Terrorism Weekly (British Special): Smart Politics, Stupid Counter-Terrorism

On Saturday British Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech at a security conference in Munich. The address was well-trailed by 10 Downing Street, as newspapers gave advance notice of the speech and then picked over the contents the following day.

It is not only Cameron’s declaration that multiculturalism has failed which concerns me. I also note the Prime Minister's dismissal of other potential root causes for disorder, such as foreign policy. The chief culprit, he informed his audience, had to be multiculturalism, specifically through its alleged failure to encourage integration. The solution, argued Cameron, was to promote an inclusive British identity and to attack difference.

First, the obvious needs to be stated: nothing Cameron said is new. Cameron's predecessor Gordon Brown jumped on the Britishness bandwagon. Tony Blair made similar pronouncements after the 7 July 2005 bombings, blaming integration while denying the place of British foreign policy as a root cause. The fact that Cameron is recycling the material of his predecessors shows how little this discussion has progressed over the last six years.

Take the linkage between UK foreign policy and terrorism that Cameron downplayed on Saturday. The Blair government continually denied there was a connection between the two. In 2004, however, it was warned in an internal report, entitled “Young Muslims and Extremism”, that "a particularly strong cause of disillusionment amongst Muslims including young Muslims is a perceived `double standard' in the foreign policy of western governments (and often those of Muslim governments), in particular Britain and the US”. The Blair government had already been told by its intelligence agencies that participating in the invasion of Iraq would increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks against the UK. A senior Blair cabinet minister, Hilary Benn, later accepted that British foreign policy toward the Middle East had angered young Muslims in his constituency of Leeds, where three of the 7-7 bombers came from.

Cameron also singled out universities as supposed hotbeds of Islamist radicalization. The prime minister made this point despite there not being conclusive evidence that this is the case (leaving aside that those who are radicalized don’t automatically become terrorists). How do we know there isn’t conclusive evidence? Because Cameron’s own minister for higher education, David Willetts, admitted it earlier in the week in a BBC interview: "It certainly does look as if there are individual incidents when young people may have been radicalised on campus. But it's very hard to pin down, when an individual goes off the rails like that, exactly what has triggered it."

What is the evidence about a lack of integration leading to terrorism? A 2006 detailed study of the background of 75 Muslims charged in the UK with terrorism offences found that they were less likely to come from predominantly Muslim areas as opposed to more ethnically mixed areas. This certainly reflects the example of the 7 July 2005 bombers wh,o by all accounts, were relatively well-integrated. Indeed, one of the bombers, Jermaine Lindsay, was a convert to Islam as was Nicky Reilly, a failed bomber in Exeter in 2008. How does the integration issue apply to them?

Why link multiculturalism, Islam, and terrorism when the evidence is inconclusive? Because Cameron’s speech was about politics and not about security. The Conservatives have seen their standing in opinion polls decline as massive cuts on social services begin to sink in. The diversionary rhetoric from Saturday plays well with the right-wing media and with the Conservative base; it is smart politics.

Indeed, it is being deployed elsewhere. In the US, Republican Congressman Peter King, who historically doesn’t have a problem with terrorism when it involves the Irish Republican Army, is about to launch hearings targeting American Muslims.

But what is smart politics does not necessarily make for wise counter-terrorism. Demonising Muslism is counter-productive. Any state efforts that ostracize and encourage opporobrium toward Muslims plays right into the hands of al-Qaeda and other extremists, since it reinforces their meta-narrative that Islam is under attack and that Muslims have no place in Western countries. The coincidence of Cameron’s speech taking place as a far-right group was staging a demonstration in Luton in Britain, in which some of its members chanted "Allah, Allah, who the fuck is Allah?" only escalates the alienating impact of his words and, in the process, makes us all less safe.

Steve Hewitt is Senior Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham and author of Snitch: A History of the Modern Intelligence Informer and The British War on Terror: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism on the Home Front since 9/11

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