’s criticism of Corbyn]
‘It’s very difficult to accuse someone in the middle of an election after Manchester of supporting terrorism…it’s a matter of good taste, what’s appropriate and reasonable to say is hard for people to get right.’
Eliza Manningham-Buller gives us a more rounded picture...the threat eminates from around the world due to a huge number of ’causes’….no matter what you do or don’t do they will find an excuse, a ‘pretext’, to blame and attack you…
There has been much speculation about what motivates young men and women to carry out acts of terrorism in the UK. My Service needs to understand the motivations behind terrorism to succeed in countering it, as far as that is possible. Al-Qaida has developed an ideology which claims that Islam is under attack, and needs to be defended.
This is a powerful narrative that weaves together conflicts from across the globe, presenting the West’s response to varied and complex issues, from long-standing disputes such as Israel/Palestine and Kashmir to more recent events as evidence of an across-the-board determination to undermine and humiliate Islam worldwide. Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kashmir and Lebanon are regularly cited by those who advocate terrorist violence as illustrating what they allege is Western hostility to Islam.
The video wills of British suicide bombers make it clear that they are motivated by perceived worldwide and long-standing injustices against Muslims; an extreme and minority interpretation of Islam promoted by some preachers and people of influence; and their interpretation as anti-Muslim of UK foreign policy, in particular the UK’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Then we have the other defence of Corbyn…the fine words of Boris Johnson in the Spectator in 2005….what those who quote him do not do, for obvious reasons when you see his article complete, is to provide a link to that article so that you can judge his words in the round, something that would give a completely different picture of what he intended to say….from the Guardian’s report….
Yes he said:
“Isn’t it possible that things like the Iraq war did not create the problem of murderous Islamic fundamentalists, though the war has unquestionably sharpened the resentments felt by such people in this country and given them a new pretext?”
And:
‘the Iraq war did not introduce the poison into our bloodstream but, yes, the war did help to potentiate that poison. It is difficult to deny that they have a point, the ‘told-you-so’ brigade.”
But note how, in this case C4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy, dodges the two big stand-out points in the first quote….that the Iraq War did not create the problem of murderous Islamic fundamentalists and that the Iraq war merely gave those who wanted to attack Britain a ‘pretext’..that’s a pretext, not a credible, authentic, rational, informed reason. Yes the war may have stirred up the anger, but was it reasonable or rational anger? No says Boris, not ‘noticed’ conveniently by those who partially quote him….
To the paranoid Muslim mind, the evident bogusness of the ‘war on terror’ — in so far as it applied to Iraq — suggested that the war was really about something else: about oil, about humiliating and dominating the Islamic world; and because they make no separation between religion and politics, the bogus ‘war on terror’ seemed to imply an undeclared war on Islam.
The ‘paranoid Muslim mind’? Hardly gives the impression that Boris thinks they are making rational, informed decisions…more that they are the subject of hardcore anti-western propaganda…a lot coming from the left-wing media itself…such as the BBC.
That second quote misses out the first part of the paragraph which indicates Boris has his doubts about the theory..
In groping to understand, the pundits and the politicians have clutched first at Iraq, and the idea that this is ‘blowback’, the inevitable punishment for Britain’s part in the Pentagon’s fiasco. George Galloway began it in Parliament; he was followed by Sir Max Hastings, with the Lib Dems limping in the rear. It is difficult to deny that they have a point, the Told-You-So brigade.
‘Difficult to deny’ but possible in truth.
And why miss this out?:
Supporters of the war have retorted that Iraq cannot be said to be a whole and sufficient explanation for the existence of suicidal Islamic cells in the West, and they, too, have a point. The threat from Islamicist nutters preceded 9/11; they bombed the Paris Métro in the 1990s; and it is evident that the threat to British lives pre-dates the Iraq war, when you think that roughly the same number of Britons died in the World Trade Center as died in last week’s bombings.
What do these folks want? Do they really want British troops out of Iraq, when most people I met in Baghdad secretly or openly want them to stay and help fight the insurgency? There are plenty of people in Iraq who think Britain did a wonderful thing in helping to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and it is still too early to reach a final verdict on the success of the Iraq war.
There’s absolutely no doubt why they miss the last bit out…it says the real problem is Islam and the Muslim community’s ghettoisation….
We have a serious and long-term security problem, not in Iraq but in this country, among young men who speak with Yorkshire accents. This is a cultural calamity that will take decades to correct.
We — non-Muslims — cannot solve the problem; we cannot brainwash them out of their fundamentalist beliefs. The Islamicists last week horribly and irrefutably asserted the supreme importance of that faith, overriding all worldly considerations, and it will take a huge effort of courage and skill to win round the many thousands of British Muslims who are in a similar state of alienation, and to make them see that their faith must be compatible with British values and with loyalty to Britain. That means disposing of the first taboo, and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem.
To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia — fear of Islam — seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture — to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques — it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim’s mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim.
The trouble with this disgusting arrogance and condescension is that it is widely supported in Koranic texts, and we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam’s mediaeval ass?
