The Centre For Social Cohesion

In a footnote to its front page account of these links between the terrorists, today's Times also reports the publication yesterday of a report by what it only identifies as ‘an official US report’ which it claims states that: ‘Home-grown British terrorists regard themselves as part of “global insurgency” which poses a new threat to international security’.

What interests me here is less, as is stated in connection with the report, the fact that British intelligence chiefs fear the next terrorist attack to take place in the US may be carried out by a UK citizen. It is rather the long overdue introduction here into the realms of public discourse of the concept of ‘global insurgency’.

Basically, both those who were convicted yesterday and those who carried out the London underground bombings in 2005, plus innumerable others here about whose arrests and convictions we have lately been reading, see themselves as taking part in a global uprising. In sum, they see themselves as foot soldiers in a global jihad or holy world war between true Muslims -- that is, themselves, their comrades and their supporters -- and non-Muslims, that is, all who do not accept their version of Islam, even if the latter consider themselves to be Muslim.

How young British Muslims are becoming so radicalised as to be willing to take part in such a form of warfare is clearly a pressing question. Clearly, a long intellectual and spiritual journey, with many stations on the way, needs be taken by anyone to get from simply feeling alienated and disaffected with their surrounding society and culture to being willing to join in a campaign of indiscriminate violence against fellow citizens and others as part of what is considered a world-wide violent struggle to rid the world of whatever they consider to be ailing it.

Rather than just focus on how vigilant the authorities here should be in future in dealing with those whom they might have reason to suspect of having made that journey all or part of the way to its final destination, there is equal need for them to consider how best to stop young British Muslims from commencing that journey in the first place.

As one small contribution towards consideration of this matter, I should like to draw the attention of the authorities, in case they don't yet know, to just how easy at present it is for young British Muslims to be made familiar with ideas that all too easily can lead those with the right predisposition to begin that hazardous intellectual journey.

For this to occur, they do not need to be enflamed by imams in their local mosques, or by disenchanted peers at university or in prison. All it takes on their part are but a few clicks of the computer mouse. These will be enough to take them from web-sites that would claim for themselves impeccable law-abiding credentials to sources of extreme radicalisation.

The first such click will take them to the MCB website where, via a link to an affiliate organisation, FOSIS the Federation of Student Islamic Societies in the UK, it is then but one more click of the mouse, via a link under the general heading ‘Muslims Organisations’, for them to arrive at the website of an organisation calling itself ‘Young Muslims Organisation UK’. Here, under ‘Online books’, visitors to the site will gain free access to Milestones. This publication is not, as some might naively think, the biography of the fabled sixties American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, but the programmatic work by Syed Qutb, co-founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Basically what Qutb argues in this book is the need for leadership of the modern world to pass from a decadent West to a revived Islam. As a clarion-call to Islamic radicalism in pursuit of global ends, Qutb’s work ranks with Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Like Marx’s, Qutb’s work is one that, can inspire to violence as well as peaceful action.

MI5 may have successfully defused the Bluewater fertiliser-bomb, but the entire country, if not the world, is sitting on a time bomb greater in size and power by far than it. To date, there has been a marked reluctance on the part of the authorities here to grapple with it.

A useful starting-point would be their careful consideration of just where all the money has come from to finance those Islamic organisations that disseminate such incendiary texts to our young citizens. To help them in this matter, I should like to draw their attention to what a famous erstwhile British citizen, who is an authority on Islam, reportedly said on the subject not too long ago:

‘Imagine if the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nation obtained total control of Texas and had at its disposal all the oil revenues, and used this money to establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over Christendom peddling their particular brand of Christianity. This was what the Saudis have done with Wahabism. The oil money has enabled them to spread this fanatical, destructive form of Islam all over the Muslim world and among Muslims in the West. Without oil and the creation of the Saudi kingdom, Wahabism would have remained a lunatic fringe.’

The author of these remarks is the historian of Islam Bernard Lewis, and he made them in August 2002.

Given its dependency on Middle Eastern oil and the revenues generated by it, there is understandable but nonetheless misguided great reluctance on the part of the West to confront the propagation within it of immoderate and illiberal versions of Islam that all too easily can be construed by the impressionable and suitably predisposed to license acts of terror here and elsewhere.

Walid Phares has given a very succinct and insightful account of the Saudi role in manufacturing global insurgency in his 2005 book, Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against America:

‘Geo-political events helped the Saudis to survive the first half of the twentieth century before ascending to a world position; from that launch pad, they have been able to unleash waves of Wahabism, the last of which – even if not under their personal control – slammed into the Twin towers and the Pentagon in 2001, before spreading from Afghanistan to the Iraq Sunni triangle. (62)…

‘The Wahabi agenda is universal… Year after year, the Wahabi influence penetrated deeper and deeper into Muslim societies in various areas and under various regimes… With the oil crisis of 1973, the Wahabi network leapt ahead internationally. Backed by the endlessly growing power of the Saudi state, the Salafi militants and preachers targeted the West (with full-fledged support by the public treasury). Western Europe and the United States became prime destinations for the advocates of Wahabism and its derivatives. By the end of the cold war, pro-jihardist organisations had created a vast infrastructure within the émigré communities. (63)

‘ In 1979 Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan, … [and so] triggered a worldwide Wahabi Salafi call for jihad and mobilisation. It was the perfect war and a huge opportunity for the jihardists worldwide. The major effort came from the Saudi government, which… mobilised the international Salafi movement behind the Wahabi regime in their new jihad in central Asia….(110)

‘ But perhaps the most important yet hidden dividend of the war in Afghanistan was to drag the United States … into a strategic alliance with the jihadists… The greatest achievement [of the Saudis] was to have the United States bless the Afghan mujahaddin and the radical Islamists [who joined them] and who would become the Taliban and later on al Qaeda…. It was a huge Wahabi success to have enlisted America’s own help and blessing in growing the jihadist influence.

‘The Afghani “battlefield” drew “fighters” from various countries. It was the long- awaited breakthrough. The Muslim Brotherhood, other factions, and Salafis of all backgrounds headed to the new Promised Land of Jihad. It would become the basis out of which “the mother of all modern Jihads” would spring again…. Hence, the last decade of the cold war was the launching pad for what probably will be the longest war of the twenty-first century’. (110-11)

When are the British authorities finally going to begin to look into the sources of funding for UK-based organisations that disseminate radicalising literature to young British Muslims, or shall we be told that, in order not to antagonise our ‘ally’ in the war against terror and thereby forfeit the intelligence they provide us in relation to it, we shall just have to compromise national security to a degree?