The Secret State vs. Enemies of State
3rd May 2015
When Mohammed Emwazi went out from west London to Syria literally to carve out a new career as “Jihadi John”, masked avenger of non-wrongs, England lost an “extremely kind, extremely gentle” idealist. That is, according to a group called CAGE, whose director Asim Qureshi was moved to chivalrous indignation by the security services’ blatantly racist practice of quizzing known Muslim extremists about Muslim extremist terrorism. MI5 “harassment”, Qureshi opined, may have been the proximate cause of the young social justice campaigner’s flight into regrettable (if understandable) excess. He did not exactly say that the problem was rooted in aeons of Islamophobia, but that implication is always taken as read in such rationales.
When three teenaged girls from Bethnal Green flew from London to Istanbul to rendezvous with Islamist eye candy, it was obviously not their fault, because they were too “vulnerable” and too female to be autonomous individuals. Nor was it anything to do with their families — nor certain excitable Koran passages. It was the internet, but also the Metropolitan Police, who had handed letters about an absconded schoolmate to the girls to give to their parents rather than to the parents directly.
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The core cause of British jihadism is of course the mass immigration mainstream politicians continue to promote, even though it was always obvious that when you import people you also import their pathologies — and when you assimilate no-one you alienate everyone. But again this is too difficult a target for politicians, many of whom are complicit in the cause and are in any case chronically uninterested in culture. This is a fast-moving situation, but it seems certain that for the foreseeable future we will keep fending off horror with soft hands, while looking concernedly at the crumbling consensus behind.