UK Muslims and Extremism - Part 3: There is no anti-Muslim 'conspiracy', threat from radicals is real

As someone, who has had a ringside view of the cat-and-mouse game between the British state and Britain’s 2.7 million Muslims over the past decade, let me say this: for all the Islamophobia, police excesses and the government paranoia over Islamist extremism there’s a lot that the Muslim community, too, has to answer for.

The Muslim narrative portraying themselves only as victims is rather self-serving. It is important to underline this in order to put in perspective the fractious debate on the British government’s controversial counter-terror strategy.

And the perspective is this: The threat posed by Muslim extremism is real; it’s growing; and the notion of an anti-Muslim “conspiracy’’ as alleged in some quarters is a load of nonsense. The wave of British Muslims heading for jihad, for example, is not anyone’s invention. Nor are the threatening boasts some of them have been heard and seen making in online videos with one saying that he would return home only when he is able to “raise the black flag of Islamic State” over Buckingham Palace.

One filmed himself saying, “There is nothing in Britain — it is just pure evil. If and when I come back to Britain it will be when this Khilafah — this Islamic State — comes to conquer Britain and I come to raise the black flag of Islamic State over Downing Street, over Buckingham Palace, over Tower Bridge and over Big Ben.”

Currently, Britain’s security alert level stands at ‘severe’ (just one rung below the highest danger mark) signifying that a terror attack is “highly likely” though not “imminent”. And in a rare public comment, MI5 chief Andrew Parker, warned that terrorist plotting against Britain is at its “most intense” for three decades with six attempts already foiled in the past 12 months.

MI5 and police are reported to be monitoring more than 3,000 Islamist extremists allegedly willing to carry out attacks in Britain.

“Numbers have escalated since 2013 with the rise of Islamic State in Syria, with more than 700 Britons believed to have joined jihadi groups in the region; and 300 thought to have returned to Britain,” one media report said adding that suspects were being held at a rate of more than one a day while “a record number” of terrorism arrests were made in the past year, eclipsing the previous peak after the 2005 London bombings.

Anyone who has lived in Britain long enough is used to routine terror warnings from security agencies and politicians. And, almost as routinely, the Muslim reaction is to dismiss them as attempts to whip up fear to justify increasingly intrusive surveillance powers.

No doubt, intelligence agencies tend to exaggerate in order to demand more funding and authority, but the idea that somehow there’s a grand plot to defame Muslims is rubbish and a bid to escape responsibility for what’s happening. The stark truth is that the Muslim community needs to acknowledge and confront the level radicalisation taking place among its ranks.

Forget what David Cameron and Parker might be saying. Here’s what Britain’s most senior Muslim police officer has said.

Mak Chishty, a Scotland Yard commander and the head of its community engagement programme in London, warned that the Muslim community was in danger of “sleepwalking” into a new phase of extremism propounded by groups such as the Islamic State if it did not exercise greater vigilance. Those most at risk of radicalisation were children.

Children as young as six, including those from moderate and stable families with no history of extremism, were being influenced by the IS’s’ “powerful” propaganda. Indeed, the threat was so serious, Chisty pointed out, that he worried about his own children.

“I am not immunised. If I feel the need to be extra vigilant, then I think you need to feel the need to be extra vigilant,” he said.

Nothing illustrates the seriousness of the threat more than the fact that little schoolgirls have been running off to join the Islamic State after being radicalised online–the most famous case being that of three East London schoolgirls—Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, dubbed the “runaway trio”—who disappeared from their homes earlier this year and ended up in Syria.

According to a former female IS “commander’’, who deserted the group and is now on the run in fear of her life, there’s a systematic campaign to lure young women. Um Asmah, said the IS had “a well-structured grooming system that can psychologically target vulnerable youngsters like the three British girls”. The London trio was “probably groomed by highly coordinated social media experts” whose job was to identify and brainwash vulnerable women.

Increasingly, it’s becoming every Muslim parent’s nightmare, the world over, to wake up one morning and find that their dear son or daughter has vanished; fled to Syria or Iraq to fight jihad. Women embracing jihad in such a large number marks a whole new stage in Muslim radicalisation.

Another significant new trend is the changing profile of an average British Islamist or potential suicide bomber belying the stereotype of an alienated youth struggling with his/her cultural identity in a hostile society. Most of the high-profile cases over the past year have tended to involve academically bright and socially well-integrated boys and girls.

And here’s the irony. I’ve written this before but it bears repetition. There was a time when Muslim immigrants constantly worried that their children were becoming too Westernised and in danger of losing their Islamic identity. So they dragged them to mosques; imported semi-literate, and often deeply fundamentalist, preachers from back home to teach them the Quran; set up Muslim faith schools; and burnt copies of The Satanic Verses. Today, the same children are brandishing their Islamic identity with a vengeance, and accusing their parents of buying into “un-Islamic” western values.

Remember Bob Dylan’s The Times, They Are A-Changin’?

And how.

(This is the third story of a four-part series. You can read the first story here , and the second story here . Part 4 of the series: ‘Ignorance, denial fuelling radicalisation’ will be published on Wednesday.)