'loving, kind, caring and affable'. The obsession with representing young 'vulnerable' suicide bombers as victims is related to the association of the act of radicalisation with vulnerability. The irrational connection of an act of terrorism to the status of victimhood is so deeply entrenched that the British media have little interest in the real victims in this drama – the people that were maimed and killed by this 'caring and affable' 17-year-old."
Islamist-led Muslim groups are keen to attribute the process of radicalization to extremist online material. Officials from the Muslim Council of Britain -- a group run by operatives from the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami -- refer to "slick ISIS media" found at the "margins of the Internet." These groups might only be keen to blame the Internet, however, because it distracts attention from their own, more persuasive fundamentalism.
Commentators from across Britain's political spectrum seek to ignore the crucial role that extremist preachers and sects play in the radicalization process, inculcating vast swathes of the British Muslim community with fundamentalist ideals.
Owen Jones, a Labour Party-aligned columnist with The Guardian, writes that the government employs "a rhetoric of collective blame that does nothing but play into the hands" of ISIS and other extremist groups. Western wars in Iraq and Libya, he argues, have produced the ISIS threat.
As with Baroness Warsi, Jones seems unable to identify ideology as the key cause. In his mind, Islamism is not a concerted global threat, but an organic response to chaos caused by Western folly.
It suits both Warsi and Jones to ignore the influence of extremism. Both have accepted invitations to speak on Islamist platforms alongside preachers such as Abu Eesa Niamatullah, who claims that Jews "find it so easy and natural... to massacre... to blow up babies," and Yasir Qadhi, who has said: "Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews ... 'The Hoax of the Holocaust', I advise you to read this book ... a very good book. All of this [the Holocaust] is false propaganda ... The Jews, the
way they portray him [Hitler], is not correct."
To his credit, David Cameron is one of the few who appears to recognize the reality of Islamic extremism. At the security conference in Slovakia, he further stated:
"The question is: how do people arrive at this worldview? ... One of the reasons is that there are people who hold some of these views who don't go as far as advocating violence, but who do buy into some of these prejudices giving the extreme Islamist narrative weight and telling fellow Muslims, 'you are part of this'. This paves the way for young people to turn simmering prejudice into murderous intent."
In that understanding, however, the government appears curiously alone. By contrast, The Times columnist and former Conservative MP, Matthew Parris, writes that merely by mentioning extremism within British Islam, Cameron has become the "ISIS propaganda machine." Parris also claims that jihadists are no different from the "adventurers who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. ... I've heard no evidence that a flyblown stint with murderous bigots in Syria has 'radicalised' young British Muslims who return: these are human beings like us, many of whom will have reacted to the reality of that dirty war in the same way as you or I would have done -- with shock and disillusion."
Matthew Parris seems to have a short memory. Just five months ago, terrorists who pledged allegiance to ISIS gunned down cartoonists and Jews in France. Before that, in 2014, an ISIS-trained terrorist murdered four people at a Jewish museum in Belgium. ISIS-linked terrorists have conducted attacks in over a dozen countries, including the recent attack in Tunisia.
Islamist terror is not the product of Western policy. It is, as David Cameron rightly notes, a global ideological network, with both violent and non-violent branches. It may thrive in chaos, but it is committed to enveloping everyone throughout the world.
The notion that British terrorists are victims of their circumstances is a fallacy that only serves to inspire sympathy with murderers, downplays